by Rick Kiernan, The War Horse On Oct. 28, 1991, I settled into an hours-long commercial flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Moscow. By year’s end, the iconic Soviet flag would fly over the Kremlin for the final time, silently signaling the collapse of the USSR after nearly seven decades. I …

by Mark Krutov, RFE/RL The elderly and sick died quietly. Crowded with hundreds of others held captive by Russian soldiers for four weeks in an airless, unsanitary school basement in Yahidne, a village in the Chernihiv region of northern Ukraine, the ill and the frail were particularly vulnerable. Several could …

by Amos Chapple A photo album sitting on the shelves of Ukraine’s KGB archives reveals how an amateur U.S. spy was captured more than 60 years ago.  In the summer of 1961, a quiet, serious American student named Marvin Makinen pulled up to the Soviet border in a Volkswagen car. The …

by Katie Lange  Editor’s note: SOF publisher Susan Katz Keating knew Col. Pappy Boyington in the 1980’s when he frequented the Nut Tree airport in Vacaville, California. Here is a story of his life in uniform. Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington was one of the service’s greatest and most legendary pilots. …

by Susan Katz Keating Another member of the Air National Guard has been hit with criminal charges – this time, not for leaking classified documents. It has to do with murder-for-hire. A Tennessee man who serves in the Air National Guard agreed to kill someone for a client who actually …

by Sara Garcia, Insight Crime Juan Manuel Delgado Cárdenas was months away from completing his studies in pharmaceutical chemistry and biology at the Autonomous University of Baja California when, on April 30, 2021, three men entered his family home in Tijuana and opened fire. Delgado Cárdenas was killed while two …

PFC Heath Hansen receiving the Combat Infantryman Badge in Afghanistan. By Heath Hansen I opened my eyes. It was still dark, but I could see the night was ending and another day in some village in Afghanistan was beginning. The smell of dip-spit and cigarette smoke betrayed the fact that the …

by Mike Eckel The cloak-and-dagger uncertainty surrounding the funeral prompted a popular quip to circulate among Russian journalists: just as the Ukraine war has been euphemized by the Kremlin as a “special military operation,” Prigozhin’s funeral should be considered a “special burial operation.” For two months after launching the greatest challenge to …

by Mike Eckel Three days after an Embraer 600 passenger jet linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin broke up and slammed into the ground north of Moscow, there is still no final clarity on the fate of the Wagner Group founder. President Vladimir Putin suggested Prigozhin was dead in comments on August …

A massive 1970’s-era Russian mega-mortar called the ‘Tulip’ has been seen on the battlefield in Ukraine. The Russian 2S4 Tyulpan is the largest self-propelled mortar in the world – with footage of the 30-ton beast appearing on social media claiming to show it being used by Russian-backed separatists in the Donetsk region. …