Free Republic

The United States is stepping up the face-to-face military advice it provides to Ukraine, dispatching a three-star general to Kyiv to spend considerable time on the ground. The Americans are pushing for a conservative strategy that focuses on holding the territory Ukraine has, digging in and building up supplies and forces over the course of the year. The United States has given vast military and economic support to Ukraine, more than $111 billion over the past two years. But a significant number of Republicans now say they oppose further spending, and others are demanding to see a new strategy before...

Conservatives, including a growing number within the House and Senate GOP, are skeptical of the continued flow of foreign aid without confidence that the war has an end point. Roberts accused Biden’s funding request for Ukraine of being overbroad, criticizing U.S. aims to help rebuild its war-ravaged economy. "The House of Representatives should strongly oppose aid to Ukraine when the European Union, which lags far behind the United States in its military assistance to Ukraine, should be required to fund greater levels of aid for Ukraine," he wrote. "Additionally, any military funding for Ukraine should include a publicly available accounting...

In the Pew survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults published Friday, 48 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the United States is giving “too much” to Ukraine, compared to 16 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who hold that view. A Fox News poll of U.S. voters published last month showed 61 percent of Republicans opposed continuing to provide financial aid to Ukraine while only 35 percent favored doing so. A Quinnipiac poll also published last month found 24 percent of Republicans thought the United States was doing about the right amount to help Ukraine, 60 percent thought...

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion, men ages 18 to 60 were forbidden from leaving the country. Some of those seeking to escape hire guides to lead them through the mountains. Others make the risky trip alone. At least 25 men have drowned while crossing the Tysa River separating Ukraine from Moldova and Romania. Many rely on fake documents to slip out of the country. Men have squeezed themselves into secret compartments in vehicles, posed as clergy members and dressed as women to sneak past border checkpoints, said Andriy Demchenko, a spokesman at the headquarters of the State Border Guard Service. Interviews...

Ep. 45 How could Washington possibly send tens of billions more to sleazy oligarchs in Ukraine now that the whole enterprise has been revealed as a fruitless, corrupt and incredibly destructive disaster? Because that’s what they always do. (Click link for video)

Business leaders, officials and ordinary people tell me that the economy has stabilized, defying the Western sanctions that were once expected to have a devastating effect. Putin’s regime, they say, looks more stable than at any other time in the past two years. Restaurants in Moscow are packed. “The restaurant market is growing, not only in Moscow, but throughout Russia, facilitated by the development of domestic tourism,” said a top Russian restaurateur. “And the quality of food is also changing for the better.” Real estate prices are rising, and construction is booming. At the beginning of 2022, most global brands...

A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files....

The vote passed with a razor-thin majority of 291 votes in favour to 274 against, with 44 abstentions. The main proposed changes include the abolition of the principle of unanimity in a total of 65 areas of law, as well as transferring competencies from the member states to the European Union. These include the transfer of inclusive competency on the matters of environmental protection and biodiversity, meaning that law pertaining to those matters would be entirely set at the European level. In addition, the shared competencies would be expanded to seven new areas, those being foreign and security policy, border...

The first several weeks of Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive have not been kind to the Ukrainian troops who were trained and armed by the United States and its allies. Equipped with advanced American weapons and heralded as the vanguard of a major assault, the troops became bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships. Units got lost. One unit delayed a nighttime attack until dawn, losing its advantage. Another fared so badly that commanders yanked it off the battlefield altogether. The complicated training in Western maneuvers has given the Ukrainians scant solace in the face...

Millions of US military emails have been mistakenly sent to Mali, a Russian ally, because of a minor typing error. Emails intended for the US military's ".mil" domain have, for years, been sent to the west African country which ends with the ".ml" suffix. Some of the emails reportedly contained sensitive information such as passwords, medical records and the itineraries of top officers. According to the Financial Times, which first reported the story, Dutch internet entrepreneur Johannes Zuurbier identified the problem more than 10 years ago. Since 2013, he has had a contract to manage Mali's country domain and, in...

Ian "Frank" Tortorici grew up in Lake Forest and volunteered to join Ukraine's International Legion 15 months ago. (This restaurant meetup of Mercenaries was hit after a Canadian Merc posted a geolocated pic from inside restaurant to instagram)

Click link for Video. Excellent overview of Ukraine from a perspective you won't get on the mainstream media.

The direct fiscal cost of the war — spending on soldiers and machines — is estimated to be about 3% of Russia's GDP, or roughly $67 billion a year, according to the report. By historical standards, the current war pales in comparison. The Soviet Union during World War II, for example, spent about 61% of GDP, and the US at the same time put about 50% of its GDP toward the conflict. ...Printing additional cash to fund the war would push inflation higher and weigh on Russia's citizens. Saddling banks with war debt could do the same, and both options...

Click link for video. In Spanish.

Fox News Greta showed a collapsed apartment building, claiming it was part of the Ukraine drone attack on Moscow. But the video really was from Davenport Ohio, a building that collapsed from poor quality concrete used in construction. English signs are shown around the building in the clip...

The UK and USA are planning more than hundreds million MRNA FLU vaccine doses. This video discusses why everyone should question the safety of this. Government and news media do not seem very concerned about these issues but you should be.

"The White House pressured YouTube to reduce watch time of 'borderline' content by 70%, the FBI boasted a 50% success rate in getting platforms to censor misinformation, the Election Integrity Partnership bragged that 35% of URLs shared with Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube were either labeled, removed or soft blocked." Tucker Carlson, Tomi Lahren, Candace Owens, Robert Kennedy Jr, Alex Berenson, @gbdeclaration were all censored. There are future censorship plans to censor topics like climate disinformation, abortion-relation speech, gendered disinformation, and racial justice. (Click link to watch Video)

After the rapid collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank earlier this month, along with Credit Suisse’s untimely demise last week, regulators and business leaders have made it a point to publicly assure consumers that banks are safe. The potential for “contagion” throughout the financial system is now slim after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), Federal Reserve, and Treasury came together to backstop all depositors, both uninsured and insured, at SVB and Signature, they say. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, for example, told lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee last week after the second- and third-largest bank failures in...

The Prime Minister of Georgia, Irakli Garibashvili, stated in Parliament that there had been many attempts to open a “second front,” pushing for Georgia’s involvement in the war. He added that “the second front” was spoken of by the secretary of the National Security Council of Ukraine. “Mr. Danilov stated at the press conference that their desire and goal was to open a second front in Georgia. He added that their task was to divert Russia’s attention to another country, to another region. It was also noted that not only Ukrainian women and children should die, but also other countries...

It's probably much bigger than you think. It has a payload (explosives) of 3850 pounds, which can include multiple 500 pound laser guided bombs and 8 hellfire missiles. It can fly up to 35 hours. As of March 2021, the US Air Force has stated that the unit cost of an MQ-9 Reaper is $56.5 million, though I have read estimates that the true cost is closer to $100 million. See picture below in first comment to see how big it is. It was flown with the transponder off.