Free Republic

Russia will have to increase its entire missile arsenal to deter the West as Moscow is now in an open confrontation with the United States and its allies, a Russian diplomat was quoted as saying on Monday. President Vladimir Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine touched off the worst breakdown in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Russian and U.S. diplomats. Russia has ramped up weapons production and is now forecast by the United States to manufacture this year more artillery than all of NATO's 32 members combined. "We are now at the...

Kremlin-owned gas giant Gazprom said on Thursday it plunged to a net loss of 629 billion rubles ($6.9 billion) in 2023, its first annual loss in more than 20 years, amid dwindling gas trade with Europe, once its main sales market. The results highlight the dramatic decline of Gazprom, which since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been one of Russia’s most powerful companies, often used as a leverage to solve disputes with its neighbors, such as Ukraine and Moldova. Analysts had expected net income of 447 billion rubles, according to Interfax news agency. According to Reuters analysis, it...

Ukrainian drones attacked Russia's third largest oil refinery on Tuesday about 1,300 km (800 miles) from the front lines, hitting a core unit which processes about 155,000 barrels of crude refining per day. -snip- Pictures from the scene indicated the drone hit the primary refining unit, CDU-7, at the Taneco refinery. The unit accounts for around a half of the plant's total annual production capacity. "A drone attack was carried out on one of the enterprises in Nizhnekamsk," Ramil Mullin, the mayor of Nizhnekamsk, said. -snip- The attack was one of several in Tatarstan, a highly industrialised region south-east of...

SUMMARIES: • Ukraine launches mass drone attack • Fire at NORSI refinery, drone downed near Kirishi • NORSI is badly damaged - sources • Russia says it repels cross-border attack by Ukrainian proxies

Russia has reduced gasoline exports to non-CIS countries to compensate for unplanned repairs at refineries, the Ministry of Energy said on Wednesday, as the country grappled with the impact of fires and drone attacks on its energy infrastructure. It said gasoline and diesel exports have been reduced in January by 37% and 23% respectively from the same month in 2023. Russia and Ukraine have targeted each other's energy infrastructure in strikes designed to disrupt supply lines and logistics and to demoralise their opponent as they seek the edge in a nearly two-year-old conflict that shows no sign of ending.

The wife of a Russian soldier delivered an emotional appeal for his return from Ukraine on Saturday at the election headquarters of President Vladimir Putin, a defiant gesture in a country where open criticism of the war is banned. "Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has issued a decree that my husband has to be there (in Ukraine). I'm interested to know when he will issue a decree that my husband has to be home," Maria Andreyeva said. She became involved in a heated exchange with a woman who told her that Russian soldiers in Ukraine were defending the motherland and she should...

A court on Tuesday sentenced a former senior officer in the National Guard to six years in a prison colony after convicting him of buying equipment unable to protect the bridge which links southern Russia to Crimea, the TASS state news agency reported. TASS said that Colonel Sergei Volkov had purchased two radar-based air defence systems for 395 million roubles ($4.5 million) which were meant to be able to bring down Ukrainian attack drones by suppressing their signal. A military court in Moscow had determined that the equipment - which was also meant to protect a gas pipeline running from...

Russia and Niger, under military rule since a coup last year, have agreed to develop military cooperation, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. According to Russian news agencies, Russian Deputy Defense Ministers Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Alexander Fomin met Niger's junta-appointed Defense Minister Salifu Modi on Tuesday. "The parties noted the importance of developing Russian-Niger relations in the defense sector and agreed to intensify joint actions to stabilize the situation in the region," - the ministry said, adding that it aims to continue dialogue on "increasing the combat readiness" of Niger's military.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan asked his U.S. counterpart Antony Blinken in a call on Sunday for Washington to use its influence over Israel to halt Israeli attacks on Gaza and the West Bank, a Turkish diplomatic source said. Turkey, which supports a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict, has harshly criticised Israel, calling for a full ceasefire and for Israeli leaders to be tried in international courts for war crimes, and slammed Western support for Israel. Washington, Israel's closest ally, has repeatedly said it supports Israel's right to defend itself after the cross-border rampage by Hamas militants on Oct....

Pro-war Russian nationalist Igor Girkin, who is in custody awaiting trial for inciting extremism, said on Sunday he wanted to run for president even though he understood the March election would be "sham" with the winner already clear. Girkin, who is also known by the alias Igor Strelkov, has repeatedly said Russia faces revolution and even civil war unless President Vladimir Putin's military top brass fight the war in Ukraine more effectively. A former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who helped Russia to annex Crimea in 2014 and then to organise pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine, Girkin said before his...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has not made any announcements that he will run for another term and the campaign has not yet been announced, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday. "The president has not made any statements" about this, Peksov said when asked about a Reuters report that Putin had decided to run.

Russia and Ukraine are locked in a stalemate on the frontlines of their war and the two sides need to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict, Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said over the weekend. "There are enough problems on both sides and in general the situation is now seriously stalemate: no one can do anything and substantively strengthen or advance their position," Lukashenko said. "They're there head-to-head, to the death, entrenched. People are dying." -snip- "We need to sit down at the negotiating table and come...

HELSINKI (AP) — Damage to an undersea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia appears to have been caused by “external activity," Finnish officials said Tuesday, adding that authorities were investigating.

Drunk recruits. Insubordinate soldiers. Convicts. They're among hundreds of military and civilian offenders who've been pressed into Russian penal units known as "Storm-Z" squads and sent to the frontlines in Ukraine this year, according to 13 people with knowledge of the matter, including five fighters in the units. Few live to tell their tale, the people said. (snip) "Storm fighters, they're just meat," said one regular soldier from army unit no. 40318 who was deployed near the fiercely contested city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine in May and June. (snip) Russian state-controlled media has reported that Storm-Z squads exist, that...

Russian occupiers tortured Ukrainians so brutally that some of their victims died, and forced families to listen as they raped women next door, members of a U.N.-mandated investigative body said on Monday, in their latest findings from the field. Erik Møse, Chair of the Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva his team had "collected further evidence indicating that the use of torture by Russian armed forces in areas under their control has been widespread and systematic". "In some cases, torture was inflicted with such brutality that it caused the death of the victim,"...

President Vladimir Putin has ordered Wagner fighters to sign an oath of allegiance to the Russian state after a deadly plane crash believed to have killed Yevgeny Prigozhin, the volatile chief of the mercenary group. Putin signed the decree bringing in the change with immediate effect on Friday after the Kremlin said that Western suggestions that Prigozhin had been killed on its orders were an "absolute lie".

Since China opened to foreign investment in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping, global firms have ploughed in hundreds of billions of dollars to buy and build factories for market access and cheap labour, bolstering the Chinese currency. A gentle downtrend in foreign direct investment gave way to a steep drop last quarter and inflows to China slammed to their lowest since records began 25 years ago, raising the prospect that the long-term trend is turning.

About half of Republicans would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a felony, a sign of the severe risks his legal problems pose for his 2024 U.S. presidential bid, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Thursday. *** The two-day Reuters/Ipsos poll asked respondents if they would vote for Trump for president next year if he were "convicted of a felony crime by a jury." Among Republicans, 45% said they would not vote for him, more than the 35% who said they would. The rest said they didn't know. Asked if they would vote for...

Israel's parliament on Monday ratified the first bill of a judicial overhaul sought by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after last-gasp compromise efforts collapsed and failed to ease a constitutional crisis convulsing the country for months. The amendment limiting the Supreme Court's powers to void some government decisions if it deemed them "unreasonable" passed by 64-to-0 vote after opposition lawmakers abandoned the session in protest, some of them shouting: "For shame!" Demonstrations against the amendment began early in the day with police dragging away protesters who had chained themselves to posts and blocked the road outside parliament.

Fighting in Russia's Belgorod region entered a second day on Tuesday, and its governor told residents who fled after a cross-border incursion of armed fighters from Ukraine that it was still not safe to return to their homes. Monday's incursion, apparently involving armoured vehicles, was the biggest raid into Russia since the war began 15 months ago, though details including the number of fighters involved, their affiliation and the extent of any clashes, could not be independently confirmed. Russian authorities evacuated residents from the region's Graivoron district after the raiding forces claimed to have captured the border town of Kozinka...