Free Republic

Thousands of demonstrators in Belarus took to the streets again Saturday to demand that the country's authoritarian leader resign after a presidential vote they called fraudulent. In response, the president declared that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had agreed to provide security assistance to restore order if Belarus requested it. President Alexander Lukashenko spoke Saturday evening several hours after a phone call with Putin as he struggled to counter the biggest challenge yet to his 26 years in power. Saturday was the seventh consecutive day of large protests against the results of the country's Aug. 9 presidential election in which election...

The Novaya Gazeta newspaper has shared a short video showing a convoy of military trucks and armored vehicles moving towards the Russian border. Official Minsk fears that Russia may take advantage of the instability in the country and carry out the Ukrainian scenario to occupy part of the territories ahead of August’s presidential election. The state-controlled Belta news agency said last week that Belarus has arrested dozens of Russian mercenaries after receiving information that more than 200 fighters had entered the country to destabilize it before a presidential election. The mercenaries worked for Wagner, Russia’s best-known private military contractor

MADRID — Spanish police arrested 16 people Monday who are suspected of recruiting Al Qaeda fighters to send to Iraq, officials said. The group's alleged leader, a 25-year-old Iraqi known as Abu Sufian, had access to Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, and probably sent his recruits on suicide missions, the Interior Ministry said. The 16, of several nationalities, sent volunteers to Iraq "to wage jihad as members of the Al Qaeda network," Spanish Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso told a news conference. He said the group had two fighters ready to send to Iraq at the time...

MOSCOW: Russia and five former Soviet republics on Monday launched a new military-political bloc in the East, similar to NATO of the US-led western nations. At a summit near Dushanbe, leaders of Russia, Armenia, Belorus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan formalised their collective security pact into Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) with a charter containing an article similar to the article 5 of NATO when an act of aggression on one member-nation would be considered as an aggression on all the member-nations, state-run 'Rossia" channel reported. "At Monday's session we finally agreed on military and military-political mechanisms, decided to set up...