The Latest Breaking News from Stefan Wolff

There’s a degree of irony that countries attending the 2024 Brics summit this week voted to adopt the Kazan declaration (named for the capital city of the autonomous republic of Tatarstan in Russia, where the summit is being held). The declaration’s first clause emphasises that “all states should act consistently…

In recent months, Vladimir Putin and his proxies have been foreshadowing a change in Russia’s nuclear doctrine. This is the set of rules that spells out when and how his country might resort to the use of its nuclear arsenal, which is currently the largest in the world. Most recently…

Social media was buzzing earlier this week with restaurant reviews from the Kursk region of Russia, written by Ukrainian troops. They were clearly enjoying the fact that after months of grinding retreat in the face of a relentless Russian advance, they now found themselves on the other side of the…

News reports this week quoted anonymous sources from the US and Ukraine that the first six F-16 jets had been supplied by the Netherlands to the war-torn country and that more were expected to be supplied by Denmark.

Ukraine will no longer exist by 2034, or so says former Russian president and Kremlin attack dog, Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev didn’t say so in as many words. But, reflecting recently on the outgoing Nato leader Jens Stoltenberg’s dream of Ukraine joining within ten years, he said none of the current…

Ukraine’s troops remain frustrated at delays in getting fresh supplies of arms and ammunition, according to reports from the frontline. It’s been several months since the US and the EU signed off on their massive aid packages to Kyiv, yet the bulk of the weapons have yet to find their…

Hotfoot from signing a security pact with North Korea on Wednesday, Vladimir Putin has popped up in Vietnam, another of the few remaining countries where the Russian president is still welcome (or doesn’t face arrest under the war crimes warrant issued by the International Criminal Court last year). Here he…

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…