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Conflict Events Archive
15,133 documented events · latest Oct 14, 2026 — chronological archive with full summaries and multi-source verification.
Trump ‘blindsided his own Ukraine peace envoys by agreeing deal with Putin’
Trump ‘blindsided’ his own Ukraine peace envoys by agreeing diesel deal with Putin: report Officials were left ‘surprised’ at the announcement having just offered Kyiv new security guarantees Become an Independent member to bookmark this article Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.Join today Already a member? Log in The United States promised Ukraine extra post-war security guarantees just before Donald Trump agreed to lift sanctions on Russia for diesel exports and upended the negotiations, according to reports. Volodymyr Zelensky has been emphatic about the need for security assurances in any deal agreed with Vladimir Putin amid concerns that Moscow is already ignoring a supposed energy ceasefire announced by Trump earlier this week. During six-hour talks in Miami last weekend, special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner suggested that the president was willing to strengthen protections for Ukraine as part of a revised peace plan, according to The Telegraph. The “upgraded” guarantees were not specified in detail but the offer was reported to go further than the provision of jets to patrol Ukrainian skies and satellite intelligence support that was initially proposed. The talks were going well and the Ukrainians were reportedly “comfortable” with what was discussed, but they and the Europeans felt that Zelensky would be required to cede territory, according to a source. However, the discussions were frustrated after Trump agreed to allow Putin to export diesel to the US and globally amid rising fuel costs worldwide. Top EU official Bjorn Seibert, who attended the meeting in Miami last week, said that the diesel agreement had shocked participants. He said they were left “surprised”, sources familiar with the meeting told the publication. The envoys reportedly told the Ukrainians that Putin was not ready for meaningful discussions and that the offer to buy Russian diesel was designed to “soften” Putin by allowing him to see the potential benefit of ending the war and reintegrating Russia into the global economy. A European diplomat told The Telegraph that the theory was “bullsh**”. All three parties left the meeting with no agreement. On Friday, Trump announced a deal with Putin allowing Moscow to supply diesel to global markets and that the US would import 300,000 tons of the fuel. He faced criticism from European leaders with the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas reminding Washington that “Russia has started this war. We should not forget this.” Zelensky said he did not believe that the deliveries would have an impact and suggested that “there are different rationales behind this decision”. Zelensky said Kyiv had not been informed beforehand of the announcement, saying: “No, we did not know about that. We’ve learned that from the media as well.” The Ukrainian leader suggested that the US should consider an arrangement with Kyiv, saying: “Why doesn't America then conclude a diesel deal with Ukraine? Let's propose a diesel deal with Ukraine.” Trump also accused Europe of being hypocritical as it had continued to purchase Russian fuel after the war began. According to a tracker led by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), the European Union has paid approximately €238.6 billion to Russia for fossil fuels since 24 February 2022. However, the data shows a steep decline in EU imports since 2023. Join our commenting forum Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their repliesComments
After Iran, Washington Needs a New Basing Strategy
After Iran, Washington Needs a New Basing Strategy The decades-old model has been upended by a war that favors movement and dispersal. For a generation, the United States has relied on large military bases across the Persian Gulf to project power, confident that they were beyond the reach of groups such as the Islamic State and that Iran, despite its growing missile arsenal, would not risk a sustained attack on them. The Iran war has shattered that assumption, with Iranian missiles and drones repeatedly striking those bases and forcing the U.S. military to empty facilities it has operated for decades. Now the Pentagon is weighing whether to rebuild and harden those bases or shift its force presence westward, including to Jordan and Israel, farther from Iran’s reach. It should do neither. Both approaches assume that projecting power in the Middle East requires large, permanent bases, even as the war has shown otherwise. For a generation, the United States has relied on large military bases across the Persian Gulf to project power, confident that they were beyond the reach of groups such as the Islamic State and that Iran, despite its growing missile arsenal, would not risk a sustained attack on them. The Iran war has shattered that assumption, with Iranian missiles and drones repeatedly striking those bases and forcing the U.S. military to empty facilities it has operated for decades. Now the Pentagon is weighing whether to rebuild and harden those bases or shift its force presence westward, including to Jordan and Israel, farther from Iran’s reach. It should do neither. Both approaches assume that projecting power in the Middle East requires large, permanent bases, even as the war has shown otherwise. The United States waged one of its largest air campaigns in decades, flying more than 10,200 sorties and conducting more than 13,500 strikes, in the first 38 days of Operation Epic Fury, despite Iran’s repeated strikes on key sites. The campaign never paused, however, because U.S. forces quickly shifted operations elsewhere when bases came under attack. For instance, anticipating an attack on Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest U.S. military facility in the Middle East, the United States pulled its personnel and ran the air war from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina instead. When Iran struck Al Udeid’s Combined Air Operations Center, which had run U.S. air campaigns in the region since 2003, it was already empty. Equipment moved, too. In the days before the war, the Air Force began sending aerial refueling tankers to Ben Gurion, Israel’s main civilian airport, where they operated using existing airfield infrastructure, supported by specialized maintenance personnel and equipment brought in as needed. That ability to keep fighting even as forward bases were evacuated or damaged may be the war’s most important lesson for U.S. force posture in the Middle East. What mattered was not large, permanent bases but access to a range of airfields, including civilian ones, and the capacity to move aircraft, personnel, equipment, and munitions among them when bases came under attack. Instead of pouring billions of dollars into repairing bases or building new ones farther west, Washington should use this opportunity to rethink its approach, trading its permanent sites for a lighter, more modular posture that better aligns with the future of warfare in the Middle East and beyond. Neither rebuilding Gulf bases nor moving them west would fix the fundamental problems, which have been painfully exposed in recent months: These bases are easy for an adversary to find, expensive to defend, and not always available when Washington needs them. Simply put, there is no hiding a permanent base. An adversary has years to study its layout, and Iran has used that time to determine where and when to strike. For instance, on March 27, Iran destroyed an E-3 Sentry, one of the few command-and-control planes in the U.S. Air Force’s inventory, at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Iran has also targeted operations centers, hangars, barracks, and fuel depots across multiple U.S. bases, suggesting detailed knowledge of their layouts and operations. Defending these fixed positions against missile and drone attacks has come at a high, asymmetric price. In the war’s first six weeks, the United States burned through more than 1,000 interceptors, including more than 40 percent of its prewar Patriot stocks and about half of its THAADs. Hardening bases would not solve the problem, nor would it come cheap. Reinforced shelters and buried fuel tanks can protect some assets, but tankers and early-warning aircraft are too large for anything but the largest and most expensive shelters. Whether Washington spends billions of dollars hardening bases or burns through costly interceptors defending them, it will be paying far more than Iran does to attack them. Shifting bases west to Jordan and Israel would merely relocate the problem, as both are still within range of Iranian missiles. Additional permanent U.S. facilities in either country would give Tehran another set of targets to map and more reason to expand its medium-range missile and long-range drone stocks. A westward shift would also come with added political risks. Israel in particular has repeatedly engaged in risky military behavior that puts it at odds with Washington. In August, it bombed an air base in northern Syria near the Turkish border without warning the United States—an attack the U.S. ambassador to Turkey called an “unnecessary escalation” and suggested could be meant to bait Turkey, a NATO ally, into a wider war. The United States already incurs entanglement costs from its alliance with Israel, but a large, permanent basing presence would compound them, exposing U.S. forces to retaliation for Israeli actions, potentially pulling the United States into Israel’s next war, and further straining relations with Arab partners. Nor do permanent bases guarantee that a host country will let the United States use them when it needs them most. In May, as the United States began an operation to escort commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, relying heavily on aircraft flying from Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait temporarily restricted U.S. access. Saudi officials were reportedly alarmed that Washington was downplaying Iranian attacks on Gulf states and doubted the United States would protect them if the fighting escalated. Not long after, in July, Israel capped the number of U.S. tankers at Ben Gurion to avoid crowding out summer tourist traffic, forcing the Air Force to move jets elsewhere. Both episodes show how quickly the United States can lose access when a host decides its interests lie elsewhere, even where Washington has long-standing bases or close strategic ties. Washington has a rare opportunity to reevaluate its basing strategy, and instead of doubling down on permanent bases, it should work to secure access to a wide variety of airports and host-country air bases across the Gulf, in Europe, and around the edges of the Middle East. Some of these airfields would be major hubs, with the ramp space, fuel, and cargo-handling equipment to support large logistical movements. Others might offer little more than a lit runway, parking space for aircraft, fuel, and a place to store munitions, with U.S. personnel deployed only in a crisis. This is a more resilient posture because no single host government’s refusal would be enough to ground U.S. air operations and Iran would have far more locations to track and target. Think of access as buying options on the stock market: For a relatively small premium, Washington can preserve choices for a crisis without paying the political, economic, and military costs of maintaining forces at every deployed location in peacetime. Keeping most forces at home would also leave them better prepared, with deeper technical and personal support that deployed units must do without. While forces train and gain readiness at home, much of what they need for contingencies could be stationed forward in the region. The United States could preposition weapons, equipment, and fuel at select sites; keep other supplies afloat; and rehearse surging forces into the region, dispersing them among multiple locations and shifting them when threatened. That hedge is as much political as technological. Today, against adversaries with limited surveillance and long-range strike capacity, dispersal has a significant advantage because it complicates targeting. As surveillance improves and long-range arsenals grow, that advantage will diminish. In a world of ubiquitous sensors, there will be fewer places to hide, and the balance could eventually swing back to a few heavily fortified strongholds. That uncertainty is reason enough to hesitate before committing resources to a single posture. This approach could also strengthen deterrence. If Iran has learned anything from this war, it is that large U.S. bases are likely to be emptied once fighting begins. That knowledge weakens the deterrent signals those bases once sent and, in turn, undercuts the strategic case for maintaining them. Deterrence requires Washington to credibly demonstrate that it can bring enough military power to bear to deny Iran its political and military objectives, but that does not mean keeping tens of thousands of U.S. forces permanently forward. Still, a lighter posture designed to surge is not without trade-offs. Forces based outside the region would take longer to arrive and would increase demands on strategic airlift, aerial refueling, and other logistics at the start of a crisis. Keeping a wide network of airfields ready would also require continuous attention, from maintaining agreements with hosts to managing prepositioned stocks. But the posture would come with readiness gains as well. Units rotating in for regular exercises would train more often with partner militaries and practice the same kinds of operations U.S. forces expect to rely on in the Indo-Pacific, flowing reinforcements into the theater in a crisis and then operating from dispersed locations under threat. Ultimately, whatever speed is lost matters less in the Middle East than it would elsewhere. Tehran is not trying to rapidly seize and hold territory, making the current war a different military problem from the one Washington faces in Europe or the Pacific, where the fear is that Russia or China could present the United States with a territorial fait accompli. Instead, Tehran wields missiles, drones, proxies, and threats to Gulf shipping to pressure its neighbors into making political concessions. Coercion of this kind takes time to work, meaning Washington can respond from farther away, whether by sending forces into the region, supporting partners, or striking, without exposing U.S. troops to unnecessary risks within range of Iran’s missiles. Offshore balancing is not a new idea. What is new is the wartime evidence that it can work. U.S. bases in the Middle East once served a deterrent purpose, but they are now less a symbol of strength than a collection of fixed targets Iran knows how to attack. Now is a good time for Washington to ask whether continuing its current posture still serves U.S. interests or is simply inertia. Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and an adjunct professor in the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. X: @ka_grieco Maximilian K. Bremer is a nonresident fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and the director of growth at CHAOS Industries. He is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel.
Montenegrin citizens to be required to obtain visas to enter Russia — diplomat
This decision was made in connection with the abolition of the visa‑free regime for Russians, Maria Zakharova said
French politician warns Ukraine’s EU accession to amount to EU’s 'hara-kiri' — newspaper
This will result in a loss of sovereignty and "absolutely huge economic losses" for France, Marine Le Pen, National Rally candidate in the 2027 French presidential election, said
What is known about one of largest attacks on Moscow Region, Sber data center
One person was killed in the drone attack in Balakovo, Saratov Region
Ukraine 200% dependent on Starlink, needs to negotiate with US on restrictions — lawmaker
A Ukrainian delegation should be on its way to the US right now, Alexey Goncharenko said
Ukraine lacked intelligence only on first wave of overnight missile launch — air force
Yury Ignat said that warnings about subsequent attacks did come in
IN BRIEF: Russia hits Ukraine's communication, energy infrastructure in massive strike
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the strike hit communication and energy infrastructure facilities in Kiev, the Kiev Region and the Kharkov Region used to support the military-industrial complex and the armed forces of Ukraine
Today’s Ukrainian drone attack on Russia becomes one of most massive of 2026 thus far
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, 902 Ukrainian drones were shot down over Russia and the waters of the Sea of Azov in the early morning hours of October 14
Palestinians say Israel’s democracy ‘is a joke’
As Israelis prepare to vote, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank say they have little hope of change.
How Israel’s ‘Yellow Line’ is reshaping southern Lebanon
Demolished homes, shifting military lines, stalled withdrawals leave Lebanese uncertain if they can return.
SpaceX restricts Ukrainian army’s Starlink access, Zelensky’s adviser confirms
The restrictions currently apply to the "military package" of Starshield services, with the speed limit set at 100 miles per hour, Sergey Beskrestnov said
Starlink restrictions disrupt Ukrainian army operations, ex-adviser says
Sergey Sternenko said that Internet access disruptions were recorded when moving at speeds of over 160 km/h
Russian strikes leave 600,000 people without power in Ukraine, Zelensky says
Ukrainian rescuers work at the site of a Russian air strike on a residential building in Kyiv [EPA/Shutterstock] At least 600,000 people across Ukraine are now without electricity after deadly overnight Russian missile and drone strikes, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.He said "critical" energy infrastructure had been hit in Kyiv and the capital region and also in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv - despite a claim by US President Donald Trump on Sunday that an "energy ceasefire" was in place between Russia and Ukraine.In Kyiv, at least three people were killed and 21 injured, Ukraine's state emergencies service DSNS said. Russia's defence ministry said its "massive" strikes overnight had targeted communications and energy facilities in the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions used by Ukraine's military.The defence ministry also said 902 Ukrainian drones had been shot down overnight over a number of Russian regions, including the capital Moscow and Crimea - Ukraine's southern peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.Ukraine's air force said that overnight, Russia had launched 39 ballistic and cruise missiles and 128 drones, and that four of those missiles and 115 drones had been shot down.On Sunday, Trump wrote in a post on social media: "Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!"President Zelensky has since repeatedly said Ukraine is ready to halt its strikes on Russian oil refineries and other energy facilities if Moscow did the same.But Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Ukraine does not deserve the "respite" a ceasefire would bring. Under any truce, he added, Europe would be able to "pump [Ukraine] with new weapons" for it to continue the war.Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory. Russia's offensive ability is broken, Kyiv's former top general tells BBCSix Ukrainian energy sites hit by Russia since Trump announced ceasefire, Zelensky says This article originally appeared on BBC at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2d6e62p49do?xtor=AL-72-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Byahoo.north.america%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bnews%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D
Trade between Russia and China up by 30.6% to $214.3 bln in January-September
During the period, Russia’s trade surplus with China reached $18.16 billion, which is 10.1% up year-on-year
‘Massive’ Russian attack on Ukraine kills at least six, damages power sites
Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine's partners failed to warn of Russian ballistic missile attack on Kyiv.
‘Like we don’t exist’: Palestinians in West Bank denied say in Israel vote
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank see little prospect Israel’s election will change their lives under occupation.
Russian forces strike ATM Ukrsibbank data center used by Ukrainian military in Kiev
The ATM Ukrsibbank data center was facilitating the exchange of Internet traffic to gather intelligence about the Russian Armed Forces
Sudan cannot afford to dismiss a chance for dialogue
A new initiative faces serious questions about military influence, but its critics should not write it off prematurely.
Russian Energy Week forum kicks off in Moscow
The main events of this year’s REW business program will take place on October 15 and 16