Free Republic

NATO dismissed on Sunday allegations by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that it was conducting a military buildup near the country’s western border but said it was closely monitoring the situation following his contested re-election. Earlier on Sunday Lukashenko said tanks and planes of the 30-nation military alliance had been deployed 15 minutes from the Belarusian border. “There is no NATO buildup in the region,” NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said in a statement. “NATO’s multinational presence in the eastern part of the Alliance is not a threat to any country. It is strictly defensive, proportionate, and designed to prevent conflict and...

Thousands of demonstrators in Belarus took to the streets again Saturday to demand that the country's authoritarian leader resign after a presidential vote they called fraudulent. In response, the president declared that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had agreed to provide security assistance to restore order if Belarus requested it. President Alexander Lukashenko spoke Saturday evening several hours after a phone call with Putin as he struggled to counter the biggest challenge yet to his 26 years in power. Saturday was the seventh consecutive day of large protests against the results of the country's Aug. 9 presidential election in which election...

A hundred years ago this week, a series of biggest battles that Europe were to witness between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 decided the fate of the continent as much as, if not more than, the Great War itself. In early August 1920, the newly resurrected, independent Poland saved the Eastern Europe, Germany and possibly the rest of the war-exhausted Europe from the triumphant Russian communism. As a result of a little known war in the distant corners of the continent, the status quo of the...

n a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the head of Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation, Yury Slyusar said that UAC will begin deliveries of the Okhotnik unmanned aerial vehicle to the Russian armed forces as early as 2024. In keeping the Russia’s top-down approach to management, UAC’s President, Mr. Slyusar, stated that Russia’s Ministry of Defense “instructed us to speed up the design and test works, to move it ‘to the left’ as much as possible so that deliveries begin as early as 2024.” In keeping with those instructions, UAC is now “actively working on this issue with our colleagues.”...

Russia will perceive any ballistic missile launched at its territory as a nuclear attack that warrants a nuclear retaliation, the military warned in an article published Friday. The harsh warning in the official military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) is directed at the United States, which has worked to develop long-range non-nuclear weapons. The article follows the publication in June of Russia’s nuclear deterrent policy that envisages the use of atomic weapons in response to what could be a conventional strike targeting the nation’s critical government and military infrastructure. In the Krasnaya Zvezda article, senior officers of the Russian military's...

ere's What You Need to Remember: A “suitcase nuke” is essentially a nuclear device so small, it could be transported in a backpack or in a person’s luggage. Tactical nuclear weapons — compacts, small-yield atomic bombs that are not necessarily designed to be rained down on cities from bomber aircraft, nor delivered via Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles, but could be an artillery shell, a nuclear torpedo, landmine, or other small and easily transportable devices. One of these tactical nuclear devices is the so-called “backpack” or “suitcase nuke” — essentially a nuclear device so small, it could be transported in a backpack...

(CU News) - Joseph R. Beyrle was the first paratrooper to land in Normandy and the only soldier to fight for both the United States and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. Beyrle survived interrogation by the NAZI Gestapo and escaped from German prison camps three different times. Joe Beyrle was married in the same church that held his funeral years. His life is the stuff of legends; And that life largely centered around the 101st Airborne Division. You see, Beyrle served in the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Division. He specialized in radio communications and demolition. Before Beyrle’s journey...

The tests last year were already known, so Russia’s agenda of discussing them again may be linked to wider agenda Turkey, a member of NATO, tested the Russian-made S-400 air defense system on US-made F-16 jets during a drill in November 2019, Russia’s state media TASS reported. The use of the S-400 against the F-16s was already reported last year, but the new details from Russian media appear to cement the claim and infer that something more was going on in those tests. Russia has an interest in knowing how well its air defense performs against US warplanes. Russia’s S-400...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russians opened the door to Vladimir Putin staying in power until 2036 by voting overwhelmingly for constitutional changes that will allow him to run again for president twice, but critics said the outcome was falsified on an industrial scale. Official results published on Thursday, after 100% of ballots had been counted, showed that the former KGB officer who has ruled Russia for more than two decades as president or prime minister had easily won the right to run for two more six-year terms after the current one ends in 2024. That means Putin, 67, could rule until...

BECKLEY, W.Va. (AP) -- A congressman skeptical of the need for U.S. military action against Iraq says he is flying to Baghdad, hoping to answer questions about a possible invasion and seeking a meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., said he wants to reassure Iraqi citizens that Americans are ``not out to wage war for war's sake.'' ``I'm not going as a secretary of state,'' Rahall said Tuesday. ``I'm not going as a weapons inspector. And I'm not calling upon this administration to do one thing or another. I just have a lot of questions.'' Rahall,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLcHbUrnl6Q Link to video. 12 minutes.

As it happens, George Floyd died exactly 100 years and 40 days after Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter were shot to death in a payroll robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. These men have little in common with Floyd save that none of them deserved to die and that their respective deaths set off worldwide demonstrations orchestrated out of the very same playbook. In the 1920s, communists had to erase some immediate history — namely, the fact that a pair of Italian anarchists murdered Berardelli and Parmenter in cold blood. The evidence that the anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, killed the...

SECONDARY school pupils are told that Winston Churchill was a “war criminal” and “a blundering reactionary” in a teaching tutorial shared by thousands of teachers. It is also claimed the wartime leader’s speeches were “poorly received”, he was “drunk” during his “finest hour” message and Bob Geldof is more important to our history. The lesson plan, Winston Churchill: Hero or War Criminal?” appears on the website of global education company Tes. Using halos and red devils’ horns as bullet points, the lesson contains a potted history of the career of what it calls “an intensely controversial figure”. Part of it...

The walls of Russia’s new Orthodox cathedral dedicated to the Armed Forces will be decorated with the faces of President Vladimir Putin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Soviet leader Josef Stalin, the MBKh News website reported Friday. The 95-meter Armed Forces cathedral, a symbol of close defense-church ties in Russia, is expected to open on May 9 — the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II — at a sprawling military-themed park near Moscow. Once completed, the building will become one of the tallest Orthodox churches in the world. Following MBKh News' report, the...

The Religion of Immoralism By MAX EASTMAN The notion of Karl Marx as a noble brooder over man's hopes is dispelled in this account of his invention and philosophic justification of the ruthless methods of modern Communism.With Stalin gone it has become necessary to find a new focus for our hostility to the unscrupulous and inhuman behavior of the Communists. I wish it might be focused on the real cause of the trouble: Marxism. Much force of argument is wasted among Western intellectuals through a wish to exempt Marx from responsibility for this return to barbarism. Realpolitik in the evil...

The world witnessed Stalin's Purge, Hitler's Holocaust, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Forced Exodus, and Saddam's brutal mass killings. Africa is no stranger to atrocities to the likes of Idi Amin and Mobutu Sese Sekos. Here is another act of genocide carried out by former Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam, who is a Communist leader of the Workers Party. Mengistu was part of the Derg, which was the military junta that came to power by overthrowing Haile Selassie in 1974. He ruled from 1977 to 1991. His first act was "Red Terror", in which he attacked anti-Communist guerillas. He detained,...

Ethiopia’s brutal Marxist dictator, known as the African Pol Pot, became the first fallen leader to be found guilty yesterday of genocide in his own country after a 12-year trial.Mengistu Haile Mariam, the former President, who fled to Zimbabwe in 1991, was accused along with top members of his military Government of killing thousands during his 17-year rule. The period was marked by vicious crackdowns on opponents, disastrous wars with neighbouring countries and rebel groups and devastating famines in which starvation was used to force peasants into submission. “Members of the Derg [Government] who are present in court today and...

When it came to deadly epidemics, the Soviets didn’t do half-measures. Not only doctors, but the police, army, navy, and even the KGB were all brought in to curb the spread.In 1939, microbiologist Abram Berlin brought a dangerous disease back with him to Moscow from Saratov. There in Saratov, during experiments on animals, he used the living causative agent of the plague, and was strictly confined to quarantine. However, an urgent call from Moscow forced him to go immediately to the capital, unleashing the plague. Berlin checked in at the Hotel National, dined there, and visited a hairdresser. Feeling very...

Ruthenians (Belarus) vs the Germans.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Experts said on Saturday they were worried by a leaked report that describes an outbreak of smallpox in the Soviet Union -- one they say may point to the testing of a smallpox biological weapon.Seven people became ill in the 1971 outbreak and three died of what appeared to be the more fatal, and more rare, hemorrhagic form of the infection, said Dr. Alan Zelicoff of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, one of the authors of the report."Someone has successfully disseminated smallpox as an aerosol," Zelicoff said in an interview."It has been talked about and it...