Free Republic

Grain production in Ukraine is likely to fall by around 20 per cent this year, prompting inflation and global food security warnings from the UK Ministry of Defence. Britain’s Ministry of Defence has warned that Ukraine’s grain harvest looks set to see around a 20 per cent decrease in yield as a result of the ongoing Russian invasion of the country. With Ukraine being responsible for a significant share of the world’s supply of wheat and other essential crops, this fall is reportedly likely to have devastating effects on the global supply of food, causing price hikes which will put...

Russia has protested against the U.S. sending military aid to Ukraine, warning of “unpredictable consequences.” In a diplomatic note sent to the U.S. this week, Moscow expressed its opposition to the Biden administration assisting Ukraine, which is fiercely resisting a Russian invasion. The Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C, forwarded the document — titled “On Russia’s concerns in the context of massive supplies of weapons and military equipment to the Kiev regime” — to the U.S. State Department. The Washington Post reviewed a copy of the document, which was written in Russian and sent with an English translation. The note came...

Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) said Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation” that it was time for the United States to talk about sending troops to Ukraine.

Russia is worried about increased activity of NATO forces in the Arctic and sees risks of "unintended incidents" occurring in the region, TASS news agency cited Russian ambassador-at-large Nikolai Korchunov as saying on Sunday. In March, Finland and Sweden, which are both considering joining the U.S.-led military NATO alliance, conducted combined NATO military drills. The exercise was long planned, but Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 added intensity to the war game. Moscow describes its actions in Ukraine as a "special military operation". "The recent increase in NATO's activity in the Arctic is a cause for concern. Another large-scale...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is leading a a six-member group of U.S. lawmakers on a two-day visit to Taiwan on Thursday, a visit that has sparked anger from Beijing. Graham along with Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) landed in Taiwan’s Songshan Airport in Taipei on Friday. Graham tweeted that the people of Taiwan are “great allies of the United States” and called Taiwan “a beacon of freedom in a troubled region.” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian...

A Senate Democrat said that the U.S. needs to discuss sending American troops to Ukraine — arguing that Vladimir Putin “will only stop when we stop him.” Appearing on Face the Nation Sunday, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) was confronted by CBS’s Margaret Brennan about comments he made earlier in the week in which he argued the U.S. needs to figure out when it would be willing to send armed forces to Ukraine. “We are in a very dangerous moment where it is important that on a bipartisan and measured way we in Congress and the administration come to a common...

Russian state television declared Friday night that its conflict in Ukraine can now "safely be called World War III." "What it's escalated into can safely be called World War III – that's entirely for sure," Russia 1 television host Olga Skabeyeva said, according to a translation of Friday night’s broadcast by Britain's Metro News. "Now we're definitely fighting against NATO infrastructure, if not NATO itself. We need to recognize that."The remarks on the Russian state sponsored station come a day after Russia's flagship, the Moskva, sank in the Black Sea on Thursday. While the Russians claim the sinking was the...

British SAS troops have been training Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv in how to use British-supplied NLAW anti-tank missile launchers, it has been reported. The training marks the first time British forces have been instructing their Ukrainian counterparts since Russia's Vladimir Putin launched his invasion on February 24. Two officers from separate battalions stationed both in and around the country's capital told The Times that British Special Forces had trained their troops on two occasions over the last fortnight. Reports of the British training came after Russian TV warned that Western involvement in the war - such as supplying weapons to...

Moscow may be co-ordinating pro-Russian demonstrations across Europe to amplify pockets of support for its war in Ukraine, it has been reported. In recent weeks cities including Berlin, Dublin, Hanover, Frankfurt and Athens have seen people take to the streets with Russian flags and vehicles emblazoned with the pro-war Z symbol that has become synonymous with the Kremlin's forces in Ukraine. Many of the marches have taken place at the same time, despite being hundreds of miles away from each other, prompting Russian experts to suggest they might be being coordinated by Moscow, according to The Times. The experts told...

MOSCOW, April 16. /TASS/. Russian air defense units have brought down a military transport plane carrying Western arms outside Odessa, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said on Saturday. "Near Odessa Russian anti-aircraft defense forces have shot down a Ukrainian military transport plane, which was delivering a large shipment of arms supplied to Ukraine by Western counties," he said. In addition, according to Konashenkov, operational and tactical aviation destroyed 67 areas of concentration of Ukrainian military personnel and hardware in the past 24 hours.

Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves (file photo) Serving as president of Estonia between 2006 and 2016, and foreign minister before that, Toomas Hendrik Ilves has always been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin's Russia. Speaking by Zoom from Estonia, Ilves pours water on the idea of negotiating with Russia and says that Georgia's position on the war in Ukraine is "absolutely despicable." RFE/RL: There are many people who think that the roots of what is going on now in Ukraine, and what happened in Georgia in 2008, go back to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest and the refusal...

While we cannot say with total certainty whether the Russian cruiser Moskva was sunk due to a Ukrainian anti-ship missile or just a fire that crews were unable to control, we know that it is lost. Soon we will find out what happened, but regardless of if it was an unfortunate series of events or enemy action, what we do know is the Russian navy is about as big of a joke as the Bad News Bears baseball team from the 1970s movie. The Russians have admitted that the flagship of their Black Sea Fleet — the ship that was...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzxBKcTpRe4&t=843s

A Ukrainian policeman and municipal workers carry a body bag as they exhume two bodies from graves dug in the yard of a house in the village of Vabliya, near Kyiv, on April 14. A Ukrainian policeman and municipal workers carry a body bag as they exhume two bodies from graves dug in the yard of a house in the village of Vabliya, near Kyiv, on April 14. Blasts were heard early on April 16 in the cities of Kyiv and Lviv after warnings from Russia that it would intensify attacks on the Ukrainian capital after accusing Ukraine of targeting...

Authorities in Russia's Bryansk region bordering Ukraine have accused Kyiv of shelling the Russian town of Klimovo and allegedly causing casualties, while the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (RNBO) rejected the accusations, calling them "an attempt to ignite anti-Ukraine hysteria in Russia." The Bryansk region's governor, Aleksandr Bogomaz, said on April 14 that two buildings were damaged in the attack, which he said was conducted by the armed forces of Ukraine. Medical personnel at Klimovo's central hospital told the Russian news agency TASS that seven people, including a pregnant woman and a child, were wounded. Russia's Investigative Committee...

"Curiously enough, today the West and Russia have switched roles. Russia supports the values that had been considered 'western' — the role of the Christian Church, autonomy of the traditional family, and cultural diversity. All these have become secondary in the West. They are only valued as long as they do not contradict liberal dogmas.”In his recent essay, Vakhtang Kipshidze, Deputy Chairman of the Synodal Department for the Russian Orthodox Church's Relations with Society and Mass Media, deliberates on the drastic change in the system of traditional Western values. We are publishing excerpts from the piece. “In his sermon on...

President Joe Biden, 79, his 59-year-old Secretary of State Antony Blinken and 45-year-old National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan have deliberately camouflaged the Ukraine War as a war between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. While 44-year-old Ukrainian President Volodymer Zelensky and his 40-year-old Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba publicly admit the U.S. is funding and supplying weapons to Ukraine, they all deny the obvious: That the U.S. is at war with the Russian Federation.

The prime ministers of Sweden and Finland, Magdalena Andersson and Sanna Marin, both signaled Wednesday that they will likely be applying for membership in NATO. The “prospect” is most “welcome,” says The Washington Post: “Finland and Sweden Should Join NATO.” The editorial was titled “A Way to Punish Putin.” Before joining the rejoicing in NATO capitals, we might inspect what NATO membership for these two Nordic nations would mean for the United States. Finland is a nation the size of Germany, but with a population only 4% of that of Russia and a border with Russia that is 830 miles...

Activists from the western Russian city of Smolensk have petitioned the country's parliament, the Duma, to demolish a symbolic memorial site to the Katyn massacre and a cemetery for its victims, Russian daily Kommersant has reported. Images posted online showed heavy machinery, bearing the pro-war 'Z' and 'V' symbols, approaching the Katyn monument in an apparent bid to destroy it. The memorial site and monument commemorate the Katyn Forest Massacre in western Russia, a series of mass executions of Polish POWs, mainly military officers and policemen, carried out by the Soviet NKVD security agency in April and May 1940. The...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused Western banks of failing to pay for Russian gas supplies after he demanded that European Union member states and other countries pay for Russian gas in rubles. Speaking at a meeting on the current situation in the country's oil and gas sector on April 14, Putin blamed Western partners for what he called "defaults on export deliveries of Russian energy resources." "Banks from these extremely unfriendly states are withholding the transfer of payments," Putin said. Last month, Putin demanded that EU nations pay for gas supplies in rubles as crippling international sanctions slapped on...