Free Republic

In a Sunday editorial in the state-owned Global Times, Beijing warned that allowing the country into the alliance—as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has requested—would lead to an inevitable escalation in the conflict, prompting Russian President Vladimir Putin's threats to use nuclear arms against the West. While unlikely—U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan stated in a White House press briefing last week that NATO should delay talks on allowing the country into the alliance—the newspaper warned "all European countries will tremble under the shadow of a possible nuclear war" should it take place, and called for the Western alliance to withdraw...

Ukraine is now facing "massive losses" with Russia overpowering Ukraine's ammunition and artillery store. There has been a rise in desertion as morale declines, says an intelligence report seen by The Independent.Up to 200 Ukrainian soldiers are killed every day, an aide to President Zelenskyy told the BBC on Friday, and there are now signs that Ukrainian fighters' morale is starting to buckle.The report, says Kim Sengupta of The Independent, describes the spike in deaths as having "a seriously demoralizing effect on Ukrainian forces as well as a very real material effect; cases of desertion are growing every week."

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed Tuesday that his country is losing as many as 100 soldiers a day as Russia presses its military offensive in the eastern Donbas region, where street-by-street fighting is being reported in some areas. “The most difficult situation is in the east of Ukraine and southern Donetsk and Luhansk​,” Zelensky said in an interview with Newsmax that was published on Tuesday.

Patron the Jack Russell has become a billboard worthy war hero as his bomb disposal skills have helped the team find over 200 Russian landmines and unexploded bombs Russian special forces Belgian Malinois dog switches sides after it was found abandoned and close to death by Ukrainian soldiers -Belgian Malinois Max, 3, was found starving by Ukrainians in the Mykolaiv region -He has been redeployed as a mine clearer after being Ukrainian commands -Ukrainian troops said could not understand why the Russians left Max behind An abandoned Russian war dog has swapped sides - and is now saving Ukrainian soldiers...

"...On the surface, this would appear to be simply about weapons. However, buried in this funding is up to a billion dollars earmarked to pay the salaries and pensions of Ukrainian government workers and soldiers. This isn’t a one-time payment – the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has indicated that up to $7 billion per month will be needed to keep Ukraine functioning. While most US citizens might not blanch at the thought of their taxpayer dollars being used to underwrite Ukrainian soldiers and civil servants, the reality is that much of this money will be deployed to pay...

These people will get us all killed. Mitt Romney called on our NATO allies to prepare for a nuclear strike from Russia. The US has already invested tens of billions of dollars in military weapons to Ukraine. The New York Post reported: The US and its NATO allies should prepare a “devastating” response to potential Russian nuclear action, Sen. Mitt Romney said on Saturday. The call to action comes on the heels of threats from the Kremlin and warnings from Russian diplomats that the country’s Ukraine invasion could lead to a nuclear strike, the Utah Republican wrote in an op-ed...

The leader of the Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has told a Moscow audience that his country's forces are "finding it difficult" and are fighting a war "against NATO" in Ukraine. A fierce loyalist of Vladimir Putin, the leader of the Caucasus republic, announced his forces had been deployed to the battlefield in Ukraine soon after the Russian president invaded on February 24. -snip- At a filmed educational forum in Moscow, Kadyrov addressed Russia's faltering invasion of Ukraine, in which his militias have suffered heavy casualties. "We're fighting not against Ukraine, against Banderites—we're fighting against NATO," Kadyrov told the...

Nearly 1,000 last-ditch Ukrainian fighters who had held out inside Mariupol’s pulverized steel plant have surrendered, Russian said Wednesday, as the battle ... drew toward a close....The Ukrainian fighters trooping out of the ruined Azovstal steelworks that became the last stronghold of resistance in the city face an uncertain fate. Some were taken by the Russians to a former penal colony in territory controlled by Moscow-backed separatists....Russia’s main federal investigative body said it intends to interrogate the surrendering troops to “identify the nationalists” and determine whether they were involved in crimes against civilians.The Russian parliament was scheduled to consider a...

The United States and the European Union (EU) have been ineffective in their trade war against Russia and are currently working on their sixth package of sanctions. These sanctions have caused price hikes and food shortages, severely harming innocent people all around the world. As the West struggles to constrain Russia’s military mission in Ukraine, European gas importers have already surrendered to Russia. European gas importers have quietly violated the EU’s own sanctions and have begun buying gas in Rubles, capitulating to Russia’s new rules. As the West’s economic warfare scheme backfires, EU leaders are beginning to crack even further....

Vladimir Putin's top military commander has been flown out of the war zone with shrapnel wounds after being to sent to Ukraine by the Russian president to secure victory, a former Russian internal affairs minister has claimed. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of staff of the Russian army, was today wounded in Izyum in Ukraine's Kharviv region, which has been at the centre of intense fighting since Russia's invasion. Putin had sent Gerasimov to the region to take personal control of his push to grab territory in eastern Ukraine, after the Russian army abandoned its plans to take Kyiv at the...

Boris Johnson has declared Russia “must fail and be seen to fail” if it invades Ukraine, warning of a bloody and protracted conflict once Russian troops cross the border ..He said: “If dialogue fails and if Russia chooses to use violence against an innocent and peaceful population in Ukraine, and to disregard the norms of civilised behaviour between states, and to disregard the Charter of the United Nations, then we at this conference should be in no doubt that it is in our collective interest that Russia should ultimately fail and be seen to fail.” He added: “I believe that...

Russian and Donbas forces have cleared the city of Mariupol except for the giant metallurgic complex of Azovstal which is held by some estimated 4,000 men, including many from the fascist Azov battalion. On Sunday Russia opened corridors across the front line and asked for those forces to surrender. However the Zelensky government ordered them to stay and to continue to bind Russian forces which otherwise could be used elsewhere: Russia had given the Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol until Sunday morning to lay down their weapons or be “eliminated.” On Sunday, the forces at the plant ignored the deadline, and...

The propaganda continues to portray the war in Ukraine as that of an unprovoked Goliath out to decimate an innocent David unless we in the US and NATO contribute massive amounts of military equipment to Ukraine to defeat Russia. As is always the case with propaganda, this version of events is manipulated to bring an emotional response to the benefit of special interests. One group of special interests profiting massively on the war is the US military-industrial complex. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes recently told a meeting of shareholders that, “Everything that ‘s being shipped into Ukraine today, of course, is...

U.S. gave Ukrainian forces detailed intelligence about exactly when and where Russian missiles and bombs were intended to strike, prompting Ukraine to move air defenses and aircraft out of harm’s way, current and former U.S. officials told NBC News. That near real-time intelligence-sharing also paved the way for Ukraine to shoot down a Russian transport plane carrying hundreds of troops in the early days of the war, the officials say, helping repel a Russian assault on a key airport near Kyiv. It was part of what American officials call a massive and unprecedented intelligence-sharing operation with a non-NATO partner that...

On Sunday, Russia entered the third month of its invasion of Ukraine, with no sign of an end in sight. Despite severe pushback in the shape of the toughest economic sanctions ever imposed on a country, the ruble, the Russian currency, appears to be strengthening.What’s become evident is that, despite an enormously broad package of sanctions on Russia’s government and oligarchs, as well as an exodus of foreign enterprises, the moves are mostly ineffectual if foreign nationals continue to consume Russian oil and natural gas, which supports the ruble.On Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion, the ruble traded...

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Russia’s military capabilities should be degraded after he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and announced more U.S. military aid to the country. “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Mr. Austin said Monday after the highest-level visit of U.S. officials to Kyiv since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Mr. Blinken said: “Russia is failing, Ukraine is succeeding.” In what could be a significant escalation of the conflict on Monday,...

According to Western media, now copy-paste reporting the same claims, Russian forces apparently secretly buried *up to 9,000 Mariupol civilians* in "mass graves" in a town just west of the city. Except, it never happened, there is no mass grave. It's actually just a normal, small, cemetery…no pits, no mass graves, just an orderly cemetery whose grave diggers refuted Western claims. On April 23, with journalist Roman Kosarev, I went to Mangush (Manhush in Ukrainian), found a normal cemetery setting, and spoke with the men responsible for burials, who refused the allegations and said they buried each person in a...

This one is really amazing, starts about 4:40 into the videohttps://youtu.be/dUask2cfFh4?t=283 This one should end any debate as to what is happening over there.

Russia has stumbled again. Its southern offensive, the second phase of the Ukraine war, has failed to be the "biggest tank war since World War II," as some analysts were predicting. Instead, Russia's ground forces have shown the same lackluster performance on the ground, unable to break through anywhere. The towns and villages of the south, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday, "are the places where the fate of this war and the future of our state is being decided, now." Experts point to May 9th—Victory Day in Russia commemorating the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945—as the next decisive...

Former Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman said Saturday that former President Donald Trump "bears enormous burden of responsibility" for the Russia-Ukraine war. Vindman, who testified in the House during the first impeachment proceedings against Trump in 2019, appeared on MSNBC when he was asked about how the situation in Ukraine ties to the actions of the Trump administration. "What is happening on the other side of the world in Ukraine, a country from which you hail, is directly tied to the attacks on democracy that you witnessed in the White House while you were the director for European affairs at...