Free Republic

Mad Vlad, whose forces are bombing women and children in Ukraine, spared no expense on the six-deck Scheherazade. Vladimir Putin's superyacht Scheherazade’s official cost could be close to $1billion A worker who helped build it said: “Every surface is marble or gold. There are countless swimming pools, a spa, a sauna, a theatre, ballrooms, a gym, two helipads. It’s like a mini city. “And it is an unimaginable amount of wealth when the average Russian’s salary is £5,000 a year, and people there are struggling to eat.” A tiled dancefloor lowers to turn into a pool. It is thought to...

Moscow and Beijing have been keeping each other abreast of their plans in the leadup to the Ukraine attack, according to two lawmakers. “I think they have coordinated and I think that China is in a better position letting Russia go first, to evaluate,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) told EpochTV’s “China Insider” program at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 25. By watching the world’s reaction on Ukraine, China is trying to gauge its next steps on Taiwan, the self-ruled island that the Chinese Communist Party claims as its own territory and long planned to bring under its...

A parade of European ambassadors passed through Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Friday to receive formal protests and details about Moscow’s plans to expel more diplomats in a deepening crisis with the West. The series of meetings — an astonishing display of European envoys arriving one after the other — marked the latest twist in tit-for-tat moves following the March 4 nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Britain. In the past week, 27 nations joined Britain in ousting Russian diplomats believed to be working as intelligence officers. NATO and Georgia also announced expulsions later...

Move over, Borat. The hottest new voice in comedy is Vladimir Putin, otherwise known as the man who saved Russia from freedom and democracy. Putin convulsed his audience at the Munich Conference on Security with this sparkling one-liner: “Nobody feels secure any more, because nobody can take safety behind the stone wall of international law.” International law has been likened to many things—gauze, cotton, clouds, tissue paper, vapor—but a “stone wall?” Where did Putin come up with this utterly original metaphor? Perhaps from the idealistic years of his youth, when he proved his devotion to making people secure by going...

December 3, 2002 C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet SmallpoxBy JUDITH MILLER he C.I.A. is investigating an informant's accusation that Iraq obtained a particularly virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist who worked in a smallpox lab in Moscow during Soviet times, senior American officials and foreign scientists say. The officials said several American scientists were told in August that Iraq might have obtained the mysterious strain from Nelja N. Maltseva, a virologist who worked for more than 30 years at the Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow before her death two years ago. The information came to...