“Ukraine – Russia”

After the Kremlin-backed Wagner mercenary group suffered its recent and heaviest African defeat when dozens of Russians were killed in an ambush in July, Ukraine’s military intelligence service was quick to claim some credit.

That boast now looks closer to a symbolic defeat for Kyiv after the juntas of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger wrote to the United Nations Security Council demanding it denounce Ukraine’s alleged support of rebel groups in the Sahel region of west Africa where Wagner is deployed.

Ukraine’s special forces have released footage which they claim shows a pontoon bridges being destroyed with US-made missiles in Kursk.

The footage displays a range of attacks in Russia’s border region, including Himars hitting the bridges, which Kyiv said were destroyed along with crucial Russian equipment.

It also shows Ukrainian Defense Forces destroying Russian field ammunition, fuel depots, a radio-electronic warfare complex, and a 152-mm D-20 gun, a Ukrainian military officer told the Kyiv Post.

Few were privy to the battle plans being hatched in the heart of the Ukrainian government for the largest foreign invasion on Russian soil since the Second World War.

At 3am on Tuesday, August 6, Ukrainian soldiers crossed the border into Russia in a highly co-ordinated assault that regained the battlefield initiative from Moscow.

The invasion of the Kursk region by several thousand of Kyiv’s troops may have changed the narrative of a slow, grinding attritional war in the east of the country — although it remains uncertain how much it could ultimately change the course of the conflict.

The attack on the Nord Stream pipelines was shocking, the damage enormous, and the geopolitical consequences are still keenly felt almost two years after the attack. The 1,200-kilometer (746-mile) Nord Stream 1 served as the key delivery system between Russian energy giants and their buyers in Germany, with Berlin braving the ire of its allies to construct another undersea delivery system, Nord Stream 2, which would run mostly parallel to the first one and carry another 55 billion cubic meters (1.942 trillion cubic feet) of gas per year.

It was not to be. A series of underwater blasts on September 26, 2022, crippled the pipelines, which were already out of action due to tensions between Berlin and Moscow provoked by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Nearly two years later, no suspects have been arrested, and it is not fully clear who was behind the sabotage.

It was an event that rocked Europe and shook world affairs.

Early in the morning on Sept. 26, 2022, a series of powerful undersea explosions damaged pipelines under the Baltic Sea near Denmark that carried Russian natural gas to Germany.

Fingers were immediately pointed at Ukraine, which had been at war with Russia since the latter invaded in February of that year. Ukraine denied involvement, and in the absence of reliable information, conspiracy theories proliferated about who attacked the Nord Stream pipeline.

KYIV — Ukraine and Russia were set to send delegations to Doha this month to negotiate a landmark agreement halting strikes on energy and power infrastructure on both sides, diplomats and officials familiar with the discussions said, in what would have amounted to a partial cease-fire and offered a reprieve for both countries.

But the indirect talks, with the Qataris serving as mediators and meeting separately with the Ukrainian and Russian delegations, were derailed by Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region last week, according to the officials. The possible agreement and planned summit have not been previously reported.

President Zelensky approved the plan, then tried unsuccessfully to call it off

International incidents rarely play out like Hollywood action films — and when they do, the public usually doesn’t get to hear about it. But every once in a while, some journalist goes out and digs up the kind of story that Steven King might conjure up.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy investigative piece on the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage mystery. For those Americans who may have forgotten, in September 2022, an unknown someone set off an explosive that ruptured the twin pipelines usually used to pump natural gas from Russia to Europe. The result was that, on the eve of winter, Europe was faced with a potential energy crisis, and they weren’t happy about it.

Germany has frozen its military aid to Ukraine, claiming that a domestic budgetary crisis means it can no longer afford to supply Kyiv with new weapons.

Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, told his defence minister this month that there would be no money available for further military aid, according to a new report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.

Boris Pistorius, the defence minister, had written up a wish list for €4 billion (£3.4 billion) in additional military supplies to Ukraine, but a letter sent to him by the finance ministry made clear that no extra money would be freed up because of the need to cut federal spending.

Nearly two years after the 21st century’s perhaps biggest sabotage operation shocked the world while fueling the U.S.-Russian conflict, investigative reporter Bojan Pancevski published the first truly detailed account of what happened in the months preceding the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022.

After identifying the primary suspect allegedly responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipeline two years ago, Germany issued an international arrest warrant for the diver living in Poland back in June, German media revealed this week.

However, the suspect evaded the authorities by disappearing behind the Ukrainian-Polish border—something that, according to Warsaw, was made possible by Germany’s failure to put him in the wanted persons database for border guards to see.

KYIV — Ukraine’s top military commander says his forces now control 386 square miles of Russia’s neighboring Kursk region, the first time a Ukrainian military official has publicly commented on the gains of the lightning incursion that has embarrassed the Kremlin.

General Oleksandr Syrskyi made the statement in a video posted Monday to President Zelensky’s Telegram channel. In the video, he briefed the president on the front-line situation.

As Ukrainian armoured vehicles maraud around the Russian countryside, they all sport the same symbol – a white triangle.

Tanks, trucks and Nato military equipment bearing the marking, daubed in paint or stuck on with tape, have forced the evacuation of some 180,000 Russian citizens from their homes.

It has been enough for some to brand the first invasion of Russian soil since the Second World War “operation triangle”.

A growing number of mainstream politicians have begun to join national conservative parties across Europe in their call to reverse the EU’s failing Ukraine strategy.

The latest to call for pivoting to a pro-ceasefire approach instead of continuing to send endless weapons shipments that Europe can’t afford was Michael Kretschmer, the minister president of the German federal state of Saxony, in a recent interview with the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND), published on Friday, August 9th.