Free Republic

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the United States will never recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea and will continue to insist that Ukraine’s territorial integrity be restored. In a statement released Wednesday by the State Department, Pompeo said the U.S. will hold to its long-standing principle of refusing to recognize Kremlin claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force, in violation of international law. He called for Russia to respect principles and “end its occupation of Crimea.” The statement was released shortly before Pompeo was to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he is expected to face tough...

As far as much of the American public is concerned, the timing for U.S. President Donald Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn't be worse. The indictments of 12 Russian military intelligence officers on Friday renewed the calls for a tougher stance from the administration against Moscow. But with Trump determined to achieve some sort of détente with Russia, the indictments gave ammunition to his critics who see the meeting as appeasement or worse. But while Americans are deeply divided about the highly politicized topic of relations with Russia, many Israelis seem to be taking a very different view...

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki: "I look at the latest developments, including Helsinki, where it might have been that one president of our neighboring country (Putin) was pressuring the U.S. president for concessions. But I have not seen any concessions, neither as regards the annexation of Crimea nor the war in Ukraine," Morawiecki said. "None of the voices that were appearing beforehand as hypothetically possible - concessions by the United States - have materialized. So I don't see where he (Trump) has made any significant concessions. Poland is the biggest former communist country in both the European Union and NATO,...

During the July 2018 NATO summit, elements of the USA newsmedia focused on President Trump’s accurate attacks on Western Europe’s contradictory actions and positions in the arenas of defense and commerce. What the USA newsmedia covered much less was how welcome those points were to NATO members from Eastern Europe, whose memories of Russian aggression are much more recent, perhaps, than those of Western Europe, making them as wary of these issues as Mr. Trump is. Delegates from Poland, Lithuania, and Romania, for example, appeared just as happy about Mr. Trump’s comments as delegates from England, France and especially Germany...

Videos at link. President Trump claimed Friday ahead of his summit with Vladimir Putin that the Russian president would not have invaded Crimea had he been in office, calling the globally condemned annexation an “Obama disaster.” The comments marked Trump's latest attempt to set the stage for his meeting with Putin, with a combination of tough talk and suggestions of future improved ties. “I think we could have a very good relationship with President Putin,” Trump said, adding that he was not going into the meeting with “high expectations.” “We’ll see.” Trump tackled questions about Russia during a joint press...

In his NATO news conference today, President Trump held President Obama responsible for permitting Russia to encroach on Crimea, and said: “Long before I got here, President Obama allowed that to happen. That was on his watch, not on my watch. People like to say, oh, Crimea but the fact is they built bridges to Crimea; they just opened a big bridge that was started years ago, they built I think a submarine port, substantially added billions of dollars. “So, that was on Barack Obama’s watch. That was not on Trump’s watch. Would I have allowed it to happen? No,...

“On the way to Sevastopol, not too far from Simferopol,” begins what is probably the most famous Yiddish song from the Soviet Union, “Hey Dzhankoye.” Jews have been living in the peninsula since ancient times, largely divided into two communities: the Krymchaks, who followed rabbinical Judaism, and the Karaites, who rejected the Oral Torah. Soon after Catherine the Great conquered the region from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, she opened it up to Jewish settlement, hoping that the Jews would serve as a bulwark against the Turks. Although Jews were later barred from living in the major cities, the peninsula...

Canada is a welsher state. (Hold your outrage, that adjective has nothing to do with the Welsh.) I am speaking specifically about this country’s financial contribution to NATO, the international alliance formed after World War II, constructed around the principle of collective defence. Article 5 of the establishing charter declares that “an attack on one is an attack on all.” Originally and for four decades the thrust of NATO’s raison d’être was deterring Soviet aggression. With the end of the Cold War, NATO shifted toward helping former Soviet-bloc countries embrace democracy and the market economy. But now it’s come full...

A Neanderthal seems to have left a message etched in stone about 35,000 years ago, a new study finds. An analysis of the slanted, zigzag lines — engraved on a piece of flint discovered at a Neanderthal site in Crimea — reveals that they likely weren't made willy-nilly. Rather, the Neanderthal artist would have needed excellent fine motor skills and attention to detail to etch the lines, which may carry symbolic meaning, the researchers said. If this new interpretation is correct, the engraved piece of flint will join a growing list of artifacts showing that Neanderthals were likely complex beings...

Ukraine, which along with most of the international community has not recognized Russia's annexation of Crimea, condemns the projectKERCH – President Vladimir Putin drew condemnation from the US, Europe and Ukraine on Tuesday, May 15, after he opened a new bridge linking mainland Russia and Moscow-annexed Crimea by driving a truck across it to the peninsula. Putin dressed in jeans and a casual jacket was shown by Russian state television behind the wheel of a construction truck to drive 19 kilometers (12 miles) across the bridge, which links the Taman peninsula in southern Russia to Ukraine's Crimea, which was annexed...

Vladimir Putin has opened a bridge between the Russian mainland and Crimea, tightening Russia’s hold over the contested peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The 12-mile (19km), $3.7bn (£2.7bn) bridge is Moscow’s only direct road link to Crimea. Russia expects it will carry millions of cars and rail travellers and millions of tons of cargo each year. Previously, all car traffic passed over the Kerch strait by ferry or by passing through Ukraine.

Poland signed the largest arms procurement deal in its history on Wednesday, agreeing with the United States to buy Raytheon Co’s (RTN.N) Patriot missile defense system for $4.75 billion in a major step to modernize its forces against a bolder Russia. “It is an extraordinary, historic moment; it is Poland’s introduction into a whole new world of state-of-the-art technology, modern weaponry, and defensive means,” President Andrzej Duda said during the signing ceremony. NATO member Poland has accelerated efforts to overhaul its ageing weaponry following Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. Two-thirds of Poland’s weaponry dates from the Cold...

Earlier this year the Russian ministry of culture banned the satirical film The Death of Stalin, because it contained “information whose dissemination is prohibited by law”. On Russian social media, the withdrawal of the film’s licence was met with widespread laughter and scorn: what sort of secrets could this movie possibly have disclosed? Could it be that Stalin is indeed dead? – so went the irony. Back in December, there had been an ominous precursor: Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s FSB intelligence services, told the Rossiyskaya Gazeta that Stalin-era repressions had been justified. He mentioned the need to counter...

Russia's ruble experienced its biggest one-day fall for over two years on Monday and stocks in major Russian companies also slid, as investors reacted to a new round of U.S. sanctions targeting some of Russia's biggest tycoons. The impact of the new sanctions could threaten Russia's fragile economic recovery, which was only just beginning to take hold after the first major wave of sanctions against Russia, introduced in response to Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014. Shares of Russian Companies Tumble Following U.S. Sanctions Russia's currency plunged to its lowest level since November last year, trading at 60.24 to the...

The Ukrainian fleet "sacrificed itself" during the accession of the Crimea to Russia , to give Kiev time to get the army ready. This was in an interview with "112 Ukraine " said the assistant commander of the Ukrainian Navy captain first rank Marina Kanalyuk. "We took the time to enable higher authorities to create conditions for the use of the Armed Forces in such a situation." All of the top leaders of the Russian security agencies came to the negotiations with us, and it made them busy for up to a month. During that time the mechanism of using...

Following a recent trip to Ukraine, Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas told Newsmax that while the final outcome of the ongoing crisis is "impossible to predict," Russian President Vladimir Putin's long-term mission "is to control Ukraine." "It could easily go on from there to Belarus or Moldova," he added, referring to two other independent states in the former Soviet Union that have large Russian-speaking populations. Two-termer Pompeo, a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, is part of the growing number of younger Republicans in the House urging the administration to take a harder line against Russia on the economic...

The head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Filaret, has said the Ukrainian church will never go back under the control of the Moscow Patriarchate. "First of all, I want to tell the Moscow patriarch and the Russian bishops that the Ukrainian church will never go back to the Moscow Patriarchate. Why is that? Because we have our own state. Don't you see how deceptive Moscow is? One cannot trust them." Filaret told journalists in Kyiv on December 1 that the Russian Orthodox Church was "deceptive" on November 30 when it said he had written a letter to Russian Patriarch...

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin warned that if Senator Barack Obama were elected president, his “indecision” and “moral equivalence” may encourage Russia’s Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Palin said then: After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next. For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine. Hounshell wrote then that Palin’s comments were “strange” and...

Working with dubious sourcing, a group close to NATO's chief military commander Philip Breedlove sought to secure weapons deliveries for Ukraine, a trove of newly released emails revealed. The efforts served to intensify the conflict between the West and Russia. Most of the 1,096 hacked emails date back to the dramatic 12 months of the Ukraine crisis after Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Thousands died in the skirmishes between Kiev's troops and Moscow-aligned separatists. More than 2 million civilians fled eastern Ukraine. Breedlove sought counsel from some very prominent people, his emails show. Among them were Wesley Clark, Breedlove's...

It was inevitable. Russian “mercenaries” attacked a forward base in Syria where they knew American advisors were stationed. It was a test. And our military passed. Let’s hope the administration passes, too. The most important thing about this attack on our troops is that it couldn’t have happened without Vladimir Putin’s personal approval. Nye vozmozhno. The core of the attacking force came from the Wagner Group, Russia’s version of the American thugs who worked for the company formerly known as Blackwater. But while the media refers to the Russians as mercenaries, the Wagner Group functions as an auxiliary of the...