Chancellor Rachel Reeves has proposed to increase defence spending by less than £10 billion over the next four years, despite the Armed Forces highlighting a £28 billion funding gap in the same period, and warning that Britain’s “national security and safety is in peril”, said The Times.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, a former Nato secretary-general, accused the Treasury in a speech on Tuesday of “vandalism” for inaction on defence. Leader of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, Robertson said that for the UK “building deterrence will not be quick or cheap”. He added that “the public need to face that uncomfortable fact or suffer the consequences of not being safe in a very turbulent world.”

With a fragile ceasefire in the Middle East and continued conflict in Ukraine, many fear that the government’s pledges to defence will prove difficult to fulfil.

What has the government pledged?

Minister of State for the Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard stated in the House that the government was undertaking the “largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War”, in response to Lord Robertson’s claims, but this is a “low bar”, said Ben Chu on BBC News. Defence spending has been on an “almost constant downward path since the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

The UK government currently spends 2.4% of GDP on defence, and Keir Starmer has committed to hitting 2.5% from April next year. This will then rise to 3% “at some point during the next parliament”, said The Times, though some critics think that the UK “should be hitting the 3% target now”.

More broadly, in June last year the government also committed to a Nato-wide agreement to spend 5% of GDP on national security. This figure will be split into 3.5% on “core defence” and 1.5% on “resilience and security” by 2035.

What state are the Armed Forces in?

In 1990, at the end of the Cold War, the Army had “153,000 regular soldiers in its ranks”, said the BBC. Now, it has less than half that number, just 73,790, according to the Ministry of Defence.

When it comes to recruitment, “Britain is at serious risk of being left behind” as other countries look to bolster their ranks, said Cahal Milmo and Jane Merrick in The i Paper. European neighbours Germany, Finland, Poland and France are “forging ahead with rearmament schemes” and programmes to increase numbers applying to their armed forces.

In the year to September 2025, the number of applications to the British Army Regular Forces (108,020) decreased by 36.6% compared to the previous year (170,380), according to the MoD.

In terms of equipment, in 1990, the Royal Navy had 13 destroyers and 35 frigates, which has since dropped to six and 11 respectively, said the BBC. Similarly, in 1990 the RAF had 300 combat jets. Though the current 137 Eurofighter Typhoons and minimum 37 Joint Strike Fighter F-35 Lightning IIs are “technically superior”, they are fewer in number. The use in combat of unmanned drones, which did not exist in 1990, is rising, and these also form part of the UK’s military aircraft.

How have recent ventures fared?

The “sad state” of the Armed Forces was illustrated by the delay in the deployment of HMS Dragon to the Middle East, said Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian. Even after the delay, the destroyer “needed further repairs almost as soon as it arrived”. It is the Navy’s “lone destroyer available to help protect British interests” in the Middle East, as the Navy’s “largest and most expensive” ships, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales – which “cost more than £6 billion” – were unavailable.

On land, ministers are facing “scrapping” the Ajax armoured vehicle programme, due to health concerns for its operators. Its issues are “so serious that vibration and noise have made soldiers training on it sick, with some suffering hearing loss”. More than £6 billion has been spent on the project, and it is “already eight years late”.

The government is also “under increasing pressure” to deliver its “long-delayed” Defence Investment Plan, said The i Paper. This promises to “overhaul Britain’s military capabilities with about £300 billion of investment over a decade”, said the outlet. Though expected to have been released last October, due to concerns over the MoD funding gap, it is not expected “until June at the earliest”.

What needs to be done?

The war in the Middle East should be a “wake-up call” for the UK to recognise its “vulnerabilities”, said George Robertson in Prospect. “There are many.” Public attention is mostly focused on the tangibles – such as planes, tanks and ships – but they are the “baubles on the Christmas tree”. “We need to focus on the tree itself” by addressing “crises in logistics, engineering, cyber, ammunition, training and medical resources”.

Russian commanders are charging “up to £30,000 to spare soldiers from the front lines in Ukraine”, said The Telegraph. Recruits unwilling or unable to pay are “reset” – a “euphemism for sending them to their deaths” in large-scale offensives with astronomical casualty rates.

Wounded soldiers must “pay thousands” to be declared unfit for active service, said PBS. Those who do not are “forced to literally limp into battle”. Seth Jones, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that injured soldiers, sometimes on crutches, are being “used as bait” to “draw fire” from hidden Ukrainian artillery.

Estimates put the number of Russian casualties in the war against Ukraine since 2022 at around 1.2 million, according to the CSIS. Ukrainian officials have also claimed that in March Russia suffered its highest number of losses – more than 35,000 killed or seriously wounded – since the launch of Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” programme last year, said the UK Defence Journal.

‘System of extortion’

“Corruption and slave labour have long been features of the Russian and Soviet armies,” said The Economist. Soldiers are not just seen as “grunts” – serving as “cannon fodder” for their superiors – but more troublingly as a “source of enrichment”.

There is a “system of extortion and punishment” in the Russian ranks, where infantry soldiers must “buy their own” military gear. Other collections begin “under the pretext of raising money for drones, equipment or food”, but payments are expected to continue. “Soldiers who refuse to pay may be thrown into dug-out pits for torture.”

In extreme cases, sources have reported that commanders “requisition troops’ bank cards and PIN codes” before sending them into battle. “The dead are declared missing, and commanders withdraw the money they earned from their bank accounts”. As one soldier was told by a new commanding officer, survival is “not a matter of luck, but of ability to pay”.

In the Russian military, “men learn quickly to fear their commanders more than their foe”, said PBS. Videos appear on social media depicting the “horrific punishments” faced by soldiers if they fail to pay up, with reports of some “being locked in cages, electrocuted and sexually assaulted”. According to the independent Russian station Radio Echo, nearly 12,000 complaints were filed over six months last year, accusing commanders of “corruption and violence towards their own men”.

‘Public resentment’

The Russian military recruitment drive has “poured blood and money into the system, resulting in a vast battlefield economy”, said The Economist. The front line has become a “marketplace where everything has a price: drones, medals, home leave and life itself”.

The problem is widespread, said The New York Times. In the last two years, “at least 12 high-ranking Russian military officials and generals, as well as dozens of lower-ranking officers, have been indicted on corruption charges”.

Most recently, Lieutenant Colonel Konstantin Frolov – known as “Executioner” – has been put on trial in a military court, facing charges of fraud, bribery and weapons trafficking. He is accused by the Investigative Committee (Russia’s equivalent of the FBI) of leading a scheme where “more than 30 soldiers and medics” in his regiment “used weapons to shoot themselves in order to obtain payouts for battlefield injuries”. The plot reportedly defrauded the army of “200 million rubles, or $2.6 million”.

This case in particular has “fed public resentment of the economic and social privileges” of high-ranking officials, who are accused of perpetuating the war “only for the money”.

Donald Trump has repeated his threat to pull the US out of Nato, after Britain and other allies refused to send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Dismissing the alliance as a “paper tiger”, he told The Telegraph’s Washington correspondent that the idea of removing America from the defence treaty had now gone “beyond reconsideration”.

“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine,” Trump said. “And we would always have been there for them”. But, in an apparent misunderstanding of the limits of the alliance, the US president believes that, in the Iran conflict, “they weren’t there for us”.

What would it mean for Nato?

Nato, formed by the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 by 12 founding countries, does not have its own army. Instead, member states pledged to provide collective defence and security. The US is Nato’s largest single military power, as well as funding 62% of its spending, so American withdrawal would dramatically weaken the alliance. Without Washington’s military might behind it, Article 5 – the treaty clause that states that an armed attack against one or more members will be considered an attack against all – would lose credibility .

Trump’s recent threats will further encourage Canada and the European member states in their efforts to rely less on the US for security – a shift that is a boon to their own domestic defence industries.

What would leaving Nato mean for the US?

The US would save money, both by ending its contribution to Nato spending and by no longer maintaining a presence in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. But it would also lose access to many military bases around the world, meaning the US Navy would have to “operate closer to America’s shores”, and US bombers would no longer be able to “reach targets halfway around the world”, said Modern Diplomacy. More broadly, the shift away from US global leadership would accelerate, with America increasingly divorced from an international framework.

Buyers for US arms could also dry up, as America’s former allies seek to re-arm elsewhere. The US spends more on its own military than any other country but that wouldn’t be enough to keep all its arms manufacturers afloat. Without crucial foreign sales, hundreds of thousands of US jobs would be at risk.

What would the process actually look like?

Leaving Nato wouldn’t be easy for the US because a 2024 law prohibits the president from doing so without the approval of a two-thirds Senate majority or an act of Congress. Even if all Republicans in the Senate voted for it, Trump would still need at least 14 Democrats to join them, and it’s unlikely he would even get unanimity from Republicans: Thom Tillis, Republican co-chair of the Senate NATO Observer Group, has already warned that leaving Nato would be an “enormous, enormous risk”.

Given the political obstacles, most Nato observers don’t think Trump will try to withdraw, “despite his obvious displeasure at alliance leaders”, said The Times. But he could use an executive order to suspend US participation, and eke that suspension out while legal challenges are mounted.

But, even without leaving, Trump could still “cause irreparable damage” to the alliance, said UnHerd. He could ignore an Article 5 request, withhold intelligence from Nato partners, cancel weapons deliveries, and limit the export of security-related technologies.

The targeting of Iranian missiles at the Diego Garcia UK-US military base on Friday has sent alarm bells ringing in Europe. Diego Garcia is over 2,500 miles (4,000km) from Iran and, if a missile from Tehran can reach there, it could also reach Paris, Berlin or even London.

“Previously, we thought Iran’s missiles had a range of 2,000km (1,245 miles),” General Sir Richard Barrons, former commander of Joint Forces Command, told BBC Radio 4 on Saturday.

One of the missiles fell well short of its target and the other was shot down, said Defence Secretary John Healey. But “the launch, however unsuccessful” has “fuelled fears” about the range of Iran’s ballistic missile programme, said the BBC’s defence correspondent Jonathan Beale.

What did the commentators say?

Israel has claimed Iran is developing weapons capable of travelling 2,500 miles (4,000km). “We have been saying it,” the Israel Defence Forces posted on social media. “The Iranian terrorist regime poses a global threat. Now, with missiles that can reach London, Paris or Berlin.”

This could “put continental Europe and possibly even Britain under threat”, defence analysts told The Telegraph’s Paul Nuki. Every European capital “now lies within credible Iranian reach”, Ran Kochav, former commander of the Israeli air and missile force told the paper.

Yes, it’s “conceivable” that an Iranian rocket “could reach London”, Sidharth Kaushal, of the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told the BBC’s Beale. But “so what?” We’re talking about “a small number” of conventional missiles over “well-defended airspace”, and they are “quite inaccurate at very long ranges”. The risk to London is “pretty low”, research analyst Decker Eveleth of the CNA Corporation told Beale. A missile could travel the distance but it wouldn’t be “particularly aim-able”. It would also be spotted quickly. Using a network of satellites and powerful radars, the US Space Force can track the trajectory of “any missile fired across the globe”.

“Various sources” agreed that it was unlikely that missiles launched from Iran would be able to hit London, said Jamie Grierson in The Guardian. Britain is protected by Nato’s ballistic missile defence, a shield “designed to detect, track and intercept” weapons in flight, bolstered by two Aegis Ashore defence sites in Poland and Romania.

The UK government is “not aware of any assessment at all” that Iran is “even trying to target Europe, let alone that they could if they tried”, said Communities Secretary Steve Reed on the BBC’s “Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg”. And “even if they did, we have the necessary military capability” to defend ourselves. “The UK is not going to be dragged into this war.”

What next?

Britain has “very little in the way of” independent “ballistic missile defences”, said the BBC’s Beale: “a glaring gap” acknowledged by the government’s recent Strategic Defence Review. But it’s “unlikely” that Iran has “large numbers of intermediate or even long-range ballistic missiles”. The fact that it only fired two towards Diego Garcia “suggests its long-range missile capability is limited”. For now, “the threat seems remote”.

Even if it were able, Iran is unlikely to single out the UK for a missile attack, according to a recent paper from the European Centre for Counterterrorism and Intelligence Studies. More likely would be “precision strikes on Nato logistics hubs, and economic disruption” through attacks on Mediterranean ports or liquefied natural gas terminals in Italy, Greece and Romania.

“Nato does have what it takes to defend alliance territory, to defend our one billion inhabitants,” said Colonel Martin O’Donnell, spokesperson for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. Europeans “should rest easy at night”.

Donald Trump’s call for an international coalition to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz has been met with a muted response. Japan and Australia have definitively ruled out sending support and escort vessels, and Keir Starmer has said the UK “will not be drawn into the wider war”.

With the US-Israeli war against Iran now entering its third week, Tehran has effectively closed the waterway through which a fifth of all the world’s oil and gas passes. Trump first demanded the help of China, France, Japan, South Korea and the UK but he then extended the invitation on Truth Social to all “the Countries of the World that receive Oil through the Hormuz Strait”. Yet, despite threatening to cancel a planned trip to China unless Beijing offers support, and warning Nato that it faces a “very bad future” if it fails to come to Washington’s aid, his demands seem “to have fallen on deaf ears”, said Reuters.

What did the commentators say?

European governments in particular “have reacted cautiously to Trump’s persistent pressure to help him reopen the strait”, said Milena Wälde on Politico. Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said he was “very sceptical” that widening the EU’s naval mission to the Strait of Hormuz “would provide greater security”.

Even if Trump is able to secure an international coalition, his “biggest hurdle” in any attempt to reopen the strait will be “interoperability”: “that’s the ability of crews to work together or with different units and different doctrine when basic communication would be an issue”, maritime security expert Alexandru Hudisteanu told Al Jazeera. There is also the challenging geography of the strait, which is only 31 miles wide at its entrance and exit, and narrows to 20 miles at one point. It is a “very unforgiving” environment to sail through, especially with “wartime threats”, such as mines or “unmanned systems that could damage or destroy ships”.

With growing unease in the US about the war and its economic impact on ordinary citizens, Trump has been forced to change tack in recent days. Having launched his campaign with Israel without consulting other allies, he clearly now needs other countries “to join a war that not only hasn’t been won, but is spreading and escalating out of control – and that the US is arguably losing”, said The Independent’s editorial board.

What next?

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has said that the strait is not open to vessels belonging to the US and its allies. But Tehran has “signalled it is considering allowing Chinese-linked ships through”, said The Telegraph – a move that would “spare Iran’s strategic ally the economic pain of the war, while doubling down on the impact felt by the West”.

EU foreign ministers are meeting in Brussels today to discuss ways of keeping the strait open. But any military assistance provided by European nations, including the UK, must come with “a say in US decision-making”, and a “demand that Operation Epic Fury be de-escalated before it becomes Operation Epic Disaster”, said The Independent. “This is a rare moment when medium-sized powers such as Britain, France and Japan can exercise some leverage on the White House; they must make full use of it.”

“Every now and then, world events take a turn that exposes Britain’s decades of self-deception” on the subject of defence, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. On 1 March, the RAF’s main base in Cyprus was hit by a drone apparently launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon. It caused only minor damage; what was shocking was that the UK seemed unprepared for such an event, although Lebanon is just “a short drone-hop away”, and an attack like this had been anticipated for years.

Our response was to dust down HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer then undergoing maintenance at Portsmouth. (With a fair wind, she’ll arrive next week.) In a panic, Cyprus turned to Greece and France, “asking to be protected from the risk Britain’s bases had exposed them to”. Greek frigates and F-16s were on the scene within hours. A French warship and air defences followed. “Quite the humiliation” for Britain. And proof that “our commitments far outpace our resources. Holes are showing, in shocking places.”

‘Point of maximum weakness’

The blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks on the Gulf states, where around 300,000 British citizens live: this is exactly the kind of emergency that “would once have found the Royal Navy in its element”, said David Blair in The Telegraph. But for the first time in centuries, Britain does not have a single warship in the Persian Gulf or the eastern Mediterranean. Three of its six destroyers and both its aircraft carriers were out of action, undergoing repairs or refits.

After years of slow decline, the Navy has “reached its point of maximum weakness” at a moment when a crisis is exploding in the Middle East “and Russia threatens the whole of Europe”. Both Bahrain and the UAE have reportedly expressed concern about the UK response; Cyprus voiced its disappointment publicly. Britain could also only send a few extra fighter jets to the region because the RAF, too, has been “cut to the bone”, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. It has 130 active jets, down from 850 in 1989. The Army is “in no better shape”, with just 70,000 active personnel, a third of the number it had in 1990.

Our current malaise “is the result of politicians from all parties trying to outrun” the same question for decades, said Matt Oliver in The Telegraph. How can Britain be “a great military power” if it won’t pay for it?

At the start of the 1990s, Britain’s health and defence budgets both hovered at 4% of GDP. Today, health accounts for 8% and defence just over 2%. New Labour was often accused of failing to invest in the forces. But the “squeeze” was harder during the Coalition years: the budget fell by 22% in real terms from 2010 to 2016. Yet even today, the Ministry of Defence has one of the largest military budgets in the world, at £66 billion per year.

So taxpayers may wonder what has gone wrong. The answer lies in part in “a string of procurement disasters”, for which civil servants and top brass must share the blame. We have expensive platforms – aircraft carriers, F-35 jets, nuclear subs – but insufficient manpower, weapons stockpiles and all-round resilience. As ex-defence secretary Ben Wallace recently put it, our forces have been “hollowed out”.

End of ‘peace dividend’

The challenge is formidable, said Larisa Brown in The Times. Al Carns, the Armed Forces Minister, has said that, by 2029, “Europe could be at war with Russia”. Former senior military chiefs warned in a letter to the prime minister this month that Britain “is facing its 1936 moment”. Assuming that funding can be found, the UK and Europe’s defence industries will have not only to ramp up production, but also to cope with the transformation of the modern battlefield already seen in Ukraine – by drone technology, robotics, cyberwarfare and, increasingly, autonomous weapons.

Add to that the likelihood that Donald Trump’s America would not “fight for us”, said Edward Lucas in The Times – or certainly cannot be relied upon to do so. “Europeans may loathe Trump, but they’re not ready to fill the gaps... They lack the hi-tech weapons, high-end intelligence, logistics expertise and ‘mass’ (quantity) that the Americans have provided since D Day.” Filling these will be costly and difficult, “if we manage at all”.

Yet politically, defence remains a hard sell, said The Independent’s editorial board. Among voters, there is no clamour to build “new cyber-defence units in the way there is demand for, say, cutting NHS waiting lists”. Keir Starmer and his cabinet know that the era of the “peace dividend” is over, said George Eaton in The New Statesman – that Britain and Europe “need to go faster on defence”, as the PM put it last month. But nothing much is happening. Labour may or may not increase defence spending from 2.4% of GDP to 3%, as the Ministry of Defence wants, by 2029 – the year that Carns thinks we could be at war with Russia. The government shows no willingness to confront voters with the fiscal trade-offs that come with higher spending. Britain remains “in denial on defence”.

Donald Trump accused Tehran of “making us look a bunch of fools” and said he would “go in and take” an island from Iran. But this threat wasn’t made in 2026. Trump said it in 1988.

In an interview with The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee nearly 40 years ago, the now US president raged against the Iranians, saying: “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island.”

Situated northwest of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategically important shipping route in the Gulf, Kharg Island has long been seen as Tehran’s Achilles’ heel. Grabbing it today could “let Trump beat Iran without sending a single soldier”, said The Telegraph.

What is Kharg Island?

Roughly 15 nautical miles from the Iranian mainland, this small coral outcrop is widely regarded by Iranians as the “Forbidden Island”. It is just five miles long and three miles wide.

Beyond its “imposing steel fences and military watchtowers” is a “pristine landscape” where “millennia of diverse human history quietly coexist”, said Al Jazeera. It is also home to the “beating heart of Iran’s modern energy empire”.

It has history with the US. When Iranian militants kidnapped 52 US diplomats in 1979, advisers to President Jimmy Carter suggested seizing Kharg but the plan was rejected as being too inflammatory. In 2016, 10 US marines were held after straying into Iranian waters near the island.

Why is it important?

It processes 90% of the nation’s total oil exports, handling approximately 950 million barrels a year. So if the US captured the island, it could cause a huge problem for Iran’s economy for years to come.

“Seizing” Kharg Island would “cut off Iran’s oil lifeline, which is crucial for the regime”, Petras Katinas, from the Royal United Services Institute, told The Telegraph. It could be used as a bargaining chip as oil exports make up nearly 40% of the Iranian government’s budget, so this would “give the US leverage during negotiations”, regardless of “which regime is in power after the military operation ends”.

The move “would be reminiscent” of the US intervention in Venezuela, when it “effectively took control of the country’s oil sector”, oil analyst Tamas Varga told CNBC.

So why hasn’t Trump seized it?

Taking the island would make American and Israeli troops vulnerable to attacks by Iranian forces. In the longer term, it would damage any future regime’s chances of managing the economy, something Washington might be keen to avoid.

Neil Quilliam, from the Chatham House think tank, told The Independent it is “unlikely” Trump would take over the territory. Previous US presidents have “steered away from Kharg understanding its strategic importance to global oil markets”.

But if Trump did control Kharg Island, he could “pressurise the existing regime into compliance”, or “all-out collapse”, forcing any new government to “toe Washington’s line” if it wanted to “regain sovereignty over oil exports”, said The Telegraph.

Russia’s plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space could be “catastrophic”, a Canadian military leader has warned on Ukrinform.

Moscow’s reported ambitions “appear quite alarming”, said Brigadier General Christopher Horner, commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Frying electronics 

Satellite warfare has been a threat for some years and the latest “devastating” development is the “possibility of Russia detonating a nuclear weapon in space”, said the Daily Mail.

In 2024 the US believed the Kremlin was developing an “anti-satellite missile tipped with a nuclear warhead for a potential surprise attack in low orbit”. Simulated blast tests by nuclear experts at the Pentagon have suggested that such an attack would destroy thousands of Western satellites.

Satellite networks are “critical to everything from banks synchronising their transactions to navigation tasks that ranged from guiding planes and ships to ensuring a pizza delivery driver finds the right address”.

An anti-satellite nuke would “combine a physical attack that would ripple outwards, destroying more satellites”, with the nuclear component being “used to fry their electronics”, said The Associated Press.

It could “render low-Earth orbit unusable for satellites for as long as a year”, said Republican member of Congress Mike Turner, and the effects would be “devastating”. The US and its allies could be “vulnerable to economic upheaval” and “even a nuclear attack”. The scenario is “the Cuban Missile crisis in space”, said Turner.

Satellite killers

If Russia were to deploy such a “satellite-killing weapon”, it would violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, The New York Times said in 2024. This kind of space weaponisation from Russia and China is “one of the primary reasons” the US Space Force was established, said AP.

Now countries are “scrambling to create their own rocket and space programmes to exploit commercial prospects and ensure they aren’t dependent on foreign satellites”, said Fortune.

The US Space Force was launched in 2019 to protect US interests in space and to defend its satellites from attacks by enemies. It’s “far smaller” than the US Army, Navy or Air Force, but it’s “growing”.

Meanwhile, Horner warned that Canada doesn’t have the “capability” to disable a potential Russian nuclear bomb in space. So “my only advice as a military officer is to put pressure” on Moscow so that they don’t follow through with the plan, because that would be an “incredibly terrible thing”.

“Vladimir Putin has not achieved his goals,” said a defiant Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a televised address marking the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The February 2022 invasion was meant to be a “short and successful military operation” that would “force Kyiv back into Moscow’s orbit” and “overturn the entire post-Cold War security architecture in Europe”, said the BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg. “It didn’t go to plan”, leaving Russia with an ever-mounting cost.

What did the commentators say?

As the conflict enters its fifth year, Russian victory seems as far away as ever and it has little to show for its estimated 1.2 million casualties, according to Seth G. Jones and Riley McCabe at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. The average pace of Russia’s progress has sometimes been as little as 15 metres per day, “slower than almost any major offensive campaign in any war in the last century”.

Russia’s economy is finally starting to teeter. It faces a huge shortfall in oil revenues and has been forced to sell gold reserves to cover its budget deficit.

The West has always believed that domestic discontent as a result of the ongoing sanctions would “persuade Putin to abandon the war”, said Peter Rutland and Elizaveta Gaufman on The Conversation. This, in turn, was “based on the assumption that the legitimacy of Putinism rests on a social contract” that offers Russians stability and income in exchange for loyalty.

But this approach “tends to downplay the role of ideology”, which has been successfully exploited by the Kremlin to spin the war as an existential threat and maintain support for the president, according to data from Statista.

This narrative has also been deployed externally, towards Russia’s opponents. The idea emanating from the Kremlin that Ukraine’s front line faces “imminent collapse” is “an effort to coerce the West and Ukraine into capitulating to Russian demands that Russia cannot secure itself militarily”, said the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. This is a “false narrative”.

The West should “stop buying into Moscow’s bluff that Russia is invincible” and “use the Kremlin’s weaknesses and double down on its support for Ukraine to bring about real negotiations to end the war”, said Jana Kobzova and Leo Litra for the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“The notion that ‘time is on the Russian side’ betrays a lack of strategic patience and, even more importantly, squandered opportunities to exploit Moscow’s growing structural vulnerabilities.”

What next?

“Standard economic theory suggests that deteriorating conditions should push the Kremlin towards negotiations on ending the war,” said The Economist. “A rational actor facing mounting costs seeks an exit.”

Yet there is little sign that Putin has any intention of yielding on his push for the “capitulation” of Ukraine, Russian political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya told The I Paper. If no peace deal can be struck, the war could even “escalate further”, with the possible involvement of China a “growing factor”, as well as fears of a “new nuclear race”, said The i Paper.

Russia can “probably continue waging war for the foreseeable future”, said The Economist, but every additional year “raises systemic risk: of fiscal crisis, of institutional breakdown, of damage so severe that no post-war policy can repair it”.

So the question for Western allies is “what kind of Russia will emerge” when its appetite for war finally fades, “and whether anyone has a plan for what comes next”.

J.D. Vance opened last year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) with an attack on the US’ European allies, stunning the world’s biggest defence summit.

In the year since, Donald Trump has published the new US national security strategy, which outlined the desire for “strategic stability” with Russia and accused European leaders of “civilisational erasure” – a document praised by the Kremlin. The president shook the foundations of the Nato alliance with his threats to seize Greenland, imposed tariffs on friend and foe alike, and undermined Europe’s defence of Ukraine.

Ahead of this year’s conference, opened today by Germany's chancellor Friedrich Merz, a report prepared by the MSC warns that the era of depending on the US is nearing the end. “Europe has come to the painful realisation that it needs to be more assertive and more militarily independent from an authoritarian US administration that no longer shares a commitment to liberal democratic norms and values,” it said.

What did the commentators say?

The MSC report “sets the scene for an all-out ideological confrontation with the Trump White House”, said The Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour. The president’s remarks disparaging European Nato soldiers who fought alongside the US in Afghanistan caused “deep offence” among Europe’s military leaders. The MSC report also accuses Trump of having “a lust for destruction and of siding with Vladimir Putin”.

There are also “strong suspicions” that Germany’s hard-right Alternative for Germany was only invited to the MSC following “pressure from the Trump administration”, said The Telegraph’s Berlin correspondent James Rothwell. The AfD was banned from the conference for two years for its “pro-Kremlin views”. Its attendance has “caused a furore” and there are fears the party will “use the summit as an opportunity to spy” – possibly for Russia.

Sergej Sumlenny, co-founder of the European Resilience Initiative Centre, a security think tank, has urged guests to “keep quiet about state secrets in the presence of AfD members” because whatever “sensitive topics” you’re talking about “stands a chance of making it back to Moscow”.

This year, Marco Rubio will be leading the US delegation. The “generally more restrained and tad more diplomatic” secretary of state is unlikely to emulate Vance’s “daylight throttling” of last year, said Politico’s Jamie Dettmer. But even if he does, Europeans are “becoming almost inured to Trumpian jolts”.

The focus in Munich will therefore be on “the practical steps necessary to de-risk” from the US, reduce reliance on its technology and military, and “forge a much more independent” path with the Canadians, who are “now honorary Europeans”. Basically, this MSC will be about how Europeans “can stand on their own two feet”.

But Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte spoke for many in the highly divided, deeply gloomy bloc: if EU lawmakers think they can do without the US, “keep on dreaming”, he said. “You can’t.”

The “unquestioned assumption of transatlantic cooperation” that always underpinned the MSC has been “upended”, but Europe’s dependence on US military support “will take years to undo”, said Reuters. It will also leave the continent “vulnerable”.

Plus Europe–US security ties have been damaged, but “they have not disintegrated”, said the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner. “We still benefit enormously from our security and military and intelligence relationship with America,” said Alex Younger, former chief of MI6.

Ultimately, this MSC should “provide some answers on where the transatlantic alliance is heading”, said Gardner. “They just may not necessarily be what Europe wants to hear.”

What next?

On arriving in Munich, Rubio struck a “warmer tone” than Vance managed last year, said Reuters. But the Trump administration’s direction remains clear: Rubio’s next stops in Europe are Hungary and Slovakia. Washington has “hinted”, said Politico, “that it could assist ideologically allied European parties”, such as the nationalist regimes of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary or Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Smer.

“In an era of wrecking-ball politics, those who simply stand by are at constant risk of entombment,” the MSC report argues. Relying on “sterile communiqués, predictable conferences, and cautious diplomacy” is doomed to failure. “Effectively pushing back against the demolition men requires much more political courage and innovative thought. The actors defending international rules and institutions need to be just as bold as the actors who seek to destroy them.”

Those who “oppose the politics of destruction” have to “become bold builders themselves”. “Too much is at stake. In fact, everything is at stake.”

Not since the era of Mao Zedong has China seen “a purge of this magnitude”, said The Indian Express (Noida). On 24 January, Beijing announced that the nation’s highest-ranking general, Zhang Youxia, was being investigated for “suspected serious violations of discipline and law” – party-speak for corruption.

The move was extraordinary because Zhang, a Politburo member, had been one of Xi Jinping’s closest allies; both were “princelings” whose fathers were senior figures in the early Chinese Communist Party (CCP); they’ve known each other since childhood. Now, after the 75-year-old’s sudden fall from grace, China’s military hierarchy lies in tatters.

‘Paper tiger’

Zhang and Liu Zhenli, another top general also under investigation, are set to be removed from the Central Military Commission (CMC), the body that controls the two-million-strong People’s Liberation Army (PLA). As three other members have already been expelled, this would leave only two people on the CMC – Xi himself (the commander in chief), and Xi’s anti-corruption tsar.

The action against the top generals is a “desperate measure”, said Youlun Nie in Nikkei Asia (Tokyo). The most likely explanation lies in the “scandalous defects” that have been discovered in the PLA, which has long been plagued by corruption. Xi has spent hundreds of billions every year to create an army capable of “fighting and winning wars” – notably to conquer Taiwan and reunite it with mainland China, but graft has turned it into something of a “paper tiger”. The hi-tech arsenal of its elite “Rocket Force” has been beset with systemic technical failures: missile tanks filled with water rather than fuel, silo lids failing to open, preventing rockets from being launched. Xi’s fear is that his supposedly world-beating missiles “might turn out to be nothing more than expensive fireworks”.

Zhang and Liu’s defenestration is part of a wider pattern, says Chun Han Wong in The Wall Street Journal (New York). Since mid-2023, at least 50 senior officials in the military and the defence industry have been investigated in corruption probes. What’s even more startling is that one-fifth of all senior generals promoted by Xi have either been fired or accused of wrongdoing. Xi is “stripping down his military command and starting over”.

‘Frozen with fear’

The purges have led to “doubts about Beijing’s war-readiness”, said The Taipei Times. Xi’s “unprecedented reshaping of the PLA’s leadership”, doing away with generals like Zhang – a war hero who fought in the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 – means the top echelon is very short of much-needed combat experience. This could “weaken its capability to launch military aggression against Taiwan” in the short-term. But it doesn’t mean war is less likely, though: Xi will probably appoint replacements more willing to execute his military “blueprint”.

Officers promoted in place of the old guard could be “far less likely to question Xi’s authority”, said Karishma Vaswani on Bloomberg (New York). And they’ll be more inclined to tell the president what he wishes to hear about the military – instead of the truth.

“These arrests are political, first and foremost,” said Deng Yuwen in Foreign Policy (Washington DC). “Anti-corruption is just a cloak in which the politics are wrapped”, as Xi amasses yet more power. This is not to say that Zhang and Liu are innocent. Corruption is so endemic in one-party China that any official can be taken down. The problem is that the rules have changed, and now no one is safe. In the past, being a member of the Politburo or a “princeling” guaranteed you protection. That’s no longer enough – just look at Zhang, who’s now in custody.

Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has been running since 2012 and has investigated millions. CCP bureaucrats must be “frozen with fear”. No one will dare sign anything off, try to solve social problems, or launch reforms. The machine is “eating itself”. Who now will dare “to keep it moving forwards”?

Nato is mulling a joint operation to defend the Arctic from future Russian and Chinese aggression – and to neutralise US ambition.

Britain, Germany and France have discussed a possible “Arctic Sentry” mission, echoing two similar Nato initiatives launched last year: Baltic Sentry (in response to underseas cable sabotage) and Eastern Sentry (following Russian drone incursions). This would be in addition to Denmark’s “Operation Arctic Endurance” in Nuuk where Britain, Canada and 10 other European nations have already sent a handful of troops to join that reconnaissance force in the Greenland capital.

The hope is to placate Donald Trump, who has repeatedly used claims of a growing threat of Russian and Chinese ships to justify his desire to seize Greenland. But whether a Nato mission could feasibly protect the mineral-rich Arctic – or whether the threat is as severe as the president claims – is a different question altogether.

What did the commentators say?

Nato should “double down” on Arctic security and “do what we’ve done in other areas”, said Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper. The Arctic is “the gateway for Russia’s Northern Fleet to be able to threaten” the UK, Europe, the US and Canada, she told the BBC while visiting British forces in northern Norway. “Transatlantic security depends on our Arctic security.”

She envisages the mission as covering “the high north”, including Greenland, Iceland, Finland and the increasingly busy shipping lanes. It would look like “coordinated exercises, operations and intelligence sharing”, she said, similar to the ongoing Baltic and Eastern Sentry missions.

Those are “considered big successes”, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). While the waters around Greenland “aren’t full of Russian and Chinese ships right now, that could change as Arctic ice melts and new sea lanes open up”.

Russian and Chinese vessels aren’t out there “studying the seals and the polar bears”, said Nato’s supreme allied commander in Europe, Alexus Grynkewich. But there are “many practical obstacles” to an Arctic Sentry operation, said RFE/RL. Nato has only about 40 ice-breaker vessels in total – fewer than Russia. Hundreds of such ships would be needed “to cover such a vast area”. Apart from Nordic countries and Canada, there are few troops with experience of operating “in harsh Arctic conditions”.

The Baltic Sentry and Eastern Sentry were also “formulated to tackle specific threats”, said The Telegraph. In the case of Greenland, the threats “are not as clear-cut”. Germany has “floated the idea of sending at least 5,000 troops” to Greenland, effectively a “tripwire” to stall a Russian or Chinese invasion.

But that wouldn’t “significantly contribute to regional security”, because any threat to Greenland is “unlikely to be a ground invasion”. Mass deployment would also “suck vast resources away from other priorities”, such as a potential peacekeeping force in Ukraine or protecting Nato’s eastern flank from Russia. It “would simply be seen as a costly public relations project” designed to placate Trump. He “appears obsessed with the purported presence of Russian and Chinese ships” near the island. Security experts do not agree.

Indeed, there’s “hardly any military activity” by Russia and China in Greenland, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, told Politico.

Seven of the eight Arctic countries that are Nato members (Russia is the eighth) are cooperating more and more; the fact that other countries are “becoming more interested is a good thing”, Eide said. But the focus is “still more on Russia’s live threat to the European high north than a future threat to Greenland”.

What next?

One potential Arctic Sentry scenario could be “Europeans handling air and sea surveillance” of what is known as the GIUK gap – the area between Greenland and Ireland/the UK – while the US “increases its troop presence in Greenland”, said RFE/RL. The 1951 treaty between the US and Denmark that allows unlimited US presence on the island is still valid. Denmark would have to consent, but that is “likely to be given”.

The EU is also considering using a rearmament scheme to build a continental ice-breaker to deploy to the region alongside Nato warships, according to The Telegraph. But the most likely Arctic Sentry scenario would “focus on the intelligence aspect of security”, which is seen as “a vital way of securing the Arctic”.

Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte is “expected to put some security proposals” to Trump: a “toolbox” of ideas on how European nations could protect Greenland. Talks on Arctic Sentry are “at the earliest stages of planning”, but hopefully “at least one of the proposals will be enough” to deter Trump.

The proposed Chinese embassy in London is once again under intense scrutiny as the government struggles to balance opportunity with security concerns in its approach to Beijing.

Following multiple delays, Keir Starmer is set to approve plans for the biggest Chinese embassy in Europe, after MI5 and MI6 declined to raise formal objections. But concerns persist over the site on the Royal Mint Court complex, next to “some of Britain’s most sensitive communications cables”, said The Times. These carry financial data to the City of London, as well as “email and messaging traffic for millions of internet users”.

According to unredacted blueprints seen by The Telegraph, China plans to build a network of “secret rooms” beneath the embassy, including a “hidden chamber” over these cables, “raising the prospect that they could be tapped”.

What did the commentators say?

“China won’t say what the basement is for,” Alan Woodward, security expert at the University of Surrey, told The Telegraph. It could be “legitimate classified communications equipment”. But the demolition of the basement wall is a “red flag”. One possibility is that “China plans to install extensive computer infrastructure as part of an espionage operation”, said the paper. Security services have warned that Beijing is “carrying out mass espionage against British targets”, said The Times. The head of MI5 has previously described Chinese state actors as a daily national security threat.

A group of Labour MPs has written to Steve Reed, the housing, communities and local government secretary, “urging the government not to approve” the embassy. Concerns remain “significant and unresolved”, including fears the complex could be used to “step up intimidation against diaspora and dissidents”.

“There have been a lot of examples before, where China used diplomatic premises to harass citizens or force people to travel back to China to face trials,” Carmen Lau, a prominent activist from Hong Kong who has been living in Britain since 2021, told Le Monde. “When I first arrived here, I felt safe. Not anymore.”

Approval of the complex could also jeopardise intelligence sharing with the US and the Five Eyes alliance, said the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Last year, a senior Trump administration official said the US was “deeply concerned about providing China with potential access to the sensitive communications of one of our closest allies”. Any reduction in sharing between two of the world’s most advanced intelligence agencies “would have serious consequences for both countries’ national security”.

But consolidating the seven sites in London that currently comprise “China’s diplomatic footprint” would “clearly bring security advantages”, the prime minister’s spokesperson said in December. China is “engaged in surveillance and interference operations, whether it has a new embassy or not”, Nigel Inkster, from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Le Monde. “And it will probably be easier for British intelligence services to monitor its activities if they are all grouped together in one place.”

What next?

“National security is our first duty and government security experts have been involved throughout the process so far,” a government spokesperson told The Telegraph. All security implications “have been identified and addressed”.

China’s London embassy did not respond to The Telegraph’s requests for comment on the unredacted blueprints, but Beijing has previously denied all allegations of espionage at the site, saying that “anti-China elements are always keen on slandering and attacking China”.

Starmer will approve the plans by 20 January, ahead of his trip to Beijing, where a £100 million scheme to renovate the ageing British embassy is awaiting approval by the Chinese authorities.

Donald Trump may allow America’s last remaining nuclear arms control treaty with Russia to lapse. “If it expires, it expires,” he told The New York Times of the agreement, which runs out on 5 February.

If the New START agreement, signed in 2010, is not renewed or replaced, it would leave the “world’s two largest nuclear powers free to expand their arsenals without limit, for the first time in half a century”, said the paper.

What is it?

START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) is a series of bilateral nuclear arms control treaties between the US and Russia, which began with START I in 1991. They aim to limit and reduce the number of nuclear weapons held by both countries.

Crucially, the New START agreement caps deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 each and delivery vehicles (such as missiles and bombers) at 700.

Will it be replaced?

Moscow and Washington are both “preoccupied by the war in Ukraine”, so they haven’t “held any talks on a successor treaty”, said Reuters, but there have been some informal statements from both sides.

In September, Vladimir Putin proposed that both parties should adhere to the START limits for a further 12 months. He has also argued that the nuclear stockpiles of Britain and France should be up for negotiation. Both countries have rejected that suggestion.

Trump hasn’t responded formally, but he told The New York Times that he would prefer a broader deal that could involve “a couple of other players,” without naming them.

Western experts are “divided” on Putin’s suggestion, said Reuters, because although it would “buy time to chart a way forward” and send a “political signal that both sides want to preserve a vestige of arms control”, it would allow Russia to keep developing weapons systems outside the scope of the treaty.

Then there is China. One US analyst argued that the US agreeing to Putin’s proposal would “send a message” to Beijing that Washington would not “build up its strategic nuclear forces in response to China’s fast-growing nuclear arsenal”.

Beijing has accelerated its nuclear programme and now has an estimated 600 warheads, but the Pentagon estimates it will have more than 1,000 by 2030.

Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that America may look to increase its stockpile in the face of this, which could lead to a “Cold War-like arms race”.

What does this mean for the world?

If New START simply expires, it would be the first time in around five decades that the world’s two largest nuclear powers would operate without any formal constraints on their arsenals. Between them, the two countries have about 87% of the world’s nuclear warheads.

But although the agreement saved superpowers “a bit of money” and provided a “forum that was useful for cooperation”, it didn’t “fundamentally change the probability of war”, Mark Bell, from the University of Minnesota, told New Scientist. It is the unthinkable results of nuclear conflict, rather than treaties, that prevent such wars, he said.

Putin has suggested that Moscow could voluntarily continue observing the limits if Washington did the same. The two countries could also share data about their deployed forces after the expiration.

As for Trump, he has previously said he would like to pursue “denuclearisation” with Russia and China to reduce the “tremendous amounts of money” each nation spends on nuclear weapons.

The UK and France have agreed to deploy troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal with Russia, as part of a broader package of security guarantees aimed at preventing a repeat of Vladimir Putin’s invasion nearly four years ago.

After talks in Paris, Keir Starmer said both countries will, in the event of a ceasefire, “establish military hubs across Ukraine” and build protected weapon facilities “to support Ukraine’s defensive needs”.

Their agreement – along with wider security guarantees from the Coalition of the Willing – has the backing of the Trump administration. Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it a “huge step forward”. But Russia has previously rejected any idea of a “reassurance force” in Ukraine.

What did the commentators say?

The announcement from Starmer and Emmanuel Macron is “not a magic wand”, said Bel Trew in The Independent. “But it is a key moment.” France and Britain have, according to Zelenskyy, already “worked out in detail” the “force deployment”, including numbers, weapons components required.

Perhaps to reassure a wary French public, Macron said that “these are not forces that will be engaged in combat” but rather deployed “away from the contact line” to provide the necessary “reassurance”.

“This does seem at first glance to be a well-developed framework for ending the conflict in Ukraine,” said Eliot Wilson in The Spectator. But one of the most “obvious problems” is that “it is not at all clear that the UK and France have the military resources available to do what they say”.

There are “deep divisions” over increased defence spending in France and “the British army is the smallest it has been since the 1790s”. About 7,500 UK personnel are already deployed internationally and “resources for our leadership of the Nato Multinational Battlegroup in Estonia are stretched”. Given this, “where will we find ‘boots on the ground’ for Ukraine?”

Then there is the lack of public appetite for a prolonged military intervention overseas. On this, Starmer “begins from a stronger position than almost any of his counterparts” in the EU, said George Eaton in The New Statesman. UK voters are “among the most pro-Ukraine in Europe”: a recent YouGov poll of voters in six European countries found 56% of Brits support sending peacekeepers to Ukraine, compared to 40% in France and Italy and 36% in Poland. That “speaks to the strength of this consensus – albeit one yet to be tested by events”.

What next?

Of all the wider security guarantees agreed in Paris, the “binding commitment to support Ukraine in the case of future armed attack” is the one most “riddled with questions”, said Euronews. Each Coalition of the Willing government “would have to convince their parliaments, many of which are paralysed by political deadlock, to agree to an exceptionally consequential commitment”.

Then there is Putin, who has shown “no sign” that he is “willing to countenance any of this”, said Politico. This week’s potentially game-changing breakthrough does, however, “thrust the ball further into his court”.

Any US attempt to seize control of Greenland by force would be the end of Nato and “post-Second World War security”, Denmark’s prime minister has said.

Mette Frederiksen issued her warning as Donald Trump reiterated his desire to take control of the semi-autonomous Danish territory, saying “we need Greenland from the standpoint of national security”.

European leaders, including Keir Starmer, have issued a joint statement saying that “it is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland”. But the “mildness” of their words “illustrates the bind Europe finds itself in”, said Politico. The fear of “potential retaliation from Trump on trade or Ukraine if he perceives harm to US interests” means Europe has “mostly pulled its punches in responding to his sabre-rattling”.

Nato is also walking a “fine line to avoid antagonising the US president”. But, while many Nato countries have, up till now, “brushed off an all-out Greenland incursion as implausible, Trump’s comments are beginning to stir anxiety – and defiance – within the alliance”.

What did the commentators say?

Since Trump returned to office and made his designs on the island clear, Greenlanders and Danes have been imagining scenarios in which the US succeeds in annexing the territory. Trump could go for “force, coercion, or an attempt to buy off the local population of about 56,000 people with the promise of cutting them in on future mining deals”, said Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic. In fact, “because neither Denmark nor its European allies possess the military force to prevent the US from taking the island”, all it may take in practice is a Truth Social post announcing that Greenland is now an American “protectorate”. Given America’s status as Nato’s leading military and financial guarantor, such a development would “paralyse” the alliance.

Few, if any, expect a Venezuela-style raid on Greenland, said Sam Ashworth-Hayes in The Telegraph, because the US “has no need to” fire shots in anger. If Trump “really wants the territory”, he “can apply deeply painful leverage until he gets his way”.

Denmark – and Europe – “have few cards to play in the world of might-makes-right that Trump is ushering in”, said Marc Champion on Bloomberg. Their “entire economic and security postures” have been built “around the rules and alliance-based order that the US created for its friends” after the Second World War. “Now they’re too dependent on US arms to resist as he tears it down, with a strong assist from the likes of Vladimir Putin.”

Today Starmer joined other European leaders for a “coalition of the willing” summit at France’s Elysée Palace, during which “Europe will again seek US security guarantees for Ukraine”, said George Eaton in The New Statesman. For those wondering why Europe has been so cautious in their criticism of Trump’s Greenland claims, here is a “key part of the answer”.

What next?

I would wager that Trump will use his leverage “to get what he wants in Greenland through some means short of outright annexation”, said The Telegraph’s Ashworth-Hayes. He could look to trade America’s continued support with Europe’s eastern defence for a greater US security presence in the Arctic. In this case, “the diplomatic side will be smoothed over” but “the fault-lines will still exist”.

There is a belated acceptance in European capitals that they need to be less reliant on Washington. At the same time, there is still some wishful thinking that Trump’s new-found expansionism is a temporary aberration. “We know who our allies no longer are. It’s just we are still hoping we are wrong and the problem will go away,” a senior EU official told the Financial Times. “We know what needs to be done, we just need to bloody do it.”

Following the stunning extraction of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, Donald Trump has suggested the US could take military action against other countries in Latin America – or even Europe.

The US president has threatened Colombia and its “sick man” president, Gustavo Petro, warned Mexico’s leaders to “get their act together”, and said Cuba is “ready to fall”. He’s told Iran that America is “locked and loaded and ready” to rescue “peaceful protestors” against the regime. And, speaking on Air Force One yesterday, he said “we need Greenland from the standpoint of national security” – drawing criticism from European leaders, including Keir Starmer.

America’s new goal is to “protect commerce and territory and resources that are core to national security,” Trump said at his press conference announcing Maduro’s capture – echoing the words of the recently revised US national security strategy to restore “American pre-eminence” in the Western hemisphere. “These are the iron laws that have always determined global power and we’re going to keep it that way.”

What did the commentators say?

“The attack on Venezuela and the capture of Maduro herald the decoupling of Trump’s United States from the rules-based international order” and the crumbling of the “liberal order as a whole”, said Juan Luis Manfredi, professor of journalism at Spain’s University of Castilla-La Mancha, on The Conversation. “A new international order is now emerging, based on the use of force, revisionism and security on the American continent.”

There are two ways to view all this, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. “A benign interpretation is that in matters of war and peace,” Trump “has no idea what he is doing – no strategy, no clue” and he is making up policy as he goes along. “The sinister interpretation” is that “he knows exactly what he’s at” and that “more and worse is to come”.

In the “heady rush to instant criticism” that can divorce policy “from its historical contexts”, it is important to remember that Trump’s policies are “in line with long-standing patterns of American behaviour, not least with the idea of forward defence against possible foreign threats”, said historian Jeremy Black in The Telegraph.

America’s policies “clash with notions of the national sovereignty of others” but these notions also can “protect dictatorships and oppression”, as was the case with Maduro, and is still “seen in many other states, including Iran and North Korea”.

Trump’s foreign policy moves have a “common thread”: as we’ve already seen in Ukraine, Yemen and the Israel-Gaza conflict, this is the “focus on short-term achievements over more complicated, longer-term questions about governance and stability”, said Courtney Subramanian and Kate Sullivan on Bloomberg.

But this is “a philosophy that could backfire on American interests”. China could use the “Trumpian approach” as a template “to take back Taiwan”, or Russia could feel emboldened “to renew its efforts to topple” Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

What next?

The “axis of authoritarians”, particularly in Moscow and Beijing, “may feel additional urgency to prove their value” in the face of US pressure on their allies in Venezuela, said Ryan Berg, a Latin-American specialist at the US Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, on Politico.

As for Trump, what happens next will greatly depend on how the situation plays out in Venezuela over the coming weeks and months. Success could encourage the US administration “to expand its pressure campaign to Cuba or other disfavoured regimes”, Latin America geoeconomics analyst Jimena Zuniga told Bloomberg. But “failure could temper its appetite for intervention”.

Donald Trump plans to turn the UK into a “potential nuclear launchpad” and put American nuclear missiles on British soil for the first time since 2008, said the Daily Mail.

The return of US nukes to these shores could prove controversial, as was their presence in the past, when they were a divisive and at times dangerous element.

When did they arrive?

US nuclear weapons were housed on UK soil for more than five decades, arriving initially at RAF Lakenheath, Suffolk, in September 1954 as part of NATO's strategy against the Soviet Union.

Two years later, a B-47 bomber on a routine training mission crashed into a storage unit containing nuclear weapons, killing four servicemen. Official US documents said it was a “miracle” none of the bombs had detonated, as it was possible “a part of Eastern England would have become a desert”, said CND. Five years later, in January 1961, an aeroplane loaded with a nuclear bomb caught fire following a pilot error, leaving the bomb “scorched and blistered”.

In 1980, RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire was chosen to host more US nuclear missiles. It took six years for the bombs to become operational, but a year later, in 1987, the US and USSR signed a treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear arms, which included those at Molesworth, meaning the project was an “expensive waste of time”, said Cambridgeshire Live.

US cruise missiles arrived at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire in November 1983 with 96 nuclear warheads based here. The site became synonymous with the Women’s Peace Camp – protesters who first arrived in 1981 and the last of whom left in 2000 when it was decommissioned. Anti-nuclear activists borrowed George Orwell's line from “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and dubbed Britain “airstrip one” for the US.

When were they withdrawn?

The US began removing its nuclear weapons from Britain around 2007, ending a “contentious presence spanning more than half a century”, said The Guardian. The last 110 American nuclear weapons on UK soil had been withdrawn from RAF Lakenheath by June 2008 on the orders of George W Bush as part of a post-Cold War strategic shift.

Are they coming back?

Speculation has grown over the past two years that the US plans to deploy nuclear weapons in the UK again. Reports in July suggesting some nukes had already arrived were neither confirmed nor denied.

But now reports of Pentagon documents indicate a $264 million upgrade of RAF Lakenheath will put US nuclear weapons back on British soil. The bombs would be in place to “face down Putin”, said the Daily Mail.

The plan includes knocking down at least half a dozen buildings, setting up secure intelligence facilities, protecting the surrounding area against enemy electronic pulse attacks, and sending over 200 American personnel, according to Pentagon funding proposals.

Even our domestic nuclear weapons are "really very American", said Scottish CND's Lynn Jamieson in The National, due to “integration with and dependence on” the US.

“Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem,” Polish prime minister Donald Tusk posted on X. “Unless something has changed.”

Tusk was reacting to the new US National Security Strategy, which has landed in European capitals at the weekend “like a bucket of cold water”, said The Wall Street Journal. Hailed by Russia as aligning “in many ways” with “our vision”, the explosive 30-page document criticises the “unrealistic expectations” of “European officials” backing Ukraine. It also castigates the EU for “censorship of free speech”, praises the “growing influence of patriotic” political parties, and warns of the “civilizational erasure” of Europe.

Signalling a more isolationist approach to Donald Trump’s foreign policy, the document declares “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over”.

What did the commentators say?

This “grenade” of a policy paper will have stunned European leaders by revealing “the depth of ideological vehemence within the White House”, said Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post.

The “pointed criticisms” of Europe, cast as “tough love advice”, stand in marked contrast to the document’s “approach to traditional US rivals”, said Daniel Michaels, David Luhnow and Max Colchester in The Wall Street Journal. Russia “isn’t mentioned a single time as a possible threat to US interests” and China, North Korea and the Middle East receive surprisingly little attention.

European leaders should “assume that the traditional trans-Atlantic relationship is dead,” Katja Bego from the Chatham House think tank told the paper. It’s “the mother of all wake-up calls for Europe”, historian Timothy Garton Ash added. “It essentially declares outright opposition to the European Union. It’s J.D. Vance’s notorious speech in Munich but on steroids and as official US policy.”

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has sought to downplay European concerns, conceding that “some” of the US criticism is “true”. Europe “has been underestimating its own power towards Russia,” she told a panel at the Doha Forum in Qatar this weekend. “We should be more self-confident.”

What next?

Since Trump’s return to the White House, “European leaders have kept up a remarkable performance of remaining calm amid his provocations, so far avoiding an open conflict that would sever transatlantic relations entirely”, said Tim Ross on Politico. But for centrists like Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz, “the new Trump doctrine poses a challenge so existential that they may be forced to confront it head-on”.

But there’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Trump’s document. “By underplaying – and refraining from even referencing – the conventional threat Russia poses to transatlantic security”, it does nothing to “empower those nations that are working to take on greater defence responsibilities”, said Torrey Taussig, a director at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, on Atlantic Council.

Instead, this strategy paper “seeks to embolden” Europe’s “nationalist and populist parties”, who would probably “cut defence budgets and downplay the conventional threats”. In this sense, the document is an “own goal that undermines the administration’s stated objectives” of “shifting the burden of defence onto the shoulders of European allies”.

This article appeared in History of War magazine issue 153.

In September 2025 President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense to the 'Department of War', reverting to the original name established during the Revolutionary War. While such a change would officially require Congressional approval, the president cited a tradition of military strength and preparedness as essential to US national security.

"The Founders chose this name to signal our strength and resolve to the world," the order declared. "The name 'Department of War', more than the current 'Department of Defense', ensures peace through strength as it demonstrates our ability and willingness to fight and win wars on behalf of our nation at a moment's notice, not just to defend."

The department originally underwent a rebrand during a radical reorganisation of the US military after the end of the Second World War.

As the free world continued to count the cost the war, the most devastating armed conflict in human history, and the early vestiges of the Cold War loomed, President Harry Truman told the American people of his intent to reshape the US military establishment.

In the autumn of 1945 he declared: "I stated that I would communicate with Congress from time to time during the current session with respect to a comprehensive and continuous program of national security. I pointed out the necessity of making timely preparation for the nation's long-range security now – while we are still mindful of what it has cost us in this war to be unprepared."

Among Truman's priorities were a reorganisation of the American armed forces hierarchy to achieve efficiency, co-ordination and unity of command while reinforcing the venerable concept of civilian control of the military.

In December 1945, Truman added: "I recommend that the Congress adopt legislation combining the War and Navy Departments into one single Department of National Defense. Such unification is another essential step – along with universal training – in the development of a comprehensive and continuous program for our future safety and for the peace and security of the world."

The National Security Act of 1947 did in fact create the National Military Establishment (NME) with a framework that separated the US Air Force from control of the US Army and established the position of Secretary of Defense.

This new cabinet post would ostensibly supervise the subordinate offices of the individual branch secretaries. The incumbent was required to be a civilian or to have been retired from the military for at least ten years. This second proviso was later modified to seven years.

Another significant component of the 1947 act was the establishment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, composed of high-ranking military officers, the Central Intelligence Agency (preceded by the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS) and the National Security Council, an advisory body for the president in consideration of domestic, foreign and military policy.

Two years later the NME was formally renamed the Department of Defense. The entire executive initiative had been prompted not only by the command challenges of the Second World War but also in preparation for a potential war with the Soviet Union. Truman's perspective demanded an enhanced national military preparedness and response capability.

While the change of designation from War Department to National Military Establishment and then Department of Defense might be construed at first glance as an effort to quell the connotation of belligerence held with the word 'war', it was in fact necessary to differentiate the new structure from the previous alignment that had endured in various iterations since the 18th century.

Some sources claim that the change from NME to Department of Defense was necessary to eliminate the negative sound when the acronym was pronounced aloud. It simply sounded too much like 'enemy'.

The War Department had been created on 7 August 1789 during the first session of the Congress in the administration of President George Washington. Its purpose was clear: replacing the Board of War and Ordnance that had been created in the midst of the American Revolution in 1776.

The War Department was initially also known as the War Office in a nod to the British influence in North America. The fledgling US Navy was given a separate cabinet post in 1798 and encompassed the command of the US Marine Corps.

Therefore the National Security Act of 1947 effectively separated the Department of the Army from the Department of War and created the Department of the Air Force as a separate branch of the military.

The amended National Security Act, which Truman signed on 10 August 1949, brought the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force directly under the Secretary of Defense and established the post of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The president explained that the revisions constituted a "unification… increased efficiency and economy and greater coordination of our military forces".

In fact, some observers conclude that the comprehensive restructuring fostered an unprecedented era of inter-service rivalry as exemplified in the competition between the Air Force and Navy as the primary custodian and potential deliverer of the American nuclear weapons arsenal during the burgeoning years of the Cold War.

However, such a rivalry may well have been unavoidable and the effectiveness of the realignment remains the subject of debate as it continues to function today.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 153. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

Israel’s famed Iron Dome air defence system is the envy of many around the world – and may eventually have a copycat in Taiwan.

The president of Taiwan has announced a “historic” $40 billion increase to the defence budget over the next eight years, which he says would include a “T-dome” air defence system. That would be accompanied by artificial intelligence, drones and other hi-tech equipment to boost Taiwan’s “asymmetric” defence against a Chinese attack.

President Lai Ching-te, writing in The Washington Post, blamed China’s “unprecedented military build-up”, its “intensifying provocations” in the region and “record” army incursions into Taiwan’s vicinity. Beijing’s “willingness to alter the status quo by force has become increasingly evident”, he said.

Tensions over Taiwan

Tensions are mounting over the self-governing democracy, which Beijing still considers Chinese territory. Xi Jinping has repeated his desire to “reunify” the island with China. Since Lai labelled China a “foreign hostile force” in March, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been conducting large-scale military exercises around the island.

China and Japan are also locked in an escalating row over Taiwan. The new Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi suggested last month that her country could respond with its own self-defence force if China attacked Taiwan.

Last week, Taiwan’s defence ministry said that Chinese military harassment had become a “severe security challenge” that Taiwan must meet. Equipped with “multi-layered defence, high-level detection and effective interception”, the T-Dome would “weave a safety net” to protect citizens, Lai said.

“Taiwan must not become a weak point in regional security,” he said at a news conference. “Among all the possible scenarios for China’s annexation of Taiwan, the biggest threat is not force – it is our own surrender.”

US military experts believe President Xi has told the PLA to “develop the capability to attack Taiwan by 2027”, said the Financial Times. The planned missile defence system would likely be used to protect the island in case of invasion, or against “targeted strikes calibrated to force Taiwan to negotiate without triggering a military response from the US”.

Taiwan’s defence spending has already doubled in recent years. The increased funding is part of a plan to raise spending from 2.5% to 3.3% of GDP by next year, and 5% by 2030, in response to “demands from the Trump administration” not to rely on the US for help, said The Times.

American pledges to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion “have always been deliberately ambiguous”, but Joe Biden “stated clearly that he expected the US to come to Taiwan’s aid”. Donald Trump’s re-election, however, “cast doubt on the security of the relationship”. His administration has offered “conflicting signals” on whether it regards China as a threat, while the isolationism of the Maga movement “challenges the whole notion of overseas interventions”.

Domestic opposition

Lai still has to get the supplementary budget approved by Taiwan’s parliament. That is controlled by the opposition party Kuomintang (KMT) – which is closer to Beijing – in alliance with the third party, the Taiwan People’s Party.

And defence has “become a polarising subject”, said the BBC. “Lai’s opponents accuse him of using the fear of a Chinese invasion to shore up his support, and urge more diplomacy with Beijing.”

Hsu Chiao-hsin, a Kuomintang politician, called the planned budget “astronomical”, said The Washington Post, and questioned whether it would “turn Taiwan into a wartime state”. Cheng Li-wun, the new KMT leader, accused Lai of “playing with fire”, said The Times.

Some Taiwanese military analysts also criticised the plan, calling it impractical and inadequate against China’s superior firepower. “If the system is modelled after Israel’s, it will require a massive budget. It won’t be easy,” said political scientist Hung-Jen Wang of the National Cheng Kung University.

It would take longer than the remainder of Lai’s term to build the dome, said Dennis Weng of the Sam Houston State University. That suggests there is a “promotional intent” and that the message is “clearly aimed at the US”.

China responded with predictable aggression; its foreign ministry said Taiwan would “never succeed” in its attempts to resist reunification.

Emmanuel Macron has said a new voluntary national service programme in France, announced today, is not about “sending our youth to Ukraine” to fight.

The growing realisation that Russian aggression could “easily spill into Europe” has put “intense pressure” on countries across the continent to “quickly expand the ranks of full-time soldiers and reservists that shrank during the post-Cold War peace”, said The New York Times.

“Yet the question of how to recruit hundreds of thousands of service members is prompting fierce and soul-searching debates.”

What did the commentators say?

France’s new national service plan “stops short” of full conscription, said France 24. Lasting 10 months, with volunteers paid for their service, it is “expected to start modestly”, recruiting 2,000 to 3,000 people in the first year, before “ramping up” with a long-term goal of 50,000 per year.

“Some countries in Europe already have a form of a conscription”, said The Times, notably those “closest to Russian borders” such as Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania. But the war in Ukraine, and the so-called “grey zone” activities carried out by the Kremlin such as drone incursions into Nato airspace, “have reignited the debate across the continent”.

In Poland, “plans are under way for every man to go through military training”, said The New York Times, as the government aims to more than double the size of its army to 500,000. In the hope of also growing its fighting force from 70,000 to 200,000 by 2030, Denmark recently expanded its military conscription programme to include women turning 18 who are entered into a conscription lottery. Croatia has gone further, voting in October to reintroduce compulsory military service, which was suspended in 2008.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, this month opted for a “new military service” made up initially of a volunteer force that mirrors a system used in Sweden, where a questionnaire is sent out to all 18-year-olds. Conscription, which ended in 2011, “is not compulsory under the new rules but this model does include the potential for that”, said DW.

It marks the “first unmistakable shift in German security policy for a generation”, said Henry Donovan in The Spectator. Far from being an “overreaction” as some claim, “it is the minimum a serious country does when confronted with the concrete possibility of war on its own continent”.

Britain should also “pay close attention”. Up to now the UK government has ruled out reintroducing conscription (which was abolished in 1960) to boost its number of military personnel, instead favouring a recruitment drive by the Ministry of Defence.

What next?

Security and defence analysts, as well as Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have warned that Russia could be ready to expand its war into Europe within the next five years.

Even with countries vowing to “do a better job of attracting volunteers to fulfil national targets and commitments to Nato”, the “outlook for meeting targets is dim”, said The New York Times. “Retention rates remain low in many countries, reserve schemes are uneven and recruitment has dwindled in ageing societies with low unemployment,” the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a European think tank, concluded in a recent report.

The problem is that less than a third of EU citizens appear willing to fight for their country in a war, according to a 2024 poll by Gallup.

“Even if conscription would help address issues with military recruitment, in many countries it could be socially and politically controversial to the point that it reinforces polarisation, leads to backlash or social/political unrest, and undermines the wider security benefits that could be gained from it,” Linda Slapakova, from research institute RAND Europe, told Euronews.

This view was summed up by France’s chief of the defence staff, General Fabien Mandon, last week. While France has the economic and demographic power to defeat Moscow, it lacked the “spirit” in society to stand up to the threat, he said. “If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children, to suffer economically because defence production will take precedence, then we are at risk.”

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has framed the 28-point US peace plan to end the war in Ukraine as an impossible choice: between losing national dignity or losing the support of its most important ally.

The plan, which has been widely decried as a Kremlin wish list, would allow Russia to keep Crimea, as well as Luhansk and Donetsk and other territory in the Donbas that Ukraine has successfully defended for nearly four years. It would halve the size of Ukraine’s army, ban it from launching long-range missiles and end its hope of joining Nato. In return, Ukraine would receive as yet unspecified security guarantees.

For Zelenskyy, such demands are unpalatable but he may end up having to swallow at least some of them.

What did the commentators say?

Nearly four years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian president faces “a triple threat at home and abroad”, said Colin Freeman in The Telegraph. There have been “huge losses on the front lines as winter draws in” and “growing anger” over a scandal in which officials allegedly stole millions from the state nuclear energy provider. Now Donald Trump is pushing a “controversial” peace plan, most of which appears “calculated to be unacceptable to Kyiv”.

“Having Zelenskyy in a bind, though, is one thing,” said Freeman. “Getting him to sell the deal to the Ukrainian public is another, as it tears up red lines that Kyiv has drawn in very thick blood.” Any peace agreement would require constitutional changes voted through by a supermajority in Ukraine’s parliament. This appears unlikely given the reaction of the Ukrainian public and politicians to Trump’s 28-point plan.

The power-company scandal, as well an unsuccessful attempt to curb the independence of two national anti-corruption watchdogs earlier this year, have “delivered a devastating blow to Zelenskyy’s international reputation and to the Ukrainian cause at large”, said Leonid Ragozin on Al Jazeera. He is “emerging out of it as a lame duck who will do what he is told by whoever is pulling the strings”, which, right now, looks to be the US president.

“Yet this very vulnerability” makes Zelenskyy “even less likely to yield to the Trump administration”, said Yaroslav Trofimov in The Wall Street Journal. “No Ukrainian president – and especially not a weakened Zelenskyy – has a mandate to agree to anything like this,” Nico Lange, a former senior German defence official, told the paper. “If he does, he would not be president any more when he comes home.”

What next?

The Trump administration has given Ukraine until Thursday to agree to the deal – or risk losing all US support and “imperilling Ukraine’s troops, who rely deeply on American intelligence sharing” and “US weapons”, said Siobhan O’Grady in The Washington Post.

But, in the rush to exploit Ukraine’s weakness, Trump may have “inadvertently strengthened Zelenskyy at home, at least for the time being”, said Cassandra Vinograd and Andrew E. Kramer in The New York Times. “The 28-point plan has shifted” the nation’s focus away from domestic scandal and allowed the president to “reprise his most successful role: as rally-er in chief”.

Vladimir Putin has said that Russia has successfully tested an (unarmed) underwater nuclear-torpedo powerful enough to “put entire states out of operation”. Speaking at an event for veterans of the Ukraine war last week, the Russian president said “there is nothing like” the Poseidon missile.

What is the weapon?

Russia’s new nuclear submarine, Khabarovsk, is armed with autonomous Poseidon missiles. Said to be 20 metres long and nearly two metres wide, they are capable of travelling up to 6,200 miles at speeds of up to 115 mph, deep below the surface of the water. According to arms control experts, the weapon breaks “most of the traditional nuclear deterrence and classification rules”, said The Guardian. “Launched from a submarine like a torpedo”, it is thought that they are “able to loiter as an underwater drone” before deploying a nuclear warhead “capable of triggering a radioactive tsunami to render coastal cities uninhabitable”.

“Compared to an intercontinental ballistic missile it is very slow”, said Naval News, but still fast enough to be “realistically uncatchable to existing torpedoes”, while its operating depth (said to be up to 1,000 metres) puts it “beyond reach” of defences.

What did Moscow say?

There’s “nothing like this in the world in terms of the speed and the depth of the movement of this unmanned vehicle”, and it’s “unlikely there ever will be”, Putin said, claiming that there are “no ways to intercept” it.

Kremlin defence minister Andrei Belousov said Khabarovsk and its missiles will “enable” Russia to “successfully secure” its maritime borders and “protect its national interests in various parts of the world’s oceans”.

A sensational report on Russian television boasted that one Poseidon missile could cause enough damage to “plunge Britain into the depths of the sea”, said the Daily Mail.

The more excessive Russian boasts of a “100 megaton ‘tsunami bomb’” are not reliable, said Naval News. “More recent estimates are two megatons”, which is still roughly 100 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

A new nuclear arms race?

News of the submarine launch has prompted Donald Trump to order the US military to restart nuclear tests for the first time in 33 years. But he said that the US would test on “an equal basis” to other countries, so as neither China nor Russia has carried out an “actual explosive nuclear test”, Trump “probably” means “reciprocal testing of nuclear-capable missiles” rather than the “actual explosive warheads that sit on top of them”, said The Telegraph.

His announcement still “bolstered concerns” that the world is “sliding into a new nuclear arms race”, said the Financial Times, as “much of the cold war-era arms control architecture has collapsed”. A return to US testing “would be a highly retrograde step”, providing a premise for Russia and China and other nuclear states to ramp up their nuclear weapons programmes, in turn encouraging non-nuclear states to “pursue their own”.

It wasn’t as calamitous as his first Oval Office encounter in February, said The Guardian, but Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s latest visit to the White House last Friday did not go well.

Ukraine’s president had hoped that Donald Trump, who has taken a tougher line against Russia in recent weeks, might agree to sell Kyiv long-range Tomahawk missiles. But Trump, who had shared a two-hour phone call with Vladimir Putin the previous day at the Russian leader’s request, not only ruled that option out but lectured Zelenskyy on the need to make territorial concessions. He apparently tossed aside maps of Ukraine during the ill-tempered meeting, warning Zelensky to accept Putin’s terms or be “destroyed” by Russia.

Reality check

Trump’s harsh tone should concentrate the minds of European leaders as they explore the idea of using frozen Russian assets to secure a £122 billion loan to Kyiv. It’s now clear that the US can’t be relied on. This makes Europe’s support for Ukraine more important than ever. Trump’s rejection of Ukraine’s request for Tomahawks has been presented as a concession to Moscow, said Jennifer Kavanagh on UnHerd, but that’s “unfair”.

The fact is, “these missiles were never truly on the table”. Kyiv isn’t equipped to launch them, and the Pentagon can’t really spare any – and Trump may be right in any case to argue that they wouldn’t shift the war’s trajectory decisively. The recent “diplomatic scramble” has delivered a reality check to Kyiv, but also to Moscow: Trump later pushed for a ceasefire along current lines, seemingly rebuffing Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede the rest of the Donbas.

‘Rattling Russia’s cage’

By dispelling some false hopes, Trump may have improved the chances of the two sides resigning themselves to an imperfect armistice. The mere possibility that Trump might send Tomahawks to Ukraine certainly prompted anxiety in Moscow, said The Washington Post. But once he withdrew the threat, the Kremlin soon lost interest in diplomacy. A planned meeting between Trump and Putin in Budapest was shelved on Tuesday, after Russia rejected the idea of a ceasefire along current battle lines. Russia once again harked back to the “root causes” of the conflict, which is really just code for its desire to snuff out Ukrainian sovereignty.

The lesson of this episode is that “pressure works on Russia”. Trump should “put Tomahawks back on the table”, as well as German long-range Taurus missiles. At some point this war will end in a deal, most likely one involving some territory for Russia and robust security guarantees for Ukraine. “Rattling Russia’s cage some more might bring Putin to his senses.”

As Europe ramps up defence spending in the face of the growing threat posed by Russia, states on Nato’s eastern flank are turning to a more unusual line of defence: bogs.

“Water has played a role in defensive strategy for millennia,” said the Financial Times. Germanic tribes used peatland to defeat the Romans, while Holland mastered strategic flooding to ward off invasion by Spain and France. The great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz thought that bogs were among “the strongest lines of defence”.

‘Let nature fight for you’

This was shown to devastating effect in 2022 when, in a desperate bid to stop the Russian army’s advance on Kyiv, Ukrainian authorities decided to blow up a massive Soviet-era dam to the north of the capital that had long contained the Irpin River.

The “desperate gamble” paid off, said The Telegraph, flooding a long-lost wetland basin and turning the land into “an almighty, impassable swamp that helped shield the city as Russian tanks languished in thick, black sludge. The drastic measure sent a message: let nature fight for you in war. Countries along Nato’s frontier took note.”

By chance, “most of the European Union’s peatlands are located on Nato’s border with Russia and Belarus”, said Defence 24. They stretch from the Finnish Arctic, through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, across the Suwalki Gap – judged by many to be the most likely point of attack in a future Russian confrontation with Nato – and on to eastern Poland.

Finland has already begun a bog-restoration pilot close to its border with Russia, while Poland plans to revive and expand peatland and forests as part of its £1.9 billion East Shield fortification.

“If there are natural stops on the border such as swamps or bogs or lakes… then that helps us,” said Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal.

‘Fusing defence and climate’

Restoring bogs and wetlands along Nato’s eastern flank would be “relatively cheap and straightforward” and fuse “two European priorities that increasingly compete for attention and funding: defence and climate”, said Politico.

Bogs store a huge amount of CO2 and, when drained, release carbon into the atmosphere, fuelling global warming. The problem is particularly acute in Europe, which has seen over half its bogs lost or converted to farmland. Wary of the environmental impact, the EU has set a goal of reviving 30% of degraded peatlands by 2030.

The problem up until now has been securing funding for this. “At a time when Europe focuses on security and resources are allocated to defence”, scientists hope that “acknowledging the military significance of bogs will accelerate their renaturation and secure unprecedented financial resources”, said Defence 24.

“There are not many things that environmental activists and defence officials agree on and here we find great common ground,” Finnish MP Pauli Aalto-Setälä told The Telegraph.

The trial of two men accused of spying for China was due to start at London’s Woolwich Crown Court today. Instead, charges against parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash and teacher Christopher Berry were dropped last month in controversial circumstances.

Both men – who maintain their innocence – were charged with violating the Official Secrets Act, which meant prosecutors would have had to prove that they had acted for an “enemy” state. But, according to The Sunday Times, Jonathan Powell, Keir Starmer’s influential national security adviser, said the government’s “star witness” in the case would have to base his evidence on the National Security Strategy 2025 – which describes China as a “geostrategic challenge”, rather than an “enemy”. And so the trial was “doomed”.

What did the commentators say?

In order “not to upset” Beijing, with whom it is pursuing closer ties, the government “fatally undermined” Scotland Yard’s investigation into the suspected espionage, said David Sheppard and Helen Warrell in the Financial Times.

Viewing the situation in the “most generous” light, the “thawing relationship” between China and the UK could have “undermined the case”, said Caroline Wheeler and Gabriel Pogrund in The Sunday Times. But more cynical critics might say it demonstrates the government’s willingness to “prioritise closer economic links to China over matters of national security”.

The collapse of the case has sparked discontent across “both sides of the political aisle”, said David Hughes in London’s The Standard. Powell is under “renewed pressure to submit to a grilling” over this, and over the national security strategy, said James Tapsfield in the Daily Mail. If he refuses, “he could be held in contempt of Parliament”.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood “insisted there was no ministerial interference in the collapse of the case”, said Tara Cobham in The Independent. Asked if China was an “enemy of the UK”, she told the paper: “China is a challenge.”

What next?

Conservative ministers have “tabled written parliamentary questions” about the matter, “including to Sir Keir directly”, said The Telegraph. These are likely to centre on what role Powell and other ministers “played in the decision” not to proceed to trial.

Tensions around Chinese espionage still loom large. Rumours that the government is considering targeting “parts of China’s security apparatus under foreign influence rules” have triggered a warning from Beijing that it would “retaliate” if that happened, said The Guardian. So far, ministers have “refused to apply stricter foreign influence rules on lobbyists acting for China”.

This month, Russian drones and fighter jets have encroached on the airspace of several Nato countries, including Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Estonia. And unidentified drone sightings have caused disruption at airports in Denmark.

These incursions, said Politico, raise “difficult questions” for the Nato alliance. Although “Moscow insists it’s done nothing wrong”, Poland has shot down some of the drones that flew over its skies, and several Nato nations are warning that “they’re ready to shoot down Russian aircraft entering their airspace”.

What did the commentators say?

The central question is whether or not it was Russia’s deliberate intention to breach Nato airspace. There is “no consensus view” on this among member states, said CNN, after speaking to “a dozen senior US and Western military, intelligence and diplomatic” officials. That puts the alliance in an “uncomfortable position”.

The Estonian incident – in which three MiG-31 fighter jets flew over the Baltic Sea for 12 minutes with their transponders off and without communicating with air traffic control – “appears hard to write off as a mistake”, said Archie Bland in The Guardian.

But there is a “fundamental difference” between Moscow’s and Nato’s rules of engagement, Charly Salonius-Pasternak, of the Helsinki-based Nordic West Office think tank, told Politico. “Russia has said they think they are in a military conflict” with the West but “we do not see it that way”. Nato’s parameters do not require the immediate use of force in response to an assumed incursion during peacetime. Nobody would “start World War Three because of this”, Ukrainian military analyst Mykola Bielieskov told the news site.

What next?

Nato’s response to “Russia’s reckless acts will continue to be robust”, said the North Atlantic Council. And the option of “shooting down a Russian jet that is intruding on our airspace is on the table”, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen yesterday. On the sidelines of this week’s UN General Assembly in New York, Donald Trump said he believed this is an option Nato countries should take.

But even shooting down Russian drones could be a challenge, said Yasir Atalan on Foreign Policy. The West will find it hard to do so “at a sustainable cost”. The price of scrambling fighter jets or deploying expensive missiles is much, much higher than what Russia is spending on each drone. Nato countries will need to follow Ukraine in finding “cheaper options, such as interceptor drones and energy lasers”, if they intend to withstand “large-scale drone attacks”.

Days after Polish and Nato forces scrambled to shoot down Russian drones that had flown into Poland’s airspace, Russian troops gathered in neighbouring Belarus for largescale war games; Indian and Iranian troops also participated. The Zapad 2025 exercises included a simulated nuclear strike. Although they were billed as defensive, analysts said they were designed to intimidate Europe.

In total, 19 drones crossed into Poland last Wednesday. Moscow’s allies claimed that they had strayed there accidentally, but days later, another Russian drone violated Romanian airspace. Warsaw said the incursion was a test of Nato’s defensive capabilities, and invoked Article 4, which brings a threat to the attention of its council. Nato then launched an operation to bolster its eastern flank. Donald Trump said he would impose tougher sanctions on Russia – but only if all Nato members stop buying Russian oil and gas and slap heavy tariffs on China.

‘Chinks in the alliance’s armour’

The sheer scale of the incursion into Poland makes it clear that this was a “calculated escalation” by Vladimir Putin”, said The Daily Telegraph. Emboldened by Trump’s indulgence, he wanted to see if Nato had the resolve to respond. Poland has painful recent experience of invasion and occupation, said The Independent. So its PM Donald Tusk’s warning that the prospect of conflict in Europe is “closer than at any time since the Second World War”, has to be taken seriously: this was the first time in Nato’s history that its member states have had to directly attack Russian forces, albeit unmanned ones.

Fortunately, for all Trump’s vacillations, Nato was still strong enough to answer the call. Yet there are “chinks in the alliance’s armour”, said The Times. Two of its members, Hungary and Slovakia, are “virtual allies of Russia”. And the leader of the US, its most powerful member, treats the Ukraine War as a “business opportunity”. Trump is making European nations buy US weapons to give to Kyiv; now he’s trying to stop them buying Russian gas, to boost sales of US liquefied natural gas.

Warning shots

Ever since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Western strategists have been asking who the Kremlin would target next, said Mark Almond in the Daily Mail. The consensus was that “small, militarily weak nations on Russia’s border”, such as Latvia or Estonia, would be the target. Yet instead, Putin picked Poland, a country which spends nearly 5% of its GDP on defence – the highest share of any Nato member – and has the third-largest standing army in the alliance, after the US and Turkey.

Does this suggest we are “teetering on the edge of World War Three”? These warning shorts certainly expose our weaknesses, said Edward Lucas in The Times. “The US insists (rightly) that Europe must take the lead in standing up to Russia.” But without it, there is nothing like a unified European alliance. Political stances vary wildly, while even supportive nations, such as France, Spain and Belgium, flinch at the risk and the cost.

Trump’s ‘latest wheeze’

Europe’s Nato powers have more than enough air power to keep the Russians out, said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon in The Daily Telegraph. But they should go further, by establishing a no-fly zone in western Ukraine. This would save thousands of lives; and as a display of power, it could be the “catalyst to get Putin around the negotiating table”.

Nonsense, said Jennifer Kavanagh on UnHerd. Ukraine – in dire straits militarily – has an interest in exaggerating the Russian threat to Europe, to scare the continent into giving more aid. Instead of responding in a bellicose fashion, and risking a wider war, Western leaders should tamp down their rhetoric and “double down on diplomacy”.

Unfortunately, any diplomatic efforts are liable to be scuppered by Trump, said Jason Corcoran in The Moscow Times. His “latest wheeze” – promising to ramp up sanctions on Russia if Nato imposes tariffs of 50% to 100% on Chinese imports – is a “cynical stalling tactic”. He knows that this would be economic suicide for Europe. He is letting Moscow “off the hook, granting Putin much-needed breathing room as the war rages on”.

India’s participation in the Zapad war games, led by the highly respected Kumaon Regiment, has “raised eyebrows” amid signs that the US may be losing a “key ally” in Asia, says Lorraine Mallinder on Al Jazeera. But despite recent tensions over US tariffs, Trump confirmed last week that India and the US were continuing negotiations. Denmark announced on Wednesday that it would buy long-range precision missiles and drones, for the first time, to combat the threat from Russia. “Russia is testing us,” said Danish PM Mette Frederiksen.

Peace in Europe seems further away than at any time since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago.

Far from forcing a ceasefire between Vladimir Putin and Kyiv, Donald Trump’s return to the White House has seen an escalation in Russian aerial attacks, culminating in this morning's dramatic drone incursion into Poland.

“Putin just keeps escalating, expanding his war, and testing the West. The longer he faces no strength in response, the more aggressive he gets,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X. “A weak response now will provoke Russia even more – and then Russian missiles and drones will fly even further into Europe.”

What did the commentators say?

Recent attempts to bring Russia to the negotiating table have focused predominantly on diplomatic efforts. By sending his envoys to meet directly with Russian negotiators and “literally rolling out the red carpet for Putin”, Trump believed he “could reset the bilateral relationship”, said Alexandra Vacroux in the Los Angeles Times. “It did. But not the way Trump intended.”

Last month’s Alaskan summit “convinced the Russians that the current administration is willing to throw the sources of American global power out the window”. At the same time, Putin has positioned Russia at the centre of a new global power alliance, alongside China and India.

The Kremlin has insisted on its own “security guarantees” before laying down arms. These “reflect a list of grievances” that Putin refers to in shorthand as “the root causes” of the war, said The New York Times. They include a guarantee Ukraine will never join Nato, limits on Ukraine's military capabilities and, most contentiously, to be part of any international security guarantees provided to Kyiv, "which analysts have equated with the fox guarding the henhouse”.

Western efforts to craft a security deal for Ukraine without considering the Kremlin’s position make them unlikely to succeed, said Samuel Charap, a Russia expert at RAND Corporation, a security research organisation in Washington.

Putin knows his maximalist demands are unpalatable to Ukraine and many of its allies, but he believes he is slowly winning on the battlefield so has little reason to broker a ceasefire agreement while he still holds out hope of a major breakthrough that will secure Moscow better terms – or even the collapse of Ukraine’s defences.

The alternative, as set out by Kęstutis Budrys, Lithuania’s foreign minister, this morning, is a ramping up of sanctions which “must strike at the heart of the Kremlin's war economy".

“In fact,” said Vacroux, “the Kremlin indicated a readiness to talk with Trump about the war only when Trump threatened very, very powerful’ sanctions in mid-July”.

What next?

Amid “frustration within the White House at the difficulty of brokering a peace deal” – and perhaps acknowledging that sanctions may be the quickest way to bring the war to an end – the Financial Times reported Trump has made an “extraordinary demand” that the EU follow the US on imposing tariffs on India and China for buying Russian oil and gas.

European capitals have been discussing potential secondary sanctions aimed at escalating economic pressure on Russia, but “many are nervous given the EU’s trade relations with Beijing and New Delhi”.

“It’s a question of, do the Europeans have the political will to bring the war to an end?” one US official said. “Any of these things will of course be costly, and for the president to do it, we need our EU partners and ideally all of our partners with us. And we'll share the pain together.”

Ukraine is thought to be one of the most heavily mined countries in the world – and the problem extends way beyond its own borders.

Landmines not only pose a lethal risk to civilians, they also "block farmland, delay reconstruction and threaten commercial shipping routes", said Decode39. As Ukraine is one of the world's leading exporters of corn and wheat, many nations are urgently considering how to help demine the nation after the war ends.

What is the scale of the problem?

Long before Russia invaded in 2022, it had planted mines in Ukrainian territory. Now, a quarter of Ukraine is thought to be contaminated with explosives, said the Institute for International Political Studies – that's an area larger than England. In the past 1,000 days, more than two million landmines have been scattered on Ukrainian territory, said the US Center for European Policy Analysis.

More than six million people live in or near these hazardous areas. Incidents involving mines happen so often that "some residents don't even bother reporting them", said The Guardian. Russian drones scatter mines over the country, and retreating Russian soldiers use them to "turn the civilian roads into death traps".

More than 1,000 people have been injured and 359 killed by mines since the start of the war, according to Ukraine's emergency service. That includes at least 18 children.

What's being done about it?

Ukraine's National Mine Action Centre has produced a map that highlights areas confirmed as hazardous, or suspected of being hazardous, said Bellingcat, as well as areas that have been cleared. The information is "collated from over 80 demining groups".

The Mines Advisory Group, a UK-based charity, has been helping demine Ukraine since 2022, removing what it calls the "contamination" of war. There are "an awful lot of unexploded shells, rockets, grenades, mortars from the fighting," UN mining expert Paul Heslop told The Guardian. We are "looking at a level of complexity, of scale, that we just haven't seen before".

The Halo Trust, with 1,500 staff in Ukraine, is also helping, scrutinising satellite and drone imagery to identify pockets of landmines and explosives, and using AI algorithms to aid the search. But most of the work is still being done on the ground.

Before 2022, only men could work in explosive disposal in Ukraine, but since so many men have been drafted, it's now largely female teams checking the land on their knees, often in high heat and heavy gear. It's "like gardening on steroids", the Mines Advisory Group's Jon Cunliffe, told Prospect magazine. The teams also use specially trained dogs to sniff out TNT; each animal can cover up to 1,500 sq metres a day.

How long will it take to demine Ukraine?

"It is a staggering task," said Prospect. It will take "decades at least" to remove all the landmines from Ukraine. The Ukrainian Association of Humanitarian Demining estimates about 30 years, said Euronews, but it depends how long the war continues. "One day of war is about 30 days of demining," said one expert.

Many contaminated areas are on the front lines, making them impossible to assess, while some mines or unexploded shells are on private land or even in water. The Black Sea, for example, is littered with naval mines. Ukraine has regularly accused Russia of dropping mines from aircraft in "an attempt to disrupt commercial shipping", said RadioFreeEurope.

Since 2022, donors have pledged more than $1 billion (£744 million) for humanitarian demining, according to The Odessa Journal. But the World Bank estimates the total cost of demining Ukraine at $37 billion (£28 billion).

Are mines returning to Europe?

This summer, Ukraine announced its intention to leave the Ottowa Treaty, a landmark agreement banning anti-personnel landmines. Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have also withdrawn, blaming threats from neighbouring Russia.

The "indiscriminate nature of anti-personnel landmines" is why they were banned back in 1999, said Prospect. It was a "huge victory" that led to a 95% reduction in landmine casualties in just 15 years. That's why Ukraine's decision to "suspend" its obligations has been "met with such confusion" and "international outrage". "But for many Ukrainians, the answer is simple: Russia."

Russia, along with the US and China, never signed the treaty. As signatory states were destroying their stockpiles, Russia was "busily producing more landmines than any other country in the world", said The Telegraph, "amassing over 26 million by 2024". Now, Nato countries bordering Russia have decided that deterring invasion "requires a defensive measure that would once have been inconceivable". From the north of Finland down to eastern Poland, a "new and explosive iron curtain is about to descend across Europe".

European countries are working with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on proposed "security guarantees" to protect any future peace deal, measures that Donald Trump has suggested he will support after the historic White House meeting earlier this week.

There is a "wide spectrum" of what this could mean in practice, said the BBC, and a "big question mark" remains over what guarantees Russia will be willing to accept.

What did the commentators say?

The "inherent contradiction" of any security guarantees is that they must be "robust enough" to deter Russia from a future attack, but "not so robust" that Russia refuses to accept them and "threatens to target Western assets" in Ukraine, said the BBC. "Nobody wants to start World War Three."

Trump has ruled out Nato membership for Ukraine and US boots on the ground, but Europe still hopes that Washington will agree to provide logistics and intelligence, and a backstop of military air support if Russia were to renege on any peace deal.

Even for Europe, "I don't think boots on the ground is a credible answer", military analyst Sean Bell told Sky News. Policing the 600-mile border would require 100,000 soldiers at a time and a force of 300,000 to allow for training and rotations. The entire UK army would only make up 10% of that, with France likely to be able to contribute a further 10%.

It's unclear what Putin and Trump agreed at the Alaska summit but the White House claimed Russia had accepted "Nato-style protection" for Ukraine. US special envoy Steve Witkoff described the security guarantees that Putin had accepted as "Article 5-like", referring to Nato's mutual defence clause.

Keir Starmer said the coalition of the willing is "preparing for the deployment of a reassurance force" in the event of "hostilities ending". In practice, that is likely to involve "protecting Ukraine from the skies and sea" and helping to train and replenish its depleted armed forces – or an agreement "with only the threat of military involvement once any deal is breached", said The Times.

What next?

The question remains: how would the coalition respond if its forces were attacked or Russia re-invaded?

"A formal pledge to fight Russia would amount to Article 5 by other means", while a "vague mandate" might "tempt Russia to test European resolve", said The Economist. France's President Emmanuel Macron said the ultimate guarantee would be the strengthening of Ukraine's own – currently much beleaguered – armed forces and thus Russia should not be allowed to impose limits on the size or capability of those forces in a peace deal.

But Kyiv and Moscow's positions remain far apart on territory, said The Economist, and the "Trumpian vision of a peace deal" relies on Russia agreeing to security guarantees for Ukraine, "a state it denies exists".

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 131.
Mark Galeotti is the author of Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, published by Osprey and out in paperback now

For all that he can scarcely walk past a tank or a fighter jet without a photo opportunity of him peering out of the cupola or ensconced in the cockpit, Vladimir Putin is no soldier.

He did his bare minimum reserve officer training at university, being assigned a technical rank of lieutenant, but abandoned it as soon as he could. He shows little sign of understanding the realities of warfare, from strategy and tactics to the unavoidable necessities of logistics.

This is something even Russian soldiers – even before the current war in Ukraine – uncomfortably acknowledge. Once, I was talking to a couple of officers, and when we had got past their inevitable wariness at talking to a Westerner (some drinks helped) it became clear that they had a complex attitude towards their commander-in-chief: at once respecting him as a strong and capable national leader, but at the same time unconvinced he truly understood warfare.

The irony is that, for all but three of the 25 years Putin has now directly and indirectly ruled Russia, he has been at war, declared or undeclared, domestic or foreign. Most of these wars were, in one way or another, victories, especially because they were limited in scale and objectives.

Nonetheless, it seems clear that the lessons Putin derived from them, sometimes accurate but often deeply mistaken, led him to his fateful decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022, and shaped his thinking as to how that should best be done.

The Second Chechen War: 1999 – 2009

When Putin first came to power, the challenge was to fight a domestic war with what he had at his disposal, after at least 20 years of catastrophic military decline. The rebellious Chechen people of southern Russia had in essence fought Moscow to a draw in the First Chechen War (1994-96), and even while still prime minister and president-in-waiting in 1999, Putin was determined to address this challenge.

In September 1999, a series of explosions in apartment buildings across Russia killed more than 300 people. The Chechens were blamed, and this was used to justify a renewed campaign. In October, Russian troops crossed the Chechen border, in a war that would be the making of Putin's reputation as a tough, ruthless and indomitable leader.

Unlike the previous war, the Second Chechen War was backed by massive force, supported by a comprehensive information campaign to justify its brutal methods, and also drew on Chechens willing to fight for Moscow.

This was an ugly conflict, even by the standards of civil wars. The Chechen capital, Grozny, was flattened. Chechen men were rounded up for infamous 'filtration camps', The official death toll was 5,200 Russian soldiers and police and over 16,000 rebels, but estimates of the civilian casualties range from 30,000-80,000.

Nonetheless, Moscow had demonstrated that it had the will and ability to keep its provinces in line. Most importantly, Putin felt he had proven not just that the Russian bear still had its claws, but that the ruthless use of force worked.

So long as he kept hostile journalists out and pitched this as simply a policing action against terrorists and jihadists, then his people would be happy and the West would do little but complain, and wring its hands when Russia presented it with a fait accompli.

The Georgian War: 2008

Chechnya, though, was at least legally part of the Russian Federation. What would happen when Moscow launched an operation abroad? Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili had long been a thorn in Putin's side, with his vehement anti-Russian rhetoric and his eager courtship of NATO.

To Putin – at the time technically just the prime minister, not the president, but still the undisputed master of Russia – Georgia needed to be reminded that it was part of Moscow's sphere of interest, not least to provide a warning to other neighbouring states thinking of challenging the self-proclaimed regional hegemon.

Two break-away regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, would be the pretext. Saakashvili was provoked into attacking South Ossetia, Moscow denounced this as an act of aggression and invaded, pushing government forces out of the break-away regions.

From Putin's point of view, this was another triumph. His personal bête noire Saakashvili was humbled and Georgia's drift towards the West halted. He seemed less than concerned with the details, which were rather more mixed.

Of course, Russia was always going to be able to beat tiny Georgia, whose total military amounted to just 30,000 troops, of whom many of the best were serving in the multinational force in Iraq.

However, it turned out not to have been as easy as anticipated, with the Russian offensive dogged by blunders. Half its aircraft losses were to friendly fire incidents, for example, and generals found themselves having to borrow journalists' satellite phones to give orders.

That said, this gave then-Defence Minister Serdyukov and his Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Makarov the opportunity finally to force serious reform on the conservative generals. It was seriously overdue: only 17 percent of the Ground Forces and 3 percent of the Air Force's regiments were combat ready and half the Navy's ships were not seaworthy.

The so-called 'New Look' reforms were meant to create more capable, mobile, flexible and professional forces based on smaller brigades and battalion tactical groups rather than the old divisions. This entailed shrinking the total armed forces by 130,000 men, especially by pruning the top-heavy officer corps (one in three were dismissed), while increasing the proportion of volunteer kontraktniki to conscripts.

These reforms, ironically, possibly even undermined Russia’s capacity to fight a mass war, geared as they were to generating forces able to deploy in small-scale interventions. Many of the reforms have been subsequently reversed since the invasion of Ukraine.

Crimea and Syria: 2014-15

Under Serdyukov and his successor, Sergei Shoigu, real progress was made. However, it was at best partial. In effect, by 2014 Russia had two armies: one which had been quite successfully reformed, largely comprising the special forces and other elite units, and a rump that was still quite some way from the 'New Look' ideal.

Nonetheless, this was enough for the seizure of Crimea following Ukraine's 'Revolution of Dignity' at the start of 2014.

The Crimean Peninsula was strategically and politically crucial to Putin: home of the Black Sea Fleet and something almost every one of his subjects considered rightly theirs (it had been Russian until 1954).

When Kyiv was taken over by a new government keen on getting closer to the West, Putin decided that Crimea ought to be 'returned' and what followed was a textbook military operation. The so-called 'little green men' – Russian special forces – took over the peninsula almost without a shot being fired and it was then annexed.

One would have been hard-pressed to imagine more propitious conditions for such a coup de main: the Ukrainian military was in disarray, the new government was weak, the West did not want a confrontation, and thousands of Russian troops were already present on the peninsula.

It was a genuine triumph, but it was not a true test of the whole Russian military machine. Nonetheless, Putin was to gain an exaggerated sense of Russia's military capabilities, not fully appreciating just how unusual the circumstances were and how far its small scope required the deployment of just the best of the best.

Much the same could be said of the military deployment in Syria from 2015. Faced with the risk that Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime could fall to popular revolt, and also eager to hit back against a West that was trying politically to isolate Russia since its Crimean annexation, Moscow decided on a limited intervention.

In September 2015, Russian combat aircraft flew to their new base at Khmeimim in Syria, in the start of an operation that would see the ruthless use of air power, mercenaries and special forces to secure the regime.

While Syria was the most asymmetric of conflicts, where Russian air power was virtually unchallenged and where the enemy was divided, a militarily prepared and unified Ukraine was able to deny air superiority to its enemy.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 131. Subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

Forged In War by Mark Galeotti, published by Osprey, is on sale now

Keir Starmer's Brexit reset took in another European superpower this week as the UK and Germany signed their first treaty since they fought each other in the Second World War.

Signed in London's Victoria & Albert Museum, in homage to the historic relationship, the Treaty on Friendship and Bilateral Cooperation highlights the need for greater collaboration in the face of rising threats, particularly from Russia.

The so-called Kensington Treaty shows Germany and the UK are "really on the way to a new chapter", said Friedrich Merz, who was visiting London for the first time since becoming German chancellor. Keir Starmer described it as a "historic document" that "measures just how close our countries are" at a time of "real volatility in the world".

What did the commentators say?

It wasn't quite "le bromance" of Emmanuel Macron's state visit to Britain last week, said The Guardian's John Crace. But this was "equally significant": a "coming of age" and "a relationship of equals with no place for tabloid stereotypes".

"Flying around are a lot of big claims" about a "ground-breaking" agreement, said the BBC. But the 23-page treaty broadly lives up to the "hyperbole".

Some of its contents aren't new: the promise to defend each other from attack comes under Nato commitments; Germany had already agreed to change its laws to "make it easier to seize boats" used by people-smugglers; the EU had already agreed to open more countries' e-gates to British travellers.

But the treaty also has "practical consequences": more cooperation in defence, including joint military drills; strengthened trade; exports of jointly produced weapons to third countries; cooperation on science; and "joint green energy projects in the North Sea".

More importantly, the treaty sets up annual meetings of ministers to coordinate policies, and a meeting every two years between the countries' leaders. "That sounds like dry stuff", but "it sends important signals" about "shared priorities and shared intent".

The treaty also commits Germany and the UK to deeper cooperation with France, said Politico, "formalising the so-called 'triangle alliance' for the first time".

The three are already partners through Nato and the G7, but Nato is a "sprawling" bureaucracy representing 32 countries that often disagree, said The New York Times. Berlin, London and Paris are "eager for a smaller, more nimble group" to respond to the "shift in the relationship" between Europe and the US.

Analysts say they are creating a kind of "break glass in case of emergency" system of planning and action, ready to react to an "increasingly aggressive Russia". If Donald Trump "continues to back away from American commitments on the continent, having that option might become necessary".

"This is literally all the kids coming together and trying to figure out what to do about the drunk dad," said Minna Alander, from the Center for European Policy Analysis.

"Rattled" by Trump's "cavalier treatment of Ukraine", Germany is "seeking a second nuclear blanket", said The Times. Britain and France are "deepening nuclear cooperation", and Merz "wants to join the party". Despite its stagnant economy, Germany is "on a defence spending spree"; some of that cash could well be heading towards British arms industries, given their expertise in nuclear.

Germany is once again on a path to building Europe's "most formidable army", said The Telegraph's David Blair. But I wonder if Starmer has really "grasped the full significance" of that? Britain's "privileged influence in Nato" has been based on having Europe's biggest defence budget. But last year, Germany overtook Britain on defence spending, committing 20% more than the UK. Its economy might be stagnant, but it's 40% bigger than Britain's; the spending gap "will almost certainly grow wider."

This will "inevitably lead to a reduction" of Britain's sway within Nato. Despite all the "bonhomie", don't forget Starmer is "conceding influence" to Merz.

What next?

"We will enable visa-free school group travel between the UK and Germany" by the end of 2025, a senior German official told The Guardian.

The treaty also includes an agreement for a new direct train link between London and Berlin. Next week, Macron will visit Merz in Berlin, and the so-called "coalition of the willing" that Britain, France and Germany lead to support Ukraine against Russia will soon get a formal headquarters in Paris.

The so-called E3 alliance of France, Germany and the UK "has the potential to bridge Nato and EU initiatives", and tie European security together, said Chatham House. But to do so it "needs to branch out to Poland and other European partners" across Nato. "It cannot by itself cover the gaps between the EU and Nato that were created by Brexit."

Details of a multibillion-pound Afghan resettlement scheme sparked by a major data breach have finally been revealed – after an unprecedented 600-day super-injunction against the media and parliament was lifted.

What was leaked?

The names, phone numbers and email addresses of around 25,000 Afghans who had applied for relocation to the UK following the Taliban takeover were accidentally released by a British soldier in February 2022. The names included many who had worked closely with UK forces previously deployed to Afghanistan.

The massive data breach was not discovered until August 2023, when screenshots of part of the spreadsheet were anonymously posted online, with a threat to disclose the entire database. It is thought the whole list had been sold, at least once, for a five-figure sum.

Assessment by British intelligence concluded that the breach had put the Afghans and their family members at risk of murder, torture, harassment and intimidation by the Taliban.

The leak is a "national embarrassment", said The Spectator, while The Telegraph called it "unforgivable".

How did the government react?

"What the government did next – and how quickly – was a matter of life and death," said The Times.

Within days, a "top-secret mission to keep the list out of the hands of the Taliban and bring those deemed to be most at risk to the UK, without them knowing why" was under way.

Operation Rubific eventually saw thousands of Afghans relocated to the UK, at a cost of billions of pounds to the taxpayer, in the "biggest covert evacuation operation in peacetime", said The Spectator.

At the same time, a High Court super-injunction prevented the public, media and even Parliament from finding out about the data breach and relocation operation for nearly two years. This was "unprecedented", said London's The Standard. It's thought to be the "first time the Government has sought such an order against the media" and the first made "against the world", rather than a handful of named media outlets or third parties.

Defence Secretary John Healey told the House of Commons on Tuesday that ministers "decided not to tell parliamentarians" about the breach as the "widespread publicity would increase the risk of the Taliban obtaining the data set". He had, however, been "deeply concerned about the lack of transparency".

What was the cost?

Despite the widely reported £7 billion bill for the operation, Ministry of Defence officials insist the direct cost was only ever estimated at around £2 billion. The final bill is expected to be "much lower because the number of eligible Afghans had been reduced", said the Financial Times. So far, around 18,500 people affected have been resettled in Britain, but "most were already eligible under an existing pathway", according to defence officials.

Nevertheless, the revelations "come at a time when Britain's public finances are under heavy strain".

It's also emerged that civil servants had warned the High Court of the risk of "public disorder" when news of the relocation plan finally emerged. And Larisa Brown, the defence editor of The Times, told the presiding judge in that, if made public, it could become an issue in the 2024 election.

In the end, there will probably be lasting damage to public trust and the UK's image abroad, said Afghan veteran Hamish de Bretton-Gordon in The Telegraph. "We cannot turn the clock back, but we can ensure that, in the future, mistakes like these are not repeated. For the sake of our allies and our international good standing, negligence of this kind cannot be tolerated."

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 138.

The Kinmen Islands is a small Taiwanese territory located a few miles off the coast of mainland China, in Xiamen Bay. The largest island is encircled by a sandy shoreline and studded by rocks. The island is 93 miles (150km) away from the Taiwan main island (formerly called Formosa), but being so close to the Fujian coast of mainland China it has historically been within range of communist artillery batteries and surveillance.

The close proximity of the Kinmen Islands to mainland China has placed it on the frontline of several conflicts between the People's Republic and the Republic of China, meaning it could be the target of any future Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

First attack on the Kinmen Islands

In 1949, Republic of China leader Chiang Kai-shek retreated his forces to the island of Formosa (the Chinese name Taiwan was rarely used at this time) after being forced to withdraw from the mainland by the communist offensive.

The defence of Formosa required a perimeter in the form of the offshore islands. Most precarious among these was the fishing community that inhabited Quemoy, or Kinmen.

Since 1948 the reeling Nationalists planned, albeit in haphazard fashion, on withdrawing from the mainland and to scatter their army's veteran divisions among China's coastal or offshore islands. By April the following year it was reported that nearly two million Nationalist soldiers and civilians had evacuated to Formosa.

When the new Communist rulers in Peking (Beijing) declared the People's Republic in October 1949, Mao Zedong was determined to quash every last vestige of the defeated Kuomintang (KMT).

With its ranks numbering in the millions, the People's Liberation Army had its orders and remained on the offensive. The Battle of Guningtou on Kinmen spanned the last weeks of October and was underway once communist troops had occupied Xiamen, the island barely 2.5 miles (4km) from Kinmen.

On 22 October it was believed at least two infantry divisions were prepared for a crossing. By the reckoning of the nationalists this force numbered at least 20,000 Communist soldiers. The amphibious operation was underway from 24 October unpredictable fighting lasted until 28 October.

Contrary to the myth of their limited skill at naval warfare, the Communists reached the shore unopposed and assaulted a spit of rock-strewn beach on the island's northern shore: this was Guningtou.

How the battle unfolded on the first day is poorly recorded, although it's known that the nationalists were caught by surprise and initially put up a feeble defence with just machine guns. The communists took appalling losses but, undeterred, moved inland on foot. The close-quarters fighting dragged on until the next day, when artillery from the Chinese coast hammered the defending KMT troops.

Less is known about the communist forces than the nationalists, who were led by trusted veterans of the KMT armed forces such as Chiang Wei-kuo, the adopted son of the dictator Chiang Kai-shek. As an officer in the Nationalist army who had trained in Germany and commanded a tank unit, he utilised what little armour could be mustered to scatter the Communists.

Another stalwart who joined the battle was no less than General Hu Lien, who had served the KMT since the 1930s and had arrived on the second day of hostilities. Communist troops had almost overrun the village of Guningtou and were halted by the timely appearance of Lien's 12th Brigade.

The balance of manpower between the communists and nationalists at Guningtou makes for a baffling assessment as both sides had troops to spare. What decided the outcome were tanks and bomber aircraft, neither of which the Communists could bring to the theatre.

In the case of the nationalists these were outdated American-made M5A1 Stuart tanks commanded by Chiang Wei-kuo. Even Wei-kuo's half brother, Chiang Ching-kuo, had a role in the fighting, although this was obscured for the sake of his political career. Having spent his formative years in the Soviet Union as a de facto hostage, he returned to China with a Russian wife and was given a suitable rank in the army.

To their credit the Chiang brothers had a profound influence preparing the offshore islands against fresh invasion attempts and the work continued after 1951 when American advisers were embedded with Nationalist units.

According to Taiwanese accounts the Battle of Guningtou lasted 56 hours. Both sides suffered appalling losses, with the communists coming off worse; their entire invasion force was decimated and some 10,000 stragglers surrendered.

The nationalists' remaining light bombers, flying in from airstrips 60 miles (100km) away, helped scatter the enemy and prevent their evacuation attempts.

For decades this attempted communist landing, memorialised by the KMT regime in Taiwan, was ignored by the Western press and only considered a smaller clash in the long struggle for Kinmen and the offshore islands.

When it was finally immortalised by Taiwan's press as a lasting victory against communism it served to bookend the defeat suffered in the mainland and raise a new 'origin story' for local heroism against invasion. It was a narrative that was acceptable for a Taiwanese citizenry fed with constant warnings about the mainland's designs on their way of life.

American intervention

During the 1950s the Taiwan Strait became the Cold War's deadliest flashpoint and a potential theatre for a nuclear showdown. Since 1949, when the Kuomintang (KMT) retreated to Formosa (Taiwan) and other offshore islands, the communists in Beijing slowly overwhelmed these garrisons. The greatest prize was the capture of sprawling Hainan in 1950 just months before one million Chinese troops, dubbed 'people's volunteers', attacked UN forces in Korea.

By 1951 President Harry S Truman's administration pivoted back to supporting the KMT after its abandonment in the late 1940s. The cherry on top was assigning the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet to sail its aircraft carriers across the strait separating the main island of Formosa from the Chinese coast, which effectively blocked any invasion attempt.

The Truman administration, then the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration later on, maintained a pro-KMT stance with the caveat that fighting would not embroil U.S. air and naval assets in Japan and the Philippines. But this is exactly what happened in the final months of 1954 when Beijing moved its forces from Korea to the coastal southern provinces.

The rationale from their perspective was clear: since 1949 KMT-backed 'guerrillas' – smuggling rings in the offshore islands such as Kinmen – had been blockading China's port cities. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) struck on 5 September with a bombardment of Formosa's island chain: the Kinmen and Matsu clusters. The Dachen, or Tachen Islands, located some 250 miles (400km) from the Taiwan coast, were pummelled into submission.

By January 1955 dozens of U.S. Navy ships organised as Task Force 502 evacuated 30,000 soldiers and civilians from the Dachens in the most brazen American intervention yet. The risk of a crossing by PLA divisions on boats panicked Taipei and the ageing Chiang Kai-shek wanted immediate American reinforcements.

A subtler approach prevailed. In a matter of weeks the superior air and naval resources of the U.S. military reinforced the Kinmen garrison with fresh artillery rounds for 6.1in (155mm) M1 Long Tom and M114 howitzers. A rare gift of the U.S. Army to their Formosan allies were divisional 8in (203mm) howitzers that had the range for hitting mainland China if they were positioned in concrete forts on the Matsus.

Over the years hundreds of U.S. advisers under the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) relocated to Taiwan. The risk to Americans embedded with KMT command staff meant there had to be strict guidelines on decision-making, so the Eisenhower administration wrung a promise from Chiang Kai-shek: there would be no attempts at a counter-invasion on the mainland in order to avoid starting World War III.

What became the First Taiwan Strait Crisis (1954-55) was portrayed by the global press as a high-risk skirmish that ebbed as a result of decisive American intervention. But neither Taipei or Beijing de-escalated in the ensuing years. Both sides grew their militaries, with the KMT fielding between 400,000 to 600,000 troops in its army, including airborne and marine units patterned after their American equivalents.

The remaining offshore islands, Kinmen and the tiny Matsu cluster, were reinforced with tunnel complexes and artillery. Constant surveillance and close calls with enemy aircraft were ever-present. A Mutual Defence Treaty and other obligations allowed the U.S. to deliver hundreds of brand new aircraft, including jets, to Taiwan's Republic of China Air Force.

By the summer of 1958 the intelligence from the Chinese coast set Taipei and Washington, D.C. on edge. The PLA was assessed to have collected almost 200,000 troops and hundreds of artillery pieces in Fujian for an upcoming operation. Its navy had grown by leaps and bounds with new gunboats armed with torpedoes.

Even more troubling was the rise of its air force, with 1,000 new Soviet fighters – the MiG-15 and MiG-17 – and the Ilyushin-28 medium-range bomber. Matters got out of hand once again on 23 August 1958 when coastal batteries hammered Kinmen with 40,000 shells inside 24 hours.

A shaken and injured Defence Minister Yu Ta-wei returned from Kinmen and met with the international press to make Taiwan's case: Beijing was ready to launch a full-scale assault. The 7th Fleet performed its usual mission reinforcing the islands while the ROC Air Force tangled with its rival on the mainland using air-to-air missiles. This time around the pinnacle of U.S. military technology was lavished on Taiwan.

The non-stop shelling of the Kinmen islands lasted 44 days, with the 7th Fleet taking pains to avoid getting within howitzer range as it escorted the resupply missions, while the sky buzzed with Taiwanese Saber jets. Aerial clashes with Chinese MiGs began at the start of August and lasted two months (the Cold War's first dog fights involving air-to-air missiles). The siege was lifted by October, but the circumstances remain debatable.

Did Beijing hesitate and order a cessation when its army began to run low on artillery shells? Or did the implied threat of nuclear attacks on Chinese airfields serve as enough warning from the Americans? After all, the deployment of Matador cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads on a Taiwanese air base was a poorly kept secret.

Other contingencies involved tactical nuclear warheads for 8in (203mm) howitzers and the arming the Honest John rockets destined for Taiwan with the same. The PLA continued raining artillery shells on the Kinmen islands. When President Eisenhower visited Taipei in June 1960 the PLA signalled its displeasure with 86,000 shells on Kinmen.

The pattern continued every week, albeit with fewer shells and on select days, for two decades. But the Eisenhower administration encapsulated the Taiwan Strait crises as separate campaigns of Chinese aggression.

The truth was more complicated as the two regimes that once fought a civil war on the mainland continued their struggle in the nuclear age with the world's most advanced technology. But the course of history, as always, took unexpected turns in the following decades.

By the 1960s the Chinese mastered nuclear weapons and secret diplomacy was carried out with the Americans in the years after. On 1 January 1979 the bombardment of the Kinmen islands stopped as Beijing and Washington, DC entered a new era of economic co-operation.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 112. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

"The war ends. The landmine goes on killing," said Jody Williams, who led the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, in her 1997 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

The Ottawa Treaty signed that year banned the use of anti-personnel landmines as well as the ability to "develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, anti-personnel mines". It has since been ratified by 160 countries, but not by the US, China or, crucially, Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has announced his intention to withdraw from the convention, following similar decisions by Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

What did the commentators say?

It is no coincidence that these countries together guard 2,150 miles of Nato's frontier with Russia and its client state of Belarus.

In the three years since the invasion of Ukraine, they have all made "significant investments to better secure these borders, for example with fences and surveillance systems", said DW. "Now, a new plan is in the works: landmines."

The Telegraph's chief foreign affairs commentator David Blair has reported plans to build a "new 'Iron Curtain' – with millions of landmines".

"Banning them might have been a luxury cause for a dominant West in the years of safety after the Cold War, yet no longer." Now, "as Europe re-arms to deter Putin, what was once unconscionable has become unavoidable".

For Zelenskyy, whose country is already at war and now the "most mined" in the world, according to Euronews, withdrawing from the convention will help level the situation on the battlefield. The Kremlin has by far the world's largest stockpile of anti-personnel mines, with an estimated 26 million, and has used them with "utmost cynicism in Ukrainian territory, he said. The problem, said Zelenskyy, is that anti-personnel mines are "often the instrument for which nothing can be substituted for defence purposes".

Small explosive devices designed to detonate under a person's weight, "they are attractive to militaries because they can block an enemy advance, channel forces into kill zones and protect defensive positions," said The Times. They are also a "serious threat to civilians, often remaining lethal for decades after a conflict has ended".

What next?

The timing of the departures is "related to threat assessments shared by Nato countries", said Al Jazeera.

"Liberal-democratic" states across northern Europe "are in agreement", defence expert Francis Tusa said in The Independent: if Kyiv "loses its struggle against Russia, the latter may be emboldened to take military action against the Baltic states, Finland, or even Poland".

Many defence specialists agree the timeline for this is "within three to five years", making the need to prepare for a potential Russian invasion with all the tools available a priority for those on the frontline.

But anti-landmine campaigners "worry this is part of a larger trend, with the rules of war and international humanitarian norms being eroded more broadly", said The Irish Times.

In the context of conflict and geopolitical tension escalating around the world "it is impossible not to feel that we are going backwards, seeing threats to the international rules-based order, and most importantly to the frameworks that have long been in place to protect civilians", said Josephine Dresner, director of policy with the Mines Advisory Group.

"Daddy has to sometimes use strong language."

That was the Nato's Secretary General Mark Rutte's assessment of Donald Trump's expletive-laden criticism yesterday of Israel and Iran, with Rutte's obsequious language a hallmark of today's Nato summit where the US president was pandered to at every turn, but at what cost?

It was an "extraordinary spectacle" at the summit, Lewis Goodall posted on X. Trump isn't being treated by Rutte and fellow world leaders now as a partner or equal, "but rather a sort of world king with themselves relegated as courtiers".

What did the commentators say?

Nato leaders were "flattering, toadying, buying into Trump's frequent nonsenses and half-truths and treating him as something different than before, because he is", said Goodall. "It's reflective of their weakness, and Trump's strength."

In one sense it appears to have worked, with Donald Trump telling ​​reporters "we're with them all the way" when it comes to Article 5, despite earlier casting doubt on his commitment to the alliance's mutual defence guarantees.

Rutte "designed this summit around Trump", said BBC Europe editor Katya Adler. To "flatter him" he has managed to build consensus amongst members for "massive hikes in defence spending, to show that Europeans would now take more responsibility for their own security".

On the big takeaway from the summit – the commitment for Nato countries to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 – Trump can rightly claim victory.

On this, at least, he is correct that "Europe needs to become more self-sufficient", said The Washington Post. Though the US commitment to the alliance "should remain iron-clad, Washington must also make major investments in other theatres", as the recent strike on Iran and rising threat of China has shown.

What next?

But for all of Trump's chutzpah the biggest issue facing Nato – Ukraine – remains unresolved. In the final declaration of the summit, there is no mention of Russian aggression in Ukraine.

It is telling that, unlike previous summits, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was also not invited to the closed-door leaders' session.

The lack of further concrete commitments will no doubt be "disappointing" for Ukraine, Jamie Shea, a former Nato spokesperson and deputy assistant secretary general, told The Guardian, "especially as most allies would have wanted much stronger language on support, the open door for Ukraine's Nato membership and a clearer path on sanctions against Russia".

What the last week has shown "is we're living in a world where the truly special relationship America has under Trump isn't with Nato, it's with Israel", said Goodall. While there is "no doubt Trump would defend Israel when it's under threat", there cannot be the same certainty about Europe.

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has arrived in Moscow, hoping to secure a tangible show of support from one of his country's most important international allies.

As Vladimir Putin weighs up how to respond to escalating tensions in the Middle East, the answer will come down to "what is stronger", said Euronews: "the desire to make money on expensive oil and divert the world's attention from Moscow’s war on Ukraine or the fear of losing the ties and contracts built up over the years in the region".

What did the commentators say?

"On the surface, at least, Moscow is fuming" on Tehran's behalf, said Sky News. Russia's foreign ministry has said it "strongly condemns" US air strikes on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, with former president Dmitry Medvedev accusing Donald Trump of starting "a new war" in the region.

But this response still "feels more show than substance and if things don't escalate further" it's doubtful the Kremlin's indignation will prove "anything more than rhetoric".

While Iran has backed Russia with weapons for its war in Ukraine, "there might be very little Moscow can or will do to reciprocate", said CNBC. Aside from needing to keep military resources back for its own operations, Russia has to "tread a fine line between placating and assisting ally Iran and keeping the US sweet, as it looks to re-establish ties" with the Trump administration.

Putin's aim may be "to play peacemaker, and to turn the situation to his advantage", said Sky News. His immediate task will be to persuade Araghchi to "limit Iran's response to a symbolic one, and to then return to the negotiating table with America". Trump would then be "in his debt" and "the obvious place he'd want that repaid is Ukraine, in the form of withdrawing US support".

What next?

The collapse of the Iranian regime would rob Russia of yet another important ally and foothold in the Middle East, following the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. This would cost the Kremlin influence, as well as lucrative investments and infrastructure projects.

Putin will also be acutely aware of the symbolism – and potential precedent – of successful Western-backed regime change and removal of a long-standing authoritarian leader. But "things are not quite as bad for Moscow as they may seem", said CNN.

A protracted war in the Middle East would distract international attention – and resources – away from Ukraine, and is likely to lead to a surge in oil prices, which would benefit the Russian economy and war machine. The Israel-Iran conflict is also "opening up the taps, as it were, to diplomatic opportunities for a Kremlin that has faced years of international isolation".

The "honest answer", said Mark Galeotti in The Spectator, is that the US decision to attack Iran is an "embarrassment", a "provocation" and an "opportunity" for Russia – "but likely more of an opportunity than anything else, if Moscow is willing to play it cool".

Last Thursday night, the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard's aerospace unit, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, held an emergency meeting at a military base in Tehran.

Hajizadeh and his officials had been warned not to congregate in one place, said Steve Bloomfield in The Observer, owing to the risk of an imminent Israeli attack, but they assumed that any raid would still be days off. It was a fatal miscalculation.

Their bunker was one of dozens of sites targeted that night by Israeli jets, which eviscerated the top ranks of Iran's armed forces and killed some of its leading nuclear experts. Israel has since continued to pummel the country's military and nuclear sites, along with energy infrastructure. Iran has responded by firing ballistic missiles at Israel, a few of which have penetrated its Iron Dome defences, killing dozens of people.

Donald Trump, who had previously stressed that the US was not involved, urged Iranians to evacuate Tehran on Tuesday, and demanded the regime's "unconditional surrender". Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei insisted Iran would never compromise with Israel, and threatened the US with "irreparable damage".

How did Israel plan the attack on Iran?

Israel's strike on Iran's nuclear and missile programmes was years in the planning, said The Times of Israel. The operation – dubbed "Rising Lion" – involved over 200 aircraft in the opening strikes, around two-thirds of the country's combat air force. Israel had spent months smuggling precision weapons systems and commandos into Iran. Mossad agents had set up a secret drone base near Tehran. These assets enabled Israel to take out Iranian air defences and hit missile launchers as they emerged from shelters, protecting Israeli pilots and helping them establish complete dominance of the skies over Iran.

Why did Israel attack now?

The attack was carefully timed by Israel, said Lina Khatib in Prospect. "Never in its history has the Islamic Republic been weaker." Its proxy forces in Gaza and Lebanon – Hamas and Hezbollah – have both been defanged, and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria has deprived it of a key ally. Even before last week, its air defences were in a parlous state owing to earlier Israeli strikes.

Trump had set a 60-day deadline for Iran to accept a nuclear deal presented by the US. That ran out last Thursday, giving Israel a perfect "opportunity to go for the jugular". "Ever the opportunist", Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu seized his chance, said The Guardian. He has long wanted to attack Iran, and doing so now had the added bonus of bolstering his weak position at home. You can hardly blame Netanyahu for wanting to stop Tehran's "mad mullahs" from getting their hands on a nuclear weapon, said Paul Baldwin in the Daily Express. "Handwringers" like Keir Starmer may witter about the need for de-escalation, but "they all know Israel has done them and the world a favour".

Will Israel succeed?

Israel may have felt that it had no choice but to act, said The Economist, but the all-out offensive is nevertheless "a huge gamble". Launched without overt US backing, it could have all sorts of unpredictable regional and global consequences. And there's no guarantee that it will even succeed. Israeli military strikes did manage to halt the nuclear weapons programmes of both Iraq and Syria – in 1981 and 2007 respectively – but Iran's is "much more advanced and dispersed than those ever were".

It has mastered the process of enrichment and its programme may just start again in the future in a more "virulent" form. In the meantime, Israel has no clear exit strategy from this war unless the Iranian regime falls or the US gets involved with its superior bunker-busting bombs. A protracted conflict will be hard for either side to sustain, said James Shotter in the FT. While Iran is burning through its supplies of missiles, Israel's stocks of interceptors are also limited.

What will happen next?

One possibility, said Michael Burleigh in The i Paper, is that Tehran, after some face-saving strikes on Israel, accepts defeat and returns to the negotiating table with the US.

Alternatively, it may lash out in desperation and seek to block the Straits of Hormuz, choking global trade. But the conflict may just drag on at a lower level, in a "tit-for-tat forever war".

Many in Washington fear that Trump may, as he has hinted, join the bombing campaign in an effort to kill off Iran's nuclear programme once and for all, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. It would be a dangerous move. Trump promised to be a peacemaker and cut deals. Only last month, in a speech in Riyadh, he "scorned the idea that outsiders can bring positive change to the Middle East by force". It would be a "supreme irony" if he found himself "dragged into another war for regime change in the Middle East".

The UK's overseas espionage agency will be led by a woman for the first time since its inception 116 years ago.

Blaise Metreweli has been appointed the new head of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, 30 years after Judi Dench played a fictional female MI6 chief in the James Bond films. Metreweli, currently head of technology, a position codenamed "Q", will take over from Richard Moore as the 18th chief – or "C" – when he steps down in the autumn after a five-year term. "C" was known as "M" in Ian Fleming's Bond novels and the films.

Keir Starmer, who interviewed the final two candidates, revealed the 47-year-old Metreweli as the new C: the only member of MI6 staff who is ever publicly named. "The historic appointment of Blaise Metreweli comes at a time when the work of our intelligence services has never been more vital," the prime minister said in a statement.

Who is Blaise Metreweli?

Metreweli, a Cambridge graduate with a 26-year career in intelligence, has been "the internal frontrunner for several years and has been groomed for the top job", said The Times. Colleagues describe her as "astute, intelligent with a streak of toughness".

In her time as the first female Q – one of four director-generals in MI6 – she has "championed under-represented groups", particularly neurodiverse people. She is said to be "very interested in artificial intelligence and its potential role in espionage".

According to the "brief biographical details given in the announcement", said The Guardian, Metreweli studied social anthropology and initially applied to work as a diplomat, before joining MI6 in 1999. She has spent much of her career in operational roles in the Middle East and Europe.

In a 2022 interview with the Financial Times, in which she was quoted under the pseudonym Ada, Metreweli said that being a spy was the only job she'd ever wanted. As a child, she learned a cipher system called pigpen code and used it with her friends to leave notes under flower pots.

A self-confessed "geek", she said that her first job in counter-proliferation gave her the chance to engage with the "really deep science" of nuclear technology, and form "incredibly close relationships" with overseas agents who "were risking their lives to be able to share secrets with us".

"Tall and athletic with cropped blonde hair", Metreweli has "a penchant for large glittering brooches in the shape of insects", said the paper. These "tend to draw anxious looks from industry contacts who suspect a camera or microphone hidden within".

MI6: the 'odd exception'

Metreweli is of Eastern European heritage, but is said to be an excellent Arabic speaker. Her expertise regarding the Middle East will be "particularly relevant given the current conflict between Israel and Iran", said the Financial Times yesterday. But "one of her main challenges" will be managing the agency's "changing relations" with the CIA, amid "diverging security interests" under Donald Trump.

She might find common ground with Gina Haspel, who was appointed the CIA's first female director in 2018.

The "historical paucity of female representation" in senior MI6 roles has also improved; three of the four current director-generals below Moore are women: Metreweli, the head of operations and the head of strategy. But Margaret "Meta" Ramsay, who worked as an intelligence officer until her retirement in the 1990s, said that MI6 was "beginning to be an odd exception among national intelligence agencies" for never having been led by a woman.

MI5, the UK's domestic intelligence agency, has had two female director-generals: Stella Rimington, from 1992 to 1996, and Eliza Manningham-Buller. Metreweli has also worked as a director at MI5, according to Sky News. Of the other main spy agencies, GCHQ is also under the command of a woman for the first time; Anne Keast-Butler took on the role in 2023.

Metreweli said she was "proud and honoured" to be appointed C, and looked forward to continuing her work "alongside the brave officers and agents of MI6 and our many international partners".

As he headed off for this week's G7 summit in Canada, where rapidly growing tensions in the Middle East look set to dominate the agenda, Keir Starmer continued to call for de-escalation between Israel and Iran.

Tit-for-tat strikes are now in their fourth day, with little sign of either side being willing to back down. So "the risk of this operation unleashing an all-out regional war – and one that could even drag in Britain – looks higher than ever", said The Telegraph.

The PM has refused to rule out defending Israel from Iranian strikes, despite a warning from Tehran that doing so could lead to British bases in the region being targeted. A No. 10 spokesperson did, however, say that the UK would not support efforts aimed at regime change in Iran.

What did the commentators say?

The difficulty for the UK is that Israel is "mostly a strategic liability", said The Independent, "but it's also a very close ally in stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon".

"Helping Israel to stop the erratic and malevolent Iranian regime from making an atomic bomb is smart." But "being seen to do so, and protecting Israel against the consequences of its endeavours, is not."

The UK government is "trying to walk a tightrope" in its relations with Israel, said Bloomberg. While keen to "remain aligned with the US on security matters and uphold the UK's backing of Israel against Iranian threats", Starmer also faces "internal pressure" from his own party to take a tougher stance against Israel's actions in Gaza.

Relations between the two countries reached a new low last week after Britain sanctioned two hardline Israeli government ministers for repeatedly "inciting violence against Palestinian communities".

The Foreign Office on Sunday advised Britons against travelling to Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories. It was "one of the UK government's most severe warnings in recent memory", said The Guardian, "reflecting the growing threat to foreign nationals".

At the same time, the UK has also sent additional RAF Typhoon jets and refuelling aircraft to the region in what Chancellor Rachel Reeves called a "precautionary" move. "It does not mean that we are at war," she told Sky News, though she did say the government would act to protect British assets and "potentially" support its allies.

While the UK is "not currently planning to take part in defending Israel from Iranian counter-attacks", said The Telegraph, "Iran's allusion to Western 'supporters' suggests that British military bases in the region could also be considered legitimate targets by Tehran as it draws up plans for retaliation".

What next?

There is still a role Britain can play in the conflict "without risking the reputational damage" of direct military assistance to Israel, said The Independent.

Chief among these would be assisting in the defence of US military assets close to Iran in the Persian Gulf, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman, which are vulnerable to attack. In the event of this, UK intervention could be justified under Article 5 of the Nato treaty.

This would also set a precedent for other conflict hotspots, most notably in Ukraine, while avoiding the "geopolitical dirty linen".

But even if the UK does manage to stay out of direct involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, British citizens could still feel the impact. There are fears that higher oil prices could lead to inflation and increased energy costs – as happened following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Reeves told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg that the government will do "everything in its power" to protect people in the UK from knock-on economic effects of a regional conflict.

Israel appears to be preparing a preemptive military attack on Iran, putting the entire Middle East region on high alert.

An attack by Israel, thought imminent by US and European officials, would derail the ongoing negotiations between Washington and Tehran to phase out Iran's nuclear capabilities.

Iran has threatened to retaliate with a counterattack not only on Israeli targets but also on American military bases in Iraq. "In case of any conflict, the US must leave the region because all its bases are within our range, and we will target all of them," said Iran's Defence Minister General Aziz Nasirzadeh.

What did the commentators say?

Iran's retaliatory plan is an "immediate counterattack" similar to its October 2024 firing of 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, which sent the entire population into bomb shelters, said The Times of Israel.

In a threat to Israel and the US, Tehran has "vowed to unleash an 'unprecedented response'", said Newsweek. A Houthi source also told the news site that the Iran-backed militant group is "at the highest level of preparedness for any possible American escalation" and warned that a broader conflict "will drag the entire region into the abyss of war".

Fear of provoking Iran's allies and proxy forces is a real deterrent to the US. Donald Trump's "America First" policy means he is wary of letting the US get dragged into an uncontained conflict in the Middle East and of seeing his nuclear talks with Iran branded a failure. Last month, Trump said that he had urged Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, not to strike Iran while Washington is pursuing negotiations with the Islamic regime.

But Israel might not be deterred. These threats come after months of rising tensions during which Netanyahu has "pressed Trump to seize on what Israel sees as a moment of Iranian vulnerability", said The New York Times.

The feeling in Israel has been that a unilateral strike on Iran without US support "would be unthinkable", said The Telegraph. Israel appears to have the military capability to undermine Tehran's nuclear programme, but only with US support could they be sure of profoundly damaging it.

The UN nuclear watchdog's board of governors recently found that Iran had broken its non-proliferation agreement for the first time in 20 years and a "damning" report from the International Atomic Energy Agency last week cited a general lack of "co-operation" from Iran and raised concerns over "secret activities and undeclared nuclear material". Those findings put Iran in a weaker position but intelligence chiefs worry that "Trump might still strike a 'soft' deal with Iran that does not guarantee the Jewish state's long-term security – in order to establish his legacy as a peacemaker".

Such a deal might be "weeks away", according to a former Israeli government official quoted by Middle East Eye. There is also "little the US can do to prevent Israel from unilaterally bombing Iran if it chooses to do so". However, Netanyahu would rather "share the political responsibility" of an attack on Iran with the US and will wait while that possibility still exists.

What next?

A sixth round of negotiations between the US and Iran is scheduled for this weekend in Oman but a deal does not appear imminent. President Trump has said that he will not accept any uranium enrichment by Iran, whereas Iran insists that its long-standing nuclear programme is intended only for peaceful purposes.

Trump initiated direct talks with Iran on his trip to the Middle East in May despite opposition from Israel, which remains sceptical of any potential deal with Iran and prefers to continue conducting what Netanyahu's office described as "countless overt and covert operations" to stunt the growth of Iran's nuclear programme.

Critics of the Israeli PM believe he is motivated to remain in a state of crisis to hold together his weakening coalition government until the next election, due by October 2026 at the latest. Most Israelis believe Netanyahu is primarily interested in remaining in power, said The Times of Israel, citing a recent poll. Asked what the PM believes is his main goal, 55% said staying in power, while 36% said returning the Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

Russia is "at war" with the UK, according to a top UK defence expert and former chief adviser to the White House on Russia. "We're in pretty big trouble," Fiona Hill told The Guardian, describing a Britain caught between "the rock" of Vladimir Putin's intransigent Russia and "the hard place" of Donald Trump's unpredictable US.

While there has certainly been no formal declaration of hostilities between London and Moscow, Russia has long been "menacing the UK in various different ways" congruent with a war footing, said Hill. She cited "poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyberattacks and influence operations" with Britain as a target.

Unveiling the government's Strategic Defence Review last week, including a commitment to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, Keir Starmer said that the UK would become "a battle-ready, armour-clad nation". We cannot, he said, "ignore the threat that Russia poses".

What did the commentators say?

It has been "steadily dawning" on the British governments of the past few years that "war is no longer something that only happens to other people a long way away", said Keir Giles in The Independent. MI5 and MI6 have issued blunt warnings about Russia's "staggeringly reckless" acts of sabotage, with MI5 chief Ken McCallum "describing Russia's mission of triggering 'sustained mayhem' on British streets". These destabilisation attempts "have, until now, been isolated pinpricks and test runs across Europe", but "could have devastating effects if delivered in a mass, coordinated fashion".

In December, University of Hull national security professor Robert Dover wrote on The Conversation that "Russia is already at war with the West" and "has been so since its occupation of Crimea in 2014". Then, Putin signalled that he was "prepared to escalate further and threaten wider military conflict" – a warning Nato and Western nations were slow to heed. Countries closest to Russia, such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Lithuania, grasped the threat "most keenly", while it has taken years for the rest of Europe "to understand that they are dealing with a continual escalation".

Neither war with Russia nor a full-scale attack on the UK is "an immediate threat", said Eliot Wilson in The Spectator, but "the international security situation can change very quickly", so failing to prepare "would bear the taint of criminal irresponsibility". The UK's renewed commitment to defence spending puts it in "good company" with Nato allies such as Poland and Germany, who are "aiming to transform their militaries to meet the challenge presented by Russia", said NPR.

British people "might reasonably ask why Russia would attack them at home", said The Independent's Giles. One answer is the "very real sense in which the UK has been a problem for Russia", with Britain leading the charge in galvanising "European and even American resolve to support Kyiv, pouring weapons into the country when others had written off Ukraine's chances of survival".

What next?

For its part, Russia has denied any overt or covert attacks on the UK, and has criticised what it calls "a fresh salvo of anti-Russian rhetoric" in the government's defence review.

"Russia poses no threat to the United Kingdom and its people", said a statement from the Russian embassy in London. "We harbour no aggressive intentions and have no plans to attack Britain. We are not interested in doing so, nor do we need to."

Keir Starmer has finally unveiled his long-awaited Strategic Defence Review but there are already questions about how much it will really achieve, and when.

The 130-page report of the review, led by former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson, sets out the UK's defence strategy for the next decade. It calls for a move to a "war-fighting readiness" and the creation of a "defence dividend", using security investment to drive growth. Facilitating this will be a move to a "New Hybrid Navy", combining aircraft, drones, warships and 12 new nuclear-powered attack submarines, a "10-times more lethal army" and a "next generation RAF", among a host of other recommendations.

It is a "plan for transformation", Defence Secretary John Healey told MPs, but its critics are already asking where the money will be found to back up its lofty rhetoric.

What did the commentators say?

The review is "systematic and detailed, but it remains an exercise in tightly bounded ambition", said The Guardian's editorial board. "It speaks of daily cyberattacks and undersea sabotage but proposes no systemic institutional overhaul or acute surge in resilience."

Among its "provisos" are its "terms of reference, which were extraordinarily restrictive", said The Spectator. This meant that those leading the review "were not able to consider the future of the nuclear deterrent; the pre-eminence of Nato in the UK's defence policy planning; any aspect of military or financial assistance to Ukraine; the UK's commitments in the Indo-Pacific, the Gulf and the Middle East, or significant examination of spending levels and requirements". While "not a bad document", it is a "disappointing one" that fails to set out a "clear strategic purpose and narrative".

Given Britain's ever-growing security concerns, the review "should be about more than missiles and missions", said The Guardian. "It must also be about whether the country can keep the lights on, the gas flowing, the internet up and the truth intact. This review sees the threats, but not yet the system needed to confront them. In that gap lies the peril."

What next?

This is the first defence review since 1989 not to recommend a cut to the armed forces and it has already been "overshadowed by a row over money", said The Independent.

The government has committed to raising defence spending from 2.3% to 2.5% by 2027, with the "ambition" to go to 3% by the end of the next parliament. The failure of the PM and his defence secretary to commit fully to the 3% increase "is not only infuriating but disturbing", and raises serious questions about whether the review "is of any value at all", said The Times' editorial board.

The "problem with this evasion" is that it "does the opposite of deterring potential adversaries. The Russians know all about Potemkin villages and they can spot a Potemkin defence policy."

With Donald Trump already calling for member states to go beyond 3% of GDP spending on defence, the defence review will "not cut the mustard" when it comes to deterring Russian aggression, Richard Dannatt, the former head of the British Army, told Times Radio. "It's like saying to Adolf Hitler, 'Please don't attack us till 1946 because we're not going to be ready.'"

"The keyboard has become a weapon of war," said Defence Secretary John Healey. Over the past two years, the Ministry of Defence has been subjected to 90,000 cyberattacks associated with hostile states like Russia and China, the ministry revealed yesterday: more than double the number in the previous two years.

This "intensifying" level of cyberwarfare "requires us to step up our capacity to defend", said Healey at the UK military's cyber HQ at MoD Corsham in Wiltshire yesterday, as he outlined plans to invest more than £1 billion in artificial intelligence and a "hacking army", as part of the government's long-awaited defence review.

Healey pledged to give the Armed Forces more power to actively target hostile states, including a new cyber command unit to coordinate offensive capabilities. "Ways of warfare are rapidly changing," he said, and the UK is "facing daily cyberattacks on this new front line".

What did the commentators say?

For the last five years, the National Cyber Force has "conducted hacking operations" for the military, as part of a "joint venture" between the MoD and GCHQ (the UK's intelligence, cyber and security agency), said The Telegraph. But Healey has announced a new Cyber and Electromagnetic Command unit to work alongside the NCF, which would unite all the UK's cyber personnel currently working across GCHQ, the MoD and other government units to "fight enemies on the web".

The new unit will also "oversee a £1 billion investment in upgraded targeting systems": an AI network that would connect all three branches of the Armed Forces and filter the massive amounts of data generated, "enabling quicker decisions on the battlefield". This "digital targeting web", to start operating in 2027, is known as a "kill web".

While the specific details of Britain's "offensive cyber capabilities are a secret", its vulnerabilities are less so. There is currently a "significant gap" between the threat and the government's ability to defend against it. "Crumbling government computer systems have been outpaced by cybercriminals", a Commons public accounts committee report warned this month, and the government is "lacking experts with cyber skills".

When asked whether the MoD was bolstering its capacity to attack hostile states, Healey answered: "Yes." That's the first time a minister has been "so explicit about launching a cyber­attack on another country", said The Times. They have "never before confirmed" such attacks – although they've been "open" about targeting terrorist groups. Healey "fell short of admitting Britain was fighting a cyberwar with Russia", but he did admit the "intensity" of Russia's cyberattacks was "stepping up".

One reason behind the rising numbers of attacks is that the military is "getting better at spotting the attempts", said Sky News. But the attacks are also "becoming more sophisticated".

Still, some experts are "sceptical" about the new unit, said the Financial Times. "Obviously, electronic warfare and cyber are critical," said one serving reserve officer anonymously. "But I'm not sure the way to cut through bureaucracy is to create more organisations and layers."

The new "kill web" aims to "knit together data" and "translate it into better intelligence about what an adversary is doing", but "on a larger scale than current software". But defence officials "insisted that no single system or company would provide the whole picture". One described it as a "system of systems".

What next?

The defence review, announced by Labour last year, will be published on Monday – and unlike with previous reviews, "military chiefs have been blocked from talking about it in public", said The Times. But a "chunk of it" will focus on autonomy and cyber. The MoD has already said that promising recruits will be "fast-tracked into specialist roles to tackle cyber threats".

Of course, there is always a risk that a cyberattack against Russia could "provoke a more devastating response". But Moscow's attacks have been "so prolific" that the MoD is redirecting resources to strike enemies "before they have a chance to strike first".

Benjamin Netanyahu has lifted the blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza after admitting that Israel's allies were "approaching a red line" in their support over the risk of famine in the territory.

The Israeli prime minister's decision to allow limited food supplies into the enclave for the first time in nearly three months is "highly unpopular" among some of his ministers but comes "amid mounting US pressure" and growing divisions at home, said The Times of Israel.

What did the commentators say?

The complete blockade on fuel, food and medicine entering Gaza was "meant to ramp up pressure" on Hamas, said The Independent. But it appears to have had the opposite effect.

"Israel – let me be frank – has been played like a violin," said Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. "With each bomb blast, each picture of weeping children, each story of operations undertaken without anaesthesia, Hamas has secured the propaganda that no amount of paid advertising could ever procure. The blockade is, in that sense, priceless."

Donald Trump, previously one of Israel's staunchest international allies, said on Friday that it was time to take care of those "starving" in Gaza. Reports in Israeli media claim that the US agreed to pressure Israel into resuming humanitarian aid as part of an indirect arrangement with Hamas for the release of Israeli-American soldier Edan Alexander last week.

At the same time, a Dutch proposal to reassess the EU's economic and political ties with Israel in response to the situation in Gaza has been "steadily gaining support among a group of member states", said Euronews. The EU is Israel's biggest trading partner. Eight countries have now "explicitly endorsed" the idea that Israel is in violation of international humanitarian law and while this is "far short of the unanimous support needed, it signals a shift in thinking among the 27".

Even hardline members of Netanyahu's cabinet have accepted the necessity to relent, in the face of growing international hostility. Far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich – one of the driving forces behind the months-long blockade – said that the resumption of aid deliveries to the strip was necessary "to dispel the lies of starvation", said The Times of Israel. While the blockade had "created very great pressure on Hamas", he said, its execution "needs to be moderated so that it does not explode in our faces".

What next?

Israel's "genocidal campaign in Gaza" has begun to fracture the "kind of international exceptionalism that shielded it from accountability", said Mehmet Rakipoglu in Middle East Eye. But it may in the end be "growing internal turmoil" that forces Netanyahu's government to end the war.

Israel is now "closer to a civil war than ever before", said former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert in Haaretz, and The New Arab reported that the Israel Defense Forces is facing "a crisis of dissent", with reservists refusing call-ups and veterans speaking out against the war.

The Gaza war has "increasingly become Israel's Vietnam", said Rakipoglu, "an unwinnable campaign marked by military overreach, strategic misjudgment and growing political costs".

Like its American ally half a century ago, Israel has found itself "trapped in a campaign it cannot decisively win, facing a resilient opponent, internal dissent and mounting international isolation".

The world must prepare for the possibility that Vladimir Putin will think a nuclear attack on Ukraine is Russia's "only option", said The Telegraph.

Russian losses are "ghosting close" to one million and "detailed analysis" shows that Moscow has made "scant progress" in the past 12 months. So the "only way" Putin can "achieve his aims" might be to deploy tactical nuclear weapons, former British Army officer and chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon wrote in the paper.

Although these battlefield nuclear missiles would be "small" compared to the atom bomb that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, their use would shatter the "nuclear equilibrium" that has "prevented WW3 for 75 years".

What are nuclear weapons?

They come under two broad categories: atomic bombs, which use power released by the splitting of atomic nuclei, and hydrogen bombs (also known as thermonuclear bombs), whose explosive force derives from nuclear fusion.

Between them, the world's nine nuclear powers are thought to have "roughly" 12,331 nuclear warheads, said the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

What are 'tactical' nuclear weapons?

Sometimes called "battlefield" or "non-strategic" missiles, tactical nuclear weapons are designed for use in military encounters between opposing forces, rather than for strategic strikes on an adversary's territory. They are smaller and less powerful than strategic nuclear weapons, but they can have explosive yields of up to 300 kilotons, or 20 times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

In 2022, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimated that Russia had 1,912 of these missiles. The US was thought to have 200, including 100 deployed across five European countries.

What are strategic ballistic missiles?

These powerful missiles, sometimes known as intercontinental missiles, are the big brothers of the tactical weapons. With ranges between 6,000 and 9,300 miles, they're capable of reaching targets on the other side of the world in a matter of minutes and contain enough power to raze cities.

These bombs, which are the ones depicted in nuclear apocalypse films and TV shows like "Threads", were first developed by the Soviet Union in 1958. The United States built its own the following year and China followed suit some 20 years later.

Are nuclear stockpiles growing?

Although the "exact number" of nuclear weapons in each country's possession is a "closely held national secret", the US is "reducing its nuclear stockpile slowly", said the FAS, as it dismantles "previously retired warheads".

Israel and France have "relatively stable" inventories, but China, India, North Korea, Pakistan and the UK are all "thought to be increasing their stockpiles". It's believed that Moscow is also adding to its nuclear capacity.

Moscow is using Telegram to recruit cheap and "disposable" agents to perform sabotage attacks in Europe, according to a European security official. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin has launched a campaign of "sabotage, arson and disinformation", sometimes focused on "specific targets" linked to support for Kyiv, but often "simply aimed at causing chaos and unease" among Russia's enemies in the West, said The Observer.

Although Russian "subversion, sabotage and assassination" projects "long predate" the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the past three years have seen a surge in such attacks, said The Telegraph.

Arson and emojis 

A "shadowy" new unit is based in a "sprawling glass-and-steel complex" on Moscow's outskirts, nicknamed the "aquarium", said The Wall Street Journal. Euphemistically known as the Department of Special Tasks, it's overseen by Col. Gen. Andrey Vladimirovich Averyanov, a veteran of Russia's Chechen wars, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Ivan Sergeevich Kasianenko, who is believed to have co-ordinated the UK operation to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.

Anonymous recruiters use Telegram and similar platforms to invite people in European countries to join the fight against Ukraine's Western allies. "On the ground", said The Observer, saboteurs are recruited online and although some of them "know exactly what they are doing and why", many don't realise they're "ultimately working for Moscow".

For example, when a man known only as Serhiy S. was arrested in Poland, officers found firelighter cubes, a juice bottle filled with paraffin, a lighter, two pocket knives, a mini handsaw and a face mask. Desperate for money, he'd been recruited via Telegram and asked to photograph shopping centres and industrial estates in Wrocław. Once a "suitable place" was agreed, he was to set it ablaze, for which he'd be paid $4,000 (£3,000).

In a separate incident, an undercover journalist posing as a 26-year-old Russian-speaking Estonian keen to earn some extra cash was offered money to spy on military bases, set fire to Nato vehicles, and even commit murder at $10,000 (£7,500) "a head", according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). The recruiter's demeanour was "brisk", and "even rude at times", but some of his messages were "incongruously accompanied" by smiley emojis.

Trash fishing

Indrek Kannik, the director of Estonia's International Centre for Defence and Security, described the mass recruitment of saboteurs through social media as "trash fishing" because of its low success rates. But from Russia's perspective, these "so-called low-level agents are cheap, fast and safe", a source from a German security agency told the OCCRP. They often "don't even know who they are working for".

People with a criminal background are particularly attractive recruits, as head of MI6 Richard Moore told a Financial Times panel. The Kremlin "can't use their own people", he said, so "they're having to do with criminal elements". But although criminals "do stuff for cash" they're "not reliable" or "particularly professional". "Usually we are able to roll them up pretty effectively," he said.

As for Serhi, even though he hadn't gone through with the arson plan, he was handed an eight-year sentence. The judge said this was meant as "a clear and unequivocal signal to you and to all potential candidates that committing such acts is not worthwhile". Indeed, Serhi shouldn't expect any help from his Russian paymasters, a European security official told The Observer. "These people are disposable and Moscow doesn't care about them."

Russia has "always looked positively on any peace initiatives" with Ukraine and "we hope that representatives of the Kyiv regime will feel the same way", Vladimir Putin told state TV yesterday, less than 24 hours after his sudden and surprise "Easter truce" ended with both sides accusing each other of multiple violations.

The "sceptical view" is that the 30-hour cessation was "less about pushing for peace" and "more to do with maintaining good relations with the Trump White House" as it grows "impatient with the lack of progress on Ukraine", said BBC Russia editor Steve Rosenberg.

"But there is also a more optimistic view" that while it was a "surprise" it "did not come out of nowhere" and was the result of "intense international diplomacy to try to end the fighting".

What did the commentators say?

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's threat to walk away from the negotiating table last week "appeared to trigger Putin's weekend offer" said The i Paper's political editor Hugo Gye, "but hopes for a lasting ceasefire between the warring nations were quickly dampened after both sides accused each other of violating the short-lived agreement".

Instead, the Russia president's "hopelessly short-lived" truce appears "aimed directly" at Donald Trump and at "shifting blame for his disastrous peacemaking efforts in the Ukraine war", said CNN.

"For Moscow, it seems, this was never going to be the beginning of the end of the war" but rather a "cynical public relations stunt" amid growing criticism that the Kremlin "had become a foot-dragging obstacle to peace".

Volodymyr Fesenko, chairman of the Penta Center for Applied Political Studies in Kyiv, told DW that Putin's "urgent, unilateral ceasefire was intended to set a trap for Ukraine".

"In exchange for accommodating Trump's wishes – even if not fully – Putin could have also achieved some of his own goals", said the German news outlet.

Among these, Fesenko points to the weakening of Western unity, reducing Russia's dependence on China, and returning to the exclusive club of influential world leaders.

What next?

In what could be a "decisive week", said the Kyiv Independent, Ukraine is set to continue talks with US and European countries in London on Wednesday, with the "primary task" of negotiations "to push for an unconditional ceasefire", said Zelensky.

Kyiv is "under pressure" to respond to "a series of far-reaching Trump administration ideas for how to end the war in Ukraine" including "potential US recognition of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and excluding Kyiv from joining Nato", the Wall Street Journal reported.

If there is a "convergence among the American, European and Ukrainian positions, the proposals could be floated to Moscow".

But Putin has so far shown little willingness to compromise, especially now he "feels he's negotiating from a position of strength", said Al Jazeera.

His aim is to "use the Trump administration's self-professed 'peace-making' ambitions to his advantage". Having launched a massive conscription drive, Putin's strategy is to "drag out ceasefire negotiations until US military aid runs out and the Russian army is able to advance far enough into Ukrainian territory to force Kyiv into capitulation".