Free Republic

This should have been a Monty Python sketch, along the lines of the “Dead Parrot” classic. Germany’s leading center-right newspaper Die Welt posted a banner headline at the top of its page last Friday evening just before Shabbat came in here in New York: “[Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany Andrej] Melnyk’s statement trivializes the Holocaust.” In a radio interview last week, Melnyk compared Ukrainian Nazi leader Stephan Bandera to Robin Hood and vehemently denied—in the face of massive historical documentation—that Bandera had helped to murder 800,000 Ukrainian Jews during World War II.” The Banderites also helped to murder between 40,000 and...

Russia’s top diplomat has admitted that the Kremlin’s overarching goal in Ukraine is to boot out President Volodymyr Zelensky “The Russians are using the scorched-earth tactics across the entire Donbas. They fire from the ground and from the air to wipe off entire cities,” Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said in televised remarks.Lavrov argued that Russia was ready to negotiate a deal to end hostilities in March when Kyiv changed tack and declared its intention to rout Russia on the battlefield. He said the West has encouraged Ukraine to keep fighting.“The West insists that Ukraine must not start negotiations until Russia...

Russia has said its forces have destroyed two U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, also known as HIMARS, in Ukraine. The number adds to the four HIMARS launchers that Russia claimed to have destroyed over a two-week period in July. A "high-precision" strike in Kharkiv took out the systems and killed 53 people, Lieutenant-General Igor Konashenkov, a spokesperson for the Russian defense ministry, said in an announcement on Monday, according to Russian state news agency TASS. "As a result of a high-precision strike in the city of Kharkiv, on the territory of the Ukrainian Energy Machines plant, two American launchers...

Russia is “a gas station masquerading as a country,” the noted warmonger John McCain once said. This astoundingly disrespectful statement by a major US political figure says much about the condescending and diplomatically destructive attitudes of US elites towards Russia since 1991.But Russia’s size, vast stores of critical resources, military might (especially nukes), and tenacious cultural conservatism mean that it will be a significant force in the world for some time. The West could have benefited greatly from a peaceful integration of this enormous country into Europe, but it chose another route. More honestly, the United States chose another route.After...