Ukraine

Ukraine has entered the gray zone

Kharkiv, Ukraine In a bunker on the outskirts of Kharkiv, a group of rookie Ukrainian soldiers are learning the basics of combat medicine. The temperature outside is minus 20C, and clouds of breath hang in the air – as does the gravity of what they are letting themselves in for. The dummies used for training have fake bullet holes and missing limbs, and during a quiz at the end of the lesson, gruesome scenarios are playing out. ‘If you tie a tourniquet, but there’s still bleeding, what do you do?’ ‘What is the significance of cerebral fluid in the mouth or ears?’ Most of these medics will not even be

Ben Clerkin

What Ukraine’s ‘Amazon-for-war’ website can teach the US

Donald Trump calls Dan Driscoll the “drone guy.” The 39-year-old Secretary of the Army – also a “total killer” with a “nice, beautiful face,” according to Trump – is on a mission to modernize the US military and firmly believes that drones are “the future of warfare.” The former Army Ranger, Yale Law School student and venture capitalist, announced last month that the Army was going to buy 1 million drones. Catch-up will be hard. Currently, the US military acquires around 50,000 a year – while Russia makes 4 million and China 8 million. In his race against time, Driscoll’s north star is Ukraine, the country he calls the “Silicon

Owen Matthews

Europe has left Ukraine living on borrowed time

Russia started the war on Ukraine, so Russia should pay for the damage it has wrought. Such was Volodymyr Zelensky’s forceful message to European leaders last night as he pleaded for a ‘reparations loan’ backed by the €190 billion (£167 billion) of Russian Central Bank capital frozen in a Belgian clearing bank since Putin’s full-scale invasion. ‘Just as authorities confiscate money from drug traffickers and seize weapons from terrorists, Russian assets must be used to defend against Russian aggression and rebuild what was destroyed by Russian attacks,’ Zelensky told his European allies. ‘It’s moral. It’s fair. It’s legal.’ But after negotiations that went late into the night, Europe ultimately shied

Ani Chkhikvadze

Boris Johnson: will cowardly Europe betray Ukraine again?

Boris Johnson has urged European leaders to hand $247 billion of frozen Russian central bank assets to Ukraine – but says he fears they “lack the courage” to do so, in an interview with The Spectator. The former British prime minister also warned that Trump is at risk of “morally polluting” himself if he caves to Putin’s demands in peace negotiations and encouraged his negotiating team to stop the “nauseating deals” they are discussing about joint business ventures. “I think Europe is at a very difficult point because Europe has got to do the reparations alone,” Johnson said. “And I’m worried that they lack the courage. They must do it.

Wednesday

December 17, 2025

Christopher Caldwell

European leaders have changed their tune on war

Ten days after Thanksgiving, news watchers were exposed to one of the more culturally incongruous images in recent history: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron beaming in front of the British Prime Minister’s house at 10 Downing Street, giving each other the locked-thumbs handshake familiar to African-American jazz musicians and professional athletes of the 1970s. Right on, brother! At that moment, according to Ukrainian media, thousands of Zelensky’s soldiers had been encircled by Russian troops near the city of Pokrovsk (or Krasnoarmiisk, as it may well soon be renamed). Large gaps were appearing in the Ukrainian front, desertions were rising and Russians appeared to be opening a