As 2026 opens, the war in Ukraine is no longer defined by headlines or symbolic victories. It is being shaped by attrition on the battlefield, mounting financial strain in Europe, and institutional contradictions in the West. This long read examines how those pressures are converging — and whether they point toward an endgame, or a more dangerous phase ahead.
War is no longer disrupting global trade. It is being written into the contracts and insurance frameworks that make trade possible. As war risk pricing, listed areas, and standard charterparty clauses harden into routine procedure, conflict becomes a toll. Watch the insurance market, not the speeches. It signals what the world is normalising.
The world’s data, energy and power grids run through cables and pipelines on the seabed. After Nord Stream and the Baltic incidents, Europe is finally patrolling this domain but its laws still make decisive enforcement slow, uncertain and dangerously easy to evade.
China’s Jiutian high-altitude unmanned aircraft is not a superweapon, but it alters the geometry of airpower. By operating above terrain and distance constraints, it pressures two theatres at once: the Himalayan frontier and the Western Pacific. The real issue is not penetration, but cost, persistence, and defensive arithmetic.
Lieutenant General Apti Alaudinov, a Chechen commander at the heart of Moscow’s war machine, says Russia is winning a deliberate slow grind in Ukraine with drones, attrition and hypersonic missiles. He claims Ukraine is bleeding faster than it can mobilise while Russian forces preserve manpower and hold back tanks. This article unpacks his story using Russian official figures and doctrine as the reference frame.
Russia’s senior military theorists now declare the age of the tank over. In a new doctrinal paper, General Yury Baluevsky and Ruslan Pukhov describe the Ukraine war as the first true “digital war,” dominated by drones, satellites, and computing power. They argue that dispersed micro-units, autonomous systems, and real-time networks will replace massed armour and artillery. Future supremacy, they warn, will belong to nations that control chips, data, and orbiting communications rather than steel.
China’s CV-18 Fujian has entered service as the world’s second electromagnetic-catapult carrier, ending decades of U.S. monopoly in carrier aviation.
It marks the moment China’s navy moved from coastal defence to blue-water power projection, fielding stealth fighters, early-warning aircraft, and an all-domestic strike group. The Fujian is more than a ship it is Beijing’s declaration that parity with the U.S. Navy has arrived.
Measured in silver, the Roman soldier seemed poorly paid. But once we map his lifetime income by social percentile, he emerges as one of the best-compensated professionals of antiquity. Rome’s army wasn’t just a military machine — it was the empire’s largest engine of social mobility, recycling half of all state spending into land, pensions, and loyalty.
Is war with Iran Approaching. The choreography of logistics, diplomacy, and rhetoric suggests a narrowing path to confrontation that could reshape the region or plunge it into chaos.
Israel faces a narrowing window for war with Iran as U.S. naval forces and refuelling tankers reposition across the Middle East. With the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group on station and regional skies soon to close with winter weather, pressure is building on Tel Aviv to decide whether to strike now or stand down until spring.
NEW DELHI — The four-day war began before breakfast. On a pale May morning, Indian Air Force fighters rose from bases in Punjab and Jammu; across the line, Pakistani pilots climbed to meet them....
On a late summer day in Murmansk, the Russian nuclear icebreaker Arktika noses out of its berth, a slab of steel and reactors bound for the Northern Sea Route. Far to the east, Chinese...
JOHANNESBURG — South Africa has asked China to postpone joint naval exercises with Russia until after November’s Group of 20 summit, an unusual step by a government that has long defended its military partnerships...
President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social account on Wednesday as China staged a vast military spectacle in Beijing, accusing President Xi Jinping — flanked by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un —...
By Jaffa Levy in London and Abu Rashid in Sana’a Last week — Thursday, August 28, 2025 — an airstrike hit the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, killing Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and several cabinet colleagues....
By Jaffa Levy August 30, 2025 Europe finds itself at a crossroads. As the war in Ukraine grinds on into its fourth year, Western capitals are under pressure to sustain the flow of weapons...
By Jaffa Levy — London They came first in small boats. Julius Caesar, peering across the narrow water, lashed together a flotilla of timbered hulls and tested the Channel twice, in 55 and 54...