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Pakistan Escalates Conflict with Strikes on Taliban Strongholds
Pakistan has confirmed that it carried out air strikes on the Afghan cities of Kabul and Kandahar in the early hours of Friday, in what officials described as retaliation for attacks by Taliban forces along the disputed frontier between the…
Mass Russian attack damages Ukraine energy grid, leaving six regions without power
Large-scale overnight missile and drone attack damages power infrastructure, forcing blackouts and supply restrictions across much of the country. Parts of six Ukrainian regions were left without electricity on Thursday, 26 February, after what Kyiv described as a combined large-scale…
Secret Tunnels and Hybrid Pressure: How Belarus and Russia Are Testing Europe’s Eastern Border
Belarus’s use of migration pressure against the European Union is no longer confined to flights, forest crossings and organised pushes at the frontier. According to reporting by The Telegraph, citing Polish officials, border guards discovered four underground tunnels under the…
England Hosts Ukraine’s First Overseas Drone Factory in Strategic Defence Move
In England’s quiet Norfolk-Suffolk borderlands, far from the front lines of Europe’s most ferocious conflict, a remarkable new chapter in the Russo-Ukrainian war has quietly begun. A £200 million drone production facility, built by one of Ukraine’s most prominent unmanned-systems manufacturers,…
China’s Critical Minerals Behind America’s Missiles
The United States still possesses the world’s most formidable military. It fields the most advanced aircraft, the most sophisticated satellites and a nuclear arsenal of unmatched technological complexity. Yet, according to a warning delivered this week by lawmakers in Washington,…
Four Years Since the Invasion: The War’s Strategic Lessons for Ukraine, Russia and Europe
Four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the central expectation that shaped much of the early commentary has not materialised: Moscow has not achieved its declared war aims. On the fourth anniversary, the…
AUKUS: U.K.–Australia Talks Focus on Building Weapons Together
The United Kingdom and Australia have long described each other as “natural partners,” a phrase that has echoed through decades of diplomacy, shared intelligence networks and wartime memory. Under AUKUS, that sentiment is now taking a more concrete form —…
Zelenskyy’s warning to Trump: peace without guarantees will fail Ukraine
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plea to Donald Trump — “stay on our side” — should be read as more than an appeal for sympathy. It is a warning about strategy. At the centre of the current diplomacy is a question that sounds…
The F-35 and the Future of European Alignment
This week, the United States ambassador to Portugal, John Arrigo, delivered a suggestion that was less a procurement recommendation than a geopolitical proposition. Lisbon, he said, should replace its aging fleet of F-16 fighter aircraft with the American-made F-35 stealth jet…
Blasts Targeting Ukrainian Police Raise Fears of a New Kremlin Destabilisation Campaign
A series of explosions targeting or affecting Ukrainian police facilities in Lviv, Mykolaiv and Dnipro within a matter of days has prompted renewed concern in Kyiv over a possible campaign of destabilisation aimed at law enforcement. On Monday, 23 February,…