Free Republic

In a solemn ceremony held at the RF Northern Fleet submarine base in Gadzhievo, Murmansk region, two portable iconostases were consecrated and handed over to crews of two nuclear submarine strategic missile cruisers: Knyaz Oleg and Novosibirsk, the fleet's press service reported. An iconostasis is a wall of icons, used to divide the Altar from the rest of the church space. Portable iconostases for sailing warships are made of wood, but for submarines, they use fabric. Such icons do not take up much space in the very limited space. On church feast days, canvases with icons are unpacked and mounted...

Russia is preparing to hold "sham" referendums in occupied Ukrainian territories within a matter of days or weeks, the US warned on Wednesday. Moscow has instructed officials to begin preparations in areas that have fallen under its control during its war on Ukraine, including Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhia, parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters. The first referenda could be announced as soon as this week's end, he added, noting the US and international community will not view any such elections as legitimate. "We expect Russia to try to manipulate the results of these referenda...

Ankara supports Ukraine's territorial integrity and rejects the illegal annexation of Crimea, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday. "The return of Crimea to Ukraine, of which it is an inseparable part, is essentially a requirement of international law," Erdogan said in a video message to the Second Crimea Platform Summit. The Crimea Platform is an international coordination mechanism of Ukraine to draw more global attention to Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. Erdogan said Ankara will continue to support the Crimean Platform that was established to resolve the Crimean issue through peaceful means. "Türkiye does not recognize...

Russia’s counterintelligence agency on Monday claimed that the car bomb that killed the daughter of Vladimir Putin’s ally Alexander Dugin was planted by a female Ukrainian spy who then fled to Estonia. Officials with FSB have identified Darya Dugina’s alleged assassin as 43-year-old Natalia Vovk, who they said was acting as part of a criminal plot “orchestrated and perpetrated by Ukrainian special services,” according to Russian state news agency TASS. FSB published a video compilation allegedly that opens with Vovk entering Russia in her grey Mini Cooper, which sports plates issued by the Kremlin-backed separatist Donetsk People’s Republic. A second...

The car bomb attack on 'Putin's Rasputin' - who Vladimir deemed 'uncontrollable' - has 'all the hallmarks of a Russian GRU execution' because the military spy group 'often include a target's family', an expert has claimed. Yuri Felshtinsky, author of Blowing up Ukraine: The Return of Russian Terror and the Threat of World War III, has claimed the attack on Putin loyalist Alexander Dugin's daughter would have been authorised by the Kremlin. He claimed that Dugin, 60, had a reputation for being 'unruly' and that the Kremlin is 'using Dugin in its own global propaganda war' counting on the fact...

"As a result of urgent detective measures, the federal security service has solved the murder of Russian journalist Darya Dugina, born in 1992," Tass reported quoting an FSB statement.The assassin, Natalia Vovk was identified as a citizen of Ukraine, who was born in 1979, the report further added. On July 23, 2022, Vovk and her daughter Sofya Shaban, who was born in 2010, arrived in Russia, the agency reported.The FSB claimed in its report that Vovk and Shaban went to the literary and musical festival Tradition on the day of the murder. Darya was there at the event as an...