Free Republic

Trump told reporters Thursday that he had spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin about ways to improve trade and wildfires blazing in Siberia. He made no mention of either the new sanctions or whether they came up during the phone call. President Donald Trump slapped new sanctions on Russia for its poisoning of an ex-spy in the United Kingdom in 2018...Trump, who signed the executive order Thursday, has been reluctant to impose sanctions against Russia in his efforts to improve relations between Washington and Moscow.

The Trump administration has informed Congress that Russia has not complied with a series of requirements necessary for Moscow to evade a second round of U.S. sanctions over the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in Britain. The development, announced by the State Department and House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday, means that a new tranche of sanctions on Russia will be automatically triggered under a 1991 law on the elimination of chemical and biological weapons — likely further deteriorating relations with Russia at a time of high tensions. In a statement, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said the department is...

Russia's poisoning of a former spy in Britain is part of a Kremlin strategy to divide the West by conducting covert operations and then fomenting doubt and disagreement over who's responsible, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said. It was part of a pattern seen in Russia's actions, Mattis said, starting in Ukraine in 2014, where he said Moscow sent armed men without insignias into Crimea and has provided fighters and weapons under cover to Ukrainian separatists. Mattis said Russia's subterfuge continued through covert efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. "They take the insignia off soldiers' uniforms and...

Today, the Stalinists in Russia are enjoying their greatest heyday since 1953. And the West doesn't understand nor want to admit it. The Kremlin’s strategy toward the West has been in place for some time and is based on a vision of Russia as a great power in the Stalinist style for namely under him, the country experienced the peak of "great power" status..." Stalin, who in their estimation, ‘saved Western civilization from Nazism/fascism.” The only difference is that Stalin strove to Sovietize Western countries while Putin and company seek the fundamental weakening of the West, Western institutions, and the...

Putin controls the Russia's state institutions, its secret police and its big state companies. Together with a few old friends from St. Petersburg, the president is tapping the big state companies through overpriced no-bid procurement, transfer pricing, asset stripping and stock manipulation. They are also making money by extorting old oligarchs and taking loans from state banks, not to be returned. Overall assessments indicate a personal enrichment of Putin and his closest cronies of some $20 billion to $25 billion a year since 2006, a pilfering from Gazprom of $60 billion from 2004 to 2007...By now, this group would have...

Bolton said the "blatant" attack in public reminds him of North Korea, "Moscow's friend," murdering Kim Jong Un's brother in the middle of an airport last year. "It's an act of defiance. It's saying to London and the other western capitals, 'what are you gonna do about it?' Well, I think there should be a very strong answer to that," he said, arguing the time has come for real "deterrence" that Vladimir Putin will understand. John Bolton said Thursday that the chemical poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in England fits into the larger pattern of Russia...

... Now police say his daughter might have brought it from Russia in her suitcase - but it is just the latest of a series of bizarre theories Thirteen days after Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were attacked with a nerve agent in Salisbury, police appear to be no nearer any answers as to how the pair were poisoned. Theories banded around in the past fortnight include food poisoning, a bouquet of flowers laced with the deadly substance Novichok and the lethal toxin being smeared on the former agent's car door handle. Now, it is understood investigators have turned...