Free Republic

Kyiv will not meet Vladimir Putin's request for Ukraine to withdraw troops from its four partially occupied regions, Volodymyr Zelensky has said. The Ukrainian leader said "it's our land," in a briefing to reporters on Monday, according to The Kyiv Independent on the day when the Russian president and U.S. President Donald Trump held a much-touted phone call. Yuriy Boyechko, CEO of humanitarian group Hope for Ukraine, told Newsweek Putin's ceasefire demands, which include Ukrainian forces leaving all of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, were "impossible to meet." Newsweek has contacted the Kremlin for comment. Why It Matters In...

Are we about to see Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sitting across from each other at a negotiating table in Turkey? It looks like that could actually happen this week. If both leaders really do show up, there will be peace negotiations in Turkey starting on Thursday. But will these negotiations lead to peace, or will they lead to World War 3? Western leaders were threatening to hit Russia with a new round of very harsh sanctions if the Russians did not agree to a 30 day ceasefire beginning on March 12th. In response, Russian President...

Russia's oil price in roubles has fallen to a two-year low below the 4,000 rouble per barrel mark and some 40% lower than planned in the federal budget, data showed, piling pressure on the Kremlin, already saddled with a burgeoning budget deficit. -snip- According to Reuters calculations, the average price of Russia's mix of Urals and ESPO blends dipped on May 2 to $48.92 per barrel, or 3,987 roubles, which is more than 40% below the 6,726 roubles the government had originally planned for this year. That's the lowest since May 2023, according to Reuters data. It is also still...

Nearly nine months after losing chunks of the Kursk region to a surprise Ukrainian incursion, Russia announced that its troops have fully reclaimed the border territory. Ukraine denied it, saying the fighting was still ongoing. If confirmed, Moscow’s victory in Kursk would deprive Kyiv of key leverage in U.S.-brokered efforts to negotiate an end to the more than 3-year-old war by exchanging its gains for some of Russia-occupied land in Ukraine. Here are key moments of the battle for Kursk and its impact:A Ukrainian blitzUkrainian forces pushed into Kursk on Aug. 6, 2024, in a surprise attack, with battle-hardened mechanized...

The radicalized son of a CIA director was killed last year while allegedly fighting for Russia in Ukraine, according to a new investigation. Michael Alexander Gloss, the 21-year-old son of the CIA’s Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Julianne Gallina Gloss and a Navy veteran father, was killed on the front lines after enlisting in the Russian army, according to a lengthy investigation by independent Russian outlet Important Stories. Gloss’ obituary said his “fiercely beautiful life … was taken from us during his travels overseas” on April 4, 2024, without detailing exactly how “With his noble heart and warrior spirit Michael...

Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the event it faces aggression by Western countries, Moscow's top security official, Sergei Shoigu, was quoted as saying in an interview with the TASS state news agency on Thursday. -snip- Shoigu, who served for over a decade as Russia's defence minister until he moved to head its powerful security council in a government reshuffle last year, cited amendments to Moscow's nuclear doctrine approved by President Vladimir Putin last November. Under the new terms, Russia could consider a nuclear strike in response to a conventional attack on Russia or its ally Belarus...

Missiles struck Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, early on Thursday morning, setting off air raid sirens and forcing residents into bomb shelters. Explosions were heard across the city just after the alert was issued. “Kyiv is being attacked by enemy missiles,” the capital’s military command posted on Telegram, urging people to take shelter immediately. Local authorities confirmed that at least two districts in the city had sustained damage. -snip- Meanwhile, in the east of the country, the city of Kharkiv was also hit. Mayor Igor Terekhov said that seven missiles had struck the city overnight. Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukraine...

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher said that while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s declaration that it’s not realistic for Ukraine to return to its pre-2014 borders “is just surrender” but “the problem is that I don’t know how it doesn’t end this way.” Maher stated, “So, here’s what Pete Hegseth, our new Secretary of Defense said…he said, returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective, which, to me, is just surrender. Then again, we can argue about whether that’s true or not. The United States does not believe, also, that NATO membership for Ukraine is...

Ukraine is demanding that 30,000 people be conscripted to fight in the war every single month. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Aleksandr Syrsky, has said Kiev must mobilize 30,000 soldiers every month to sustain resistance against the Russian army. In an interview published on Wednesday by the Ukrainian outlet lb.ua, Syrsky claimed that Russia can mobilize up to 5 million trained and experienced troops, with a total potential force of 20 million. He emphasized this gap to underscore the urgency of Ukraine’s continued mobilization amid mounting battlefield pressure.

Moscow once listed the Afghan hard-line movement as a terror group, but President Vladimir Putin now describes it as a “trusted ally.” The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office requested Monday that the Supreme Court ends a ban on the Taliban’s activities in the country. Moscow’s foreign and justice ministries submitted an appeal last week to President Vladimir Putin urging the Taliban’s removal from Russia’s list of terrorist organizations. The Taliban is a political and militant Islamist group that emerged in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, and has ruled in Kabul since the U.S. withdrew from the country in August 2021. The...

brand new Russian nuclear submarine during visit an Arctic naval base yesterday. Speaking to submariners, Putin smugly declared: 'Not long ago I said we'd grind [Ukraine] down — now it looks like we'll finish them off. He also mocked the state of the British economy and armed forces after Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron revealed yesterday they would deploy an Anglo-French 'reassurance force' to Ukraine following a ceasefire deal. '[Britain] is jumping on us, behaving aggressively... but their economy is, I think, in the ninth or tenth place in the world,' the Russian President smirked. 'Hence the...

Russian forces have made a breakthrough south of the Ukrainian-held town of Sudzha, potentially threatening to cut off some of the Ukrainian positions in Russia's Kursk Oblast, Agentstvo and Ukrainska Pravda reported on March 7. An undisclosed military source deployed in Kursk Oblast told the Ukrainska Pravda outlet that Russian forces have broken through Ukrainian defenses south of Sudzha and that the defenders are trying to stabilize the situation. Ukrainian forces are trying to contain the Russian advance to prevent a partial or complete encirclement, the source claimed.

A Russian intelligence-gathering vessel caught fire and temporarily lost control off the Syrian coast on Janaury 23, according to Associated Press (AP). The Kildin, a Russian spy ship equipped with surveillance technology, was seen emitting black smoke and flames as it drifted, prompting an urgent maritime radio warning to nearby vessels. The Associated Press obtained audio of the broadcast, as well as video and photographs of the incident. “Warship on your course,” the Russian Captain said. “I am drifting. I’m not under command.” The videos, taken by three NATO military officials, were collected by a nearby NATO vessel. These officials...

China and India have stopped buying Russian oil due to increased freight costs for tankers not subject to US sanctions. A representative from India's Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd stated that the company has not received new supply offers for March, as is usually the case, and expects the volume of cargoes offered for the first month of spring to decrease compared to January and December. Typically, India receives offers for Russian oil supplies in the middle of each month. Traders noted that the premium for Russian ESPO crude oil has increased by $3-5 per barrel compared to ICE Brent, while...

President Trump re-upped his claim that Russia stole the plan for hypersonic missiles during the Obama administration. “Russia stole the design, they got it from us,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity. Part two of the interview, his first since taking the reins at the White House, was aired Thursday night. “Some bad person gave them the design,” he said, adding that the United States will have super hypersonic missiles “which is even a step better.”

On March 5, 2022, the wreck of the sailing ship Endurance was found in the depths of the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. This, of course, was the vessel lost in Ernest Shackelton’s third expedition to Antarctica, which became trapped in the ice and sank in 1915. The story of that expedition is an extraordinary tale of human fortitude - with the Endurance lost to the ice, Shackleton’s crew evacuated to a loose ice flow where they camped for nearly 500 days, drifting about the Antarctic seas, before making a desperate dash across the open ocean in an...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals have an artful knack for keeping the Russian military bear off-balance. On Sunday, they renewed their offensive in the Russian Kursk Oblast, once again catching the Russian high command, Kremlin, and many pundits by surprise. Reports of a demoralized Ukrainian army fighting to retain terrain captured during the August Kursk offensive — of which at least 40 percent has been lost — have circulated among western media and Russian milbloggers since November. So too reports that Ukraine’s 155th Mechanized Brigade — trained and equipped by France — was under-resourced in “first person view...

I will never forget New Year's Eve 1999. I was working as a producer in the BBC's Moscow bureau. Suddenly there was breaking news: Russia's President Boris Yeltsin had stepped down. His decision to resign took everyone by surprise, including the British press corps in Moscow. When the news broke there was no correspondent in the office. That meant I had to step in to write and broadcast my first BBC dispatch. "Boris Yeltsin always said he would see out his full term in office," I wrote. "Today he told Russians he'd changed his mind." It was the start of...

Terrorism -- i.e., the use of violence on civilians and civilian targets for a political purpose -- is an act of weakness, not strength. A couple of incidents -- the crash of an Azerbaijani airplane in Aktau, Kazakhstan, and the sinking of the Oboronlogistica, a Russian state-controlled company that operated the Ursa Major freighter, in the Mediterranean Sea between Spain and Algeria -- are characterized as terrorist attacks. Maybe.While Western media immediately blamed the plane crash on Russian air defense-missile, the video and the wreckage do not support that claim. Yes, the fuselage was peppered with shrapnel holes, but those...

The country’s prime minister said the incident, the latest in a series of disruptions to undersea infrastructure, underscored the danger of a so-called Russian shadow fleet.The Finnish police on Thursday boarded an oil tanker that the authorities said they suspected was involved in damaging vital undersea cables. They suggested the tanker was part of a shadow fleet used by Russia to avoid Western sanctions.The Estlink 2 submarine cable, which carries electricity between Finland and Estonia, was cut on Wednesday, Finland’s police said in a statement, the latest in a slew of disruptions to undersea infrastructure that are being investigated as...