Free Republic

President Joe Biden is wrapping up his whirlwind, four-day visit to Poland and Ukraine by reassuring eastern flank NATO allies that his administration is highly attuned to the looming threats and other impacts spurred by the grinding Russian invasion of Ukraine. Before departing Warsaw on Wednesday, Biden will hold talks with leaders from the Bucharest Nine, a collection of nations on the most eastern parts of the NATO alliance that came together in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. As the war in Ukraine drags on, the Bucharest Nine countries’ anxieties have remained heightened....

There was perhaps only one truth spoken during Vladimir Putin’s two-hour state of the nation address: that Russia would suspend its participation in the New Start treaty with the US. The rest was yet another a trip down the rabbit hole into the Russian president’s parallel universe Putin continues to make veiled nuclear threats, and did so again in this address when he stated that western declarations on ensuring a strategic defeat for Russia were an existential threat “to which we know how to react”. Threats to the existence of the Russian state allow for a first-use nuclear strike in...

As the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine approaches, Russia is increasingly under pressure to claim a big victory, notably the capture of the important city of Bakhmut, according to the UK Ministry of Defence. The ministry said in an intelligence update on Monday that no matter how the fight for the city is faring, Russia intends to declare a victory there by February 24, or the country's leadership faces the risk of increasing domestic tensions. "It is likely that Russia will claim that Bakhmut has been captured to align with the anniversary, regardless of the reality on the...

Russia carried out a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears to have failed while President Joe Biden was in Ukraine on Monday, according to two US officials familiar with the matter. Russia notified the United States in advance of the launch through deconfliction lines, one official said. Another official said that the test did not pose a risk to the United States and that the US did not view the test as an anomaly or an escalation. The test of the heavy SARMAT missile – nicknamed the Satan II in the West and capable of delivering multiple nuclear...

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia's mercenary Wagner Group, has accused unspecified officials of deliberately denying his fighters sufficient ammunition as part of an ongoing rivalry between himself and parts of the Russian elite. A onetime catering entrepreneur, Progozhin has assumed an increasingly public role in Russian politics since the start of the war in Ukraine, with his Wagner Group spearheading Russia's long battle for the town of Bakhmut in Ukraine's Donetsk region. In an audio message released on February 20 by his press service, Prigozhin said he was required to "apologize and obey" in order to secure ammunition for...

After a year of hard fighting there are a rush of observers trying to make sense of the current balance of power in Ukraine. The focus in often on (often small) movements in the frontlines, casualties, or the performance of particular platforms and systems. Those things matter, but wars are not generally fought to take individual trenches or solely to inflict casualties. They are fought for strategic objectives. In this episode I dig into Russia's history of Empire, its modern strategic objectives, and try to assess whether or not the war in Ukraine represents a success or failure by Russia's...

Russians left desperate for the loo as toilet exports are banned to 'punish' Putin Sinking to grimy lows, Russian troops are well-known for thieving lavatories out of Ukrainian homes to send back to their families as Western sanctions of "bidets, lavatory pans, [and] flushing cisterns" bite The EU included lavatories, bidets and flushing cisterns in its list of banned products The EU included lavatories, bidets and flushing cisterns in its list of banned products

A Russian journalist was sentenced to six years in a penal colony on Wednesday for accusing the Russian air force of bombing a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol last April where women and children were sheltering. The Lenin district court in the Siberian city of Barnaul also banned Maria Ponоmarenko from working as a journalist for five years, according to a court service statement. State prosecutors had asked for a nine-year sentence.

As Russia steps up its offensive in eastern Ukraine, weeks of failed attacks on a Ukrainian stronghold have left two Russian brigades in tatters, raised questions about Moscow’s military tactics and renewed doubts about its ability to maintain sustained, large-scale ground assaults. The fighting has also come at a cost for Ukraine, which is expending vast amounts of ammunition to repel Russia’s growing numbers of ground troops, often supported by heavy armor, artillery and close air support. That has added urgency to Ukraine’s pleas for more ammunition, while Western allies this week expressed increasing concern about their ability to meet...

If you are still wondering why the United States failed to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially Afghanistan, all you need to do is watch today’s press conference of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium. What a veritable clown show! The remarks by Lloyd Austin and General Mark Milley revealed two guys with an iron grip on delusion and a total lack of self-awareness.The audacity of these two failed military leaders to pretend they are qualified to offer advice to Ukraine on how to fight a first world military when their own dismal military records show they failed...

The war in Ukraine is at a stalemate, but that doesn’t mean it’s not changing. General David Petraeus predicts the war will look different this year with significant offensives likely staged by the two sides. Bergen: Who’s winning the war? Petraeus: It is not Russia. Russia has, after all, lost the Battles of Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv; failed to take the rest of Ukraine’s southern coast (not even getting through Mykolaiv, much less to the major port at Odesa). It has lost what it had gained in Kharkiv province. And it has had to withdraw its only forces west...

Aid to Ukraine has evolved dramatically since February 2022, and there are few topics that have attracted more constant press coverage away from the battlefield itself. So today I [Perun] try and set out how aid has evolved, who the major contributors are, and the impact aid has had - and may have in 2023.

'At the operational-tactical level, we did not think that within a year we would not be able to liberate the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. 'We did not think that there would be such heavy losses, although I then said there would be tens of thousands of dead on both sides. 'But everything turned out to be much worse.' Some estimates say the losses on both sides are now over 200,000, and rising fast. Russia alone is estimated to have lost as many as 140,000 since February last year. 'It was not expected that there would be such destruction: in fact,...

Prigozhin admitted that he created and financed a "troll factory" Businessman and founder of Wagner PMCs Evgeny Prigozhin admitted for the first time that he created and financed the "troll factory". He said this in response to a request from Der Spiegel that Prigozhin was an alleged financier of the so-called "Internet Research Agency". "I have never been just a financier of the Internet Research Agency. I invented it, I created it, I managed it for a long time," he said. They blocked it in my country present time What to do The "troll factory" was first mentioned in 2013....

U.S. researchers say that Russia has relocated thousands of Ukrainian children to a network of sites in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine and in Russia whose main goal is to "reeducate" the children to make them pro-Russian.The researchers said in a report published on February 14 that they had identified 43 camps and other facilities where at least 6,000 Ukrainian children have been held."The primary purpose of the camp facilities we've identified appears to be political reeducation," Nathaniel Raymond, one of the researchers, said in a briefing to reporters.The report also provides evidence of the Russian government's efforts to sever communication...

Almost two-thirds (65%) of Americans would rather see the US keep boosting Ukraine against its larger adversary,...Democrats were far more supportive of efforts to aid Ukraine than Republicans or Independents, with 81% of members of the liberal party saying they wanted the US to offer prolonged support to Kyiv, compared to 53% of GOP voters and 59% of Independent voters, the poll found...The US has sent some $27 billion in military aid to Ukraine...

University student Olesya Krivtsova has been missing a lot of classes. That's because 20-year-old Olesya is under house arrest. She has an electronic tag on her leg. Police can monitor her every move. Her alleged crime? Olesya was arrested for anti-war posts on social media. One of them concerned last October's explosion on the bridge linking Russia to annexed Crimea. "I posted an Instagram story about the bridge," Olesya tells the BBC, "reflecting on how Ukrainians were happy with what had happened." She had also shared a friend's post about the war. Then the drama began.

The Russian president's train boasts radio antennae for special communications fixed to the roof of certain carriages, covered by casings, and has been upgraded to be more secure. It has reinforced axles like heavy freight trains because of the weight of the armour on the carriages. It requires three engines at the front, and has one at the rear. On the side of the train is the logo of Grand Service Express, a company which Dossier alleges is linked to close Putin associate Yuri Kovalchuk. Regular trains are halted to allow the Putin express to speed to its destinations. Putin...

The head of Russia's Wagner mercenary group has said in a rare interview that it could take two years for Moscow to control the whole of two eastern Ukrainian regions whose capture it has stated as a key goal of the war. Yevgeny Prigozhin said his understanding of Russia's plan was that it needed to fully control the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that Moscow last year claimed as "republics" of Russia, in a move condemned by most countries of the United Nations as illegal. "As far as I understand, we need to close off the Donetsk and Luhansk republics and...

Russia's federal media watchdog tasks its spooks with protecting Vladimir Putin from memes that portray him as a 'bald dwarf', 'a crab', or 'a Hitler wannabe'. That is according to reports on a leak out of Roskomnadzor, the main agency behind online censorship in Moscow that is responsible for blocking material about the on-going invasion of Ukraine and any disparaging posts about the Russian president. Analysis of the leaks found that the agency compiles reports on all 'negative publications', and sends them 'upstairs' to the Kremlin and Russia's security services to brief them on all of the despot's critics via...