Free Republic

Russia is intensifying its efforts to seize Chasiv Yar, a crucial stronghold in eastern Ukraine, as exhausted and under-equipped Ukrainian brigades struggle to hold the line while waiting for US military aid. -snip- Chasiv Yar is seen as a key prize for Moscow, with senior Ukrainian commanders claiming the Russian general staff has ordered its forces to seize it by May 9 when Russia celebrates the end of the second world war. -snip- It took the Russian military nearly a year to advance six kilometres from the ravaged city of Bakhmut to the edge of Chasiv Yar.

Aerial drone footage shared by military analysts on Wednesday appears to show dozens of Russian soldiers being targeted with U.S.-supplied long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, at a training ground in Ukraine's eastern Luhansk region. The clip was shared on X, formerly Twitter, by a volunteer with GeoConfirmed, an OSINT account that geolocates visual content from the Russia-Ukraine war. "Ukrainian ATACMS strike, with 4 ATACMS, including one dud, hitting a Russian training area in Mozhnyakivka, Luhansk Oblast. Based on the footage the losses will be significant. 80 km behind the front line," GeoConfirmed said, sharing stills showing the impact...

Russia has no warships deployed in the Black Sea at present, Ukraine's Navy said on Wednesday, shortly after Moscow said Kyiv had attacked annexed Crimea with U.S.-supplied missiles—using Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS. Ukraine's military didn't detect Russian warships in the Black and Azov Seas on Wednesday morning. "In the Black and Azov Seas [the] enemy ships are missing," the press service of the Ukrainian Navy said. Kyiv has targeted Russia's Black Sea Fleet throughout President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of the country, which began in February 2022. Ukraine has vowed to reverse the Russian leader's 2014 annexation of...

UKRAINE has blitzed another major Russian oil refinery in a kamikaze drone strike, the explosions sparking a huge inferno near Moscow. Dramatic video from the scene showed flames raging from the Rosneft energy giant facility in the city of Ryazan on Wednesday. Residents of Ryazan, located 125 miles southeast of Moscow, were said to have heard the rumble of drones about 3am. Two explosions followed the sound, triggering the inferno. The attack came after another Ukrainian strike on two oil refineries in Krasnodar region -snip- Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu demanded more "means of destruction" as Western supplies...

Fire broke out at energy facilities in Russia's Smolensk region after a Ukraine-launched drone attack and people were evacuated from parts of Lipetsk in Russia's southwest after a drone there fell on an industrial park, regional officials said. "Our region is again under attack by Ukrainian UAVs," Vasily Anokhin, the governor of the Smolensk region in Russia's west, said on the Telegram messaging app. "As a result of the enemy attack on civilian fuel and energy facilities, fires broke out in the Smolensk and Yartsevo districts," Anokhin said on the Telegram messaging app. It was not immediately known what facilities...

Polish director Besaleel’s film will feature an AI-rendered Russian president and footage shot by Ukrainian film-makers during the Russian invasion. The “world premiere” of a new biopic of Russian president Vladimir Putin featuring an AI-rendered central character, has been announced for 26 September. In a statement released via PR Leap, Polish studio AIO said the film, titled Putin, will be released in 35 countries, and describes itself as “up close and personal with the Kremlin leader’s story”. -snip- Originally titled The Vor in Law (a term used for elite organised crime figures), the film also incorporates footage shot by Ukrainian...

Tucker Carlson gave a wide-ranging interview with Joe Rogan, where the pair discussed UFOs being "spiritual beings," politicians being blackmailed by intelligence agencies over their "weird sex lives," blasting Joe Scarborough, and partaking in too many magic mushrooms. During the most recent episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," Tucker and Rogan touched on a myriad of topics. Tucker said of unidentified anomalous phenomena, "If they are spiritual beings – which I believe they are – it's binary, they're either team good or team bad. And I think some of them are bad." Carlson also called the UAPs "supernatural" because they...

The missing American who’d traveled to Ukraine years ago to aid Russian separatists in Donbas was found dead in the country’s war-torn eastern region. The body of Russell Bentley, a 64-year-old U.S. Army vet, was recovered in the Russian-controlled region of Donetsk Oblast, Reuters reported. -snip- The former pothead, who used “Texas” as his military call-sign, left behind a yoga instructor girlfriend to travel to Ukraine. He utilized crowdfunding sites to finance his trip, and had since become a Russian citizen. He also got married after moving to Ukraine, where he began working as a reporter for the state-owned Sputnik...

UFOs and their pilots might not be 'extra-terrestrials' from a distant planet at all, but 'spiritual entities' who have inhabited Earth for as long as humanity itself. At least, that's the 'supernatural' theory Fox News vet and one-time MSNBC host Tucker Carlson put forward this week on comedian Joe Rogan's podcast 'There's a ton of evidence that they're under the ocean and under the ground,' Carlson told Rogan's listeners during the show's usual, sprawling, three-hour-long chat format, adding: 'They've been here for a long time.' -snip- 'They're from here and they've been here for thousands of years,' Carlson said, 'whatever...

The Pentagon could get weapons moving to Ukraine within days if Congress passes a long-delayed aid bill. That's because it has a network of storage sites in the U.S. and Europe that already hold the ammunition and air defense components that Kyiv desperately needs. -snip- If about $61 billion in funding for the war-torn country gets the green light, “we have a very robust logistics network that enables us to move material very quickly,” Ryder told reporters Thursday. “We can move within days.”

Russian state media outlet Tass has reported that a Russian TU-22M3 strategic bomber crashed in Stavropol Krai, southwestern Russia. The exact cause of the crash remains unknown at this time as some Ukrainian sources claim that it was shot down, which would mark a first for the conflict. The crash comes as Russian bombers launched a series of missile strikes against Ukraine.

DRAMATIC footage captured the moment Ukraine "shot down" a Russian Tu-22M3 nuke bomber sending it spiralling to the ground. The £228million aircraft was part of Vladimir Putin’s nuclear strike force - and the downing is seen as a major blow to the dictator. It crashed over the Stavropol region - some 250 miles from the border - in southern Russia after completing a bombing attack on Ukraine. The long-range strategic bomber was shot down by a S-200 anti-aircraft missile system, said Channel 2, citing sources in Ukraine's GUR military intelligence agency. The GUR said: “As a result of the damage,...

New videos appear to show a fire raging in northern Crimea, after reports of explosions around a military airfield overnight. Footage widely circulated on social media by Russian and Ukrainian sources early on Wednesday show bright flashes of light and explosions, with sirens wailing in the background. A local Telegram channel reported "several loud explosions," starting just before 4 a.m. local time, before a fire broke out. Roads around the air base are blocked, the channel later reported. Dzhankoy is a major military hub, home to one of Russia's largest airfields in Crimea. It is a key location for supplying...

Tens of thousands of residents in the Russian city of Orenburg and neighbouring Kazakhstan have been told to evacuate immediately as flood waters inundate homes. -snip- Orenburg is home to half a million people, and the city's mayor Sergei Salmin said the situation was extremely dangerous. "Over the last 10 hours, the water level in the Ural River has risen by 40cm … these levels are dangerous," he wrote on the Telegram messenger app. He called on residents to gather essential items and to abandon their homes. Emergency workers said water levels in the Ural River were more than two...

Russell Bentley, an American who fought against Ukrainian forces, is missing in the Russian-controlled Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, police there said Friday, adding that a search was underway. Bentley went missing on April 8, according to police. The online news outlet Mash said he had disappeared after a district in the city of Donetsk was shelled by Ukrainian forces. Mash cited his wife as saying he had gone to see if anyone needed help but had not returned. She was quoted as saying she had found his car with his baseball cap in it along with his smashed mobile...

Tucker Carlson criticizes the United States foreign policy and the persecution of Christians in the world: TUCKER CARLSON: A consistent but almost never noted theme of American foreign policy is that it is always the Christians who suffer. When there's a war abroad that the United States is funding, it is Christians who tend to die disproportionately. And this goes back a long way, 60 years, really, to Vietnam, where Catholics in that country were massacred. But it's accelerated. So, for example, during the more than a decade the US government spent occupying Iraq, the Christian the ancient Christian community...

Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson on SiriusXM's 'The Megyn Kelly Show' addressed the divide on the right on Israel and called out Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens for criticizing the situation on the ground in Gaza. -snip- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Most of the evangelical community I know is still very pro-Israel. I think what we're talking about is the libertarian, right intellectual movement. I know that Tucker Carlson is voicing things, Candace Owens has, the CATO Institute's been very vocal. There's some people on that website who've called for breaking relations almost with Israel. But I don't think...

Tucker Carlson invited Palestinian Christian Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac to discuss the situation in Gaza and attacked Christians who support Israel's war in Gaza, independent US news website Mediaite reported on Wednesday. On Wednesday, Tucker Carlson engaged in a discussion with Isaac, shedding light on the complexities of Christian support for Israel's actions in Gaza. Carlson's critique of Christian leaders in the United States was blunt, arguing that they are "not being more critical of the destruction in Gaza." He backed his views on the ongoing war and the US Christian leader's response, remarking: "If you wake up in the...

Starting with Tucker Carlson’s adulatory interview with Vladimir Putin, people asked a question: “Was Fox News, rather than acting as an ugly censor when it came to Tucker, actually preventing the world from seeing his worst ideas?” That question takes on new power when it comes to Tucker’s latest interview with Munther Isaac, a Christian pastor living in Bethlehem. The gist of the interview is that Hamas is good and Israel (because Christians have been killed as a byproduct of war) is evil. Tucker, by promoting this view, has fallen into a terrible moral fallacy…or revealed himself to be a...

Welcome to the club, Tucker. It won’t end well for you. What do Tucker Carlson, the isolationist conservative pundit, and Elizabeth Warren, the woke progressive senator of Massachusetts, share in common? Not much, other than their sickening slander of Israel, America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East. -snip- Yesterday, in an interview on X (formerly Twitter) that already has over 7 million views, Tucker Carlson gave a platform to Pastor Munther Isaac, the conference director of Christ and the Checkpoint, a well-known anti-Israel propagandist forum in Bethlehem that seeks to undermine Evangelical Christian support for Israel. Christ and the...