Free Republic

A former Air National Guardsman facing child pornography charges defected and joined the Russian army in its war against Ukraine, the Rhode Island attorney general's office alleges. Wilmer Puello-Mota, 28, a former security forces technical sergeant with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, allegedly fled the country following charges of possession of child pornography. "We are aware Mr. Puello-Mota left the country in response to civil criminal charges filed against him," Don Veitch, a spokesperson for the 104th Fighter Wing in Massachusetts, told Military.com, emphasizing that the charges are "very serious." The charges prompted Puello-Mota's removal from the National Guard in...

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” former Defense Secretary and former CIA Director Leon Panetta called for the Biden administration “to get tough” with Russian espionage in the U.S. to help give the U.S. leverage that it lacks to free Americans detained by Russia and “We’ve got to basically shut him down by playing hardball with Putin with regards to the spies he’s got in this country.” Panetta said, “We have got to play a tough game with Putin to make clear that he’s not going to get away with this kind of game.”

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Ukraine has sunk or disabled a third of all Russian warships in the Black Sea in just over two years of war, the navy spokesman said Tuesday, a heavy blow to Moscow’s military capability. Ukraine’s Navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk told The Associated Press that the latest strike on Saturday night hit the Russian amphibious landing ship Kostiantyn Olshansky that was resting in dock in Sevastopol in Russia-occupied Crimea. The ship was part of the Ukrainian navy before Russia captured it while annexing the Black Sea peninsula in 2014. Pletenchuk has previously announced that two other landing...

“Quite interesting was that one of those assailants that participated this Friday in the attack on the concert thing was there on 7 March and photographed by one of the security staff there. They matched that up and it looks a little bit as if maybe the act was intended for 8 March, when a very famous singer, Shaman, was due to sing. An icon of Russian nationalism, he’s famous for his rendition of the national anthem. It really is striking if you ever listen to it, anyway what happened was that at the time the son of the owner...

Ukraine has taken responsibility for “disabling” a railway bridge in the Russian mainland region of Samara after explosions were seen in the early hours of Monday morning. Apparently continuing with the strategy to take the war closer to home for Russians, the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (DIU) confirmed “disabling railway bridge in Russia’s Samara region,” state media Ukrinform reported. In a post on social media, the Ukrainian intelligence service wrote: “The Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine confirmed the fact that the railway bridge over the Chapayevka River in was disabled.”

The Russian air force lost another Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber on Thursday, the Ukrainian air force claimed. If confirmed, the Thursday shoot-down would extend an unprecedented hot streak for Ukrainian air-defenses. The Ukrainian claim they’ve shot down 11 Russian planes in 11 days: eight Su-34s, two Sukhoi Su-35 fighters and a rare Beriev A-50 radar plane. But those 11 claimed losses are worse than they might seem for the increasingly stressed Russian air force. In theory, the air arm has plenty more planes. In practice, the service is dangerously close to collapse.

WASHINGTON — Then-Vice President Joe Biden allegedly told Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, to “be good to my boy” during a 2014 speaker phone conversation, according to a former Hunter Biden business associate who was interviewed Friday in the House impeachment inquiry. Jason Galanis, a federal inmate who defrauded an American Indian tribe, said from his Alabama prison that on May 4, 2014, the sitting vice president called into a party in southern Brooklyn featuring his son, business partner Devon Archer and the Russian power couple. “I was present when Hunter Biden called his...

Vladimir Putin's fierce rival and critic Alexei Navalny has died, according to the prison service. The Russian opposition leader, who was the most prominent and persistent domestic foe of President Vladimir Putin, had been serving a 19-year sentence on an extremism conviction. He had been incarcerated in central Russia’s Vladimir region, 140 miles east of Moscow. Navalny has been behind bars in Russia since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests.

A cousin of former top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was convicted of fraud and sent immediately to jail on Tuesday. In addition to fraud, Omar Amanat is accused of trying to tamper with potential evidence by allegedly asking his brother in an email to “delete all of my emails from the yahoo site” because he was afraid of a subpoena. Amanat, who did business with a man known as the “Russian Donald Trump,” was reportedly determined to be a flight risk by a judge. The indictment charges that Amanat convinced people to invest millions of dollars in a tech...

Russian President Vladimir Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century." This documentary from 2021 shows the path Russian foreign policy has followed under Putin. [This documentary was originally released in 2021. In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine.] On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. Along with it came hope for the end of the Cold War, for independence and freedom for the former Soviet republics. But for many it also brought poverty and war. What remains of the dreams of that time? The...

Anxious FBI chiefs are trawling through 'numerous' top-level investigations spanning 22 years for fear they were compromised by convicted bureau spook Charles McGonigal, DailyMail.com can reveal. The forensic clean-up operation ranges over the entire time the philandering former head of counterintelligence in New York worked for the agency. McGonigal, 55, has already been sentenced to four years and two months in prison for taking money and conspiring with a sanctioned Russian oligarch who is a crony of despot President Vladimir Putin. But the full possible repercussions of his treachery are outlined in a sentencing memorandum by the US government for...

In a tragic incident, a Russian military transport plane crashed near the Ukraine border. Conflicting reports mention 65 captured Ukrainian military onboard and, separately, cargo related to air defense systems.

Footage of Hunter Biden complaining to a Prostitute that a Russian drug dealer stole his laptop computer for blackmail. (video in link below)https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1748963735895490962

A journalist who took aim at Russian officials and promised to release details of “gigantic corruption” was found dead near a roadside over the weekend, but the circumstances of his death remain shrouded in mystery. “It will be almost impossible to determine whether foul play was involved Rybin’s death or whether he died of heart disease as some Russian media outlets claim,” Rebekah Koffler, a strategic military intelligence analyst and the author of “Putin’s Playbook,” told Fox News Digital. Alexander Rybin, 39, was found near a highway some 130 miles outside the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, where he had spent...

For people who don’t know, Christmas in Russia/Ukraine is a more traditional advent thing, and it’s not commercialized like in the West. It’s also on the 7th of January, because the Eastern Church uses the Julian (solar) calendar. So, New Year’s is the bigger celebration day of the period. They’ve even started with the Western-style gifts, but they do it on New Year’s, not on Christmas.

Russia acknowledges a missile attack on warship Novocherkassk, which Ukraine claims to have destroyed in a cruise missile strike in the early hours of Boxing Day. Ukraine appears to have come out of Christmas Day determined to make an impact, as they claim to have destroyed another Russian warship, this time with an air-launched cruise missile strike. Russia acknowledged the attack on the Ropucha-class Novocherkassk, a 1980s-vintage landing ship similar in size to the U.S.-made Freedom-class warship, saying that one person had been killed in the strike. Lieutenant General Mykola Oleshchuk of the Ukrainian Air Force thanks his pilots for...

CNN anchor Jake Tapper said Sunday on his show “State of the Union” that it was “stunning” former President Donald Trump was quoting Russian President Vladimir Putin on persecution of political rivals. Saturday, at a rally, Trump said, “Vladimir Putin, of Russia, said that Biden’s persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which can not pretend to teach others about democracy.”

A highly classified binder of documents related to 2016 Russian election interference disappeared from the White House during former President Donald Trump's final days in office. CNN first reported Friday on the mystery, which remains unsolved nearly three years after Trump left office. The binder contained raw intelligence the U.S. and its NATO allies collected to inform the government's assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The Russian advance is ongoing. It appears today will be a very troubling day for Ukraine.

Pro-Ukrainian saboteurs hacked into Russian television channels in Crimea overnight to air President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech vowing to liberate the occupied peninsula. In a further humiliation to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, the pranksters renamed all 20 channels in Crimea’s IPTV network “Putin is a d—head,” as seen in videos shared online. In his brief address to the people of Crimea, who have lived under Moscow’s control since the region was illegally annexed in 2014, Zelensky promised that the occupiers’ presence there “will not last forever.”