Ukraine-Russia warfare newest: Russia’s Lavrov alerts use of ‘any means’ as North Korean troops saved from fight

The head of Britain’s armed forces has warned that the world stands at the cusp of a “third nuclear age,” defined by multiple simultaneous challenges and weakened safeguards that kept previous threats in check.

Admiral Tony Radakin, chief of the defence staff, said Britain needs to recognise the seriousness of the threats it faces, even if there is only a remote chance of Russia launching a direct nuclear attack on the UK or its Nato allies.

While the Cold War saw two superpowers held at bay by nuclear deterrence and the past three decades were characterised by international efforts to restrict the spread of nuclear weapons, the current era is “altogether more complex,” Mr Radakin said Wednesday in a speech to the Royal United Services Institute.

“We are at the dawn of a third nuclear age—” he said. “It is defined by multiple and concurrent dilemmas, proliferating nuclear and disruptive technologies and the almost total absence of the security architectures that went before.”

Challenges faced by the West include Russia’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine,

China’s drive to build up its nuclear stockpiles, Iran’s failure to cooperate with international efforts to limit its nuclear program, and “erratic behavior” by North Korea, Mr Radakin said.

All of this comes against a backdrop of increasing cyberattacks, sabotage and disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing Western countries.

The White House is mulling providing a huge tranche of military assistance to Ukraine in its last-minute strategy to boost Ukraine’s position in the war before the transition to Trump’s administration.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan held a meeting with Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, for more than an hour yesterday.

Mr Sullivan committed to issuing hundreds of thousands of additional artillery rounds, thousands of rockets and hundreds of armored vehicles to Ukraine in the first month of next year, Guardian reported, citing the briefing from the meeting.

The US will also impose a slew of new sanctions on Russian entities in the coming weeks and also support its troops in war by offering to train soldiers.

According to a Reuters report, the president-elect’s team is discreetly crafting a peace plan for Ukraine that would exclude Nato membership and could involve conceding substantial territory to Russia, marking a significant departure from current US policy.

Mr Trump, meanwhile, has frequently claimed he could end the war between Ukraine and Russia within 24 hours.

The Ukrainian air force said that Russia launched 53 drones to attack the country overnight in its latest update today.

Of 53 drones, it shot down 32 and “lost track” of 16, likely due to electronic warfare. Two drones left Ukraine-controlled airspace and headed to Belarus, according to the statement

Scientists have sounded a warning about the alarming rise of “extremely pathogenic” multi-drug resistant bacteria in war-torn Ukraine.

They narrowed in on samples of the bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae to assess if it had the ability to cause disease in a wider context.

The Kremlin is using state media, fake news sites and social media accounts to push divisive narratives about the war and US president-elect Donald Trump before he returns to the White House next month.

Analysts said the content is aimed at turning sentiment against Ukraine at a crucial time, to reduce US military aid and ensure a Russian victory.

Clips from fake videos purporting to show Ukrainian soldiers burning effigies of Trump and his supporters have circulated among Trump supporters and believers in QAnon, a conspiracy theory that claims Trump is waging war against a satanic cabal of powerful world leaders.

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov faced heavy criticism as he arrived at an annual meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Malta.

The Russian diplomat walked out of the hall before US secretary of state Antony Blinken arrived as the two traded accusations in a heated annual gathering.

The Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said: “My message to the Russian delegation is the following: We are not taken in by your lies. We know what you’re doing. You’re trying to rebuild the Russian empire and we will not let you. We will resist you every inch of the way.”

Mr Lavrov hit back by accusing Nato and the EU of politicising the OSCE.

He accused the West of the “reincarnation of the cold war, only now with a much greater risk of a transition to a hot one”.

Western countries including the United States assailed Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov over the war in Ukraine at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Malta.

“My message to the Russian delegation is the following: We are not taken in by your lies. We know what you’re doing. You’re trying to rebuild the Russian empire and we will not let you. We will resist you every inch of the way,” Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski said.

Poland and Ukraine’s foreign ministers were amongst those who left the room for Mr Lavrov’s speech, which is common for international meetings. Mr Lavrov was also absent when US secretary of state Antony Blinken spoke.

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said the use of a hypersonic missile in the Ukraine war was to make the West understand that Moscow was ready to use any means to ensure no “strategic defeat” would be inflicted on Moscow.

Russia deployed the Oreshnik hypersonic missile against the Ukrainian city of Dnipro last month in what Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin described as a test of a missile he said could not be brought down.

He said Russia could bring other such missiles into action in “combat conditions” if required.

“The message is that you, I mean the US and the allies of the US, who also provide these long-range weapons to the Kyiv regime – they must understand that we would be ready to use any means not to allow them to succeed in what they call a strategic defeat of Russia,” Mr Lavrov told US journalist Tucker Carlson.

“They fight for keeping their hegemony over the world, on any country, any region, any continent. We fight for our legitimate security interests.”

In his 80-minute interview, Mr Lavrov also said that the West should abandon any notion that Russia had no “red lines” that it would bar anyone from crossing in defending its interests.

“If they are following the logic which some Westerners have been pronouncing lately, that they don’t believe that Russia has red lines, they announced their red lines, these red lines are being moved again and again, this is a very serious mistake,” he said.

Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) carried out a successful cyber-attack against one of Russia’s largest banks, disrupting services for hundreds of thousands of customers, a source in the agency told the Kyiv Independent.

The website for Gazprombank was reportedly inaccessible in France and Germany, and the mobile application also experienced outages. Russian state media on Wednesday confirmed problems accessing the bank’s website.

The source said the agency directed excessive traffic to the bank’s website and mobile application, overloading its servers in what is known as a distributed denial of service attack.

Both Ukraine and Russia have used cyber warfare during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov walked out from an annual security meeting in Malta before US secretary of state Antony Blinken arrived as he accused the West of reviving the Cold War.

Speaking at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ministerial meeting in Malta, Mr Lavrov said the West was provoking a direct conflict with Russia.

He said the US actions were driven by a desire to “return Nato to the political spotlight.”

“After the Afghan disgrace, there was a need for a new common enemy,” Mr Lavrov said during his first stop in an EU nation since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “The result is the reincarnation of the Cold War, but now with the far greater risk of its escalation into the hot phase.” Mr Blinken, who spoke after Mr Lavrov left the room, put the blame for escalation in the region back on Russia, noting that the Russian foreign minister, the fourth speaker, did not stick around to listen to other speakers.

“Let’s talk about escalation,” Mr Blinken said, citing the deployment of North Korean forces in Europe, the use of an intermediate-range ballistic missile to attack Ukraine, Russia’s move to lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, and attacks on Ukraine‘s energy infrastructure. “Mr Lavrov spoke about the sovereign right of every member-state to make their own choices,” Mr Blinken said. “That’s exactly what this is about: the sovereign right of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people to make their own choices about the future, not to have those choices made in and by Moscow.”