Lisa Haseldine

Munich, Germany It’s no secret that Keir Starmer prefers foreign diplomacy to the domestic side of his job. So after perhaps the most difficult week of his leadership so far, the Prime Minister was no doubt relieved to have made it to the Munich security conference today, addressing delegates in the main conference hall this morning. Starmer was unexpectedly forthright in his address: Britain would be prepared to fight Starmer began by warning that the prospect of war for Britain was no longer a remote one. Russia, he warned, could be ready to use force against the Nato alliance ‘by the end of this decade’. In doing so, he echoed key figures of the British armed forces and intelligence services who, in recent months, have said much the same.

One of Russia’s top military generals, Vladimir Alekseev, is in a critical condition after being shot while leaving his Moscow apartment earlier this morning. Lieutenant General Alekseev, a deputy director in Russia’s military intelligence agency – still best-known by its former acronym, the GRU – has been taken to hospital following reports he was shot multiple times in the back in the lobby of his apartment block in the north of the city. The assailant fled the scene immediately after the shooting, which took place shortly after 7 a.m. local time, and reportedly has yet to be caught. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack yet. Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped some in Russia from already pointing the finger at Ukraine.

Britain should prepare for more rape cases involving illegal migrants, Dominic Cummings has warned. Speaking on The Spectator’s Quite right! podcast, the former advisor to Boris Johnson referenced the case of two young Afghan asylum seekers who were jailed earlier this month for the rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa. Places like Leamington ‘better get used to it’, Cummings said, ‘because there’s going to be a lot more of it.’ Criticising the lack of information Warwickshire police were initially willing to share about the identities of the Leamington perpetrators, Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, following their arrest in May, Cummings told Michael Gove and Madeline Grant: The odd thing is, the country knows it's all fake.

Ukraine – not Russia – is ‘refusing to end this conflict using peaceful means’, Vladimir Putin claimed this morning. The Russian President chose to open his traditional end-of-year press conference in Moscow with the subject of Ukraine, rehashing lines Kremlin-watchers have heard many times since he launched his full-scale invasion almost four years ago. The strength of feeling with which he answered prompts the question of whether Putin truly believes what he is saying?Asked by NBC – one of the few foreign outlets granted a question during the marathon press conference – if he would feel responsible for more deaths if he didn’t agree to a peace plan, Putin replied: ‘We do not consider ourselves responsible for the loss of life because we did not start this war.

Keir Starmer will travel to Berlin this afternoon to join European leaders for a ‘mini-summit’ in support of Ukraine following two days of talks between president Volodymyr Zelensky and American officials. Zelensky has been in the German capital since yesterday, locked in talks with US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to hammer out the terms of a peace deal on the war in Ukraine that can then be presented to Russia. US representatives have also been invited to this afternoon's mini-summit – due to kick off shortly after 5.30 p.m. UK time. Overnight, Witkoff declared that ‘significant progress’ had been made with Zelensky.

Vladimir Putin is ‘morally responsible’ for the death of Dawn Sturgess, a public inquiry today has concluded. The mother of three died in Salisbury in June 2018 after unknowingly spraying herself with the nerve agent novichok, which had been discarded three months earlier by two Kremlin agents sent to kill the former spy Sergei Skripal. The operation was so sensitive that it ‘must have been authorised at the highest level by President Putin’ as a ‘demonstration of Russian power’, the inquiry’s chair Lord Hughes said. Keir Starmer condemned the Kremlin’s ‘disregard for innocent lives’ Lord Hughes said that disguising the novichok in a perfume bottle ‘dramatically magnified’ the risk of unintended casualties, and called it ‘an astonishingly reckless act’.