Free Republic

The hall at St. Vladimir's Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Calgary is packed. Three gigantic, artistically painted wooden Easter eggs dominate the stage. Heavily accented voices rise and fall amid the chatter as attendees nibble on poppyseed cake and other Ukrainian delicacies. No one wears the bright blue-and-yellow of the war's early days, but embroidered vyshyvanky peek from under sweaters and jackets. These are the faithful still committed to Ukraine's cause. They came to hear Michael Bociurkiw — a Canadian journalist of Ukrainian heritage now based in Odesa — deliver a sobering assessment of a war grinding into its fifth year....

Russia has a problem it cannot bomb its way out of. For months, Ukraine has been quietly dismantling the one road that keeps Russia's southern war machine alive — a highway so critical that without it, Crimea starves, and the front line goes cold. On May 27th, Kyiv stopped being quiet about it. Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov formalized what had been a covert campaign into a declared strategic program, announcing a $113 million initiative he calls a "logistics lockdown." The target is the R-280 highway — also known as the M-14, renamed by Russian occupation authorities the "Novorossiya" route....

Vladimir Putin has rejected an offer from Volodymyr Zelenskyy to hold a face-to-face meeting, insisting instead that Russia will achieve its war goals in Ukraine, including seizing all of the eastern Donbas region. Speaking at the St Petersburg economic forum, the Russian president described the open letter from his Ukrainian counterpart containing the offer as rude. He refused to use Zelenskyy’s name, referring to him only as its author. Asked if they could meet to discuss an end to the conflict, Putin replied: “So far I see no point.” Zelenskyy’s letter, which was published on Thursday, proposed a meeting in...

King Charles reportedly raised concerns about hosting President Donald Trump during his state visit to the U.K. following Trump's public attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Last September, Trump paid a state visit to the U.K., during which he stayed at Windsor Castle with King Charles and Queen Camilla. According to an iPaper report, King Charles was “reticent” about hosting Trump. One source told the outlet he “did not want to do it.” Per the report, the concerns stemmed from how Trump treated Zelensky during his visit to the White House in February 2025.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy said the country and the U.S. will sign an agreement to design an underwater tunnel connecting Russia’s Chukotka region to Alaska across the Bering Strait. Kirill Dmitriev, who is also head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, made the announcement Thursday at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. “As regards, the tunnel, we have a piece of news for tomorrow that we will continue tunnel engineering. The tunnel will take place,” he told Russian TV channel Zvezda, according to a translation by state-owned news agency TASS. He added that this will be one of...

Keir Starmer will host Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz for talks in Downing Street on Sunday to discuss support for Ukraine. The Ukrainian leader will visit the UK with the French president and German chancellor after a week of heightened hostilities and Vladimir Putin’s rejection of his proposal of face-to-face talks on Moscow’s war. The three countries meeting the Ukrainian leader are some of Kyiv’s staunchest allies. The UK and France are leading the “coalition of the willing” initiative to provide security guarantees for Ukraine as part of a peace process. A large-scale Ukrainian drone attack targeted St...

The European Union could reduce the refugee status protections it grants to military age Ukrainian men because “the war needs to be fought and won”, and should crack down on Russians coming to the bloc for luxury shopping trips and beach holidays, ministers were told. A European Union Justice and Home Affairs summit in Luxembourg has discussed the need to reform the bloc’s open borders approach to the Ukraine War, with crackdowns on both Ukrainians and Russians proposed. While preventing Russians from enjoying their summer holidays in Europe is already widespread, a further proposal came from the Swedish government, with...

The Republican-led House on Thursday passed a sweeping security package providing new military aid to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia, delivering a sharp rebuke to the Trump administration, who opposed the measure. Eighteen Republicans crossed party lines to support the Democrat-authored legislation in a vote of 226-195. California Rep. Kevin Kiley, an independent who caucuses with Republicans, also supported the legislation. Meanwhile, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was the lone Democratic lawmaker to vote against the bill. House GOP leadership and the vast majority of Republicans opposed the legislation aimed at bolstering Ukraine's defenses amid a surge in Russian missile...

Russian military vehicles are being painted with vivid stripes to baffle AI systems of Ukrainian-launched drones, experts say. Now the "cloaking" tactic has apparently launched a high-stakes game of hide and seek on the highways of Russian-held territory in Ukraine. Todd E. Humphreys, an aerospace and AI expert at the University of Texas at Austin, agrees the paint tactic may be more effective than many realize. "Dazzle paint pushes the vehicles 'out of distribution' -- they no longer look, to the AI classifier, like the images it was trained on," he told RFE/RL. But any specific paint job would have...

Russia's oil and gas tax revenue, which accounts for around a fifth of ​total budget income, increased by 32.4% year-on-year in May ​to 678.9 billion roubles ($9.3 billion), Finance Ministry data showed ⁠on Wednesday, thanks to a global oil price rally fuelled ​by the Middle East war. Revenue declined by 20.7% from April, when ​the budget received additional payments from profit-based tax, paid cyclically. Russia, the world's third-largest oil producer and exporter after the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, ​has been one of the main beneficiaries of the rise in ​oil prices after the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran began at the...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lamented during a Wednesday press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that his country’s war with Russia is no longer top of mind for U.S. officials. “Iran is the No. 1 issue for the United States, and only after that comes Ukraine,” Zelensky said in Kyiv. “Unfortunately, we are in the queue of these wars.” Rutte arrived in Ukraine on an unannounced visit one day after a Russian drone and missile attack killed at least 13 people and injured more than 100. In the United States, members of the House of Representatives are forcing a...

Ukrainian drones on Wednesday attacked St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, on the opening day of an annual economic conference that President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to cultivate into a showcase of a modern and prosperous country. It was the second time in a month that Ukraine had struck a major Russian city before an event important to Mr. Putin, as Kyiv expands a campaign of long-range strikes aimed at inflicting economic damage on Russia and demonstrating its vulnerability to attacks. In early May, Ukrainian forces hit sites in Moscow, including a high-rise apartment building near the city center, days...

First, the bad news: The Iran War shows no signs of ending soon. Tehran on Monday said it would suspend peace talks with the U.S. in protest of Israeli strikes in Gaza and Lebanon. Now, the even worse news: The Iran War is linked to the Ukraine War in myriad disturbing ways, and the longer the former drags on, the more dangerous the latter becomes. Talk of “World War III” tends to be ludicrously overwrought—crafted to generate clicks and grab eyeballs on social media, rather than highlight geopolitical risks—but the connections between these two wars have, if anything, been underdiscussed....

Vladimir Putin has suffered a fresh wave of war humiliation amid warnings that his unaffordable conflict with Ukraine is pushing his economy to the brink of collapse. Russia's Finance Ministry and its central bank has projected the government's budget deficit widening to a dangerous level if the Kremlin continues at the current rate of defence expenditure, according to Bloomberg. The stark warning came as Putin suffered further setbacks on the frontline, where the tide of the war is increasingly turning in Ukraine's favour. And authorities in Crimea are urging citizens not to panic amid ongoing petrol shortages with pictures showing...

Candice Owens revealed that the US leader called her from Mar-a-Lago and told her about the French president's demandsMOSCOW, June 2. /TASS/. Journalist Candice Owens told TASS that French President Emmanuel Macron informed US leader Donald Trump that he’s fed up with stories that his wife, Brigitte Macron, is a man, going so far as to say he wouldn’t sign a certain deal on Ukraine if the hate didn’t stop. "President Trump called me. That was not a tale, it's a true story. I have the phone records. And he called me from Mar-a-Lago, actually. So he says, well, you...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday said he hopes White House special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will come to Kyiv, Ukraine, for talks in the coming weeks. CBS News’s “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked the president whether he had heard from the envoys and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and whether they will ever travel to Kyiv. “Yes, we count on [them] coming to Kyiv,” Zelensky said. “I hope that they will find a possibility to come here in two weeks. But at least I’ve got such message from my negotiation group, they...

The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 26, contains this invaluable insight: “As dogs return to their vomit, so fools repeat their folly. You see those who are wise in their own eyes? There is more hope for fools than for them.” Invaluable because, in connection with the Russia-Ukraine War, the passage powerfully illuminates the current debate about Ukraine’s future strategic prospects.The past few months have witnessed the dog returning to its vomit in the form of any number of efforts to once again make the case that Ukraine still has a path to total victory in its war against Russia. In...

Things are not always as they seem, and I am convinced that the drama that we witnessed at the White House on Friday is a perfect example. Right now, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is being endlessly ridiculed by the conservative media in the United States. One of the words that is being used to describe Zelenskyy is “stupid”, but the truth is that Zelenskyy is not stupid at all. I strongly disagree with Zelenskyy on a lot of things, but I also recognize that he is an incredibly cunning individual. He has used the war with Russia to become one...

A drone struck a residential building in Romania’s city of Galati near the Ukrainian border, injuring two people and triggering a fire after impact, authorities said on Friday. The incident, which prompted the evacuation of dozens of residents, comes amid continued drone activity in the region linked to the war in Ukraine.

"Russia is considering limiting exports of diesel and jet fuel," Bloomberg and other sources reported Tuesday, "as refinery run rates fall to multi-year lows amid Ukraine’s escalating attacks." An Interfax source claimed that the decision to ban exports is at "an advanced stage," but no date has been set. If it comes to pass, that would be bad for diesel prices and inflation right here at home, but worse for Moscow's finances. Just the fact that the Kremlin is considering an export ban is more evidence that Kyiv's drone campaign is increasingly effective — against Russia's energy production at home,...