Russia

Russian forces have reportedly been ordered to watch last year’s state-funded propaganda film Sky. The Kremlin-funded drama follows the lives of Russian airmen in Syria, where an estimated 18,000 people are believed to have died in Moscow’s bombings. With jets soaring through the sky and explosive special effects, it tells the story of Oleg Peshkov, a pilot shot down by a Turkish fighter plane. When Hollywood makes its own action flicks about the war in Ukraine, directors may settle for a different kind of hero. Instead of strapping military men jumping into cockpits, it is becoming increasingly clear that Kyiv owes much of the credit for its fierce defence to drones. While in

Russia is now 33 days into a war it expected would last 72 hours. Given the relative failure of the invasion, it is surprising anyone in the Russian security establishment has much time to spare for side projects. Yet, yesterday’s news that the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich was poisoned during informal peace negotiations with the Ukrainians would suggest otherwise. While details are murky, according to the investigative journalism collective Bellingcat, billionaire Abramovich was engaged in shadow negotiations in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, earlier this month when he and his two Ukrainian interlocutors fell ill. The men later received medical treatment in Istanbul. Since the story broke, there has been a

Yerevan, Armenia ‘This is our land,’ Anna says, looking out over her roadside flower shop. ‘Lenin promised it to us.’ Her father was born across the mountains in Russia, one of around 100,000 displaced Armenians only able to return home after world war two. ‘But thanks to Lenin, we have our own country. A free country – at least for now.’ As the fighting in Ukraine stretches into its first month, another conflict between two former Soviet states might not be far away. Last year, a brief but bloody war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been autonomously governed by ethnic Armenians over

The Ukrainian airforce has so far held out in the battle for the skies. Russia continues to rely on missiles for deep strikes into Ukrainian territory while the defenders have been able to contest the airspace by employing drones. Ukraine has proven a turning point in the age of drone warfare. The first great drone superpower, the United States, used its unmanned aerial vehicles in places like Afghanistan where few fighters had the technology to shoot them down. But Ukraine isn’t primarily using drones to hunt people, loitering over targets for days; rather, it’s using them to go after Russian armoured vehicles and supply columns. This seems like a strategy

Just three weeks after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would directly arm Ukraine, Europe’s economic powerhouse is running out of weapons to send. ‘We’re delivering Stingers. We’re delivering Strelas. The Defence Minister has looked at what we can deliver but honesty also requires us to say: we don’t have enough,’ Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the Bundestag last week. ‘If we could conjure up more weapons to send, then we would.’ Scholz then appeared to revert to an old German habit: trumpeting the importance of diplomacy as an end in itself. In the very same tweet in which he thanked Ukraine’s war-time President Volodymyr Zelensky for his speech to

Several thousand Muslim Chechen fighters are reportedly massing on the edge of Kiev. Syrian volunteers, filmed this week holding assault rifles and chanting pro-Moscow slogans, are en route to the Ukrainian frontlines. Is Vladimir Putin running out of Christians for his war machine? The number of Russian battlefield casualties has certainly been high. Up to 7,000 Russian infantry have been killed since the invasion began, according to US estimates. That would put Russian casualties at more than the entire American losses in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. As many as 14,000 Russians may have been injured. Military experts say that once a battle group has exceeded about a