Free Republic

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley slammed Russia over a deadly chemical attack on Syrian civilians, saying the country's hands are "covered in blood." "The Russian regime, whose hands are all covered in the blood of Syrian children, cannot be ashamed by pictures of its victims," Haley said during a U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday. "We must not overlook Russia and Iran's roles in enabling the Assad regime's murderous destruction," she continued.

The US threatened unilateral action against Iran after Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Tehran’s failure to stop its weapons from reaching Houthi rebels in Yemen. "If Russia is going to continue to cover for Iran then the US and our partners need to take action on our own,” said US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Monday. “If we’re not going to get action on the council then we have to take our actions.” Ms Haley did not specify what kind of action could be taken. Russia on Monday vetoed the resolution that would have...

The Kremlin-backed head of Russia's Chechnya region, Ramzan Kadyrov, says he hopes President Vladimir Putin will remain in power for life. The remark, not unusual for a regional leader who has frequently praised the president and called himself Putin's "foot soldier," comes weeks ahead of a March 18 presidential election that seems certain to hand Putin a new six-year term. "I wish our president and supreme commander in chief a long life and hope that he will run our country for life," Kadyrov said in a post on Telegram on February 15.

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...

“We are sliding back,” the Ukrainian journalist turned parliamentarian Serhiy Leshchenko warned a year ago about the arc of political reform in his country. At the time, his assessment sounded alarmist, but it rings true today. Since the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, reformers in and out of Ukraine’s government have tried to remake a fiscally troubled and deeply corrupt country into a Western-oriented, rules-based one, but have only partially succeeded. Ukraine’s future as an independent and sovereign state will depend as much on winning its internal war on corruption and fixing its broken government as on keeping Russia contained in the...