Geopolitics

Ukraine's former defence minister has called for a presidential election to be held during the war, the first such demand by a senior political figure since Russia's 2022 invasion.

Russia's Pskov City Court has jailed Yabloko deputy chairman Lev Shlosberg for eleven years over social media posts opposing the war in Ukraine, one of the heaviest sentences yet handed to a mainstream opposition figure.

Diplomacy conducted by personal instinct tends to move in bursts. It bypasses the careful scaffolding of preconditions and working groups, and bets everything on a relationship that may exist more vividly in one leader's imagination than in any shared reality.

Trump warned US ally Oman it would be 'blown up' if it interfered in the Iran standoff, as the only formal guarantee of toll-free Hormuz passage expired with nothing to replace it.

NATO fighters shot down a foreign drone over eastern Latvia, then scrambled again as another crossed into Romania, back-to-back live tests of the alliance's eastern air defences.

Trump has ordered the Pentagon to substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea, saying Seoul offered no help against Iran, in a post that touted his relationship with Kim Jong Un.

The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow corridor between Iran and Oman through which roughly one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil trade ordinarily passes, has gone almost quiet.

Jared Kushner arrived in Israel this week carrying something concrete: confirmation from the Board of Peace that Hamas had agreed to the roadmap's next phases, following rare direct talks. The government he flew to meet had still not formally endorsed the plan he was there to advance.