Free Republic

Russia's President Vladimir Putin will skip a planned visit to the United States this month for a key global summit and a much-anticipated meeting with President Barack Obama, the Kremlin confirmed Thursday, as he faced pressure from protests and opposition criticism at home. The White House announced Wednesday that Putin is unable to join the other leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations meeting outside Washington on May 18-19. The Kremlin said Putin needs to finish work setting up his new government. Instead, Russia will send Dmitry Medvedev, the former president and new prime minister, to the G8 summit....

Just days after reclaiming the Russian presidency, Vladimir Putin has canceled his planned visit to the United States, where he'd been scheduled to attend a major economic summit and meet with President Obama. The White House confirmed in a statement late Wednesday that Putin told Obama on a phone call he'd be sending Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in his place. Putin claimed he was too busy finalizing cabinet appointments to make the May 18-19 G-8 Summit at Camp David. Yet the Obama administration had moved the gathering to the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland from the planned venue in...

As Moscow gears up to celebrate its victory in World War II, 67 years ago Wednesday, the shadow of political conflict shrouds the capital as hundreds of arrests cloud Victory Day festivities. Police said over 200 arrests were made Tuesday and overnight Wednesday on the eve of the anniversary, including repeat detentions for Left-Front leader Sergei Udaltsov and anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, who was arrested twice in a single evening, Interfax reported. Socialite Kseniya Sobchack and State Duma Deputy Dmitry Gudkov were also among those arrested during protests against President Vladimir Putin's inauguration, though they were later released. Sobchak called...

Russian riot police beat protesters about the head with batons and detained 250 on Sunday after clashes broke out at a Moscow rally by thousands of people against Vladimir Putin on the eve of his return to the presidency. Opposition leaders Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov and Sergei Udaltsov were among those detained during violence that showed the depth of divisions and tensions in Russia as the former KGB spy starts his six-year third term on Monday.

On 10 April 2010 a Polish Air Force Tupolev Tu-154M crashed near the Russian city of Smoleńsk. All 96 people aboard the plane were killed, including President Lech Kaczyński and his wife. American media coverage of the crash is best represented by The New York Times, which offered the following description of what happened: “President Kaczyński’s plane tried to land in a thick fog, missing the runway and snagging treetops about half a mile from the airport in Smoleńsk….” This version of events has been repeated throughout the English-speaking media, and is consistent with official Russian claims. What other claims...

Russia’s most senior military officer said Thursday that Moscow would preemptively strike and destroy U.S.-led NATO missile defense sites in Eastern Europe if talks with Washington about the developing system continue to stall. “A decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov said at an international missile defense conference in Moscow attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials. The threat comes as talks about the missile defense system, which the U.S. and its allies insist is aimed at Iranian missiles, appear to have stalled. “We have not been...

The Pechersky district court in Kyiv on April 12 sentenced Valery Ivashchenko, who was acting Minister of Defense from June 2009 until April 2010, to five years in jail. This is despite the European Union’s warnings that more persecution of ministers from the former government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (2007-2010) would put into question Ukraine’s European integration. Ivashchenko has been the fourth imprisoned former top official from Tymoshenko’s government. Like Tymoshenko, former Interior Minister Yury Lutsenko and former Environment Minister Georgy Filipchuk before him, Ivashchenko was indicted under the same Article 365 of the Criminal Code “for excess of...

While the American media provide cover for the Constitutionally ineligible Barack Hussein Obama,Vladimir Putin and the nation of Russia are reaping a treasure trove of defense secrets and missile technology by threatening to reveal the true history of the Manchurian Candidate.

Vladimir Putin on Wednesday called NATO a "relic of the Cold War era," but said Russia should nonetheless continue supporting the alliance's mission in Afghanistan. Putin, who won a third presidential term last month, defended the government's intention to offer NATO a new logistics facility on Russian territory to facilitate transit of military cargo to and from Afghanistan. "It's in our national interests to help maintain stability in Afghanistan," Putin told lawmakers who voiced concerns that a NATO facility on Russian soil would threaten its security. Moscow has provided the U.S. and other NATO member states with air corridors and...

Barack Obama blackmailed by Vladimir Putin, betrays United States and her Allies BY COACH COLLINS, ON APRIL 7TH, 2012 by Doug Book, staff writer While the American media provide cover for the Constitutionally ineligible Barack Hussein Obama, Vladimir Putin and the nation of Russia are reaping a treasure trove of defense secrets and missile technology by threatening to reveal the true history of the Manchurian Candidate. Obama has spent millions to prevent his personal story being revealed to the American public. Records have been destroyed, information hidden, false claims advanced, potential whistleblowers threatened and official documents forged. Enabled by a...

President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.   President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…   President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.   President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

While the American media provide cover for the Constitutionally ineligible Barack Hussein Obama, Vladimir Putin and the nation of Russia are reaping a treasure trove of defense secrets and missile technology by threatening to reveal the true history of the Manchurian Candidate. Obama has spent millions to prevent his personal story being revealed to the American public. Records have been destroyed, information hidden, false claims advanced, potential whistleblowers threatened and official documents forged. Enabled by a complicit media and the craven cowardice of political opponents, the most egregious felonies in the nation’s history have served to make the American people...

Twenty-first century Russia has three famous faces: Anna Chapman, the failed spy, who came in from the cold to become a red hot sex symbol back home; Alexander Litvinenko, the spy-turned-dissident, who was poisoned by a radioactive polonium isotope in London; and Vladimir Putin, the KGB colonel-turned-president, who had himself re-elected for a six-year term last month. It is no accident that all three of these faces belong to former intelligence officers. The point of Deception is to explain how and why Putin's Russia has succeeded in fooling us all, both about its own sinister nexus of espionage, politics and...

Mind-bending ‘psychotronic’ guns that can effectively turn people into zombies have been given the go-ahead by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The futuristic weapons – which will attack the central nervous system of their victims – are being developed by the country’s scientists. They could be used against Russia’s enemies and, perhaps, its own dissidents by the end of the decade. Sources in Moscow say Mr Putin has described the guns, which use electromagnetic radiation like that found in microwave ovens, as ‘entirely new instruments for achieving political and strategic goals’. Research into electromagnetic weapons has been secretly carried out in...

When President Obama blurted out to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he couldn't do serious business during an election year, the New York Times characterized it as a "moment of political candor." It seems to me, actually, to be a moment of political contempt—for the issues at hand as well as for the demos itself. Mr. Medvedev meanwhile was in familiar territory: Dissembling is the routine of the elected Russian dictatorship. We are the big boys, Mr. Obama seemed to be telling Mr. Medvedev— or rather Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and I are, and you, Medvedev, are the messenger, to...

President Obama has done the country a favor: He has given a hint of what his second term would consist of. Unshackled by the need to be re-elected, Mr. Obama would unleash an all-out radical assault. His plan is to bring Trotskyism to America, thereby imposing a socialist revolution from above. America’s military will be gutted. Its private economy subordinated to a centralized, bureaucratic state. The nation transformed into a Third World basket case. And all of this will come with the Kremlin’s blessing. At a security summit in South Korea, Mr. Obama was overheard speaking with Russian President Dmitry...

So what did this mean? Obviously what is being referred to is something that the American people might not want, otherwise it could be mentioned in public before the election. And why does Obama have to ask the Russians for any cooperation on this issue at all? That doesn’t sound like a strong negotiation approach to me, assuming it is a real negotiation and not just a big giveaway.

Turns out he’s not Kenyan after all. He’s KGB. All this time, people were worried that President Obama was born in Africa and that his radical agenda had been crafted by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Saul Alinsky on the streets of Chicago’s South Side. Now we know his real radical hidden agenda is in service of the Kremlin.

After a day of spin from the White House didn’t tamp down outrage over Barack Obama’s sotto voce conversation with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, the President himself addressed the controversy. Earlier today, Obama insisted that nothing he told Medvedev was out of the ordinary, and that he wasn’t “hiding the ball” on missile defense: A defensive President Obama said Tuesday he wasn’t guilty of “hiding the ball” when an open microphone caught him pleading with the president of Russia to delay missile shield talks until after this year’s elections.“The only way I get this stuff done is If I’m consulting...