Tim Ogden & Vazha Tavberidze

The discovery by Czech intelligence services that a bombing of an ammunitions and weapons depot in 2014 that killed two people was carried out by the same Russian agents responsible for Sergei Skripal's poisoning in 2018 is the latest act in the ongoing drama between the Kremlin and the West – one that has been intensified by the Czech President’s inability to blame Russia for the attack, and the lack of allied support for the Czech Republic. The two men who bombed the ammunition site used the same aliases as they used to enter the UK and travel to Salisbury almost four years later – ostensibly to visit the city's 123-metre high cathedral.

Even with Alexei Navalny imprisoned, Russia’s opposition continues to struggle against Vladimir Putin and his quarter-century of Kremlin rule. This already daunting task has been made harder by the fact that key figures are now imprisoned or in exile: the opposition leader’s principal aides Vladimir Ashrukov and Leonid Volkov have fled to London and Vilnius respectively, while Navalny himself is serving a three-year prison sentence for supposed fraud. Still, his inner circle continues to plan Putin's downfall from beyond Russia’s border ­— and they now believe they have the support to succeed. The first stage, Volkov tells me, is mass protests. Already Navalny's movement has led to thousands of people rallying in public since January.

Although internationally recognised as belonging to Azerbaijan, the region of Nagorno-Karabakh is populated by ethnic Armenians, who fought a war of secession in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. The area is now an unrecognised but de facto independent republic with strong ties to the Republic of Armenia. Azerbaijan continues to claim the land and has complained that the ethnic Azerbaijani population that once lived there were ethnically cleansed in the war of the 1990s, with approximately one million Azerbaijanis forced to leave the area. Sporadic fighting has occasionally flared up since the end of hostilities in 1994, mostly in the form of artillery exchanges.