Free Republic

MOSCOW (Reuters) - In pre-war Syria, Safaa Al-Kurdi sold wedding dresses. Fed up with the conflict, the mother-of-three fled Damascus four years ago and sought asylum in Moscow. Now, Russia is saying she must go home. Safaa is one of thousands of Syrian refugees that Russia, an ally of President Bashar al-Assad, is urging to return. Large parts of Syria are safe, Russian officials say, and there is no reason for asylum seekers like Safaa, 55, to remain. The Russian stance is creating problems for Syrians here who are seeing their asylum requests rejected. Banned from working, they face the...

The Kremlin remains determined to establish itself as a hegemonic great power, and to follow the domestic as well as international priorities that have underpinned that objective since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. But Russia’s wider public has become less committed to the Kremlin agenda. The unknown of what happens when Vladimir Putin’s second term as president ends by 2024 weighs on the public mind. That alone attracts attention to domestic questions rather than international issues. The succession to Putin, whenever it is to happen, is not just about who it might be but also what that...

Four-time Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Sunday the Crimean people had made a democratic choice to split from Ukraine and hailed Russian President Vladimir Putin as the world's greatest political leader. Earlier this month, Berlusconi became the most prominent Western politician to visit the Black Sea peninsula, which was annexed by Russia last year in a move that has driven a wedge between Moscow and Washington. Pro-Russian separatists are fighting the Kiev government in eastern Ukraine, a conflict that will most likely be raised at a meeting on Monday in New York between U.S. President Barack Obama and...

AUSTIN, Texas — U.S. leaders say Vladimir Putin used a familiar cyber playbook to “muck around” in the midterm elections last month, but intelligence officials and key lawmakers believe a much more sinister, potentially devastating threat lies just down the road — one that represents an attack on reality itself. Policy insiders and senators of both parties believe the Russian president or other actors hostile to the U.S. will rely on “deep fakes” to throw the 2020 presidential election cycle into chaos, taking their campaign to influence American voters and destabilize society to a new level. The eerie process, which...

Russian President Vladimir Putin may retaliate after President Trump canceled a weekend meeting in Argentina over Russia’s detention of Ukrainian sailors, experts said after the surprise announcement Thursday. About an hour after saying he "probably" would meet Putin at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires, Trump tweeted that he would cancel the meeting “[b]ased on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine,” surprising critics who accused him of being soft on Putin. But the snub — the second this month, after a Paris meeting also was scrapped — may provoke Putin in the near-term,...

U.S. and NATO military intelligence agencies have recently identified a “mysterious” Russian missile they believe is designed to take out allied communications and targeting satellites during a conflict. The missile was spotted underneath a MiG-31 interceptor, and it’s estimated to be a mock-up version that could be ready to deploy by 2022, three sources told CNBC.

Let’s start with the basics. If you are a Russian citizen in 2018, it is currently illegal for you to share the Gospel with a friend in your home. It’s illegal for you to invite others to your church. VKontakte— the Russian equivalent of Facebook—can’t be used to spread anything that might be considered “evangelism.” In fact, all religious dialogue has been banned outside of churches and other religious sites. On the street. Online. Even in your own home. How did we get here? How did a country that seemed to be bucking decades of Orwellian control slip back into...

Sochi, October 19, Interfax - Russia would use nuclear weapons only after it is certain that a potential aggressor has launched a strike on it, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday. "Our strategy of nuclear weapons use doesn't envision a preemptive strike. Our concept is a launch under attack," Putin said at the plenary session of the Valdai Club in Sochi. This means that Russia is ready to use and would use nuclear weapons "only when we are certain that someone, a potential aggressor, is delivering a strike on Russia." The essence of Russia's launch-under-attack nuclear strategy is that...

Rights activists and immigration attorneys say the surge in the number of Russian asylum applications in the United States has been driven in part by the 2013 law concerning sexual minorities. Putin has been accused by critics of overseeing a mounting crackdown on dissent -- including against the political opposition and businesspeople not in step with the Kremlin – and fostering stigmatization of sexual minorities since he regained the presidency. 'I Had To Leave' Vlad, a gay Russian applicant in his 30s, told RFE/RL that he was simply looking to move somewhere where he could live "more freely," and that...

Russia will transfer two to four S-300 air defense missile systems to Syria within the next two weeks, the Russian news website Kommersant reported Tuesday, citing a source familiar with the details. The amount of systems may increase in the future. The Assad regime will use the systems to defend Syria's coastline and its borders with Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq, the report said. According to the official, Russia may end up transferring up to eight systems to Syria, depending on the circumstances.Meanwhile, Russian outlet Izvestia reported that Moscow is boosting its electronic warfare systems in Syria, which were brought...

Putin’s dialing down of the rhetoric is an effort to mask his intentions. He — Russia — still has the same foreign policy interests in Syria as he did before the plane was shot down, and those aren’t going to change anytime soon. When journalists asked him about the much more hostile statement of his Defense Ministry, which also vowed a retaliatory response, Putin stated clearly that it was “fully coordinated” with him (of course it was). He defined what ‘retaliatory’ meant. “The retaliatory measures will be directed above all to boosting the security of military men and installations in...

<p>3:05 p.m.</p> <p>The president of Poland is telling President Donald Trump that he'd like the U.S. to create a permanent American base in Poland that would be named Fort Trump.</p> <p>Trump says that he's considering the idea and that Poland has offered more than $2 billion to the U.S. to pay for such an effort.</p>

It is impossible to evaluate events in Russia today without understanding the mysterious series of bombings in 1999 that killed 300 civilians and created the conditions for Vladimir Putin to become Russia’s dictator for life. The bombings changed the course of Russia’s post-Soviet history. They were blamed on the Chechens. In the wake of initial success, Russia launched a new invasion of Chechnya. Putin, who had just been appointed prime minister, was put in charge of the invasion and his popularity soared. Six months later, he was elected president. On July 14, 2016, I filed a request for documents on...

Several Russian media outlets, nearly simultaneously, began broadcasting “breaking news” warnings claiming that rebels occupying the last anti-government stronghold in Idlib Province, Syria, are preparing to stage chemical weapons attacks in order to blame them on the Syrian government. The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that the anti-Assad rebels were preparing “fake footage of chemical attacks,” while the Russian Center for Syrian Reconciliation announced that the “fake footage of chemical attacks” was expected to be delivered to various TV channels and Western journalists before the end of the day Tuesday.

President Bashar al-Assad has approved a gas attack in the Idlib province, which is the country’s last rebel stronghold, a report on Sunday said. Reports of Assad's approval comes about a week after President Trump warned the strongman and his allies not to “recklessly attack” the province. Trump called any gas attack a potential “grave humanitarian mistake.” The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. officials, was first to report on Assad.

In a chilly, high-ceilinged room in a Sussex preparatory school in the winter of 1959, I work intently on my model of the destroyer HMS Cossack. Such models come in lurid cardboard boxes illustrated with pictures of aircraft, tanks and warships, amid scenes of fiery melodrama, guns emitting orange streaks of flame, and the smoke of battle. With these and our imaginations, we seek to recreate the thrill of the war we have just missed, in which our fathers fought and our mothers endured privations. This is a war just over the horizon of time in which we wish we...

The “Resistance” has morphed into the “Lynch Mob.” Having successfully been gaslit into believing Donald Trump is everything from a bad joke to a Russian spy, the Progressive left in the U.S. are embracing all the totalitarian impulses their grabby little hands can find as they climb the Cliffs of their Insanity to remove him from office. This putsch is orchestrated by a now open conspiracy of members of FBI, CIA, MI-6, DNC, the U.S. corporate media and Trump’s own staff in the Oval Office as evidenced by the recent and infamous New York Times op-ed. This expose from a...

The Chief Secretariat of the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate announced on 7 September 2018 that within the framework of the preparations for the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, the Ecumenical Patriarchate has appointed as its Exarchs in Kiev His Excellency Archbishop Daniel of Pamphilon from the United States, and His Grace Bishop Ilarion of Edmonton from Canada, both of whom are serving the Ukrainian Orthodox faithful in their respective countries under the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

Members of an opposition party running for office outside Moscow have reportedly been beaten and had their cars torched before regional elections scheduled for Sept. 9. Voters in 22 different regions across Russia, including Moscow, will elect mayors and local legislative assembly deputies on Sunday. Seven regions will also be holding special elections for seats in the State Duma. Parnas opposition party member Sergei Balabayev was beaten by a masked assailant who was allegedly plastering Parnas-branded flyers calling for an election boycott, the party said. “As soon as the deputy entered the vestibule, he was immediately kicked and punched in...

The memory of Stalin’s Terror is now receiving more attention in Russia than at any time since the 1980s. The Stalin epoch’s influence on Russia is undeniable. Present-day Russians mainly live in a country inherited from the Stalin-era Soviet Union, not least in terms of infrastructure, architecture and social institutions. However, scholars, intellectuals and journalists agree that Russian society has yet to thoroughly work through the totalitarian legacy of Stalin’s era. According to a recent Levada-Center poll, Stalin’s popularity is actually rising. Around 40 percent of respondents expressed positive attitudes towards Stalin, while around one third agreed that Russia now...