Free Republic

Russia has sent a stark and chilling warning to Donald Trump, as the US Congress prepares to vote on a new batch of sanctions against Moscow. -snip- Vladimir Solovyov - a Kremlin apparatchik - warned Trump that Russia could become America's "most terrifying enemy" in a rant on his TV talkshow. "Maybe Trump simply can't grasp that Russia doesn't care about the national interests of other countries if they contradict those of our own state?" he fumed. Warming to his subject, the Putin stooge continued: "The time when someone like Yeltsin, who randomly emerged from the dust of history, managed...

Panic in Russia is growing amid intensifying attacks by Ukrainian forces on key infrastructure. Two major Moscow airports were temporarily shut down on Sunday due to a Ukrainian drone strike targeting Russia's capital city, Russian officials claimed, while an oil refinery in Engels, Saratov Oblast was targeted in a similar attack on Friday. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram that Russian air defense units destroyed multiple Ukrainian drones flying towards the city. Emergency personnel have been deployed at the wreckage sites, he said. This comes as Russia unleashed a massive air strike in Ukraine, with the war showing no...

An audacious Ukrainian drone attack against multiple airbases across Russia is a humiliating security breach for Vladimir Putin that will doubtless trigger a furious response. Pro-Kremlin bloggers have described the drone assault - which Ukrainian security sources said hit more than 40 Russian warplanes - as "Russia's Pearl Harbor" in reference to the Japanese attack against the US in 1941 that prompted Washington to enter the Second World War. The Ukrainian operation - which used small drones smuggled into Russia, hidden in mobile sheds and launched off the back of trucks - also demonstrated how technology and imagination have transformed...

President Trump in a new post on Truth Social on Sunday night accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of having gone “absolutely” crazy and said if he did not stop what he was doing, it would lead to the downfall of his country. The social media comments came after Trump had issued some of his toughest comments about Putin earlier in remarks to reporters in New Jersey. “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!,” Trump wrote. “He is needlessly killing a lot of people, and...

Ukraine’s former top general warns against false hopes of restoring 1991 borders and says only tech-driven warfare can overcome Russia’s war resources. Ukraine’s Ambassador to the UK and former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces (AFU), retired Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, has cautioned against hoping for a return to Ukraine’s 1991 borders, warning that Russia still possesses the resources to continue the war. Speaking at the “Export of Security: Ukrainian Weapons in the World” forum, Zaluzhny said, as quoted by Ukrainian media: “I hope that there are no people in this hall who still hope for some miracle or wonder, for some...

Vladimir Putin's forces are massing next to Russia's border with Ukraine's Sumy oblast, it has been reported, following evacuations from the region and a threat that Moscow has identified further territorial targets in its full-scale invasion. Sumy governor Oleh Hryhorov said thousands had been evacuated from the region on Ukraine's northeast border and next to the Kharkiv oblast, according to the Kyiv Independent. On the other side of the frontier Russian troops numbers are said to be increasing. It comes Putin is trying to justify the renewal of Russian plans to seize Sumy City—16 miles from the border—and illegally annex...

The Kremlin announces that Putin is set to make an announcement shortly. The statement will be issued in one hour. Putin is reportedly meeting with the security council right now. The 3-day ceasefire in Ukraine is set to end in 1 hour 10 minutes. Interesting timing.

CNN — A Russian strike against a military educational facility in central Ukraine killed 47 people and injured at least 206 others, according to Ukrainian officials, in one of the deadliest single attacks since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. President Volodymyr Zelensky said preliminary information indicated two ballistic missiles hit the facility in the city of Poltava and a nearby hospital on Tuesday morning. “We say again and again to everyone in the world who has the power to stop this terror: air defense systems and missiles are needed in Ukraine, not somewhere in a warehouse,”...

FR needs a block feature. I'm tired of coming to FR to get the news only to find zeepers and ho supporters dominating the bandwidth.

The situation with Russian payments to China continues to deteriorate: Chinese banks have begun to return about 80% of transfers in yuan to Russia, informed sources told Kommersant. According to them, the Chinese side has been tightening requirements "increasingly" since December 2023. Then US President Joe Biden signed a decree allowing the US Treasury to impose secondary sanctions against credit institutions of third countries for cooperation with Russian sanctioned companies and assistance to the military-industrial complex (MIC). After another tightening of sanctions in June, when the United States included all sanctioned persons, including Russian banks, in the definition of the...

Videos emerge online, showing a targeted attack by a Kh-101 missile on the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv Ukrainian military expert Oleksandr Kovalenko has analyzed Russian propaganda messages after the terrorist attack on the largest children’s hospital of Ukraine. At first, the Russian invaders claimed their strike on the Okhmadyt children's hospital in Kyiv was due to an alleged military meeting taking place there. “So they openly admit that the attack on the children's clinic was targeted and justify it with a “meeting” claim… Seriously? Let me recall that when two weeks ago, Kharkiv was attacked with glide bombs, Russian...

With his constitutional Presidential mandate expired, the ‘champion for democracy’, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky is facing the discredit by the Russian enemies. Recently re-elected in a landslide, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s has been repeatedly clear about how Moscow sees the Ukrainian leader as lacking legitimacy. For the first time, in a press conference in France alongside President Emmanuel Macron, Zelensky addressed the allegations and dismissed them. Reuters reported: President Volodymyr Zelensky said his legitimacy is recognized and determined by the Ukrainian people while criticizing that of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “‘President Zelensky’s legitimacy is recognized by the people of Ukraine....

When President Biden proposed an additional $24 billion in supplemental funding for Ukraine in August, Moscow spin doctors working for the Kremlin were ready to try to undermine public support for the bill, internal Kremlin documents show. In an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment, Kremlin-linked political strategists and trolls have written thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions, according to a trove of internal Kremlin documents...

Nato must be ready for Russia launching an “existential” war against the Baltic states “masked by a blizzard of disinformation”, ambassadors from the three countries have warned. Writing exclusively for The Sunday Telegraph, the top diplomats to the UK from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said that Russia could “pivot quickly” from Ukraine to invade the Baltic. And they said that Vladimir Putin’s brutalisation of Ukraine is evoking the three countries’ “darkest memories” of occupation under Stalin. The Estonian ambassador Viljar Lubi, the Latvian ambassador Ivita Burmistre, and Lithuania’s charge d’affaire Lina Zigmantaite, wrote the joint article to mark Friday’s 20...

ISIL’s Afghan branch – also known as the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K) – has claimed responsibility for the attack... “Russian foreign policy has been one big red flag for ISIS [ISIL],” Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Washington-based Wilson Center told Al Jazeera. “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Russian actions in Chechnya, Moscow’s close relationships with the Syrian and Iranian governments, and especially the military campaigns that Russia has waged against ISIS fighters in Syria and — through Wagner Group mercenaries – in parts of Africa.” “ISK [ISKP] has consistently demonstrated its ambition...

The Kremlin promised entertainment.Western analysts feared Vladimir Putin would declare another war.But the Russian president’s more than two-hour-long address on Thursday delivered on neither expectation, though Putin presented Russians with a vision of the future that alternated between nuclear saber-rattling and grand social promises. ###Putin, who cut a relaxed figure, also called for the safeguarding of “traditional family values.”“We see what is happening in some countries where moral norms and family institutions are deliberately being destroyed, pushing entire peoples to extinction and degeneration,” he said. “We choose life.”

For over a year now, pro-Russian voices have circulated the conspiracy theory that Ukraine was close to signing a peace deal in the spring of 2022, only to be thwarted by the West. Although this narrative has repeatedly been debunked as disinformation, it stubbornly persists in some circles.The central premise of the theory is that, only a few weeks into the war, Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with Russia amid peace talks in Istanbul until Western powers, led by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, ordered Kyiv to scrap the deal. It is thus argued that blame for...

Senior Russian officials were due to fly on the doomed military plane that crashed Wednesday, killing around 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war – but were stopped “at the last moment” by their security services, according to Ukraine. The claim came as gruesome new video showed apparent charred human remains at the scene of the crashed plane, which Russia has blamed Ukraine for downing as it flew to a prisoner exchange. “It is known that there were indeed several VIPs from the military and political representation of the state aggressor due to fly on the Il-76,” Andrii Yusov, spokesman for Ukrainian...

A Russian military transport plane carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war crashed near the border between the two nations Wednesday, with Moscow accusing Kyiv of shooting down the aircraft, Kremlin officials say. The Russian Ilyushin Il-76 plane was carrying 74 people, including six crew members and three guards who were set to deliver the POWs in exchange for Russian captives, according to state news agency RIA’s quotes from the defense ministry. Andrei Kartapolov, a Russian lawmaker, claimed during a parliamentary session Wednesday that the plane had been shot down by three missiles.

Russian strategic culture: Why Russia does things the way it does By Martti J. Kari, former intelligence Colonel in the Finnish Defense Forces BACKGROUND My background is that I have served in military intelligence for most of my career. I am an officer and an intelligence colonel who retired last fall. I started here in January at the university as a teacher. I teach intelligence. As I have spent most of my career in intelligence, Russia and the Soviet Union have always been my point of interest. As a young lieutenant, I was sent to what was then Leningrad to...