Peter Apps

Ever since mid-2024, residents and Ukrainian officials have been stripping everything of value from the frontline town of Pokrovsk: library books, hospital beds, industrial equipment, everything that once supported a bustling settlement of more than 60,000 people at the heart of Ukraine’s eastern, mainly Russian-speaking Donbas region.

As U.S. President Donald Trump headed to the Pacific this week for a string of meetings including with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, officials in Beijing ramped up their already growing efforts to present the "reunification" of Taiwan with the mainland as increasingly inevitable.

As unidentified drones brought chaos to multiple European airports last month, former Danish Air Force officer Dan Hermansen was not surprised to find his company MyDefence suddenly besieged with orders.

Six days before Russian drones entered Polish airspace on September 9, a U.S. B-2 stealth bomber flew across the North Atlantic and sank a target ship as part of military drills, escorted to its target by Norwegian F-35 stealth jets.

At the end of August, Britain's Ministry of Defence announced it was looking to procure a new medium-range ballistic missile capable of striking targets 600 km (375 miles) away with a conventional high-explosive warhead – and that it wanted the first trials to take place as soon as summer.

In London’s Shoreditch district, long home to UK tech start-ups, a French artificial intelligence firm is crunching data that would have allowed Ukrainian commanders to more quickly counter Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.

As the billionaire founder of one of the world’s fastest-growing defence technology companies visited Taiwan earlier this month, he had a stark message for the island’s next generation of IT engineers: In the face of a mounting threat from mainland China, the survival of their democracy might well depend on them.

Visiting Beijing at the height of U.S. President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day” trade war rhetoric this April, Kenyan President William Ruto described a “broken ... global order". He declared that Kenya would work with China to build a "fair, inclusive and sustainable ... world order".

As they kicked off the largest joint military exercises in Australia’s history with a press conference in Sydney earlier this month, U.S. commanders gave a simple explanation for why 35,000 troops from 19 nations were simulating high-tech warfare.

As some 20 Iranian ballistic missiles headed for the U.S. airbase at Al Udeid in Qatar last month following U.S. strikes against Iran, the only U.S. personnel at the almost entirely evacuated base were some 40 air defence personnel manning a Patriot missile battery flown in a few weeks earlier.

As India’s defense chief attended an international security conference in Singapore in May, soon after India and Pakistan fought what many in South Asia now dub “the four-day war”, he had a simple message: Both sides expect to do it all again.

At the headquarters of U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs, military planners are racing to a very earthbound deadline as they draw up plans for how they might fight the first major war in space.

As Estonia’s defence minister opened a tech conference this week focused heavily on cutting-edge military equipment, he said his nation’s strategy in the face of mounting Russian pressure was to turn itself into a “fly that can paralyse an elephant”.

Earlier this month, U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Doug Wickert summoned nearby civic leaders to Edwards Air Force Base in California to warn them that if China attacks Taiwan in the coming years, they should be prepared for their immediate region to suffer potentially massive disruption from the very start.

As the Trump administration marked 100 days in office this week, China's state broadcaster described what it called "100 days of chaos" and said the government in Beijing was providing "stability to a changing and turbulent world".

On his first tour of Asia last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told service members on the Pacific territory of Guam they were not just the “tip of the spear” of efforts to deter a big war with China, but also literally “living in history”.

At the most newsworthy Munich Security Conference in recent memory last weekend, Germany’s likely next chancellor did all he could to look unfazed by the unexpected endorsement of its far-right AfD party by U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

As Donald Trump and Kamala Harris faced off in the 2024 U.S. presidential race, Estonian and Taiwanese troops were training together at Fort Sill in Oklahoma to use U.S.-made HIMARS long-range rocket systems their governments had purchased.

As they watched Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy evicted from the White House last week after an unprecedented live televised quarrel with President Donald Trump and his Vice President JD Vance, some of America’s closest allies began to swiftly reappraise decades of foreign and defence policy.

NATO’s first major exercise this year, "STEADFAST DART", has seen its Allied Response Force (ARF) deploy 10,000 troops with accompanying aircraft, warships and well over 1,500 vehicles into southern Europe, not far from the borders of Ukraine.