Ukraine's parliament has passed a law which authorizes commanding officers to use physical force against army defectors. It comes as the latest military draft has seen a lack of enthusiasm on the part of potential soldiers. Ukraine’s parliament voted on Thursday with 260 MPs in favor - only 226 votes were needed to pass the law. [...]

Ukraine's subversive hacker group CyberBerkut has published documents allegedly exposing dreadful situation with the Kiev's troops attacking separatist forces in the East: war crimes, tremendous loss of lives and wholesale desertion of entrapped troops. The anti-government activists claim they have hacked personal computer of Ukraine’s Judge Advocate General and copied a number of classified [...]

Armed people in uniform speaking fluent English with no accent have been spotted in Mariupol in the aftermath of the rocket hit, fuelling allegations that foreign private military contractors are serving among Ukrainian troops. [...]

By the end of next year, Washington plans to station about 150 tanks and armored vehicles in Europe, according to a US military commander, who said the decision was made before the Ukrainian crisis strained Russia-US relations. Although no official announcement has been made as to where the armored tanks and vehicles will be stationed, possible locations include Poland, Romania or the Baltic St [...]

Besides targeting top Taliban leaders, NATO forces in Afghanistan included low-ranking fighters and drug dealers on their list of "legitimate" targets, risking civilian lives in a wider airstrike campaign, Der Spiegel reported, citing Snowden archives. Classified intelligence files from the NSA, GCHQ, and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from the archive of whistleblower Edwar [...]

A former military doctor who participated in missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan has asked the Czech Defense Ministry to take back his NATO medals, calling the North Atlantic alliance a "criminal organization" with "atrocious interests." Lieutenant Colonel Marek Obrtel, former chief of the 11th Czech military hospital in Afghanistan, who also served in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, wrote to the [...]

Since the anti-war protests on Vietnam, the U.S. government has made “perception management” of the American people a high priority, feeding them a steady diet of propaganda about foreign crises, even getting “peace groups” to buy into “pro-democracy” wars, write Margaret Sarfehjooy and Coleen Rowley. “War is peace” double-speak has become commonplace these days. And, the more a [...]

The pinnacle of political power is slowly changing its homestead, moving eastwards to the Pacific, with the region becoming more and more vital within global matters; and U.S. is pushing itself actively into the regional scene, spurring rising rivalry between America and China. What future holds for the Pacific region? What is at stake between Washington and Beijing? And how’s the political g [...]

As the U.S. Congress votes for a military confrontation with Russia over Ukraine and even “liberal” commentators cheer the economic pain being inflicted by U.S. policies, it is worth recalling how big-power arrogance sparked the conflagration called World War I and how it could start World War III, writes Greg Maybury. At this point in our history – and especially at this time of the year [...]

Russia has adopted an updated version of its military doctrine, which reflects the emergence of new threats against its national security. NATO military buildup and American Prompt Global Strike concept are listed among them. The new doctrine was approved on Friday by President Vladimir Putin. Its core remains unchanged from the previous version. The Russian military remains a defensive tool wh [...]

The Russian Lower House speaker wants to instigate an international investigation into the 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US military - a possible crime against humanity with no statute of limitation. “Next year we will have the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trial and also the same anniversary of the first and only nuclear bombings of two civilian cities – Hiroshi [...]

Over 100 descendants of the Russian nobility residing outside the country have addressed European nations with a call to stop irrationally alienating Russia and give an unbiased appraisal to the current Ukrainian crisis. The open letter written by Prince Dmitry [...]

Russia's Investigative Committee has confirmed the claims by a Ukrainian, who said he witnessed the deployment of a Ukrainian warplane armed with air-to-air missiles on the day the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down. [...]

Journalist Glenn Greenwald said Dick Cheney is able to brag about the success of torture on weekend news shows because the Obama administration has decided to shield torturers rather than prosecute them. In a wide ranging interview about the CIA torture report, prospects for the 2016 presidential race, US-Cuba relations and the Sony hack, Greenwald told HuffPost Live that the discussion about t [...]

Federal investigators in the United States should considering weighing whether or not health workers involved in the interrogation tactics highlighted in the recent CIA torture port should be charged with war crimes, a group said this week. Physicians for Human Rights, a New York-headquartered organization that examines instances of atrocities and severe human rights violations within the medic [...]

The so-called "torture report" released by the Senate this week contains only a fraction of the findings on how the CIA aimed to gather intelligence from detainees through interrogation. Still, it contains more than a few shocking revelations. According to the Senate committee’s findings released on Tuesday, the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or EITs, used against foreign prisoners [...]

A freight train carrying a whole column of American armored vehicles has been caught on camera in Latvia. Dalbe Railway Station, where the train was reportedly spotted several days ago, is less than 300km from the Russian border. The train was carrying at least 38 vehicles and several semitrailers, including eight Bradley Fighting Vehicles, nine M113 Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs), four petr [...]

Fifty-four countries were named in the Senate report into US terror activities around the world. Here are seven governments whose leaders will be having sleepless nights trying to come up with excuses to explain their actions. [...]

The build-up of NATO forces in Eastern Europe is hostile and destabilizes the Baltic, once the safest region in Europe, a senior Russian diplomat charged. The alliance's chief accused Moscow of conducting aggressive exercises close to NATO borders. The trade of accusations between Russia and NATO continued on Monday ahead of a NATO ministerial meeting this week. [...]

The mother of a victim killed in the Malaysian plane crash in eastern Ukraine has started legal proceedings to sue the Ukrainian authorities in the European Court of Human Rights, demanding about $1 million for pain and suffering. The mother of “Olga L.”, a German citizen, submitted her case against Ukraine to the European Court of Human Rights last week. She is demanding €800,000 (roughl [...]

Ukraine's anti-government CyberBerkut hacker group published documents allegedly showing Kiev's detailed demands for money from the US military, and Washington agreeing to giving them support. According to hacktivists, who made the documents public on Tuesday, the Ukrainian military have recently been asking for and being promised financial support from the United States, worth hundreds of thou [...]

New radar data indicating that military aircraft were in the air near Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 when it crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17 has been released by a Russian air safety consultancy. The consultancy provided a snapshot representing the readings taken by a radar station located in Russia’s Rostov, near the Ukrainian border, shortly before and about 20 minutes after the MH17 c [...]