Got a Ukraine war question? Send it to Michael Clarke here
06:05:48
Send in your Ukraine war questions
It's Wednesday, which means our security and defence analyst Professor Michael Clarke is back to answer your questions on the Ukraine war in his weekly Q&A.
Hundreds of you have already sent in your questions after a very significant few days on the battlefield in the three-year conflict.
Ukraine has pulled off three daring attacks - on two bridges and Russia's bomber fleet over the weekend and on the key Kerch Bridge linking Russia to Crimea yesterday - and the world is waiting to see how Vladimir Putin responds.
Watch: Ukraine strikes Russian bombers
Watch: Kerch Bridge explosion
And there are reports Moscow is launching a summer offensive as peace talks make little sign of progress.
Teams from Kyiv and Moscow met for a second round of direct talks in Istanbul on Monday, agreeing only to another prisoner swap and exchanging terms for a full ceasefire, which still appears a long way off.
And all the while, the usually vocal Donald Trump has remained quiet.
So what does it all mean? Michael is here at midday to help make sense of it.
Submit your questions to join in - and you'll be able to watch the Q&A live on this page.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Republicans weigh in on whether Trump and Musk should make peace after talks called OFF
Elon Musk and Donald Trump should reconcile their differences Republican lawmakers told the Daily Mail. The two most powerful men in the world engaged in a historic blowup over differences about Trump's signature 'big beautiful bill.' It quickly turned ugly as Musk hurled insults at the president and Trump fired back on social media. Trump said earlier Friday that the two 'won't be speaking' for a while as a result of the back-and-forth falling out. 'I'm not even thinking about Elon,' Trump told CNN. 'He's got a problem. The poor guy's got a problem.' But GOP lawmakers are hopeful that the pair can patch up their differences in the coming days. Speaker Mike Johnson, who has been in the middle of the spat over the Big Beautiful Bill Act, said Friday he hopes Trump and Musk 'reconcile.' 'I believe in redemption,' Johnson said. 'That's part of my worldview, and I think it's good for the party and the country if all that's worked out.' The speaker appeared to downplay the spat on Thursday, saying that differences over policy are never personal despite Musk's below-the-belt claim that Trump has ties to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Musk even went so far as to suggest the president should be impeached and replaced with JD Vance for wanting to sending the U.S. into 'debt slavery.' As tensions flared between the two leaders, Republicans in Congress appeared like children caught in a fight between their parents. Speaker Mike Johnson has said that the dispute over policy is not personal despite Musk calling for Trump to be impeached and insinuating he has nefarious links to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein 'I think they should reconcile,' Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, told the Daily Mail. 'After all, they said they loved each other, so I think it's time for reconciliation for them.' 'My intel that I have is that they are going to reconcile today,' he disclosed. Many GOP lawmakers said the same, hoping for the two to iron out their differences. 'I hope they make up,' Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., told the Daily Mail of the Musk-Trump divide. Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., who sits on House GOP leadership, told the Daily Mail the attacks aren't new. 'It's not something that, you know, we haven't seen before,' he said of the feud, adding Musk's attacks 'are all falsehoods and for political show.' Firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., told the Daily Mail that it's up to Trump to decide whether he wants to make amends with the businessman. 'I don't get involved with things that involve him,' she said not wanting to instruct the president on how to react. 'They should reconcile,' Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., shared. 'I think its a great idea.' A member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus that often acts as a thorn in the side of GOP leadership, Tiffany bragged that the saga is evidence of a normal policy debate. 'I think the good robust debate is a good thing,' he added, noting that with the pace of the tweets sent out by Musk the pair could make up at any moment. Mark Bednar, a former senior staffer for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Principal at Monument Advocacy, told the Daily Mail that the turbulence between Musk and the president amounts to 'just another week' of being a Republican in Washington. 'It also remains true that if and when Republicans are together, they can rack up massive legislative wins for the American people, and when they are apart it's the Democrats who benefit.' Trump, for his part, is not eager to talk to his former DOGE lieutenant. Speaking with ABC News on Friday morning, the president admitted he was 'not particularly' interested in speaking with the billionaire. The president referred to Musk as 'the man who has lost his mind,' saying that the Tesla owner wants to speak with him but he does not have interest in speaking.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Russia is at war with Britain and US no longer a reliable ally, UK adviser says
Russia is at war with Britain, the US is no longer a reliable ally and the UK has to respond by becoming more cohesive and more resilient, according to one of the three authors of the strategic defence review. Fiona Hill, from county Durham, became the White House's chief Russia adviser during Donald Trump's first term and contributed to the British government's strategy, and made the remarks in an interview with the Guardian. 'We're in pretty big trouble,' Hill says, describing the UK's geopolitical situation as caught between 'the rock' of Vladimir Putin's Russia and 'the hard place' of Donald Trump's increasingly unpredictable United States. The best known of the reviewers appointed by Labour, alongside Lord Robertson, a former Nato secretary general, and retired general Sir Richard Barrons, Hill, 59, said she was happy to take on the role because it was 'such a major pivot point in global affairs'. She remains a dual national even after living over 30 years in the US. 'Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn't fully anticipated,' Hill says, arguing that Putin sees the Ukraine war as a starting point to Moscow becoming 'a dominant military power in all of Europe'. As part of that long-term effort, Russia is already 'menacing the UK in various different ways,' she says, citing 'the poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyber attacks and influence operations. The sensors that we see that they're putting down around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables.' The conclusion, Hill says, is that 'Russia is at war with us'. Though the foreign policy expert, a long time Russia watcher, says she first made a similar warning in 2015, in a revised version of a book she wrote about the Russian president with Clifford Gaddy, reflecting on the invasion and annexation of Crimea. 'We said Putin had declared war on the West,' she says. At the time, other experts disagreed, but Hill says events since demonstrate 'he obviously had, and we haven't been paying attention to it'. The Russian leader, she argues, sees the fight in Ukraine as 'part of a proxy war with the United States; that's how he has persuaded China, North Korea and Iran to join in'. Putin believes, she says, that Ukraine has already been decoupled from the US relationship because 'Trump really wants to have a separate relationship with Putin to do arms control agreements and also business that will probably enrich their entourages further, though Putin doesn't need any more enrichment'. When it comes to defence, however, Hill says that the UK cannot rely on the military umbrella of the US as during the Cold War and in the generation that followed, at least 'not in the way that we did before'. In her description, the UK 'is having to manage its number one ally', though the challenge is not to overreact because 'you don't want to have a rupture'. This way of thinking even appears in the defence review published earlier this week, which says 'the UK's long-standing assumptions about global power balances and structures are no longer certain' – a rare acknowledgement in a British government document of how far and how fast Trumpism is affecting foreign policy certainties. The review team reported to Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and defence secretary John Healey. Most of Hill's interaction were with Healey however, and Hill said she only met the prime minister once – describing him as 'pretty charming … in a proper and correct way' and as 'having read all the papers'. Hill is not drawn on if she advised Starmer or Healey on how to deal with Donald Trump, saying instead 'the advice I would give is the same I would give in a public setting'. She says simply that the Trump White House 'is not an administration, it is a court' in which a transactional president is driven by his 'own desires and interests, and who listens often to the last person he talks to'. She adds that unlike his close circle, Trump has 'a special affinity for the UK' based partly on his own family ties (his mother came from the Hebridean island of Lewis, emigrating to New York aged 18) and an admiration for the royal family, particularly the late Queen. 'He talked endlessly about that,' she says. On the other hand, Hill is no fan of the populist right administration in the White House and worries it could come to Britain if 'the same culture wars' are allowed to develop with the encouragement of Republicans from the US. Already, she notes, Reform UK won a string of council elections last month, including in her native Durham, and leader Nigel Farage wants to emulate some of the aggressive efforts to restructure government led by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) before his falling out with Trump. 'When Nigel Farage says he wants to do a Doge against the local county council, he should come over here [to the US] and see what kind of impact that has,' she says. 'This is going to be the largest layoffs in US history happening all at once, much bigger than hits to steel works and coal mines.' Hill's argument is that in a time of profound uncertainty, Britain needs greater internal cohesion if it is to protect itself. 'We can't rely exclusively on anyone any more,' she says, arguing that Britain needs to have 'a different mindset' based as much on traditional defence as on social resilience. Some of that, Hill says, is about a greater recognition of the level of external threat and initiatives for greater integration, by teaching first aid in schools or encouraging more teenagers to join school cadet forces, a recommendation of the defence review. 'What you need to do is get people engaged in all kinds of different ways in support of their communities,' she says. Hill says she sees that deindustrialisation and a rise of inequality in Russia and the US has contributed to the rise in national populism in both countries. Politicians in Britain, or elsewhere, 'have to be much more creative and engage people where they are at' as part of a 'national effort'. If this seems far away from a conventional view of defence, that is because it is, though Hill also argues that traditional conceptions of war are changing as technology evolves and with it what makes a potent force. 'People keep saying the British army has the smallest number of troops since the Napoleonic era. Why is the Napoleonic era relevant? Or that we have fewer ships than the time of Charles II. The metrics are all off here,' Hill says. 'The Ukrainians are fighting with drones. Even though they have no navy, they sank a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet.' Her aim, therefore, is not just to be critical but to propose solutions. Hill recalls that a close family friend, on hearing that she had taken on the defence review, had told her: ''Don't tell us how shite we are, tell us what we can do, how we can fix things.' People understand that we have a problem and that the world has changed.'
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Leftist late night hosts give their take on Trump-Musk fallout
Gleeful late-night hosts took victory laps around President Donald Trump and Elon Musk Thursday as they delighted in the pair falling out. Across the board, the MAGA-hating panel of hosts rejoiced in the spat. They repeated Musk's claim that Trump is 'named in the Epstein files', mocked SpaceX 's record of exploding rockets and questioned what Trump would now do with his Tesla. The spat made for easy material for the hosts, who are struggling to maintain ratings with a tired format. Among the most delighted was Jimmy Fallon . 'You can tell Trump is really mad at Elon because earlier today he was seen driving a Prius,' the former SNL star noted. 'Trump said he hasn't felt this betrayed since McDonald's started putting apple slices in Happy Meals. 'It's orange vs. white,' he added. 'It's like watching a creamsicle attack itself.' Over on CBS, Stephen Colbert sang a similar tune, also reveling in the rift between whom he smarmily put as 'the world's most famous besties'. It all happened on social media, serving as easy ammo for the hosts. 'So now Donald Trump is a Tesla owner who hates Elon Musk?' Colbert asked during a more than 12-minute monologue devoted to the subject. 'He's never been more relatable.' He then honed in Musk's claim that Trump is 'in the [Jeffrey] Epstein files' - documents involving the late financier and his alleged accomplices spread out across various probes and lawsuits that have been mostly kept classified. 'Trump's going to have to get one of those bumper stickers for his Tesla that says "I bought this before Elon told everyone I was on Epstein's plane,"' Colbert quipped, as hosts like Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers offered similar, smug material. 'The real truth is that Musk is mad about the things that affect him, like cutting the electric vehicle tax credit, not using his company Starlink for air traffic control, and that they pulled his friend's nomination for head of NASA,' Kimmel laughed on the set of Jimmy Kimmel Live! 'What Elon Musk cares about is Elon Musk,' he further noted on his ABC show, before bringing the First Lady into the mix 'Now, between Elon and Melania, Trump now has two foreigners who won't sleep with him. 'I feel bad for Donald Trump,' he then added. 'I mean, first, he lost Jeffrey Epstein, now, Elon. He's running out of friends. 'You know, I knew this day would come, and yet, somehow, it's even better than I imagined,' he kept on. 'It's like coming down the stairs on Christmas morning and finding a second tree.' On Late Night, Seth Meyers showed similar bias, labeling the feud over 'Trump's Big Beautiful bill' a 'stunning turn of events'. The comic then offered some uncharacteristic stern words. 'Things have been bad for Elon, which is what happens to everyone who sells their soul to Trump.' The Daily Show's Michael Kosta, filling in for Jon Stewart, also commented on the quarrel. He sarcastically opened the show with: 'America, tonight we are a nation at war.' 'I thought these two billionaires with the world's biggest egos would work it out amicably.' the Daily Show senior correspondent said sarcastically. 'Washington is a lot like high school and not just because all the politicians are trying to date high-schoolers.' Fallon further fanned the flames with a reference to the recent Blur Origin broadcast live by rival CBS, which featured a crew of pop stars, TV personalities, and Jeff Bezos's fiancée. 'Trump said that the easiest way for the country to save money would be to terminate all of Elon Musk's government contracts,' Fallon set-up. 'Smart, now the future of space exploration rests on Katy Perry.' Colbert, meanwhile, went as far as to mimic Musk's accent, while further fanning the flames surrounding Musk's claims Trump is linked to a convicted pedophile. 'Donald Trump, was a sexual predator that preyed on young women, which is something I've only decided to tell you because he hurt my feelings,' he said, speaking as if he were the Tesla boss. 'I am the hero of the story!' A White House official on Thursday said Trump and Musk were scheduled to speak in person on Friday. The official did not give a time for the call, which could ease the feuding after an extraordinary day of hostilities. Meanwhile, late night, as a format, is on the decline. Numbers show Greg Gutfeld's late night-styled Fox alternative attracting the largest average nightly audience of the field - something unthinkable just a decade ago. Epstein, moreover, died in prison in 2019 after being convicted. He and Trump were once close friends.
