Free Republic

Beneath the gold onion domes of the Danilov Monastery a few miles south of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s chief shaman explains why Russia is hell-bent on destroying Ukraine. “If we see [Ukraine] as a threat, we have the right to use force to ensure the threat is eradicated,” Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill recently preached to his church’s 90 million faithful followers. “We have entered into a conflict which has not only physical but also metaphysical significance. We are talking about human salvation, something much more important than politics.” The wartime coalition between Putin and his patriarch is called symphonia, an...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought death, destruction and debate over historical analogies. Is this the summer of 1914, with great powers stumbling into a horrific global conflict? Or is it the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939? What about Moscow’s 1939-40 Winter War against Finland? Will Vladimir Putin’s gambit end like the Soviet Union’s 1979-89 misadventure in Afghanistan? Matt Pottinger has been thinking of another conflict. Mr. Putin’s attempted conquest, and his burgeoning partnership with China’s Xi Jinping, reminds Mr. Pottinger of the Korean War. “In 1950, Stalin and Mao and Kim Il Sung badly miscalculated how easy the...

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to have accepted that his country will not become a member of NATO, one of the demands made by Russia before it invaded. According to a translation of his comments in a speech, Zelensky said that Ukraine had "realized" it would not become part of the Western military alliance. "For years we've heard the opposite, open doors, However, it is not," he said Tuesday according to Ukrainian news outlet, Trukha. "Our people understand this, and we are beginning to count on our own strength," he added.

Be prepared for increased tension this Spring, followed by a Chinese invasion of Kinmen, then in late Summer or September Biden (his puppetmaster) and Putin will negotiate a treaty that restores oil flow, gives Putin the Ukraine (or massive parts of it), reduces our nuclear weapons amd presence in Eastern Europe, and restores the Iranian nuclear deal. Same for the Chinese. It will be heralded by the MSM as "peace in our time" and Biden will be portray as a great statesman for "solving" two crises and "lowering" gas prices. Biden and the Dems will get a massive poll bump...

Retired Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor joined Tucker Carlson on Fox News Tuesday to discuss the latest developments of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, noting that the first phase of Russia’s incursion is over, marking the “beginning of the end of the Ukrainian resistance.”“The first five days, we witnessed a very slow, methodical movement of Russian forces into eastern Ukraine,” MacGregor said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Tuesday.“That is Ukraine — the third of Ukraine, which is on the eastern side of this river, called the Dnieper. They move slowly, cautiously. They try to reduce casualties among the civilian population, tried to give as...

Twitter has suspended or locked the accounts of at least 15 users who were tracking Russian military movements on the platform. The accounts are part of a relatively new form of journalism that uses the internet to gather images and video (also known as open-source intelligence, or OSINT) in an effort to track and report on violent conflicts. Many of these accounts have been tracking Russian military movements — information that the Russian military might have found problematic if they launched an attack.

A video unearthed from 2001 by the Republican National Committee’s research team revealed then-Senator Biden praising Russian President Vladimir Putin for embracing the West, heralding his actions as comparable to Peter the Great. “I’m close to amazed by how far Putin seems to have come in making – throwing – his lot in with the West,” Biden said as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “He seems to have – out of all the briefings I’ve gotten – actually stiff-armed his military and stiff-armed some of the browns and reds in his government and out of government.”

Ah, Alaska, America's 49th state and the Last Frontier. The home of salmon, gold, oil, and many kinds of wildlife. And a potential place of origin for World War III. In 1867, the Russian Tsar sold the territory of Russian America to the United States. The territory wasn't doing the Tsar much good, never really turning a profit, and proving to be an unnecessary thorn in the Empire's already strained relationship with the UK (which owned Canada), so the Russian government was open to any reasonable opportunity to offload it. Russia and the US being rather buddy-buddy in the 1850s...

WASHINGTON — Visiting Kyiv in early 2008, then-President George W. Bush told Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko that it was time that the Eastern European nation join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, a military alliance between the United States and European nations meant to serve as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and, after communism’s collapse, Russia.“Helping Ukraine move toward a NATO membership,” Bush said, “is in the interest of every member in the alliance and will help advance security and freedom in this region and around the world.”Fourteen years later, Ukraine remains outside the alliance. And President Biden...

Since 2016, Hillary Clinton has been trolling Donald Trump on social media over his alleged ties to Russia, calling him “Putin’s Puppet.” But Special Counsel John Durham’s probe has uncovered the truth about who was Putin’s Puppet. It was Clinton herself. She and the Obama-Biden administration spy agency chiefs and their corrupt minions were unknowingly, or perhaps even knowingly, Putin’s little helpers in tearing our country apart. It turns out that Clinton and her top foreign policy advisor, Jake Sullivan, spread a bogus Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative. To enable this Soviet-style disinformation campaign, Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign hired a tech firm...

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko warned on Thursday his country could host 'super-nuclear' weapons if it faces any external threats, as tensions soar between his ally Russia and the West over Ukraine.Lukashenko is due to hold talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Friday. He has previously offered to host Russian nuclear weapons.'If necessary, if such stupid and mindless steps are taken by our rivals and opponents, we will deploy not only nuclear weapons, but super-nuclear and up-and-coming ones to protect our territory,' Lukashenko said, according to the state-run Belta news agency.'But if there are no threats to...

Ukraine's president has demanded the US share intelligence which suggests Russia is planning to invade his country on Wednesday after America claimed an assault was imminent. reported by German newspaper Der Spiegel, are said to detail specific routes that might be taken by individual Russian units in an imminent invasion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a live broadcast on Saturday told the US: 'If you have 100 percent-certain information about a Russian invasion of Ukraine, please share it with us'. Early on Saturday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a call with Russian diplomat Sergey Lavrov to discuss the crisis,...

Because America entered both world wars of the 20th century last, while all the other great powers bled one another, and because we outlasted the Soviet Empire in the Cold War, America emerged, in the term of President George H.W. Bush, as "the last superpower." We had it all. We were the "indispensable nation." We saw further into the future. We could impose our "benevolent global hegemony" on all mankind. And so it was that we set out to create a "new world order," plunging into successive wars in Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Syria, Libya, Yemen. So doing,...

Vladimir Putin is now threatening all of the Ukraine. See here. Robert Mackey notes how, "As the United States condemned a referendum on the future of the Crimean peninsula staged by pro-Russian separatists on Sunday, one of Russia’s most influential television hosts appeared on the evening news in Moscow, before a huge mushroom cloud graphic, to remind viewers that Russia is still “the only country in the world capable of turning the U.S.A. into radioactive dust.” Rita Biesemans, in a comment left one post on this Blog dealing with masonic infiltration of the Catholic Church, had this to say: "When...

BBC reports on President Putin's meeting with President Xi of China just before the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Also, RT provides an English-language version of the photo-op comments from Putin.China's leader "gave his support to Russia's security and foreign policy aims," according to the BBC."China also gave its backing to the idea that NATO needs to halt its expansion."The two leaders accused the US and NATO of "ideologized Cold War approaches" to defense policy, an illusion to Washington’s support for Ukraine and Russia's fears that the trans-Atlantic alliance has ambitions to expand its presence on Moscow's...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken's team is "working ... to prevent" Russia from establishing military bases in Latin America as the crisis in Ukraine is widening the diplomatic disputes between the former Cold War rivals. "We, as a hemisphere, do not accept provocations," State Department Assistant Secretary Brian Nichols, Blinken's top lieutenant for the Western Hemisphere, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "And those types of prodding by forces from outside our hemisphere are unacceptable." Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov gestured toward such a deployment earlier this month, when he said he could "neither confirm nor exclude" whether Moscow...

MOSCOW, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Russia and China on Friday called in a joint statement for NATO to halt its expansion, while Moscow said it fully supported Beijing's stance on Taiwan and opposed Taiwanese independence in any form.

Venezuela is moving troops to the border with Colombia with technical assistance from Russia and Iran, Colombia's defense minister Diego Molano said on Thursday, calling the possible deployment "foreign interference." Molano, citing intelligence sources, said troop movements were registered in Venezuela opposite Colombia's Arauca province, the scene of fierce fighting between guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and FARC dissidents for control of the drugs trade.

On Monday, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, posted a tweet in which he echoed the concerns of many others: that the destruction of the United States and cities in America is part of a deliberate plan by radical, left-wing “woke” politicians. is the US’s destruction deliberate “Is there a deliberate plan to destroy the United States from within? Why are the authorities and some of the media not even commenting on this things? Why are they letting their beautiful cities rot?” he asked on Twitter.

This interview with Mr. Moric of the Geopolitical and Empire podcast is an attempt to give background on the Soviet long-range strategy, Anatoliy Golitsyn, James Angleton, and the fall of the Soviet Union. It is too big to treat so quickly, but an overview may be useful for some readers who want a snapshot before embarking on more serious reading. To correct an error, I misspoke when I referred to KGB defector Nosenko exonerating Oswald. I meant to say he exonerated Moscow in the death of JFK. Talking has no edits, but it is lively enough to carry you and...