North Korea appears to be increasing its military commitment to the war in Ukraine following the disclosure that the communist state is going to donate more than 100 mobile howitzers to the Russian army. The 170mm M1989 Koksan howitzers, among the longest-range artillery systems in the world, are known as “juche cannons” and were built to pound the South Korean capital in the event of a conflict. The new arms donation comes in the wake of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un sending more than 10,000 soldiers to fight in Ukraine. The North Korean troops have, however, suffered significant casualties, with estimates suggesting that at least 4,000 have…

Videos obtained by National Security News and circulating on WhatsApp groups suggest that some South African soldiers have surrendered to the M23 rebels.

President Donald Trump announced plans to soon meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss peace talks with Ukraine.

The British Army’s regular force now stands at a mere 72,000 soldiers, the smallest it has been since the mid-Eighteenth Century. Whilst it is still a much respected organisation that continues to deliver incredible outputs, it must now contend with the new Labour Government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR 2025), which will be looking for further ways to deliver the UK’s mandated defence outputs for less. Regular Army soldier numbers should not be the only factor in deciding how the Land Force should be structured, however they do constrain what tasks and outputs the Army are instructed to achieve. And today’s small…

The signs are not good. The much-anticipated Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal is a horribly complicated construct which seems almost designed to fail. The three-phase is designed to stop the fighting for 42 days. During that time, Israel will withdraw from the Gaza Strip’s most populated regions and allow much needed aid convoys at the Rafah border to enter the devastated area. In return, Hamas will release 33 Israeli hostages, and Israel will release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The two sides will continue talking in the hope of securing the deal’s next two phases, which would free the remaining…

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…