BERLIN, Feb 12 (Reuters) – Germany will deliver five additional PAC-3 missile interceptors to Ukraine if other countries donate a total of 30, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Thursday.
PAC-3, or Patriot Advanced Capability-3, is among the main weapons the West has supplied to Ukraine as it fights Russia’s invasion.
“We all know it is about saving lives,” Pistorius said in Brussels after a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group.
“It’s a matter of days and not a matter of weeks or months,” he added.
The minister noted that the Patriots announcement has not been approved by national governments yet, but he said he is “very optimistic” the 30+5 can be achieved.
(Reporting by Maria Martinez, Editing by Miranda Murray)
Russia has officially ordered a nationwide block on WhatsApp, marking the most significant step yet in its campaign to isolate citizens from Western communication tools.
The Kremlin announced the move on Thursday, following months of technical disruptions that had already forced many users to rely on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
The official justification for the ban is a lack of legal compliance. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed the service was blocked due to Meta’s “unwillingness to comply with the norms and the letter of Russian law.”
Specifically, Moscow has long demanded that foreign tech firms store the data of Russian users on local servers and provide law enforcement with access to encrypted messages – demands that WhatsApp, which uses end-to-end encryption, has consistently refused.
Rights groups have condemned the move as a transparent attempt to ramp up state surveillance. WhatsApp, which had over 100 million users in Russia, warned that trying to isolate people from secure communication is a “backwards step” that only decreases public safety.
The ban follows similar restrictions placed on Telegram, which regulators accused of failing to abide by security laws, despite the app’s widespread use among Russian military personnel.
MAX super-app
In place of Western platforms, the Kremlin is aggressively promoting MAX, a state-developed “super-app” designed to be a Russian equivalent to China’s WeChat. MAX is touted as a one-stop shop for messaging, making payments, and accessing online government services. However, the convenience comes with a significant catch: the app lacks the end-to-end encryption found in WhatsApp.
Experts warn that MAX is a “surveillance app” by design. The platform openly declares it will share user data with authorities upon request, leaving private conversations vulnerable to state snooping. To ensure adoption, the government has mandated that MAX be pre-installed on all new devices sold in Russia, while public sector employees and students are increasingly required to use the platform for official communication.
The block on WhatsApp completes a digital iron curtain that already includes bans on Facebook, Instagram, and X. By pushing the population toward a state-monitored ecosystem, the Kremlin is hoping to create a “sovereign internet” where the flow of information can be entirely controlled and monitored by the state.
IOC President Kirsty Coventry was waiting for Heraskevych at the top of the track when he arrived around 8:15 a.m. Thursday, about 75 minutes before the start of the men’s skeleton race.
They went into a private area and spoke briefly, and Coventry was unable to change Heraskevych’s mind. The Ukrainian athlete briefly addressed reporters and said he would appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
“It’s hard to say or put into words. It’s emptiness,” he said.
“This is price of our dignity,” he added in a social media post.
Ukraine’s Vladyslav Heraskevych reacts after being disqualified from the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo on Feb. 12, 2026.
Odd ANDERSEN / AFP via Getty Images
Coventry spoke with reporters after the meeting with tears rolling down her face.
“I was not meant to be here but I thought it was really important to come here and talk to him face to face,” Coventry told reporters, according to the Reuters news agency. “No one, especially me, is disagreeing with the messaging, it’s a powerful message, it’s a message of remembrance, of memory. The challenge was to find a solution for the field of play. Sadly we’ve not been able to find that solution. I really wanted to see him race. It’s been an emotional morning.”
The IOC added that it made its decision “with regret.”
“Despite multiple exchanges and in-person meetings between the IOC and Mr Heraskevych, the last one this morning with IOC President Kirsty Coventry, he did not consider any form of compromise,” the IOC said in a statement. “The IOC was very keen for Mr Heraskevych to compete. This is why the IOC sat down with him to look for the most respectful way to address his desire to remember his fellow athletes who have lost their lives following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The essence of this case is not about the message, it is about where he wanted to express it.”
Ukraine’s Vladyslav Heraskevych is seen during the Men’s Skeleton Training at the Cortina Sliding Center, on day three of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy on Feb. 9, 2026.
Andrew Milligan / PA Images/Getty
Heraskevych came to the Olympics with a customized helmet showing the faces of more than 20 Ukrainian athletes and coaches who were killed during the war, a conflict that started shortly after the 2022 Beijing Games ended.
The IOC said Monday night that the helmet wouldn’t be allowed in competition, citing a rule against making political statements on the Olympic field of play. Heraskevych wore the helmet for training Tuesday and Wednesday anyway, knowing the IOC could ultimately keep him from the Olympic race.
“The helmet does not violate any IOC rules,” Heraskevych said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticized the IOC decision Thursday, saying on social media that, “Sport shouldn’t mean amnesia, and the Olympic movement should help stop wars, not play into the hands of aggressors. Unfortunately, the (IOC) decision says otherwise,” adding that Heraskevych’s helmet was a reminder of Russian aggression.
“No rule has been broken,” he said.
The IOC had sided with Heraskevych before. When he displayed a “No war in Ukraine” sign after his fourth and final run at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, the IOC said he was simply calling for peace and did not find him in violation of the Olympic charter.
“We want him to compete. We really, really want him to have his moment,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Wednesday. “That’s very, very important. We want all athletes to have their moment and that’s the point. We want all our athletes to have a fair and level playing field.”
The first two runs of the race were Thursday, with the final two runs on Friday night. Heraskevych was a legitimate medal hopeful.
Speaking with CBS News’ Aidan Stretch in Kyiv on Wednesday, Ukrainian artist Iryna Protts, who made Heraskevych’s helmet, said she would be “very upset” if he wasn’t allowed to wear it.
“This world of mine looks like hypocrisy,” she said. “A lot of our people have been killed. Our intelligent people have been killed. Our businesspeople have been killed. Our athletes have been killed. And now it’s already the fourth year of the war, and it feels like no one cares. Everyone just looks on, silently.”
MOSCOW, Feb 12 (Reuters) – A Ukrainian drone attack has caused a fire at an oil refinery owned by Lukoil near Ukhta in Russia’s northwestern Komi Republic, the head of the region, Rostislav Goldshtein, said on Thursday.
He said in a statement on the Telegramn app that nobody had been injured and that emergency services were working on the scene.
Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure somewhat subsided in January amid peace negotiations, but have picked up intensity in recent days.
Ukraine’s General Staff said on Wednesday that Ukrainian drones had hit Lukoil’s oil refinery in Russia’s southern Volgograd region.
(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by Felix LightEditing by Andrew Osborn)
MOSCOW, Feb 9 (Reuters) – Russia’s Federal Security Service said on Monday that the men suspected of shooting one of the country’s most senior military intelligence officer had confessed that they were carrying out orders from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).
Ukraine has denied any involvement in Friday’s attempted assassination of Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev, deputy head of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service. Alexeyev has regained consciousness after surgery.
Russia said that the suspected shooter, a Ukrainian-born Russian citizen named by Moscow as Lyubomir Korba, had been questioned after he was extradited from Dubai. A suspected accomplice, Viktor Vasin, has also been questioned.
The FSB said in a statement that both Korba and Vasin had “confessed their guilt” and given details of the shooting which they said was “committed on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine.”
The FSB did not provide any evidence that Reuters was able to immediately verify. It was not possible to contact the men while they were in detention in Russia. The SBU could not be reached for immediate comment on the FSB statement.
The FSB said Korba was recruited by the SBU in August 2025 in Ternopil, western Ukraine, underwent training in Kyiv and was paid monthly in crypto-currency. For killing Alexeyev, Korba was promised $30,000 by the SBU, the FSB said.
The FSB said Polish intelligence was involved in his recruitment. Poland could not be reached for immediate comment.
(Reporting by Reuters, Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Michael Perry)
The U.S. has given Ukraine and Russia a June deadline to reach a deal to end the nearly four‑year war, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters, as Russian strikes on energy infrastructure forced nuclear power plants to cut output on Saturday.
If the June deadline is not met, the Trump administration will likely put pressure on both sides to meet it, he added.
“The Americans are proposing the parties end the war by the beginning of this summer and will probably put pressure on the parties precisely according to this schedule,” Zelenskyy said, speaking to reporters on Friday. Zelenskyy’s comments were embargoed until Saturday morning.
“And they say that they want to do everything by June. And they will do everything to end the war. And they want a clear schedule of all events,” he said.
He said the U.S. proposed holding the next round of trilateral talks next week in their country for the first time, likely in Miami, Zelenskyy said. “We confirmed our participation,” he added.
Zelenskyy said Russia presented the U.S. with a $12 trillion economic proposal — which he dubbed the “Dmitriev package” after Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev. Bilateral economic deals with the U.S. form part of the broader negotiating process.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends a joint news conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026.
Sergei Grits / AP
Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure continued with over 400 drones and about 40 missiles launched overnight Saturday, Zelenskyy said in a post on X. Targets included the energy grid, generation facilities and distribution networks.
Ukrenergo, the state energy transmission operator, said the attack was the second mass strike on energy infrastructure since the start of the year, forcing nuclear power plants to reduce output. Eight facilities in eight regions came under attack, it said in a statement.
“As a result of missile strikes on key high-voltage substations that ensured the output of nuclear power units, all nuclear power plants in the territories under control were forced to reduce their load,” the statement said.
It said the power deficit in the country has increased “significantly” as a result of the attacks forcing an extension of hourly power outages in all regions of Ukraine.
The latest deadline follows U.S.-brokered trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi that produced no breakthrough as the warring parties cling to mutually exclusive demands. Russia is pressing Ukraine to withdraw from the Donbas, where fighting remains intense — a condition Kyiv says it will never accept.
“Difficult issues remained difficult. Ukraine once again confirmed its positions on the Donbas issue. ‘We stand where we stand’ is the fairest and most reliable model for a ceasefire today, in our opinion,” Zelenskyy said. He reiterated that the most challenging topics would be reserved for a trilateral meeting between leaders.
Zelenskyy said no common ground was reached on managing the Russian‑held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and expressed skepticism about a U.S. proposal to turn the Donbas region, coveted by Russia, into a free economic zone as a compromise.
“I do not know whether this can be implemented, because when we talked about a free economic zone, we had different views on it,” he said.
He said in the last round of talks the negotiators discussed how a ceasefire would be technically monitored. He added that the U.S. has reaffirmed it would play a role in that process.
Repeated Russian aerial assaults have in recent months focused on Ukraine’s power grid, causing blackouts and disrupting the heating and water supply for families during a bitterly cold winter, putting more pressure on Kyiv.
Zelenskyy said the U.S. again proposed a ceasefire banning strikes on energy infrastructure. Ukraine is ready to observe such a pause if Russia commits; but he added that when Moscow previously agreed to a one-week pause suggested by the U.S., it was violated after just four days.
London — Gamers around the world can now buy and play at home a pared-down version of a first-person drone training program developed and used by the Ukrainian armed forces. The game’s evolution — from battlefield training tool to home entertainment — is a notable first, and it is tied directly to Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to repel Russia’s four-year, full-scale invasion.
“Ukrainian Fight Drone Simulator” (UFDS) is available to buy online for about $30. It features the same ultra-realistic physics and piloting controls that have helped teach Ukrainian drone pilots to seek out and destroy Russian tanks, missile launchers and troops. The Full Simulator is available, for free, to all members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to use.
Vlad Plaksin, CEO of the Drone Fight Club Academy, a facility that trains Ukrainian military drone pilots, was one of the lead developers and driving forces behind UFDS. The academy has trained more than 5,000 Ukrainian military drone pilots since it was established early in the war, and it collaborated last year with the U.S. Air Force for a training session at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
Plaksin told CBS News one objective in turning the military program into a video game is to train young Ukrainians to fly drones, to “give them a possibility not to go to the trench with rifles.”
A screenshot from the “Ukrainian Fight Drone Simulator” video game shows the first-person view perspective of a player moments before the simulated drone impacts a Russian truck.
Ukrainian Fight Drone Simulator
Interest in anything drone-related among young Ukrainians has soared during the war, thanks largely to the country’s military drone pilots, whom Plaksin said had achieved heroic status.
“Most young people want to fly, want to hit [Russian targets], want to grow up in this new world of robotics,” he told CBS News.
The game’s creators call it a “public adaptation of a leading ultra-realistic FPV [first person view] drone trainer, built on lessons from the Ukrainian front line,” offering players an opportunity to “learn to fly like a front-line pilot, take on real-world mission scenarios, and feel the rush of modern FPV warfare.”
In hyperrealistic detail, it includes different types of drones to pilot on combat missions against Russian targets, with weather conditions and other variables that aim to provide an experience realistic enough for anyone to learn and practice the basics of drone warfare.
There are many games that offer similar FPV warfare experiences, including driving tanks, piloting fighter jets, and commanding submarines. But UFDS is the first to be developed directly from military software.
Ethical concerns?
While many games have likely been used by armed forces around the world as teaching tools, they have been developed as games first. UFDS flips that model around, bringing a real-world military training tool to screens in people’s homes.
Plaksin acknowledged ethical concerns around creating a game that allows young people to pretend they’re piloting deadly drones in such a realistic way, calling it “a very sensitive question,” but noting that the game is not unique in this regard.
“There are many other simulators which do the same, and we are not opening something new,” he said.
The view from a simulated drone just after it releases a bomb over a Russian trench, as seen in a screenshot from the Ukrainian Fight Drone Simulator video game.
Ukrainian Fight Drone Simulator
UFDS is not the first video game to be used as a pseudo recruitment tool by a military, either.
The “America’s Army” series, launched in 2002 and developed by the U.S. Army, is widely seen as the first overt use of video games to drive recruitment by a national military. While the series was nowhere near as realistic as UFDS, it served a similar purpose.
Could Russia take advantage?
Plaksin says the Ukrainian game, at its core, is a tool for people to gain “a basic knowledge for the drones, but also at the same time, we try to do it maximum safety, for not sharing the sensitive information.”
To avoid revealing details that Russia’s military could potentially use to train its own pilots, there are significant differences between the publicly available version of UFDS and the version used at the Drone Fight Club Academy to train Ukrainian military operators.
Ukrainian soldiers with a drone unit from the 24th Mechanized Brigade prepare a Ukrainian-designed R18 octocopter UAV during a training exercise in eastern Ukraine, in early October 2023.
CBS News
Those differences are “mostly about tactics,” Plaksin told CBS News. “It gives you everything that you need, but it will not give you the tactics. I think it’s the main difference between the versions.”
He said some of that just involves paring down what, for gamers, might be the more tedious parts of drone warfare. Gamers may not want to spend 30 minutes flying their virtual drone to reach an objective, for instance. So the gameplay is deliberately made more arcade-style, while maintaining highly realistic controls and user experience.
This means that there is “less understanding of missions, less understanding of how to fly for a huge distance” which is a vital part of training drone pilots.
“When you fly on the [real] drones, you see the area and you need to read the map and compare it with what you see,” Plaksin said. “In missions, it’s very important. In arcade games, it’s not important, and we don’t put it inside because it will not be interesting for the players.”
UFDS is still a very niche game, with only around 50 people playing online daily. Such detailed military simulation games often garner small but loyal followings, and rarely break into the wider gaming community.
But Plaksin is trying to change that, and broaden appeal. He’s helping to organize a championship he hopes will “maximise the level of people playing the game” and encourage competition between players.
A high-profile general in Russia’s military has been shot several times and wounded in Moscow.
Lt Gen Vladimir Alexeyev was immediately taken to hospital after the attack in a residential building on the north-western outskirts of the city and his condition is unknown.
Alexeyev is a senior figure in the main directorate of Russia’s military general staff (GRU) and is the latest high-ranking military figure to have been targeted in the capital since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began almost four years ago.
He was placed under European Union sanctions after the GRU was accused of being behind a 2018 nerve agent attack in Salisbury in the UK.
“The victim has been hospitalised at one of the city’s hospitals,” said Svetlana Petrenko of Russia’s Investigations Committee, which said it opened a criminal case for attempted murder.
Alexeyev has played a significant role during the war in Ukraine, taking part in talks with Ukraine during the Russian siege of Mariupol in 2022.
He was also sent to negotiate with the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led a short and bloody mutiny in June 2023.
It is not yet known who was behind the shooting on Friday morning in a residential block on Volokolamskoye Highway in Moscow.
Ukraine has claimed some attacks on Russia military figures in the past. Russian intelligence officials claimed they had thwarted an attempted attack on a Russian soldier in St Petersburg at the end of last month.
An Uzbek man was jailed in January for the 2024 killing of another general, Igor Kirillov, in an explosion outside a block of flats in Moscow. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence had said it was behind the attack.
Lt Gen Kirillov had been in charge of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection troops.
For the first time in more than 50 years, the world’s largest nuclear powers, the U.S. and Russia, do not have an agreement limiting their long-range nuclear arsenals. Margaret Brennan explains what this could mean in an already dangerous world.
WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday said further U.S. sanctions against Russia depend on talks aimed at ending the nearly four-year-old Ukraine war.
Bessent, who participated in talks with Russian officials and President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in Miami on Saturday, said he would consider new sanctions against Russia’s shadow fleet – a step Trump has not taken since returning to office in January 2025.
“I will take it under consideration. We will see where the peace talks go,” Bessent said at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.
He said the Trump administration’s U.S. sanctions against Russian oil majors Rosneft and Lukoil had helped bring Russia to the negotiating table in the peace talks.
Asked what role Kushner was taking in the Russia talks, Bessent said that he believed President Trump’s son-in-law was acting as a special envoy and an interlocutor in the talks
Democratic Senator Andy Kim said the involvement of Trump family members without official positions could raise conflicts of interest.
STOCKHOLM, Feb 5 (Reuters) – Estonia’s Tax and Customs Board said on Thursday it had allowed the seized Baltic Spirit cargo vessel to leave the port of Muuga after an inspection had not confirmed suspicions it carried contraband.
(Reporting by Anna Ringstrom, editing by Stine Jacobsen)
The bombardment has been relentless. From the beginning of October through the middle of January, Ukraine’s intelligence service documented two hundred and fifty-six drone and missile strikes on energy facilities: eleven on hydroelectric power plants, ninety-four on thermal power plants, and a hundred and fifty-one on substations. “There is not a single power plant in Ukraine that the enemy has not attacked,” the country’s energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, told lawmakers in Kyiv on January 16th. “Thousands of megawatts of generation have been knocked out.” In a sign of how dire the situation has become, Shmyhal called on businesses to turn off their outdoor advertising. “If you have excess electricity, give it to people,” he said.
At the power plant I visited, repair crews were working twenty-four hours a day to get whatever they could back up and running. There was only so much they could do. With stocks of spare parts running low domestically, Orest said that former Eastern Bloc countries, such as the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, were the most obvious places to turn for help. “Many of their power plants are almost identical to ours,” he said. Still, other equipment that was damaged in the latest attack will need to be built to exact specifications, a process that can take months, even in normal times. Meanwhile, Orest just hoped that the plant wouldn’t sustain any more damage. “But we must always be prepared,” he said. “I don’t see any signs that the attacks will stop.”
Russia began targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the first year of the war. Back then, the attacks were sporadic and spread out. This winter, they’ve been concentrated on major cities, such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Dnipro—and punishing in scale and frequency. A single barrage can include dozens of missiles and hundreds of drones, overwhelming Ukraine’s already beleaguered air defenses. At a recent press conference, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, disclosed that several air-defense systems had just been replenished after running out of missiles—for how long, he didn’t say.
The attacks have plunged large swaths of the country into prolonged blackouts. (DTEK alone has lost more than two-thirds of its generation capacity.) Many of the blackouts are announced ahead of time, though not all. Lviv, a city of more than seven hundred thousand people, situated some forty-five miles east of the border with Poland, has been spared the worst of it. The longest stretch of time that my apartment has been without electricity is eight hours. Inconvenient, yes, but far from unbearable. I’ve given up on storing anything in my freezer, and I make sure to check the outage schedule, which is posted online every morning, before I throw in a load of laundry. When the power is out in the evening, I cook dinner and read by the light of a headlamp. I’ll often go to bed early, falling asleep to the low hum of an eighteen-kilowatt diesel generator that powers a convenience store across the street.
In parts of Kyiv, by contrast, outages have lasted weeks. Hot showers are a luxury in much of the city, elevators are best avoided, and frozen pipes have become a widespread flooding hazard. Schools extended winter vacation to the end of January out of concern that the heating and electricity shortages made the buildings unsafe for students. It’s often not much better at home; to ward off the cold, people have taken to warming bricks on their gas stoves and huddling in tents pitched in their living rooms. “The Russians are weaponizing winter,” Daria Badior, a Ukrainian journalist and cultural critic who splits her time between Lviv and Kyiv, told me. “They want Kyiv to suffer.” On January 24th, a huge strike knocked out heating to nearly half of the city’s twelve thousand apartment buildings. In Troieshchyna, a densely-populated neighborhood on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, about six hundred apartment buildings also lost electricity and water. Emergency-response teams quickly erected two tent camps in the neighborhood, giving local residents a place to warm up and charge their phones. On Tuesday, Russia launched another sweeping barrage, hitting power plants in at least six regions of Ukraine and thumbing its nose at President Donald Trump, who had just called for a pause in such attacks. In some areas of Kyiv, where more than eleven hundred apartment buildings were left without heat, temperatures fell to minus thirteen degrees Fahrenheit.
Feb 5 (Reuters) – Ukraine’s military said on Thursday it had carried out a series of “successful” strikes at the infrastructure of a Russian intermediate-range ballistic missile launch site in January.
Ukraine’s general staff said in a statement that some buildings were damaged, one hangar was “significantly” damaged and some personnel was evacuated from the Kapustin Yar test range near the Caspian Sea. It did not provide the dates of the attacks.
The military added it used its long-range capabilities to carry out the strikes, including the Ukrainian-made Flamingo missile.
(Reporting by Anna Pruchnicka; Editing by Daniel Flynn)
KYIV, Feb 5 (Reuters) – Ukraine and Russia on Thursday started a second day of U.S.-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi to discuss how to end their four-year-old war, top Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov said.
“The second day of negotiations in Abu Dhabi has begun,” Umerov said on the Telegram app. “We are working in the same formats as yesterday: trilateral consultations, group work and further synchronization of positions.”
(Reporting by Olena Harmash; Editing by Daniel Flynn )
Bergen, Norway — In the frigid waters off the coast of Norway, America’s NATO allies scour the depths for clandestine Russian activity.
The stretch of ocean, viewed as a gateway to the Arctic, is where Europe’s high north meets the Russian high north, home to the Kremlin’s Northern Fleet.
Nuclear-armed Russian submarines are dispatched regularly from the vast naval base on the country’s freezing Kola peninsula, slipping silently beneath the waves before heading into the North Atlantic.
CBS News joined the crew of a NATO warship taking part in drills aimed at detecting, tracking and — if necessary — taking out these subs before they pass through the narrow gap between Greenland, Iceland and the U.K., and onward to the United States’ eastern seaboard.
If a war were to break out between Russia and the U.S. and its NATO allies, the area would become a strategic chokepoint.
Commanders see Operation Arctic Dolphin — an exercise involving ships, submarines and aircraft from Spain, Germany, France, the U.K. and many other nations — as essential to maintaining cohesion in a military alliance that has endured for 75 years.
“Norway has the great advantage of being a part of such a huge alliance,” said Commodore Kyrre Haugen, commander of the Norwegian Fleet overseeing Arctic Dolphin. “But every nation is taking advantage of being a part of something that is bigger than themselves.”
The commander said Norway has operated in the Arctic since the Cold War, and the “special focus” on the region now highlights how crucial it is to the security of both Europe and the U.S.
Arctic map shows Greenland and the Northern Hemisphere with locations of NATO and Russian military bases.
AFP via Getty Images
“Those missiles can attack Europe, can attack America by being deployed in the deep seas, all into the Atlantic,” he said, referring to Russia’s arsenal.
The NATO drill is just one aspect of a race to secure a region that has become a “front line for strategic competition,” according to U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.
Russia’s already using the Arctic as a testing ground for its hypersonic missiles, designed to evade U.S. air defenses.
But threats to regional stability have also emerged closer to home.
President Trump angered NATO partners by repeatedly insisting the U.S. needed to take ownership of Greenland — and by threatening last month to impose tariffs on allies if they didn’t comply.
Undeniably, the alliance is playing catch-up in the Arctic and the high north. Seven of the eight Arctic states are NATO Allies. Yet Russia, with more than half the Arctic coastline in its territory, has almost as many permanently-manned bases in the region as all NATO members combined.
On the bridge of the Spanish frigate ESPS Almirante Juan de Borbon, the commander defended to CBS News the contribution to NATO by Spain, which Mr. Trump recently accused of not being “loyal” to the alliance.
“I’m not going to dig into political dynamics,” said Rear Admiral Joaquín Ruiz Escagedo, before gesturing to the young naval officers busy in front of maps and radar screens. “But I would say the contribution of Spain, you can see here.”
Escagedo said the country has “a lot of capabilities,” and is committed to NATO’s collective defense principle.
“We cannot be isolated. The power of NATO is the unity,” he said. “That’s the success of NATO for decades.”
That unity is about to be tested with a new mission.
NATO planning new Arctic Sentry mission for “enhanced vigilance” in the far north
A spokesperson for Gen. Grynkewich, NATO’s American commander in Europe, confirmed to CBS News that planning is underway for a mission in the Arctic region.
Arctic Sentry will be an “enhanced vigilance activity to even further strengthen NATO’s posture in the Arctic and High North.”
The spokesperson told CBS News that planning for the new mission has “only just begun, but details will follow in due course.”
The possibility of an Arctic Sentry mission was first mentioned by Britain’s top diplomat last month, as an element of the negotiations that resolved Mr. Trump’s standoff with Europe over the fate of Greenland.
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said the U.K. had proposed working “through NATO on a new Arctic sentry, which is similar to what we already have through NATO — a Baltic Sentry and an Eastern Sentry,” referring to existing regional security partnerships among NATO allies.
“This is now going to be a focus of work through NATO, with different Arctic countries coming together and supported by other NATO countries on how we do that shared security,” she told CBS News’ partner network BBC News on Jan. 22.
Feb 4 (Reuters) – United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday called the expiration of the New START Treaty a grave moment for international peace and security and urged Russia and the United States to negotiate a new nuclear arms control framework without delay.
New START, which was due to run out at midnight on Wednesday, capped the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.
“For the first time in more than half a century, we face a world without any binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the Russian Federation and the United States of America – the two States that possess the overwhelming majority of the global stockpile of nuclear weapons,” Guterres said in a statement.
He said the dissolution of decades of achievement in arms control “could not come at a worse time – the risk of a nuclear weapon being used is the highest in decades.”
At the same time, Guterres said there was now an opportunity “to reset and create an arms control regime fit for a rapidly evolving context” and welcomed the appreciation by the leaders of both Russia and the United States of the need to prevent a return to a world of unchecked nuclear proliferation.
“The world now looks to the Russian Federation and the United States to translate words into action,” Guterres said.
“I urge both states to return to the negotiating table without delay and to agree upon a successor framework that restores verifiable limits, reduces risks, and strengthens our common security.”
(Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
The last remaining treaty between the U.S. and Russia that limits the number of deployable nuclear weapons expires Thursday, marking the end of decades of arms control agreements between the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals in the world.
The New START Treaty, signed in 2010 by the U.S. and Russia, limited the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 on each side and required on-site inspections and notifications to ensure both superpowers were complying with the agreement.
Russia stopped providing notifications and suspended inspections during the war in Ukraine but is estimated to not have significantly exceeded the required caps, according to the State Department’s latest report released last month.
Former President Joe Biden in 2021 extended the treaty for five years, but it cannot be extended further.
In January, President Trump told The New York Times “if it expires, it expires,” indicating he could let the treaty lapse. A White House official told CBS News the president will decide a path forward on nuclear arms control “which he will clarify on his own timeline,” and he has indicated he would like to keep limits on nuclear weapons and involve China in future arms control talks.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that it’s “impossible” to come to an agreement without China “because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile.” The Pentagon has estimated China will have over 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2035, up from around 200 in 2019.
The current treaty is a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Russia, which have about 4,300 and 3,700 nuclear warheads respectively, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in September suggested both sides should abide by the parameters of the treaty without signing another deal for a year, which former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Rose Gottemoeller told senators was a viable option.
“It should be Donald Trump who gets to be the president of nuclear peace in this case, not Vladimir Putin,” Gotttemoeller testified Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee. She argued that continuing to keep New START limits in place for another year would allow the U.S. “to reestablish strategic stability with Russia and control nuclear weapons at the negotiating table.”
Retired Adm. Charles Richard, the former head of U.S. Strategic Command, and Tim Morrison, a former deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs during the first Trump administration, disagreed, arguing that the treaty does not address several pressing concerns.
All three of the former officials agreed the treaty is not perfect, in part, because it does not account for China and it doesn’t constrain non-strategic nuclear weapons, like tactical nuclear weapons, but Goettmoeller told senators it’s better than nothing.
“My bottom line is that it does not serve U.S. national security interests to have to address the Chinese nuclear buildup while simultaneously facing a rapid Russian upload campaign,” Gottemoeller said.
Now that the treaty limiting the U.S. and Russia is expected to expire, each of the officials raised concerns about other countries exploring their own nuclear programs in the future even if they’re not actively pursuing it right now.
“I don’t think you can understate the risk of proliferation,” Morrison told senators.
Morrison said the U.S. stockpile is aging and emphasized that effective nuclear deterrence requires sustained investment.
“By 2035, 100% of U.S. nuclear weapons, the warheads and bombs themselves, will have exceeded their design lives by an average of 30 years,” Morrison said. “The only means to reliably enforce compliance with arms treaties is to be able to threaten that failure to comply will be met with a compelling response.”
Undated: An artist rendering of the future Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. The 12 submarines of the Columbia class are a shipbuilding priority and will replace the Ohio-class submarines reaching maximum extended service life.
U.S. Navy illustration
And to deploy the weapons effectively, the U.S. needs to boost its defense industrial base, the former officials all agreed, especially when it comes to building Columbia-class submarines that will make up the sea-based part of the nuclear triad.
“I think the numbers are insufficient on all portions of the triad, particularly on the bomber and the ballistic missile submarine leg,” said Richard, the retired admiral formerly in charge of U.S. Strategic Command. “There are additional capabilities that we should consider in addition to the recapitalization of the triad and increasing the capacity inside the triad.”
MILAN, Feb 4 (Reuters) – Italy has thwarted a series of cyberattacks targeting its foreign ministry facilities, including an embassy in Washington, as well as websites linked to the Winter Olympics and hotels in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Tuesday.
“These are actions of Russian origin,” Tajani said in remarks confirmed by a spokesperson.
“We prevented a series of cyberattacks against foreign ministry sites, starting with Washington and also involving some Winter Olympics sites, including hotels in Cortina,” he said.
(Reporting by Giselda Vagnoni and Cristina Carlevaro, editing by Ed Osmond)
Russia has launched a high-stakes campaign to intercept and shadow critical European satellites.
Security officials have confirmed that Russian spacecraft are targeting the communications of at least a dozen key satellites over Europe. These interceptions risk compromising sensitive intelligence and could allow Moscow to manipulate or even crash orbital assets.
The manoeuvres involve two specific Russian vessels, Luch-1 and Luch-2. These “stalker” satellites have been observed performing suspicious approaches to some of Europe’s most vital infrastructure. Luch-2 alone is known to have shadowed at least 17 different satellites.
Maj. Gen. Michael Traut, head of the German military’s space command, described the activity as “signals intelligence business.” By hovering near Western communications hardware, Russia can harvest data from older systems that lack modern encryption.
The threat extends beyond simple spying. Officials warn that by intercepting command data, Moscow could mimic ground operators. This would allow them to send false instructions to European thrusters, potentially knocking satellites out of their intended orbits.
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has labelled the escalation a “fundamental threat to us all.” He noted that Russian surveillance satellites have specifically trailed Germany’s Intelsat network, which is used by both the armed forces and various government agencies.
This orbital aggression marks a significant shift in the Kremlin’s tactics. Analysts argue that space has become the latest frontier in Russia’s “hybrid warfare” campaign – a strategy that already includes drone incursions and the severing of undersea cables.
While Russia, China, and the U.S. have long competed for dominance, the proximity of these latest intercepts has alarmed NATO allies. Pistorius warned that Russia now possesses the capability to blind, manipulate, or kinetically destroy Western equipment in orbit.
The danger is not merely theoretical. Reports recently emerged that a Russian Luch satellite was destroyed in a “graveyard orbit” following a collision with space debris. Whether this was an accident or a deliberate act of destruction remains unknown.
As the war in Ukraine continues to strain global security, the focus has shifted upward. European leaders are now calling for the development of offensive space capabilities to protect the digital infrastructure that modern society depends on.
MOSCOW, Feb 4 (Reuters) – The last nuclear treaty between Russia and the United States is due to expire within hours, raising the risk of a new arms race in which China will also play a key role.
The web of arms control deals negotiated in the decades since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, considered the closest the world ever came to intentional nuclear war, were aimed at reducing the chance of a catastrophic nuclear exchange.
Unless Washington and Moscow reach a last-minute understanding of some kind, the world’s two biggest nuclear powers will be left without any limits for the first time in more than half a century when the New START treaty expires.
COSTS COULD CONSTRAIN NEW ARMS RACE
There was confusion about the exact time it would lapse, though arms control experts told Reuters they believed this would happen at 2300 GMT on Wednesday – midnight in Prague, where the treaty was signed in 2010.
Matt Korda, associate director for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said that if there was no agreement to extend its key provisions, neither Russia nor the United States would be constrained if they wanted to add yet more warheads.
“Without the treaty, each side will be free to upload hundreds of additional warheads onto their deployed missiles and heavy bombers, roughly doubling the sizes of their currently deployed arsenals in the most maximalist scenario,” he said.
Korda said it was important to recognise that the expiry of New START did not necessarily mean an arms race given the cost of nuclear weapons.
U.S. President Donald Trump has given different signals on arms control. He said last month that if the treaty expired, he would do a better agreement.
So far, Russian officials said, there has been no response from Washington on President Vladimir Putin’s proposal to extend the limits of the treaty beyond expiry.
THE DEATH OF ARMS CONTROL
Total inventories of nuclear warheads declined to about 12,000 warheads in 2025 from a peak of more than 70,000 in 1986, but the United States and Russia are upgrading their weapons and China has more than doubled its arsenal over the past decade.
Arms control supporters in Moscow and Washington say the expiry of the treaty would not only remove limits on warheads but also damage confidence, trust and the ability to verify nuclear intentions.
Opponents of arms control on both sides say such benefits are nebulous at best and that such treaties hinder nuclear innovation by major powers, allow cheating and essentially narrow the room for manoeuvre of great powers.
Last year, Trump said that he wanted China to be part of arms control and questioned why the United States and Russia should build new nuclear weapons given that they had enough to destroy the world many times over.
“If there’s ever a time when we need nuclear weapons like the kind of weapons that we’re building and that Russia has and that China has to a lesser extent but will have, that’s going to be a very sad day,” he said in February last year.
“That’s going to be probably oblivion.”
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Alex Richardson)
