The Latest Breaking News from Stefan Wolff

For the past several days the focus of war news has been squarely on Germany’s Olaf Scholz. The chancellor has been battling with his conscience over whether to accede to Volodymyr Zelensky’s plea to supply Ukraine with his country’s fearsome Leopard 2 tanks.

Over the holiday period, a pedal-powered Christmas tree became the symbol of Ukraine’s defiant resistance against Russia’s relentless bombing campaign which Vladimir Putin hoped would spoil everyone’s Yuletide. Usually the Orthodox church would celebrate Christmas on January 7, but a decision was made by the Ukraine church to give its…

Volodymyr Zelensky has been on his travels this week, leaving Ukraine for the first time since the invasion to fly to the US to meet with Joe Biden and address a joint sitting of Congress. The Ukrainian president impressed with his Churchillian tone, comparing his country’s defiance of Russia’s war…

The conflict in Ukraine appears to have reached another key moment that has the potential to influence the course of the rest of the war. Ukrainian troops, who have been sweeping through the south of the country since September appear poised to recapture the city of Kherson.

The next couple of weeks is likely to see Ukraine’s weather taking a turn for the worse, bringing first rain and then, as temperatures plummet, increasingly heavy snowfalls. “General Winter” has always had an important part to play in armed conflicts in this part of the world – something that…

The political climate got a few degrees warmer this week after Vladimir Putin announced a plan for partial mobilisation of Russian reserves, calling on a reservoir of somewhere between 300,000 and a million troops to bolster the Russian military’s parlous position in Ukraine.

Rebels are stepping up their resistance movement amid Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south.

The death this week of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who presided over its disintegration at the end of the 1980s, prompted an avalanche of tributes. These came mainly from outside Russia – where he was viewed with considerable ambivalence by much of the population who…

Ukraine hopes new ability to hit Russian targets deep behind front lines can turn the tide of the war.

This time last week, the world was anxiously awaiting the annual Victory Day celebrations in Russia for a clue as to what Vladimir Putin might be planning for his war in Ukraine. Victory Day, held every year on May 9, is a commemoration of the victory over Nazism in Europe,…

It’s fair to say that things are not going well for Vladimir Putin and his war on Ukraine. Heavy losses of men and equipment and supply chain problems have forced an apparent change of plan. Instead of taking Kyiv and effectively ending resistance, Russia’s deputy defence minister, Alexander Fomin, said…