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News Russia claims Syrian rebels planning Idlib chemical weapons attack The Kremlin has claimed that rebels are planning a chemical weapons attack with the intent of blaming it on Syria. Russia also says a British contractor is helping the militants... Russia's Defense Ministry said Saturday that Syrian rebels are planning a chemical weapons attack, with the aim of blaming it on the Syrian government to provoke a military response from the West. The ministry issued a statement quoting unnamed sources claiming that the jihadi group Levant Liberation Committee — also known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — is preparing an attack...

Russia is "stuck" in Syria and looking for others to fund its post-war reconstruction, US National Security Adviser John Bolton said, describing this as an opportunity for Washington to press for Iranian forces to quit the civil war-wracked country. Bolton said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had told the United States that Moscow could not compel the Iranians to leave Syria. "But he also told us that his interest and Iran's were not exactly the same. So we're obviously going to talk to him about what role they can play," said Bolton, who meets his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, in...

China’s military will for the first time participate with Russia in massive joint exercises that are expected to be the largest war games since the fall of the Soviet Union as the U.S. rivals look to showcase their deepening ties. The annual Vostok military drills will kick off late this month and run through mid-September, the Chinese Defense Ministry announced Monday. Military forces from the two countries will hold joint exercises at the Tsugol training range in Russia’s Trans-Baikal region, near where the borders of Russia, China and eastern Mongolia meet, from Sept. 11 to 15, the ministry added.

Moscow is preparing to recover a nuclear-powered missile lost at sea, according to sources with direct knowledge of a U.S. intelligence report. Russian President Vladimir Putin bragged earlier this year that the new missile had unlimited range. The missile was tested four times between November and February, each resulting in a crash, according to sources who spoke to CNBC on the condition of anonymity. Crews will attempt to recover a missile that was test launched in November and landed in the Barents Sea, which is located north of Norway and Russia. The operation will include three vessels, one of which...

Moscow issued a stern warning to the US on Friday against ramping up sanctions against Russia, saying the Kremlin will retaliate with economic, political and unspecified “other” measures. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s warning reflects Russian fears over the impact of new restrictions on its economy and assets, including the ruble, which has lost nearly 6 percent of its value this week on sanctions jitters, according to Reuters. In a sign of how seriously Russia is taking the threat, strongman Vladimir Putin discussed what the Kremlin called “possible new unfriendly steps by Washington” with members of his Security Council. They said...

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on recent remarks made by Russian president Vladimir Putin: Russian president Vladimir Putin is making some waves with his recent statement equating communism to Christianity. He said that “communist ideology is very similar to Christianity,” crediting Soviet communism for preaching “freedom, brotherhood, equality.” Though he admitted that religious persecution took place under Soviet rule, he nonetheless lauded it for its ideological commitment to these ideals. Pope Francis himself said in 2016 that it has been noted many times that “it is the communists who think like Christians.” By that he meant the communists profess...

"Anyone who grew up with the Eastern Orthodox Church (in my case, the Greek Orthodox Church in New York) will get a good laugh at Vladimir Putin pretending to be a Christian during his first Easter as Russian ruler..." "The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has been, since its reconstitution during WWII, an instrument of the state. The best illustration of this is probably the 1949 “Greetings from the clergy and laity of the Russian Orthodox Church to the leader of the nations of the USSR, the Generalissimus Joseph Stalin on his 70th birthday.” It states, in part: "Witnessing at every...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he is and has always been fond of communist "ideas", while also comparing the Soviet code of conduct to the Holy Bible, independent news agency Interfax reported. ... "I was not, as you know, a party member by necessity," he said. "I liked communist and socialist ideas very much and I like them still."

On Friday, May 9, 2014, Moscow's Red Square was once again the site of massive demonstrations as Russia commemorated the 69th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany. Units representing all branches of the Russian armed forces paraded down the square, as the surrounding buildings, including the Kremlin, were decorated with communist Soviet-era emblems and hammer-and-sickle insignias. Standing alongside top Russian military brass and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Russian President Vladimir Putin personally oversaw the parade. There was the stereotypical goose-stepping, as a select honor guard of Russian soldiers marched under both the modern Russian flag and the red...

Russian President Vladimir Putin Laments Death of Soviet Union in Campaign SpeechMOSCOW Feb. 12 — President Vladimir Putin used a campaign speech Thursday to declare the demise of the Soviet Union a "national tragedy on an enormous scale," in what appeared to be his strongest-ever lament of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Putin, a former agent of the Soviet KGB spy agency, has praised aspects of the Soviet Union in the past but never so robustly nor in such an important political setting. "The breakup of the Soviet Union is a national tragedy on an enormous scale," from which...

“Uncle Joe” New National Hero Modern Russia Displays Red Roots thelastcrusade.org Joseph Stalin sent over 30 million Russians to their deaths during his reign of terror. His body was removed from the Kremlin. His name was taboo for decades. But the ruthless Soviet dictator is the new hero of modern Russia, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin now openly praises “Uncle Joe’s” achievements. In a recent appearance on national television, Mr. Putin gave credit to Stalin for making the Soviet Union an industrial superpower and for defeating Hitler in the Second World War. “It’s obvious that, from 1924 to 1953,...

Vladimir Putin is to fulfil an unrealised dream of Joseph Stalin's by creating a grandiose state cemetery. In a corner of northern Moscow bulldozers began churning the earth his week in a section of wasteland where Mr Putin and Stalin, the dictator he is said to revere, could one day be laid side by side. The Federal Military Memorial Cemetery, its designers boast, will be Russia's answer to America's Arlington. Arguably the most ambitious architectural project undertaken since the fall of the Soviet Union, it remains to be seen whether the cemetery, due to be completed by 2010, will become...

In his most candid comments on the subject to date, the Russian prime minister said that at least part of his job as a KGB agent in East Germany involved acquiring sensitive technological and industrial secrets from the West. But he told a meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences that he grew increasingly frustrated as the know-how he passed back to the Soviet Union to help it make good the yawning technological gap with the West went unused. "When I was serving in a different department (the KGB) in my past life I remember very well the moment at...

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a country in which history plays a pivotal role in maintaining the legitimacy of the political regime. Putin sees himself as a leader that has given the Russians back their sense of pride. Ever since becoming president in 2000 he has been hard at work at whitewashing the Soviet period of Russian history and creating an uninterrupted narrative linking the Romanov Empire, the USSR and modern Russia. Not unlike the official French version of history, Putin’s Russian story is all about greatness – but with a twist. While France with all its respect for l’etat still...

The notorious 1939 pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that divided up much of eastern Europe is open only to historical re-evaluation, a Kremlin spokesman said Saturday, suggesting that Moscow isn't prepared to support a legally binding renouncement of the agreement. "At present, only the historical evaluation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is possible," Dmitry Peskov, deputy press secretary to President Vladimir Putin, told reporters. "There is no possibility of its juridical evaluation due to current realities." He did not elaborate, but the statement appears to dampen expectations, created this week by Estonian President Arnold Ruutel, that the Kremlin...

Putin has called for Communist leader Vladimir Lenin's body to be preserved in its mausoleum on Red Square, comparing the embalmed body of the founder of the Soviet state to the relics of saints. "Many are saying that having Lenin's Mausoleum runs counter to the tradition. But what runs counter to tradition?" Putin told a meeting with celebrities who campaigned for him in the March 2012 presidential election, according to the Kremlin website. "Just go to Kiev Pechersk Lavra or check out Pskov Monastery or Mount Athos. You'll see the relics of saints there." Putin cited almost word-for-word the present-day...

A senior Russian official finally admitted that Stalin's secret police shot dead Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of central European Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944 and 1945. For decades the Soviet authorities insisted that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in 1947 in a Soviet prison, but speculation about his fate grew into a full-blown mystery as gulag inmates surfaced to report sightings of the Swede in Siberia into the 1950s.

... On the right, hatred of Russia also runs deep, and little or no distinction is made in most quarters between things Russian and Soviet. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian patriot and the anti-communist par excellence, told an interviewer in 2006, that is very disappointing, indeed. Why such blindness and rigidity across the political and media class in the Western world, and in the United States in particular?

Russia has used a closely guarded communications channel with America's top general to propose the two former Cold War foes cooperate to rebuild Syria and repatriate refugees to the war-torn country, according to a U.S. government memo. The proposal was sent in a July 19 letter by Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian military's General Staff, to U.S. Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Russian plan, which has not been previously reported, has received an icy reception in Washington. The memo said the U.S. policy was only to support such efforts if there...

The head of the Russian Lower House Committee for Eurasian Integration says the recent proposal to split Russia into several parts, voiced by a Latvian MP, is proof of NATO’s hostile plans. MP Leonid Kalashnikov (Communist Party) told RIA Novosti on Monday that the statement by the Latvian MP Aleksandrs Kirsteins clearly demonstrated that Russian concern over NATO bases in Baltic countries was justified. The comments came shortly after Kirsteins wrote on his Twitter feed that the end of military conflicts and the guarantee of a peaceful life in Europe was possible only if Russia is divided into several small...