The Latest Breaking News from Stefan Wolff

Vladimir Putin has been looking pretty chipper of late. Two weeks ago saw him wearing his trademark vulpine smile as he presided over the Victory Day commemorations in Moscow. It was a rather more upbeat occasion than in the two years previously, given recent Russian successes on the battlefield. Then,…

Ukraine is alive. Ukraine lives. Ukraine fights. Ukraine advances, Ukraine overcomes the path. Ukraine gains. Ukraine works. Ukraine exists.

While it may seem glib to repeat the notion of a new cold war, winter 2023-2024 has brought with it the sense that there is now an ever-more uncertain faultline between the west and an increasingly aggressive Russia – perhaps more vividly than at any time since the late 1980s.…

For the past week or so it has felt as if Ukraine’s fate is more likely to be decided in Washington and Brussels than on the battlefield as US president Joe Biden struggles to get his US$111 billion (£88 billion) package of aid through the senate and EU members quibble…

War in wintertime is especially challenging militarily. Troops have to deal with the risk of frostbite while vehicles can’t always move over muddy or frozen terrain. It’s no wonder then that wars tend to move much more slowly during the colder months.

For the past month, the world’s attention has reeled at the violence in Israel and Gaza. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has ground on, day by day, metre by metre. Fierce fighting has continued in the north-eastern Donetsk region as a Russian offensive has attempted – thus far unsuccessfully –…

At a press conference after talks with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, this afternoon, Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg sounded like a man determined to take a “glass half full” attitude when he said that “every metre that Ukrainian forces regain is a metre that Russia loses”.

Where were you when you heard that Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aircraft had crashed and he was presumed dead? For Ukraine watchers it was something of a surreal JFK moment. And, like the Zapruder tape, the video footage of the Russian mercenary group commander’s Embraer Legacy 600 private jet…

Stefan Wolff professor of international security at the University of Birmingham explains how Yevgeny Prigozhin is just another in a long line of those who have faced an early demise after opposing Vladimir Putin. 

Google the words “Ukraine counteroffensive” and the adverb you will most commonly find associated with them is “slowly”. The popular misconception in the months leading up to the launch of Ukraine’s summer push was that, like last autumn’s lightning counter-attacks around Kherson in the south and Kharkiv in the north-east…

Reports from the front lines of the various conflict zones reveal daily just how difficult Ukraine is finding its summer counter-offensive. Russia has had months to build defensive fortifications and Ukrainian troops are having to fight their way through territory which – according to Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s…