Free Republic

There are always reasons to doubt Russia is playing it straight. For years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has bundled U-turns and lies together, making it hard to distinguish between evasion and fiction, and weaponizing the toxic mix to blackmail, divide and bewilder his foes. In recent days, Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal, then gone back into it, and issued bloodcurdling threats of nuclear attack before reversing course to endorse the language of non-proliferation. This week, Putin ordered his forces to retreat from Kherson only weeks after declaring that the city would-be part of Russia “forever.”...

“Why are you taking our children? Who attacked who? Isn’t it Russia that attacked Ukraine?” The questions hurled at the police by a clamorous group of indignant women outside a theater in Dagestan’s capital That was last month the confrontation between infuriated mothers in Dagestan, a mountainous republic within the multi-national Russian Federation, took place shortly after Putin announced a partial mobilization. Elsewhere in the north Caucasian city, standoffs between protesters and baton-wielding police were fiercer with jostling and heavy-handed arrests, according to geo-located posted videos. Some other ethnic minority parts of the Russian Federation, including its 22 ethnic republics,...

Kobani has become the Kurds’ Alamo as they fight ISIS in Syria. Nobody’s coming to help them, and if and when they fall, the repercussions will be felt for years to come. ATMANEK, Turkey — At dusk on Friday evening the crackle of automatic gunfire, the whoosh of rockets and the sickening roar of tank shells echoed from the fighting in Kobani, Syria, less than a mile away. We stood on the rooftop of a derelict farmhouse meters away from a Turkish tank and a razor wire fence marking the end of Turkey. Nearby a family of Turkish Kurds busied...

As the British government urges the UN to crack down on ransoms to terrorist groups, jihadists in the Maghreb are upping their hostage prices. In the past three years, jihadists groups linked to al-Qaeda and other radicals have raked in at least $70 million in ransom money—and with each year, the average financial demand from abductors has jumped, according to the British Foreign Office.

The Kremlin was quick off the mark. Within hours of Washington acknowledging in late November that it had begun formal negotiations to take over several Polish military bases, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov warned during a trip to Warsaw that any reconfiguration of the U.S. military presence in Europe must consider his country's national-security interests. According to a Russian official, "The Kremlin is not concealing from the Americans or the Poles its negative attitude toward Polish-American discussions about relocating bases in Germany." But in the weeks to come the Russians won't be the only ones jittery about a long-touted...

Despite the insistence of the Pentagon that a menacing arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) eventually will be found in Iraq, the failure after more than a month of war and occupation to unearth even a single illegal warhead or a drum of prohibited chemicals is causing alarm in political circles here. Already British Prime Minister Tony Blair is coming under mounting pressure in the House of Commons to agree to setting up a formal British parliamentary inquiry into Saddam Hussein's WMD programs and the claims made about them before the war by the intelligence services. Prior to the...