Free Republic

It is Russia’s patience - and not the United States’ - that is waning over the situation in Syria, the chief of Russia’s General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, has told the media. Earlier, US Secretary of State, John Kerry said that while the Syrian President, Bashar Assad and Russia were demanding strict compliance with ceasefire in the whole territory of Syria, the Syrian government troops were pushing ahead with their operation to recapture Aleppo. He remarked that Russia should be aware that patience on Assad’s Syria was wearing thin. "If anyone’s patience on Syria is waning, it is our patience, not...

Russia is preparing an "asymmetric" response to the increase in NATO troop rotation in Eastern Europe, and in particular the United States' military presence near Russian borders, Russia's ambassador to NATO said on March 31. "Of course, our response will be completely asymmetrical. It will be calibrated to match our ideas about the degree of military threat, to be most efficient and not overly expensive," Alexandr Grushko said on Rossiya-24 television. "We can see that the U.S. continues to increase its military presence in Europe with an emphasis on the Eastern front... We are not passive observers. We consistently implement...

People in the Baltic states cannot feel secure. Russian President Vladimir Putin has a plan he has been working on for over a decade. So says former adviser to President Putin, Andrey Illarionov. Giving a presentation at a conference in Palanga, Lithuania, Illarionov, who advised Putin on economic policy in 2000-2005, referred to a question that was raised in the recent Riga Conference 2014: Can people in Riga sleep peacefully at night? “The same question could be raised in Tallinn, Vilnius, Palanga, Bucharest and other cities. No one in Riga could reply to it in the positive,” Illarionov said. “From...

Did you ever want to see AC/DC, The B-52′s, Pink Floyd, Donna Summer, The Village People, and Julio Iglesias in the same place? Well then, you can either read my dream journal or check out this list of Western music banned on Soviet radio stations. The list was titled “The approximate list of foreign musical groups and artists whose repertoires contain ideologically harmful compositions” (catchy title) and was distributed to Communist Party officials in January of 1985. We like how they call it an “approximate list”. Everything in the USSR was so slapdash.

KIEV, Ukraine, Jan. 16 - As protests here against a rigged presidential election overwhelmed the capital last fall, an alarm sounded at Interior Ministry bases outside the city. It was just after 10 p.m. on Nov. 28. More than 10,000 troops scrambled toward trucks. Most had helmets, shields and clubs. Three thousand carried guns. Many wore black masks. Within 45 minutes, according to their commander, Lt. Gen. Sergei Popkov, they had distributed ammunition and tear gas and were rushing out the gates. Kiev was tilting toward a terrible clash, a Soviet-style crackdown that could have brought civil war. And then,...

[translated by google] 05-09-13.-The army of China on Thursday sent warships to the Syrian coast to observe the actions of U.S. vessels. UU. and Russia as tensions grow before a military attack against Syria. According to the Russian news website Telegrafist, the Chinese army sent Jinggangshan amphibious ship was seen sailing in the Red Sea to the Suez Canal. The report indicates that the vessel was not sent to participate in an action of aggression but is there to observe the actions of the U.S. warships. UU. and Russia. No clutch Jinggangshan equipped for fighting. The report also notes that...

This tweet came from BBC Moscow’s acting bureau chief: Kevin Bishop @bishopk Urgent: hostage @SimonOstrovsky free and safe with me in car en route to Donetsk @RadioCanada J-François Bélanger Simon Ostrovsky is free - BBC has spoken to him direct. He is on his way to Donetsk. “VICE News is delighted to confirm that our colleague and friend Simon Ostrovsky has been safely released and is in good health,” VICE said in a statement to Poynter. “We would like to thank everyone for their support during this difficult time. Out of respect for Simon and his family’s privacy, we have...

<p>Russia has warned the Ukrainian government to pull its military from the restive southeast of its own territory, saying it could invade to “protect” pro-Russian separatists there – just as it did in Georgia, another former Soviet republic that Moscow invaded six years ago.</p>

<p>The Soviet Kremlin was skilled at dishonesty – from Vladimir Lenin’s “a lie told often enough becomes the truth” to Josef Stalin’s denial of Ukraine’s forced famine that killed millions and Mikhail Gorbachev’s stonewalling about the Chornobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986.</p>

Disgraced former President Victor Yanukovych called for urgent action to resolve the ongoing separatist violence in eastern Ukraine in a statement from Rostov-on-Don on April 21. Yanukovych requested the “immediate removal of all Ukrainian Armed Forces from the east of Ukraine, sent there as a detachment of the so-called ‘national guard,’ dressed in military uniforms and armed with automatic weapons and grenades.” Yanukovych, who fled Ukraine on February 22 after being accused of ordering riot police to fire on activists demanding his removal from power, called for “the immediate commencement of peaceful dialogue with the leaders of the eastern regions.”

A pregnant journalist was recovering in hospital last night after a pro-Kremlin political leader in Russia told two male aides to ‘violently rape’ her. Nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky launched his extraordinary tirade after reporter Stella Dubovitskaya asked him an innocuous question about sanctions against Ukraine. The 67-year-old MP’s outburst came before a deadly gunfight at a Ukraine checkpoint controlled by pro-Russian separatists tore apart an Easter truce.

A museum dedicated to the victims of U.S. and NATO military aggression has opened in the North Caucasus city of Vladikavkaz. The exhibition, which is housed at the National Scientific Library of North Ossetia, opened Thursday to visitors over the age of 16, and displays artifacts "attesting" to "the state terrorism" of Western nations, organizer Vyacheslav Lagkuyev said, Interfax reported. Among the themes of the exhibition are the conflicts in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan — each of which has its own display in the museum. The U.S. war in Vietnam and the NATO bombing of Serbia are also detailed in...

WASHINGTON -- This may shock you. During the eight years of the Reagan Presidency I was not his biggest fan. I looked not so much at what he accomplished but what he didn't accomplish. My expectations were that government would get smaller under President Reagan. It didn't. I was disappointed. I looked at the agencies left in place -- the National Endowment for the Arts, the Legal Services Corporation (which has done so much damage) and A.I.D. -- and I felt that the Reagan Administration did not make a real effort to curtail them. I was disappointed. Also there was...

The United Nations Security Council will meet for an emergency session to discuss the escalating crisis in eastern Ukraine at 8 p.m. ET on Sunday. "The Council will meet at 8 at Russia's request," a council diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Another diplomat said negotiations were under way on Ukraine's participation. Russia's Foreign Ministry said earlier it would put an urgent discussion of the situation in Ukraine on the Security Council agenda, calling Kiev's plans to mobilize the army to put down a rebellion by pro-Russian militants in eastern Ukraine "criminal".

A group of MPs representing both majority and opposition parties have asked Russia’s Prosecutor General to probe the events leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union. They view possible action against former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. In the letter, signed by two MPs from United Russia, two Communists and one representative of populist nationalist party LDPR, the parliamentarians claim that at the March 1991referendum the majority of Soviet citizens voted that their country should remain united, and therefore the actions of several top officials that led to USSR breakup were unlawful. They also noted that in November 1991 the...

Satellite images which appear to show Russian warplanes, combat helicopters, armour, artillery near Ukraine's border have been released. The organisation's top military commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove said a probable airborne or special forces brigade deployement could also be spotted on the pictures as Russian armed forces maintained their presence the area's military bases.

In June 1981, the Soviet Union began building a huge, nuclear-powered reconnaissance ship specifically designed to sail thousands of miles to the U.S. missile test site at the remote Kwajalein Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There, the vessel would sit for months, hoovering up electronic data in order to determine what America’s most secretive weapons could do. But the spy ship Ural, completed in May 1983, sailed only once—from the Baltic shipyard where she was built to her home port of Vladivostok—and never went anywhere near Kwajalein. Hobbled by faulty hardware, cursed with bad luck and starved...

Earlier today, Garry Kasparov accused NBC Sports of pushing Putin propaganda. This latest downplay of decades of communism probably won’t make Kasparov change his mind about the network that’s airing the Sochi Olympics. Many viewers of the opening ceremony couldn’t believe their ears when the narrator referred to decades of Soviet-era communism as a “pivotal experiment”:

KIEV, Ukraine –  More than 100,000 demonstrators chased away police to rally in the center of Ukraine's capital on Sunday, defying a government ban on protests on Independence Square, in the biggest show of anger over the president's refusal to sign an agreement with the European Union. Thousands of demonstrators tried to storm the nearby presidential administration building, but were driven back by riot police using tear gas and flash grenades, which produce a loud bang but are not intended to cause injury. The standoff continued, with more demonstrators arriving. The protest was led by prominent opposition politicians, who...

Four Ronald Reagan historians have slammed the portrayal of former President Reagan in the movie "The Butler," saying that the 40th president's "attitudes toward race" as shown in the movie are inaccurate. They begin the article, "What 'The Butler' gets wrong about Ronald Reagan and race," published in The Washington Post, by recounting instances in Reagan's life when he decried racism and took a stand for the African-American community. While serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, for example, "Ronald Reagan called upon the entertainment industry to provide greater employment for black actors." That position was controversial at the...