Free Republic

Merz will tell Netanyahu "not to overdo it" in a call this week, though notes Germany will remain more guarded in its criticism than others for 'historical reasons'. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday that Israel's recent attacks on Gaza are taking a humanitarian toll on civilians that can no longer be justified as a fight against terrorism. "Harming the civilian population to such an extent, as has incresingly been the case in recent days, can no longer be justified as a fight against Hamas terrorism," he told broadcaster WDR in a televised interview...

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese authorities decided to form the strategic alliance for defense, trade and energy. Russia will deliver oil to China and China will collaborate with Russia in Geopolitical strategic defense of Euresia. Russia's Security Council and the Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party's Politburo will form a forum and will work closely to make sure both countries can create and maintain the necessary military and political infrastructure as well as coordination. According to some international think tanks, sources close to Russia's Security Council say recommending countermeasures to check the U.S. geopolitical "offensive" in Eurasia...

The Senate Intelligence Committee has requested documents from a 2016 Green Party presidential candidate as part of the committee’s Russia probe, according to a new report. Last week, candidate Jill Stein contacted Dennis Trainor Jr., who worked as her communications director and acting campaign manager from January to August 2015, because the committee had requested documents from the campaign, BuzzFeed reported Monday. Trainor said that he was contacted because his personal cellphone had been given as the “primary point of contact” to those trying to reach Stein, such as producers from the Russian state-funded media company, RT News. Stein had...

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's defense minister has revealed that two senior Kremlin officials served in military intelligence - underscoring the clout of security service veterans in the administration of President Vladimir Putin. Sergei Ivanov said that Putin's envoy to southern Russia, Dmitry Kozak, and a deputy Kremlin chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, are both veterans of the Russian military General Staff's Main Intelligence Directorate, known by its Russian acronym GRU. "I know two well-known people who served their military conscription terms in GRU's Spetsnaz (special forces) - Dmitry Nikolayevich Kozak and Vladislav Yuriyevich Surkov," Ivanov told Rossiya state television late...

The deputy head of the Russian administration, Vladislav Surkov -- who serves as a designated mouthpiece for the policies of President Vladimir Putin -- has begun advocating the creation of a heftier opposition to the ruling United Russia party. Talk surfaced Thursday of a suggested merger between the nationalist-socialist Rodina (Motherland) Party, the Party of Life, and possibly the Party of Pensioners into a new opposition party in the Russian Duma. ...The two-party system is only being created for the benefit of Putin's (or his successor's) administration. The new party would serve the function of a loyal opposition to United...

Russia could be sliding into dictatorship as Germany did soon after World War I, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves has warned. "There is a mentality of being stabbed in the back that reminds me of the Weimar Republic," Mr Ilves told Russia's Moscow Times newspaper. The Weimar Republic is the name given to the German state in 1919-1933 - before Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Estonia-Russia ties have been tense since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Last year, Tallinn and Moscow had an all-out row over the relocation of a Soviet-era war memorial in the Estonian capital. Amnesty report...

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., once falsely accused President Ronald Reagan's CIA of all but causing urban cocaine dealing in the '80s. She claimed that Reagan, by working with Nicaraguan drug dealers to defeat the communists running that country, colluded with them to created the urban drug epidemic. Never mind that The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all debunked Waters' claim. At a town hall meeting about these allegations, Waters shouted, "If I never do anything else in this career as a member of Congress, I'm gonna make somebody pay for what they've done to...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia wouldn’t agree to an immediate end to the fighting in Ukraine, as Moscow’s army made rapid gains toward expelling Ukraine’s forces from its Kursk region.Any pause in fighting at this point would be in Ukraine’s interests, he said, adding that Russia wanted a truce that led “to a lasting peace and the elimination of the root causes” of the war, which he described as a crisis. Putin’s comments were the first official response from Moscow to a U.S.-backed proposal agreed by Ukraine this week to pause the war, now in its fourth year. They...

Key Points Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said Russia agrees in principle with the U.S.-led ceasefire plan backed by Ukraine earlier this week, but stopped short of signing up to any deal. “We are in favor of it but there are nuances,” Putin said when asked about the 30-day ceasefire deal brokered by the White House. ============================================================= Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said Russia agrees in principle with the U.S.-led ceasefire plan backed by Ukraine earlier this week, but stopped short of signing up to any deal, arguing that it needed further negotiation and must lead to “enduring...

Deep in your heart you knew there are tax-payer’s money wasted somewhere in the whole Russian spy drama. Why did the Obama administration and the Russian government wanted to get rid of them so fast? We may never know. However we can prove that USAID funded the agro- and eco-tourism project in 2004 run by the company 4Vlast for which Anya Chapman and Vasily Kushchenko worked at the time. As you know from the previous research Chapman was the London contact person for the 4Vlast firm, Kushchenko was running their tourism firm and worked for the 4 Vlast Mrs. World...

The plot thickens. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Jeffrey Epstein tried to blackmail Bill Gates after learning about an affair Gates had with a young woman. Epstein learned that Gates had an affair with a Russian bridge player and when Gates shot down a donation request from Epstein, Jeffrey sent him an email reminding the Microsoft founder what he knew. According to The Wall Street Journal: “The Microsoft co-founder met the woman around 2010, when she was in her 20s. Epstein met her in 2013 and later paid for her to attend software coding school. In 2017, Epstein...

Saddam Hussein's government provided senior Russian officials with oil rights worth millions of dollars under the oil-for-food program in an effort to lift U.N. sanctions against Iraq, according to a U.S. Senate Committee report released on Monday. The oil allocations were "compensation for support," Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The report, based on documents as well as interviews with Ramadan and Tareq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, pointed to Alexander Voloshin, former chief of staff to President Vladimir Putin in the Russian Presidential Council, and ultranationalist parliamentarian Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Both men had...

When he penned his eyewitness account of the 1917 Russian Revolution, American journalist John Reed famously titled it Ten Days That Shook The World. But 10 days is too long for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. They've shaken things up in a week. -snip- The Kremlin wants the Russian public and the international community to see that Western efforts to isolate Russia over the war in Ukraine have failed. Russian media are welcoming the prospect of warmer ties with Washington and pouring scorn on European leaders and Kyiv. "Trump knows he will have to make concessions [to Russia] because he...

The office of Russia’s infamous troll factory believed to be at the vanguard of Russia’s information war has been set on fire in St. Petersburg overnight. An investigation revealed last year that the secretive troll factory had rebranded itself as a media conglomerate with 16 news websites generating more than 30 million pageviews every month. Its operational hub, a website called FAN (Federal News Agency), is based a stone’s throw from the troll farm’s original location in northern St. Petersburg. The Fontanka.ru news website cited police as saying that an unknown suspect broke the agency’s ground-floor window and threw a...

a prominent FBI official, Charles McGonigal, was sentenced to a prison stint. He was convicted of conspiracy and bribery involving a Russian oligarch who is known for being an extremely close associate of Vladamir Putin. While this is being widely reported on today there is a very notable omission seen from the various major news outlets covering this sentencing. To set the stage correctly we need to flash back briefly over what we have been told over the past seven or so years. With the rise of Donald Trump in Republican circles, one of the earliest complaints leveled against him...

Ukraine has imposed sanctions on former president and opposition politician Petro Poroshenko, including asset freezes and a ban on withdrawing capital from the country, a presidential decree published on Thursday said. Poroshenko, one of Ukraine's richest men who heads the largest opposition party in Ukraine's parliament, served as president from 2014 until 2019 when he lost his bid for a second term at an election won by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The decree did not say why the sanctions were imposed, but Zelenskiy said earlier that his security council would announce sanctions targeting people who had undermined Ukrainian national security. "The...

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would likely impose sanctions on Russia if its president, Vladimir Putin, refuses to negotiate about ending the war in Ukraine. Trump gave no details on possible additional sanctions. The United States has already sanctioned Russia heavily for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Trump said his administration was also looking at the issue of sending weapons to Ukraine, adding his view that the European Union should be doing more to support Ukraine.

Iran-backed militants entered Syria yesterday to bolster dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime against the Islamist rebels who seized Aleppo. Militias crossed into the war-torn country from neighbouring Iraq, following a lightning offensive against the Syrian army by rebel forces from the hardline Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and Turkish rebel groups. Their seizure of Aleppo, Syria’s second city, and swathes of territory in the north of the country has reignited the deadly civil war in Syria and shocked its allies in Russia and Iran. President Assad blamed the West for the ‘terrorist escalation’, and accused the US and its allies...

Genocidal Chinese dictator Xi Jinping held extensive, fruitful meetings with socialist Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Wednesday that concluded with the countries agreeing to elevate their diplomatic ties to that of “Community for a Shared Brazil-China Future for a More Just World and More Sustainable Planet.” ... The two leaders agreed to expand the scope of their cooperation as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure plan in which China offers predatory loans to poor countries to be used to fund cost-prohibitive infrastructure projects. When the countries cannot pay the loans back, China...

An investigation by French newspaper Le Monde found that the highly confidential movements of U.S. President Joe Biden, presidential rivals Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and other world leaders can be easily tracked online through a fitness app that their bodyguards use... Le Monde found that some U.S. Secret Service agents use the Strava fitness app, including in recent weeks after two assassination attempts on Trump, in a video investigation released in French and in English. Strava is a fitness tracking app primarily used by runners and cyclists to record their activities and share their workouts with a community. Le...