Free Republic

Russians opposed to Vladimir Putin for years have been inspired by telegenic anti-corruption campaigners willing to risk their freedom and even their lives to expose the Kremlin’s crimes. Now, after two years of war and with most opposition figures either in jail, in exile or dead, they have been left with Boris Nadezhdin. Asked by a reporter on Wednesday whether Putin considered Nadezhdin a political threat, the president’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We do not consider him a rival. Not at all.” Yet political analysts said it was unlikely the Kremlin would allow Nadezhdin’s popularity to progress too far. Authorities...

President Vladimir Putin extended his reign over Russia in a landslide election whose outcome was never in doubt, declaring Monday his determination to advance deeper into Ukraine and dangling new threats against the West. After the harshest crackdown on dissent since Soviet times, it was clear from the earliest returns that Putin’s nearly quarter-century rule would continue with a fifth term that grants him six more years. Still, Russians heeded a call to protest Putin’s repression and his war in Ukraine by showing up at polling stations at noon on Sunday. With all the precincts counted Monday, election officials said...

In a SPIEGEL interview, leading Russian politician and potential Putin successor Vladimir Yakunin discusses the president's plans, the Bush administration's "political arrogance" and the need for nations to consider the interests of other countries when defining their own.Vladimir Yakunin, 59, who worked as a diplomat at the Soviet mission to the United Nations in New York and later as the Russian deputy minister of transportation, became the president of the powerful Russian railroad corporation in 2005. He is considered a possible presidential candidate. SPIEGEL: You have known (Russian President) Vladimir Putin for a long time. In fact, you had neighboring...

Pekka Kallioniemi, a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University in Finland, put forward the theory that Moscow could be deliberately pushing Helsinki to shut its borders to prevent Russians from fleeing should Russian President Vladimir Putin introduce a full-scale mobilization to draft more troops to fight in Ukraine.... "There is an interesting and feasible theory, that Russia will start partial or full mobilization after the March 2024 presidential elections, and that they actually WANT Finland to close the border so that young Russian men can't flee through Finland like they did during the first mobilization wave," Kallioniemi wrote on X, formerly...

Huma Abedin forwarded sensitive State Department emails, including passwords to government systems, to her personal Yahoo email account before every single Yahoo account was hacked, a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of emails released as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch shows. Abedin, the top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, used her insecure personal email provider to conduct sensitive work. This guarantees that an account with high-level correspondence in Clinton’s State Department was impacted by one or more of a series of breaches — at least one of which was perpetrated by a “state-sponsored actor.”...

On December 7, 2003, Russians voted their two liberal-democratic parties out of parliament and handed a two-thirds majority in the lower house, the Duma, to the leading pro-presidential party. On March 14, Russians reelected President Vladimir Putin, giving him 71 percent of the vote. Nine days later, a 23-year-old Russian blogger posted a photo of a very homely young woman on his website, accompanied by the following appeal: Vote for Alyona Pisklova! Alas, our candidate, Fuck the Election/Against All Candidates, failed in the presidential and the parliamentary election. But this time our candidate has to win! May the force be...

Putin's nuclear show blows up in his face By Julius Strauss in Moscow (Filed: 18/02/2004) Russia's biggest military exercise since the collapse of communism flopped yesterday, ruining an attempt to project Vladimir Putin as a global leader and reaffirm the country's status as a nuclear superpower. With Mr Putin and a host of military officials watching from the nuclear submarine Arkhangelsk, two intercontinental ballistic missiles went wrong during a firing from a submarine believed to be the Novomoskovsk. They were aimed at Kamchatka on the Pacific coast. A malfunctioning satellite was blamed. Putin promised that Russia will again be a...