Free Republic

In the summer of 2013, a Moscow restaurant owner was gunned down in the Russian capital. A hooded man jumped off a bike and shot his victim twice before fleeing. Six years later, an exiled Chechen commander, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, was murdered in a busy Berlin park in eerily similar circumstances, shot by a man on a bike with a silenced Glock 26 in broad daylight. The assailant was arrested after dumping a pistol and wig in the River Spree close to the Reichstag, the building housing the German parliament. A passport bearing the name "Vadim Sokolov" was found on the...

Russian forces have deployed a powerful ODAB-1500 bomb in Ukraine for the first time, striking the town of Velyka Pysarivka in Sumy Oblast, Russian Bild reported on Telegram on March 30. Following the ODAB-1500 strike, a smoke cloud billowed to a height of 1 kilometer, reported Bild military analyst Julian Röpcke. The ODAB, or volumetric detonating aviation bomb, is a relic from the Soviet era. About 10 meters before impact, this bomb releases a combustible liquid in aerosol form, igniting upon contact, resulting in a volumetric explosion. These bombs primarily target enemy soldiers and lightly armored vehicles, delivering devastating blast...