Free Republic

LENIN is supposed to have referred to blind defenders and apologists for the Soviet Union in the Western democracies as "useful idiots." Yet even Lenin might have been surprised at how far these useful idiots would carry their partisanship in later years -- including our own times. Stalin's man-made famine in the Soviet Union during the 1930s killed more millions of people than Hitler killed in the Holocaust -- and Mao's man-made famine in China killed more millions than died in the USSR. Yet we not only hear little or nothing about either of these staggering catastrophes in the Communist...

Seventy years ago, Soviet tanks made it all the way to Berlin, but this week one of the newest Russian tanks struggled to make it all the way across Red Square. The next-generation tank appeared to stall during the final rehearsal for a major military parade in Moscow to mark the 70th anniversary of victory in the second world war. The Armata tank, which is on display for the first time, ground to a halt during the rehearsal, in an incident later claimed to have been a deliberate test. President Vladimir Putin will welcome the leaders of India, China and...

Despite threatening language, Vladimir Putin is not going to start a nuclear war, according to Yuri Shvets, who studied along with him at the KGB’s Andropov Institute. Putin’s only desire is to remain in power for life, he says, and he knows Russia’s nuclear weapon delivery systems aren’t accurate enough for a first strike that would not result in national suicide. “Do you seriously think, that a man who annually disappears from public view for seven to ten days in order to have a facelift and to fill himself up with Botox is capable of unleashing a nuclear war?”

Hillary Clinton: We knew her as a grim, charmless harridan; a pear-shaped harpy. Now, after reading Peter Schweizer's new book, Clinton Cash (HarperCollins, New York, May 2015), we see the ultimate Hillary, one of the world's truly scary women. Think Lady Macbeth, Messalina, Evita. Add Bill to the sordid picture and you have Bonnie and Clyde -- elected to high office, and lionized all over the world. We know about Hillary's thousands of missing e-mails and unaccountable donors. What may be less known is how the Clinton double-scam works. Take, first of all, the so-called Clinton Foundation, whose stated purpose...

Russia's ministry of defence has unveiled a new array of war machines that it said would revolutionise the country's army and put it in a position to outclass Western rivals for the first time since the Cold War. Photographs released on Tuesday show the T-14 Armata tank, a semi-robotic replacement for Russia's current T-90, and its sibling armoured personnel carriers, fighting vehicles and self-propelled artillery models which will take pride of place at Saturday's Victory Day parade on Red Square. In earlier photographs released last month the turret was covered with fabric and only the chassis was visible. The Armata...

Advocates of the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran need look no further than Ukraine to see what the consequences of a bad deal with a rogue state can be. Back in February, the leaders of France, Germany and Russia pressured a desperate Ukrainian president into signing an agreement that made no mention of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, guaranteed a “special status” (read: Russian-controlled) eastern Ukraine, and froze in place the current front lines. This meant that all Russia’s ill-gotten gains would be held by President Putin. In return, Ukraine’s President Poroshenko got a sorely-needed $17.5 billion aid package...

Some pro-Kremlin figures have openly glorified wartime dictator Stalin, while the current patriotic fervour has drowned out unvarnished accounts of Soviet military blunders or infamous "barrier troops" who shot deserters. - 'Drowned in Russian blood' - Viktor Astafyev, a writer known for his grim WWII stories, claims that Russia's war losses were much higher than the estimated 27 million and military commanders won the war at the expense of "a huge amount of blood." "It is they who threw people in the fire like straw," the war veteran wrote in a letter recently published by the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta,...

Two Russian nuclear-capable bombers intruded into the U.S. air defense zone near Alaska last week in the latest saber rattling by Moscow, defense officials said. The Tu-95 Bear H bombers flew into the Alaska zone on April 22. But unlike most earlier incursions, no U.S. interceptor jets were dispatched to shadow them, said defense officials familiar with the latest U.S.-Russian aerial encounter. Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a spokesman for the U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), declined to confirm the incursion. But he said no jets were dispatched last week to intercept intruding aircraft. The incident...

In a startling new interview, a 3-star general and former head of Communist Romania’s secret police who defected to the United States in 1978, claims that the Theology of Liberation was the creation of the KGB, who exported it to Latin America as a way of introducing Marxism into the continent. Ion Mihai Pacepa has been called “the Cold War’s most important defector,” and after his defection, the Romanian government under Nicolae Ceausescu placed two death sentences and a $2 million bounty on his head. During the more than ten years that Pacepa worked with the CIA, he made what...

​Turkish Foreign Minister: "Russia arranged famine in Ukraine" The video of Vladimir Putin for the day was a hit the Internet. More information on this. zelv.ru Ankara recalled the Russian leader Vladimir Putin about the "mass atrocities" of Russia in the last century - the Holodomor, links and persecution of Muslims. Here is the full text of the STATEMENT from the Turkish Foreign Ministry: "We reject and condemn labeling the events of 1915 as 'genocide' Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite all our warnings and appeals. These policy statements that are in flagrant violation of the law, have no legal effect...

The Clinton Foundation is now refiling its IRS returns for five years based on stories from the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Hillary Clinton’s campaign releases rebuttal to stories about her corruption and greed: “There isn’t a shred of evidence.” That’s true. Not a shred. A mountain. A $140 million mountain that landed at the Clinton Foundation, courtesy of Vladimir Putin, who may have also sent a bouquet of roses with the money transfers. Team Hill adds: “It’s a RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY financed by the Koch Brothers!” Sure it is. Questions keep arising about the largest deposit-only ATM machine in the...

History often repeats itself, and if you have lived two lives, as I have done, you have a good chance of seeing the reenactment with your own eyes. Liberation theology, of which not much has been heard for two decades, is back in the news. But what is not being mentioned is its origins. It was not invented by Latin American Catholics. It was developed by the KGB. The man who is now the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, secretly worked for the KGB under the code name “Mikhailov” and spent four decades promoting liberation theology, which...

In a Fox News preview of “The Tangled Clinton Web,” a New York Times reporter accused the Clinton Foundation of lying to her about a meeting Bill Clinton had with Kazatomprom officials regarding the sale of uranium to Russia. “Frank Giustra arranged for officials to go to Bill Clinton’s house in Chappaqua,” reporter Jo Becker said. “When I first contacted the Clinton Foundation, they denied any such meeting ever took place. And when we told them we have already talked to the head, who not only told us all about the meeting but actually has a picture of him and...

The headline in Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when the newspaper served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.” The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain. But the untold story behind that story is...

The headline in Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir Putin's latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when the newspaper served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: "Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World." The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world's largest uranium producers and brought Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain. But the untold story behind that story is one that...

European antitrust regulators on Wednesday charged the Russian energy giant Gazprom with abusing its dominance in natural gas markets, a move amounting to a direct challenge to the authorities in Moscow. The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, said that unfair pricing might have resulted in higher gas prices in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, which have long been wholly or substantially dependent on Russian gas. In those countries, the commission said, Gazprom was suspected of charging wholesalers prices that were significantly higher compared with the company’s costs or to benchmark prices.

CBS News is in the tank for Barack Obama. Of course, and less you’ve been living in a cave, you already knew that. But last night’s episode of the CBS fictional series “60 Minutes” provided new evidence of their love affair with our second black president. They broke out there Monica Lewinsky branded kneepads for an episode focusing on Syria. You’ll recall that Pres. Obama made a number of statements regarding Syrian dictator Assad with reference to chemical weapon use. He noted that if chemical weapons were used in Syria, Assad would have crossed a “Red Line.” No sooner were...

The Russian president stunned Barack Obama when he proposed Steven Seagal as an intermediary between Washington and Moscow. Max Seddon and Rosie Gray tell the extraordinary story of the faded action star’s dalliances with the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin knew his relationship with the United States was nearing breaking point when he met Barack Obama in Lough Erne, a picturesque lakeside golf resort in Northern Ireland, on the sidelines of the G-8 summit in June 2013. The Russian and U.S. presidents had never gotten along. Putin spent their first meeting on the porch of his residence in Novo-Ogarevo, outside Moscow, in...

The commander of the US army in Europe has warned that Nato must remain united in the face of a "real threat" from Russia. "It's not an assumption. There is a Russian threat," Lt-Gen Frederick "Ben" Hodges said. "You've got the Russian ambassador threatening that Denmark will be a nuclear target if it participates in any missile defence programme. And when you look at the unsafe way Russian aircraft are flying without transponders in proximity to civilian aircraft, that's not professional conduct." Gen Hodges spoke to the Telegraph on the sidelines of a military debriefing after an exercise to move...

Moscow, April 16, Interfax - Russian President Vladimir Putin said the situation in the Middle East for Christians is terrible and the international community is not taking enough steps to protect them. "As to the Middle East and Christians, the situation is terrible. We have spoken about it many times and we believe that the international community is not doing enough to protect the Christian population of the Middle East," Putin told reporters. He reiterated that Christians have lived in the Middle East for centuries and the place is the birthplace of Christianity. "It is sad that the international community...