Ukraine

Every drone Ukraine fires at a Russian oil terminal is meant to defund Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Right now, each one may be doing the opposite. Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil export infrastructure are intended to starve Moscow of the budget revenues that fund its war machine. The logic is straightforward: disrupt exports, reduce revenues, constrain the war effort. Kyiv has been explicit about this: Ukrainian officials consistently frame attacks on oil terminals as direct hits on Russia’s war chest, treating every barrel that cannot be shipped as a ruble that cannot be spent on missiles or mobilization. Reuters puts the scale of that disruption in stark terms – at least

Sometime in the late morning of February 4, somebody at SpaceX headquarters pressed a computer key. A command line was beamed to Starlink’s 9,600 satellites in low Earth orbit. Their onboard processors, circling 550 kilometers above the Earth, instantly obeyed the command and fractionally changed their operational settings. Back down on the frozen ground, in the trenches, bunkers and ruined cities of Russian-occupied Ukraine, hundreds of Starlink terminals lost internet connectivity. As another freezing night set in, the Russian army’s drones and tactical comms went dark. “We are left without communication!” complained a frontline Russian military officer in a video posted on the Telegram channel “Voenkory Russian Spring.” “Virtually on

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says that World War Three has already started. Speaking to the BBC on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion, it’s understandable why he would want to take this line, but he’s wrong. What is striking about Putin is the lack of a messianic ideology On an emotional level, Zelensky has seen millions of his citizens flee within and out of his country, its cities and infrastructure shattered and Vladimir Putin’s propagandists denounce him variously as a Nazi apologist, drug addict and western puppet. Of course he will frame this in the most apocalyptic of terms. More to the point, Ukraine is now

How might the ayatollahs know an American strike force is coming? Advanced radar technology, perhaps, or a mole somewhere in the Pentagon. Or they could just look at Polymarket. There is currently around $125 million wagered in the largest market predicting when the US will next strike Iran. Given the current odds, traders reckon an attack will take place in the second half of this month. If Nicolás Maduro had checked Polymarket on the night of January 2, he would have seen his odds of losing power spike from around one in ten to 66 percent, hours before Delta Force arrived. One trader has racked up $150,000 in profits in

Last week was one of realpolitik, Trump-style. Greenland was sorted, the “New Gaza” unveiled, and all that was left was Ukraine and Russia. Donald Trump went from Davos back to the US but ordered his special envoys to Abu Dhabi, armed with the president’s formula for ending the war in Europe, to get a deal to stop the killing and destruction. As the envoys from the US, Russia and Ukraine opened the talks on Friday in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, none of the pre-signaling indicated that a breakthrough was in the offing. Two days were allotted for the meetings, in the expectation that it wouldn’t just be

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.

No one ever tucked themselves up in bed to read a government document – at least not in the expectation of enjoying it. The standard format is one of hundreds of pages of impenetrable jargon yielding no more than nuggets of significant ideas. The Trump administration has admirably cut through that tendency to produce a National Security Strategy (NSS) that is worth reading: a coherent outlining of America’s strategic intentions on the world stage. Originally composed by Michael Anton, a brilliant mind who is sadly leaving the State Department, the document concisely lays out a Trumpian vision of America’s role in the 21st century. It stands as a corrective to

Believing that time and destiny are on his side, Putin is sticking to his maximalist war aims

In Ukraine, peace will be a hard sell

Yuri Ushakov seems to be the prime mover behind Russia’s negotiating position