Free Republic

While Nato sat down for a summit to decide what to do about the war in Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin negotiated a ceasefire deal with Kiev, Russian society recoiled from reports about secret funerals of soldiers killed in Ukraine: missing sons, calls from husbands begging their wives to save them from ­battle, bodies with missing limbs arriving in coffins to Nizhny Novgorod, Orenburg, Pskov, Murmansk, Dagestan and other regions of Russia. The death toll for Russian soldiers jumped to more than 200 soldiers in a few days, between August 12th and September 2nd, in a war that was, officially, not...

Russia: Alexey Gaskarov “If, in this country, the way to freedom runs through prison, we are ready to go”. Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky District Court on Monday found four opposition activists guilty on all counts charged of "inciting mass riots" related to participation in Moscow's 6 May, 2012 Anti Putin Bolotnaya Square protests. Alexei Gaskarov and Alexander Margolin were sentenced to 3.5 years in prison each. Ilya Guschin was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison. Yelena Kokhtareva received a 39-month suspended sentence. Following the verdict being read, three activists unfurled a banner at the entrance of the courthouse that read: “Russia is...

Russia has warned that US air strikes against militants in Syria would be a "gross violation" of international law. A Russian foreign ministry spokesman said any such action, without the backing of the UN, would be "an act of aggression". It comes as US Secretary of State John Kerry meets Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia to try to build a coalition against Islamic State (IS) militants. President Obama has threatened action against IS in Syria as well as Iraq. IS controls large parts of Syria and Iraq after a rapid military advance. In a speech outlining his strategy, Mr Obama...

Russia's foreign ministry said on Thursday airstrikes against Islamist militants in Syria without a UN Security Council mandate would be an act of aggression, Interfax news agency reported. "The US president has spoken directly about the possibility of strikes by the US armed forces against ISIL positions in Syria without the consent of the legitimate government," ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said. "This step, in the absence of a UN Security Council decision, would be an act of aggression, a gross violation of international law."

Wednesday in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, former Vice President Dick Cheney said our Israeli and Arabs allies in the Middle East no longer trust the United States and "deeply believe" the "Untied States has been supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood" because of the way "the United States has conducted itself over the last few years."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Struggling Syrian rebels that President Barack Obama once derided as "former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth" now form a key pillar of the U.S. leader's strategy to beat back the militant insurgency known as Islamic State. For over three years, Obama has kept the so-called moderate rebels at arm's length. While giving verbal and limited material support, he and his spokesmen often said publicly that adding more weaponry to the civil war would only make things worse. Now Obama is taking a different tack as he sets out his strategy to defeat the Syrian-based Islamic State,...

Sometime in 1993, after several trips to Russia, I noticed something bizarre and disturbing: people kept dying. I was used to losing friends to AIDS in the United States, but this was different. People in Russia were dying suddenly and violently, and their own friends and colleagues did not find these deaths shocking. Upon arriving in Moscow I called a friend with whom I had become close over the course of a year. “Vadim is no more,” said his father, who picked up the phone. “He drowned.” I showed up for a meeting with a newspaper reporter to have the...

Crimean officials have proposed solving water shortages in Sevastopol by supplying the city with drinking water from a lake that lies near a municipal landfill and a reservoir that has been closed since the Soviet era because of contamination concerns, a news report said. The plan to serve the city of 340,000 inhabitants on the Black Sea coast would "reanimate" the Orlovsky reservoir, whose water was deemed unsuitable for drinking in the 1980s, and tap into a lake in the nearby Inkerman region, local news site NovoCrimea.ru reported Tuesday, citing the director of Sevgorodvodokanal water utility, Nikolai Pereguda. The lake...

As the referendum on Scottish independence approaches, the “Yes” campaign is receiving an unexpected boost – from Russian nationalists. Supporters of the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea have latched on to Alex Salmond’s bid to leave Britain as a parallel to the struggle of ethnic Russians in Ukraine to break with a supposedly bullying overlord in Kiev. With resentment running high against Britain as a crusader for tough sanctions against Moscow over its patronage of the separatist rebels in Ukraine, blogs in Russia have become flooded with calls for Scottish “freedom”. The campaign – often tongue-in-cheek but chiming with official rhetoric...

Who stands to benefit if Denton bans fracking? Those behind the petition drive say it will benefit the Denton residents because they won’t have to worry about wells being fracked less than 300 feet away from their homes, which is what happened to several neighborhoods in South Denton. Economist Ray Perryman said the result will be millions of dollars and jobs lost for Denton, costing the city up to $251.4 million over 10 years. Being the oil capital of the country and one of top producers of oil and gas worldwide, the stakes will be high when Denton voters cast...

Russia is developing an array of new nuclear and conventional weapons to counter recent moves by the U.S. and NATO, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday as the military successfully tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile launched from a nuclear submarine. Putin accused the West of using the crisis in Ukraine to reinvigorate NATO, warning that Moscow will ponder a response to the alliance's decision to create a rapid-reaction "spearhead" force to protect Eastern Europe

God is inside Vladimir Putin. A divine light transfixed Putin’s essence after his secret baptism as a child. We are not worthy of the Russian president. These were a few of the tenets advanced by radical Russian Orthodox activist Dmitry Tsorionov in a September 7 lecture that marked one of the more bizarre expressions of a many-faceted grassroots cult of personality surrounding Russia’s paramount ruler.

Poland said on Wednesday the volume of gas it has received so far this week from Russian gas monopoly Gazprom was down by at least 20 percent. Some European countries believe Moscow may use a disruption of gas to Europe as a trump card in its confrontation with the West over Ukraine. The row has already dragged ties between Moscow and the West down to their worst since the Cold War. Ukraine's gas transport monopoly Ukrtransgaz was quoted by a Russian news agency as saying Gazprom was limiting flows to Poland to disrupt supplies of gas in the opposite direction,...

More types of aircraft are still needed for Beijing to establish its first carrier air wing on China's first aircraft carrier the Liaoning, according to Wendell Minnick, in an article written on Sept. 7 in Washington-based Defense News. 24 J-15 Flying Shark fighters, six Z-18F anti-submarine warfare helicopters, four Z-18J airborne early warning helicopters and two Z-9C rescue helicopters will together form the first carrier air wing of the People's Liberation Army Navy according to an article in Chinese-language newspaper Shanghai Morning Post published Aug. 28, citing an interview with Cao Dongwei, a senior colonel and researcher at the PLA...

BRUSSELS — Eight weeks after a Malaysia Airlines plane disintegrated over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard and triggering a frenzy of East-West finger-pointing, investigators, in their first account of the calamity on Tuesday, released evidence consistent with an attack by a surface-to-air missile but shed no clear light on who was responsible. A preliminary report issued in The Hague by the Dutch Safety Board, which is leading an international effort to get to the bottom of the tragedy, gave some indirect support to assertions by the United States and Ukraine that pro-Russian rebels shot down the aircraft with...

...faces unprecedented challenges to its long-term expansion and modernization plans.... Last week Rosneft said it would cut staff to reduce costs: Kommersant business daily said Rosneft's Moscow headquarters would see cuts of up to 25 percent from the current 4,000. These would be the first significant job losses at a company that swelled via the acquisition of rivals such as YUKOS, pushed into bankruptcy some ten years ago by the government of President Vladimir Putin. Since then Rosneft's output has risen 10-fold to exceed 4 million barrels per day or four percent of global supply. But last week it reported...

"I say to the people of Estonia and the people of the Baltics, today we are bound by our treaty alliance. ... Article 5 is crystal clear: An attack on one is an attack on all. So if ... you ever ask again, 'who'll come to help,' you'll know the answer -- the NATO alliance, including the armed forces of the United States of America." That was Barack Obama in Tallinn, Estonia, last week, reissuing a U.S. war guarantee to the tiniest of the Baltic republics -- which his Cold War predecessors would have regarded as certifiable madness. From 1945...

Russia, one of the world's largest wheat exporters, has supplied 4.7 million tons of all grains including pulses to its customers abroad in August. Its top customers are in North Africa and the Middle East. Russian wheat prices rose for a second straight week thanks to a record pace of August exports, high domestic demand and weak rouble that offset continuing harvesting, analysts said on Monday.

Assuming the ceasefire declared in Ukraine as of sundown Friday holds—and the early signs are favorable—we celebrate the end of a conflict that has claimed a startling 2,600 lives since it broke out in April. But not so fast. It’s also time to recognize the Obama administration’s strategy in Ukraine as among the worst of its numerous foreign-policy errors. The agreement just forged between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, is acknowledged all around as the design Putin suddenly proposed when he got off a plane in Mongolia late last week. In all likelihood, this was the...

(Reuters) - NATO staged a major military exercise in Latvia on Saturday in a practical demonstration of NATO leaders' commitment to defend its Baltic member states in the face of an assertive Russia.