Free Republic

Russia spent 18.4 percent of its reserve fund in a single month to plug deficits in the federal budget, Finance Ministry figures released Tuesday have revealed. The country’s reserve fund fell from $38.18 billion to $32.2 billion during the course of August 2016, shrinking to just over a third of pre-crisis levels, reports The Moscow Times. The fund stood at $90 billion in late 2014, but has come under increasing strain as Russia’s oil-dependent economy has suffered under falling energy prices. Russia has been somewhat cushioned to the fall in oil prices as the commodity is sold in dollars and...

“The beauty of the American voting system is that it is dispersed among the 50 states, and it is clunky as heck,’’ Comey said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “A lot of people have found that challenging over the years, but the beauty of that is it’s not exactly a swift part of the internet of things, and so it is hard for an actor to reach our voting process.’’

While in command, the top U.S. general in Europe said President Obama looked at NATO as a warmonger “worry” and “threat” rather than an alliance trying to keep the peace, retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, who retired in May, wrote a 2014 series of emails to a think tank official in Washington. The four-star general bemoaned what it was like trying to work with the White House at a time when Vladimir Putin’s troops had invaded Ukraine and was trying to rattle other former Soviet Union puppet states. The emails were acquired by DCLeaks, a new site which earlier...

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, the world will remember Aug. 25 as the day she began the Second Cold War. In a speech last month nominally about Donald Trump, Clinton called Russian President Vladimir Putin the godfather of right-wing, extreme nationalism. To Kremlin-watchers, those were not random epithets. Two years earlier, in the most famous address of his career, Putin accused the West of backing an armed seizure of power in Ukraine by “extremists, nationalists, and right-wingers.” Clinton had not merely insulted Russia’s president: She had done so in his own words. Worse, they were words originally directed at...

The opening segment of today’s Morning Joe was a Niagara of negativity deluging Donald Trump, focused on his comments at the Commander-in-Chief Forum. No discussion of Hillary Clinton’s newest lies about her email, and the fact that, in order to create a veil of secrecy for her Foundation malfeasance, she subverted our national security. Two examples of the extreme hostility toward Trump, coupled with a dose of Hillary-worship. Ad man Donny Deutsch detected “envy” of Putin by Trump, saying “I think he wants to be a dictator.” A bit later, Mika Brzezinski sympathized with poor Hillary: she’s so “incredibly prepared”...

“We had the enjoyable quasi-grilling of Hillary on the emails, and Trump had a strong performance,” Dr. Sebastian Gorka said of Wednesday night’s national-security forum, on Thursday morning’s Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM. Gorka suggested Trump “may have been playing with us a little bit” with his positive comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 television reported Wednesday, citing information it said was included in an archive smuggled out of the USSR. According to Channel 1’s foreign news editor Oren Nahari, the famed Mitrokhin archive, kept by KGB defector Vasily Mitrokhin, revealed that Abbas was a Soviet mole in Damascus in 1983. The documents — obtained by Israeli researchers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez — purportedly show that Abbas, code-named Krotov (mole), was involved with the Soviets while Mikhail Bogdanov, today Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Middle East....

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urged Speaker Paul Ryan on Tuesday to keep Republican candidates from using hacked Democratic documents in this year’s election campaigns, the latest political twist in a summer of revelations of digital break-ins believed linked to Russia. “Russia’s cyber attack is an unprecedented assault on the sanctity of our democratic process,” Pelosi, D-Calif., wrote in a letter to the Wisconsin Republican. “We must come together to say that defending our democracy from Russia’s meddling is more important than any advantage or disadvantage in this election.” A GOP aide said Ryan cannot control campaign ads by Republican...

Ninety-nine years ago, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, and, after a few months of weak parliamentary rule, the Bolsheviks seized power. We call that seizure the Russian (or October) Revolution, but it might better be designated the Bolshevik coup d’état. A party of 10,000 people gained control of an empire occupying one-sixth of the earth’s land area. From the start, they made up for their small numbers with outsized violence. If at first their executions of liberals, socialists, workers who showed independence, and peasants from whom grain was seized at gunpoint seemed like a short-term necessity, it soon became evident that...

On 6 September 1976, an aircraft appears out of the clouds near the Japanese city of Hakodate, on the northern island of Hokkaido. It’s a twin-engined jet, but not the kind of short-haul airliner Hakodate is used to seeing. This huge, grey hulk sports the red stars of the Soviet Union. No-one in the West has ever seen one before. The jet lands on Hakodate’s concrete-and-asphalt runway. The runway, it turns out, is not long enough. The jet ploughs through hundreds of feet of earth before it finally comes to rest at the far end of the airport. The pilot...

Hillary Clinton Accuses Russia of Interfering With U.S. Election By AMY CHOZICKSEPT. 5, 2016 MOLINE, Ill. — Hillary Clinton accused Russian intelligence of interfering with the American election, implying that President Vladimir V. Putin viewed a victory by Donald J. Trump as a destabilizing event that would weaken the United States and buttress Russian interests. “It’s almost unthinkable,” Mrs. Clinton said on Monday, referring to what she called recent “credible reports about Russian interference in our elections” and citing a hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails in July. “We’ve never had the nominee of one of our major parties...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering an offer by Russian President Vladimir Putin to host talks in Moscow between the Israeli leader and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Netanyahu's office said on Monday. It said in a statement Netanyahu, at a meeting with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, "presented Israel's position whereby he is always ready to meet (Abbas) without preconditions and is therefore considering the Russian president's proposal and the timing for a possible meeting". A spokesman for Abbas, who is on a visit to Europe, declined immediate comment. The last Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in...

The world’s largest cargo airplanes, all Cold War relics, continue to be in great demand around the globe. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, outsized air cargo charter went from an oddity to a burgeoning cottage industry. The global war on terror, and especially Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, further accelerated its growth, along with an increasingly globalized marketplace that relies on just-in-time manufacturing concepts. So, unless you're the US Air Force, when a 747 freighter can’t carry it, a chartered An-124 Condor usually does—and sometimes, the world’s largest aircraft, the An-225 Mriya (“Dream”) steps in to...

Grinning Putin shakes hands with stony-faced Obama after US President was snubbed by Chinese hosts Smirk … Smiling Putin met Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit taking place in China Sly Putin could be seen grinning as he clasped hands with stony-faced Obama, who is serving the final months of his Presidency before November’s election. Relations with Russia have become central to the campaigns of Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump after the alleged hack by Moscow spooks of Democratic Party emails.

Compromised and de-facto obsolete as soon as it entered service — an Su-27SM of the Russian air force. NATO release In March 1986, U.S. Navy aviators out-flew, out-maneuvered and jammed the Libyan Arab Air Force so badly that the Libyans stopped flying their interceptors over the Gulf of Sidra. As a result, Tripoli had to give up its claim on this part of the Mediterranean. Equally damaging, the lack of air cover allowed the Americans to attack with relative impunity. You could chalk up the Americans’ success to superior training and tactics. But don’t dismiss another potentially important factor — espionage. By the mid-1980s,...

The massive explosions destroyed vehicles on a highway just outside the base at the Syrian port-city of Tartus, northwestern Syria. It is understood the first blast was a car bomb planetout outside the base. The second explosion was a sucicde bomber who detonated his belt as people rushed to help those injured, AFP reported. Dramatic pictures show plumes of black smoke billowing from under the al-Arzunah Bridge on the Safita highway, where the blasts took place. "Information has been received regarding a double explosion at the entrance to the city of Tartus, at a government road under the Arzuna bridge,"...

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Sunday that the United States and Russia were struggling to reach a ceasefire agreement on Syria as the two sides planned to meet again on Monday. "We're not there yet," Obama told reporters after a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. "We have grave differences with the Russians in terms of both the parties we support but also the process that is required to bring about peace in Syria," he said. On the battlefront, fighting raged. Syrian government forces and...

The Sukhoi Su-33 air superiority fighters based on the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov that is scheduled to be deployed to the Syrian shores in November will be outfitted with an ultra-precision targeting system, known as the SVP-24, Izvestiya reported, citing an unnamed source in the Russian Defense Ministry. The system, developed by Russian defense contractor Gefest & T, will allow Russian warplanes to drop unguided bombs with the same precision as a guided weapon. In addition, the Mikoyan MiG-29K 4++ generation multirole fighter aircraft recently added to the Admiral Kuznetsov's roster are expected to use guided bombs and missiles...

President Vladimir Putin says Russia wasn’t involved in the hacking of emails of the U.S. Democratic Party, but thinks the release of the information was a benefit. Some American officials have claimed that Russian military intelligence was behind the hacking, which provoked a political scandal in the U.S. by revealing apparent prejudice in the Democratic National Committee against Hillary Clinton’s challenger for the presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders. …

The Kremlin is attacking our democracy—and our president let it happenPractically every day we learn more about the Kremlin’s secret espionage offensive against our country. This week, we discovered that hackers linked to Russian intelligence have cracked into several think tanks in Washington, D.C.This should not surprise. Moscow considers targeted hacking such as this to be legitimate intelligence gathering, and the Kremlin’s interest in behind-scenes goings-on in our nation’s capital is perennially high. Russian intelligence has spied on Washington—our leaders, politicians, and their battalions of think-tank and media hangers-on—for many decades. This is nothing new.What is new and alarming is...