WARFARE

Evidence and stories from people living under Russian occupation in Ukraine tell of fear, intimidation, and silence. Photo: Milda Gostautaite The story of Svitlana and her husband, Petro, both in their 50s, who spent almost a year in an occupied small town in Kherson Oblast, offers insight into the experience of suddenly falling under Russian control. The couple worked at a railway station and, like many Ukrainians, Svitlana now looks back on life before the invasion with a n

Is China expanding its presence in areas of Ukraine occupied by Russia? Or is it just another of the Kremlin’s propaganda games? Photo: Leestat | Dreamstime.com “In the village of Urzuf, the first tourists have opened the swimming season,” reports a Russian TV reporter from the Azov Sea coast in occupied Donetsk. “There is even a new ride called the Pendulum, and today we are the first to test it. It was recently brought from China, installed by Chinese specialists.” Moscow

It’s important to distinguish between a genuine military alliance and the picture-perfect imagery of authoritarian propaganda. Source: Ria Novosti Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Beijing on May 19-20 during a highly publicized two-day summit. The pair announced some 40 new agreements, including a symbolic “declaration on the formation of a multipolar world.” But pomp, ceremonials, and signatures aside, the summit did not see an agreeme

NATO’s fragmented responses to Russia’s “accidental” border incursions are enabling Moscow’s shadow war. Galati, Romania / Source: Digi24 On the night of May 29, two Russian drones crossed into Romanian airspace, flew roughly 18km (11 miles) into NATO territory, and struck a residential building in the city of Galați. Two people were injured, and a large fire swept through the neighborhood. The incident was reported as an accident, an unintended consequence of Russian strikes

Drone strikes on St. Petersburg / RBC.UA Ukraine’s recent drone strikes on St. Petersburg provided arguably the most visible indication to date that Vladimir Putin’s invasion is not going according to plan. They also served to underline the fact that the war is now no longer confined to Ukraine and is increasingly being fought inside Russia itself. The drone attacks on Russia’s second city took place in early June as it hosted the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

Source: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Europeans are increasingly speaking of Ukraine as a shield protecting the continent from Russian aggression. This recognition is certainly justified, but it also carries a risk. Amid all the talk of Ukraine’s growing military strength, there is a danger that this could encourage complacency over the country’s ability to bear the current security burden indefinitely. Changing attitudes toward Ukraine were on display at the r

The Kremlin’s efforts to show it’s an accepted member of the global community require enormous work by every arm of the regime. Source kremlin.ru The International Security Forum, a conference held at the Live Arena, a huge concert venue in the military park outside Moscow, was conceived as a direct challenge to the West’s high-level gatherings. The Kremlin announced that the Forum, held at the end of May, would be an alternative to the Munich Security Conference, which for t

Source: Wix Europe’s electricity grids were not built for the demands now being placed on them. The proliferation of large-scale data centers has fundamentally altered the continent’s energy arithmetic. This energy demand growth has exposed a structural power deficit that European policymakers have yet to adequately address. The bloc’s planning and permitting system has been widely criticized as fragmented and ill-suited to the pace now required. Meanwhile, Ukraine, whose inf

With the US summit behind it, China is squaring up for the next defining trade battle. It’s very confident that it will win. Source: Unspash Europe and China may be heading for a trade war. The European Commission said on May 29 that its economic and security interests will require “a more robust and coherent response” to a surge in Chinese exports to the bloc. The current situation is “not sustainable,” it said. For its part, China accused the Commission of seeking a scapego

Europe will struggle to defend itself against Russia without the aid of Ukraine’s battle-tested legions. Source: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Russia’s recent missile and drone strikes and follow-on attacks against Ukraine represent a cruel exercise in signaling. Following a brief ceasefire, Russia revealed that it can breach Ukraine’s aerial defenses. By deploying an unparalleled barrage, Putin arguably sent a veiled warning to Europe that their cities and fac

Dating apps promise connection, chemistry, and maybe even love. For Ukrainian and Russian intelligence services, they also offer something else: data, emotional vulnerability, and a private channel to manipulate targets. When Russia launched its full-scale illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the front lines extended beyond the physical battlefield into the digital space. Among many other sites, dating platforms such as Tinder and its local equivalents became operati

Drones are powerful — and can cause chaos. Remedies are urgent to deploy them safely. Source: Jessica Tisemann / Neue Deister-Zeitung A busy commercial airport cancels all flights twice in quick succession. The trigger? Small, remote-controlled, low-flying objects. Safety concerns over drone activity and the defensive measures in place to deal with drones caused chaos this year at El Paso’s international airport. Cheap, expendable drones also dominate modern battlefields. Th

Ukraine’s mid-range strike capacity is growing and smashing Russian supply lines, with autonomous systems taking the lead. Source: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine At the turn of 2026, Russia appeared to pose the greater mid-range threat. Its forces were striking Ukraine’s rear with drones at will, using satellite links, including Starlink, to bypass electronic warfare. It had also increased its use of cheap Molniya medium-range strike drones, with varied control

Source: NATO Multinational Battlegroup Estonia Washington—As Ukrainian and Russian delegates take stock of resuming peace talks—temporarily on a “situational” hold amid the US conflict with Iran—there is growing agreement among Kyiv’s partners that, after an agreement is reached, Western troops will be needed in Ukraine to monitor and enforce it. Several Western states have already committed to contribute forces, with the United Kingdom and France recently announcing their wi

The dead of World War II are now conscripts for the Putin’s regime’s battle to own 20th century history. The Immortal Regiment march in Montpellier, France / Source polk.press On May 8 and 9, so-called Immortal Regiment marches were staged across dozens of countries, with crowds carrying portraits of Russian relatives who died in World War II. The significance is far greater than mere commemoration; however, the Kremlin-aided parades represent a key regime propaganda event.

‘We didn’t kidnap anyone’, Russia’s then-ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, insisted in 2023. ‘We saved these children’. The ambassador was not simply denying the systematic deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children by Russian occupation forces in Ukraine, a crime for which there is a growing body of evidence from international organisations, researchers, and human rights groups. He was using a well-known playbook – an information campaign seeking to paint t

The EU's new defense industry program has the right architecture. The factories, the workers, and the political will are another matter. Rheinmetall AG artillery ammunition factory in Lithuania / A. Pliadis / Lithuanian MOD Europe’s new €1.5bn ($1.8bn) defense industry program has a line item nobody expected. Factories built to produce counter-drone weapons can now claim EU money to protect themselves from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The Commission adopted the work progr

An exercise testing NATO responses to hybrid attacks revealed a need for the West to be more nimble, and willing to mimic enemy tactics to defend itself. Source: NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) At Lithuania’s Šiauliai International Airport, a delegation receives reports of sudden signal degradation and communications disruption across Ukraine. The news is an early indicator of spillover from an enhanced Russian jamming operation and raises serious quest

One of the features that makes propaganda effective is that it reshapes how people understand the world around them, turning war into ‘peace’ and lies into ‘truth’. Propaganda, disinformation, and information manipulation more generally do not work like an order from a commander which makes a person take up arms; its influence is more gradual and more insidious. The non-governmental group LingvaLexa, with the support of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine and the

Ukraine’s women are central to sustaining the state, supporting the front and holding society together under the extreme pressure of Russian aggression. Photo: Daniel Kosoy / UNITED24 The country offers a striking case study of the way war reshapes the roles of women and men, not only on the battlefield, but across society, the economy, and national recovery. Approximately 100,000 women are serving in Ukraine’s armed forces out of a total of one million personnel. Around 5,50

Western nations can do more to stop criminal gangs forcing Ukrainians into sexual slavery. By Luca Iaconelli / Unsplash Amid widespread suffering and more than 180,000 documented war crimes committed by Russia during its war on Ukraine, the heightened risk of sex trafficking of Ukrainians has been largely absent from US and European policy discussions. Millions of forcibly displaced people, in particular women and children, have become increasingly vulnerable to transnationa

A crashed Russian Shahed-136 drone (The National Guard of Ukraine) Bottom lines up front The Islamic Republic of Iran should be held accountable for its role in supplying Russia with the means to carry out international crimes against civilians in Ukraine. Researchers have collected evidence indicating that Iranian officials could be held legally liable for supplying its drones to Russia to be used in Ukraine. There are several international and domestic legal mechanisms tha

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine approached the four-year mark in early 2026, the international media widely reported that the war had now lasted longer than the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany during World War II. This historical comparison made for attention-grabbing headlines, but it was not entirely accurate. In fact, the Russia-Ukraine War did not begin in 2022; it started eight years earlier in 2014. Efforts to end the war must reflect this reality. Despite

For decades, Western defense strategy assumed that technological superiority ensured victory. That assumption proves false in modern conflict. Source: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Conflict is being shaped less by the performance of advanced systems than by the ability to produce, sustain, and regenerate them at scale. Mass is the new buzzword, along with non-admiring references to “exquisite” high-end systems There is now a realization of a growing gap between

Kyiv is disrupting Russia’s African networks. That reduces Moscow’s ability to raise money and to pressure Europe’s most vulnerable frontier. By EUvsDisinfo Russia’s war against Ukraine is increasingly being contested in Africa, where Ukraine has begun targeting Russian networks far beyond the European battlefield. The operations are limited in scale but strategically focused, aimed at disrupting the infrastructure Moscow relies on to sustain its war effort and pressure NATO’

Russia’s shadow war in Europe is escalating. Allies need a new strategy before it’s too late. Prime Minister Tusk confirmed the incident on Warsaw–Lublin railway line was an act of sabotage. Source: Donald Tusk / X/ Press materials An unidentified object crosses into Lithuanian airspace from Kaliningrad and is quickly picked up by NATO radar systems. It’s small, fast, and unregistered. Shortly thereafter, three more similar objects joined in formation. NATO aircraft are scram

Changes at the top of the defense hierarchy reveal old-style graft and pressure to raise military spending efficiency. Photo: Vardan Papykian / Unsplash Russia’s Ministry of Defense has a spending problem. That’s not just because the country started a war of choice against Ukraine, at a staggering human and economic cost; it’s also because the military system is riddled with corruption, and no one has been able to get a grip on it. Of course, it’s true that Vladimir Putin’s

Source: Kremlin.ru The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine recently entered a fifth year and has now been underway for longer than the entire cataclysmic conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during World War II. This historical comparison does not flatter Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has turned veneration of the fight against Hitler into an unofficial state religion. While Red Army troops played a key role in the Nazi defeat and managed to advance th

New research demonstrates the fast-growing role of cryptocurrencies to finance military aggression, sanctions evasion, and other covert activities. Over the past year, this author reviewed court records, indictments, and investigative reports to build what is probably the first open-source database of major known cryptocurrency money-laundering schemes. It includes 164 cases spanning roughly two decades and shows roughly $350bn in illicit flows have moved through crypto-lin

Despite being freed by the Belarusian dictatorship, Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski says the West should recognize hostage diplomacy as a dead end. Ales Bialiatski, founder of the human rights center “Viasna” and 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Vilnius, Lithuania. December 18, 2025. Photo: Belsat “Does Belarusian give us more sausage?” It is a question the Belarusian dictator Aliaksandr Lukashenka once put to his own people. What does the Belarusian language actually give you

Ukraine has emerged from its harshest wartime winter with its energy system battered by relentless Russian strikes designed to freeze civilians into submission. At the same time, a sustained FIMI campaign sought to spin the blackouts into narratives of Ukrainian weakness, division and European fatigue – claims starkly disproven by sustained public and governmental support across the continent. Ukraine has just endured its harshest winter since the start of the full-scale war.

We should care about Russian provocations but it’s extremely important how we care. "Putin - war criminal" poster on the wall of Narva Fortress, May 9, 2024 Source: Dmitri Fedotkin/ERR A small Telegram channel has begun in recent weeks to promote the idea of a so-called “Narva People’s Republic” in Estonia’s northeastern border city of Narva, where almost all the inhabitants are Russian speakers. The campaign uses separatist slogans, meme-style content, and imagery that imita

The Kremlin’s war against international law reaches beyond mere words and now includes the use of heavily armed military squads operating on foreign soil. Wagner Group mercenaries in Africa. Photo: Grey Zone / Telegram The Russian Duma is about to adopt a law permitting the extraterritorial engagement of the armed forces to free Russian citizens arrested or detained by foreign courts. The government commission on legislation has just approved the respective draft legislation.

The cyber abilities of the EU’s 27 member states are variable, but the best-prepared can benefit from helping the laggards. One year has passed since Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered US Cyber Command to halt all offensive cyber operations and planning against Russia. The decision came as elements of the defense community were calling for a more offensive posture in the cyber domain, given that Russian operations against NATO allies and other countries in the European n

Since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the outbreak of hostilities in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, residents of Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories (TOT) have faced a steadily tightening system of information control. This process accelerated dramatically after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Today, an estimated 5 to 6 million people living under occupation exist in a prolonged state of information limbo. They are cut off from Ukrain

Russia’s dependence on American technology shatters the Kremlin’s invincibility narrative, leading to a slowdown in advance on the front. Claims of Russia’s invincibility became a central element of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine as we examined in our recent article . Faith in the greatness and self-sufficiency of the Russian army has been turned into a mantra of Kremlin propaganda. However, the war against Ukraine has shown the world that this narrative, like the myth

Imagine a world where your past is not yours – where every event, every hero, every town can be deleted and replaced with someone else’s script. For Ukraine, this has not been speculative fiction but but a political practice it continues to resist. Centuries of Ukrainian history have been rewritten by Russia, which corrupts the files, reformats archives, so that they conform to its imperial design. In late 2025, Vladimir Putin signed Decree No. 858 , a technical document outl

Some young people resist Kremlin pressure to create a generation of Putin-supporting nationalists. The West must recognize and support them. Russian anti-war activist Maxim Lypkan / Source: memopzk.org “Wars are not won by generals, but by schoolteachers,” Vladimir Putin said in 2023, in a statement that has become a cornerstone of his approach to youth indoctrination. The regime is determined to reshape young Russians’ minds by replacing critical thinking with militarized pa

The mythology of Russian military invincibility is not new, but since the full‑scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 it has become one of the central pillars of the Kremlin’s information warfare. Research shows this narrative is deliberately engineered to serve geopolitical, military and psychological objectives; in particular to deter Western support for Ukraine, demoralise Ukrainian society, and project an image abroad of unstoppable Russian power . The invincibility myth depic

Russia’s poorest people face a grim choice — an existence of grinding poverty, or gambling your life and limbs on the regime’s imperial adventure. Erik Romanenko / TASS Russia’s war in Ukraine is not being fought by a united “multiethnic people,” as Vladimir Putin likes to claim. The enormous burden of the fighting and the death toll has been disproportionately borne by the peoples of the poorest and most remote parts of the country. New analysis by The Bell shows that the h

Throughout 2025, Russian officials were repeatedly shut out of the governing bodies of international organisations – a direct consequence of Kremlin’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine and its escalating campaign of hybrid interference worldwide. A glimpse of what’s to come? 2025 was a bad year for Russia’s international standing. As Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, recently described on Facebook, Ukraine and its allies worked hard throughout

Five recurring false narratives the Kremlin uses to justify and distort its war against Ukraine. Russia has carried out online disinformation and FIMI campaigns against Europe and Ukraine for over a decade. After the illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, these activities grew rapidly in scale and intensity. The Kremlin now uses information manipulation as a key tool in its confrontation with the West. Alongside the war in Ukraine, Russia is also waging a

The Kremlin blames others for not extending The New START Treaty. But Moscow played a big role in undermining the Treaty long before its demise. On 6 February 2026, The New START Treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty, expired . As that happened, the Kremlin both launched and continued FIMI campaigns that sought to minimise Moscow’s responsibility for the Treaty’s lapse, blame the expiration on outside actors, generate doomsday paranoia, and proclaim a new nuc

For decades, television was considered the primary mouthpiece of propaganda. The digital age, however, has elevated a new and potentially more dangerous instrument of influence: video games. Under the guise of entertainment, they shape worldviews and political narratives, making propaganda subtle, scalable, and effective. Unlike passive media, video games offer players not only a story but an experience in which they actively participate. As a result, ideological messages emb

Russia’s use of cryptocurrency to bypass sanctions has exposed a gap in the international community’s attempts to throttle Moscow’s war machine. Photo: Agency «Moscow» / snob.ru The emergence of the A7A5 stablecoin represents a transformative shift in global financial evasion. Until now, the international community has relied on the dominance of the US dollar and the SWIFT system to enforce economic order, but the rise of ruble-backed digital assets suggests a sophisticated

The pace of technological change on the Ukrainian front lines is now exceptionally fast. Could Western armies adapt as quickly? As the worst winter in many years settled across Ukraine late last year, the 600,000-strong Russian invasion force innovated to embrace the cold — and briefly gained a tactical edge all along the 700-mile front line. The Ukrainians innovated right back, ultimately blunting that edge. That dance — measure versus countermeasure — should reassure frie

Europe needs to get on the front foot to tackle Russia’s hybrid warfare, a Polish deputy defense minister warned as he unveiled details of a new anti-drone systems. Warmate loitering munition. (Source: Polish Ministry of National Defense) Cezary Tomczyk, secretary of state in Poland’s Ministry of Defense, has provided new details about a new €2bn (£2.3bn) anti-drone system which will be the largest of its kind on the continent, and able to detect and neutralize enemy drones

Russia’s foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) operations are diverse, entrenched, well-resourced, and coordinated. They are also linked globally to culture through ‘Cultural Heritage Exploitation’, or CHX. CHX is a multi-institutional endeavour with spatial, temporal, cognitive, and material aspects. In practice, it fuses pro-Russian historical propaganda to cultural objects, and it is one of the tools deployed to legitimise Russia’s war against Ukraine a

Ukrainian Droid Raw 12.7 UGV fitted with M2 Browning heavy machine gun during field trials. (Source: Ukrmilitary Pages / X) Ukrainian army officials claim to have made military history in late 2025 by deploying a single land drone armed with a mounted machine gun to hold a front line position for almost six weeks. The remote-controlled unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) reportedly completed a 45-day combat mission in eastern Ukraine while undergoing maintenance and reloading ever

Russian attacks against energy facilities in winter were designed to freeze Ukraine into submission. Russian disinformation narratives justify these attacks and blame Ukraine’s leadership for them. Targeted attacks to break Ukraine’s resistance Russia has recently used a bitter cold snap in Ukraine to inflict terrible pain upon Ukrainian citizens by attacking the country’s energy infrastructure. Among other strikes, Russia launched a massive missile and drone assault against