Britain will send 30,000 drones to Ukraine to help fight against Russian aggression, the UK government has announced. The move comes ahead of a possible meeting in the coming weeks between US President-elect Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The “state-of-the-art, first-person view drones” will allow Ukraine’s Armed Forces to bypass Russian air defences and “target enemy positions and armoured vehicles,” the government said. The defence boost forms part of an international drive to ramp up efforts to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The drones will be sent following £45m worth of contracts agreed upon by the International Drone…

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has arrived in Kyiv to sign what Downing Street is calling a “landmark 100-year partnership” with Ukraine. The pact will formalise economic and military support already pledged to the country, which has been fighting a war with Russia for almost three years. It is the prime minister’s first visit to the country since taking office last summer, in a show of support for Ukraine just days before Donald Trump re-enters the White House. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is keen to discuss firm security guarantees from key allies such as the UK, wary that a new…

The new head of NATO has told the European Union that member states need to spend more on defence or start learning Russian. In a speech to the European Parliament, NATO’s new Secretary-General Mark Rutte said the EU needs to rethink its defence spending. “On average, European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health, and social security systems. We need only a small fraction of that money to make defence much stronger,” Rutte told MEPs. Most EU countries also belong to NATO, and for the last decade, the alliance has called on them…

Drones delivering weapons to two of England’s highest-security prisons have become a national security risk, the prisons watchdog has warned. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor, said that drops of contraband to inmates at the top-security jails HMP Manchester and HMP Long Lartin in Worcestershire were now so frequent that guns could be smuggled in. The two jails house some of the most dangerous men in the country, including terrorists, murderers, and organised crime gang bosses. Mr Taylor claimed that prison authorities had “ceded the airspace” over the jails, leading to an increasing risk of armed violence, escapes, and…

The Ukrainian military has developed a new drone that incinerates enemy troops by spraying them with molten metal. These drones have been fitted with canisters filled with thermite, a chemical mixture of aluminum and iron oxide developed over a century ago to weld railway tracks. When thermite is ignited, it produces a reaction that is almost impossible to extinguish. Despite causing horrific injuries, thermite drones—also called Dragon Drones by Ukrainian troops—are not banned under international law, provided they are used to attack military and not civilian targets. The thermite drones have been used to attack Russian infantry hiding in densely…

South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICC drove the review of South Africa’s inclusion in AGOA by Congress according to Tony Carroll.

Ukrainian troops are using millions of hours of video combat footage to train artificial intelligence-driven drones to independently track and target Russian forces. AI has been deployed by both sides on the battlefield during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to identify targets, scanning images far quicker than a human can. Oleksandr Dmitriev, founder of OCHI, a non-profit Ukrainian digital system which centralises and analyses video feeds from over 15,000 drone crews working on the frontlines, said his system had collected two million hours, or 228 years, of battlefield video from drones since 2022. He said that the data gleaned from the…

There is a strong reservoir of goodwill towards the country in Washington that should be explored though robust engagement with the US Congress says US Ambassador Brigety.

Protests in Mozambique targeting infrastructure, particularly the vital Lebombo border post to South Africa, could escalate, potentially disrupting trade and transport routes for months.

Russia has reportedly sold its stakes in certain Kazakh uranium deposits to Chinese-owned companies, marking a significant shift in the global uranium market. The development involves Kazakhstan’s nuclear resources company, Kazatomprom, and Russia’s Rosatom transferring interests to Chinese entities. Kazatomprom, the world’s largest uranium producer, revealed that Rosatom’s Uranium One Group sold its 49.97 per cent stake in the Zarechnoye joint venture (JV) to SNURDC Astana Mining Company, whose ultimate beneficiary is China’s State Nuclear Uranium Resources Development Company. The Zarechnoye JV operates the Zarechnoye mine, which had uranium reserves of approximately 3,500 tonnes at the start of 2024. Mining…

The MK Party continues to allege irregularities in the May elections. Having exhausted legal avenues in South Africa, they are now threatening to escalate their claims to an international court.

An international war crimes prosecutor has claimed that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria has exposed a state-run “machinery of death” in which he estimated more than 100,000 people were tortured and murdered since 2013. Former US war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp, who had visited two mass grave sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, said: “We certainly have more than 100,000 people that were disappeared into and tortured to death in this machine. I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves.” “We…