Last week, the Trump administration was publicly signaling that a deal with Iran was coming soon – but the prospect of a permanent peace between the two sides now appears far more remote after Iran announced that it had suspended all indirect negotiations with Washington through mediators. On Monday, Iran accused the United States of failing to restrain Israeli attacks and claimed that continued military operations in Lebanon constitute a violation of the ceasefire agreement.

Summary and Key Points: Russia planned a three-day war. More than four years later, the way it actually fights tells a very different story — one the parades and the propaganda are built to hide. Look past the rhetoric at how Russia now puts men and machines into the field, and a single, damning pattern emerges. This is no longer a great power on the march. It’s an army scraping the bottom of every barrel it owns — and hoping Ukraine runs empty first.

Summary and Key Points: The MiG-35 was supposed to be Russia’s comeback fighter — a modern, affordable jet to rebuild a battered air force and rake in export billions, hyped as Moscow’s answer to the American F-35. The reality is one of the more embarrassing stories in modern military aviation. Years after the promises, Russia has almost nothing to show for it — and what little it has is being used in a way that gives the whole program away.

Russia’s MiG-35 Failure Is Clear 

MiG-35 Creative Commons Image.

MiG-35 Fighter from Russia. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

The Marines will make up the 24th Littoral Comb

Summary and Key Points: China calls it the aircraft carrier killer. The DF-26B is built to do what most weapons can’t — track a U.S. aircraft carrier moving across open ocean and slam into it from thousands of miles away at Mach 15. Beijing says it works. The Pentagon has to assume it might. But no one outside China’s Rocket Force really knows what this missile can actually do — and that uncertainty may be the most dangerous thing about it.

The Aircraft Carrier Question

NAVAL AIR STATION NORTH ISLAND, Calif.

Welcome to The Ukraine Compass, a weekly digest of Ukrainian commentary and analysis from across the political spectrum only for War on the Rocks members. Each Monday, we bring you a curated selection of articles from Ukrainian media offering insight into how Ukrainians themselves debate the issues shaping their country.American coverage often narrows the view to the battlefield — these pieces widen it, revealing the texture of daily life, politics, and public argument in a nation at war.

Summary and Key Points: One of Russia’s largest oil refineries has gone quiet. A Ukrainian drone strike on May 29 forced the Volgograd plant to halt processing — only the latest hit in a campaign reaching deeper into Russian territory than almost anyone thought possible. Kyiv has stopped going after symbolic targets near the border. It’s now methodically working through the refineries that turn Russia’s crude into the fuel and cash that Putin’s war runs on.

The Ukraine War Is Coming for Russia’s Oil 

Putin in 2025 Looking Stern. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Ukraine has become a world leader in UAV techno

Canada’s INKAS Defense and Aerospace integration has introduced two new products at defence trade show CANSEC 2026.

Trump’s Ceasefire Mirage Is Collapsing: and the War Is About to Return: The purported ceasefire between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was always shaky, is breaking down in real time.

President Donald J. Trump has posted on his Truth Social an utterly delusional (typically long-winded) post that concludes with this bit of Pollyanna-like flair: “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end – It always does!”

B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber on Runway. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

India has signed an agreement to supply BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles to Vietnam, according to Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh.

Germany is embarking on a significant military recapitalisation programme via a special fund that is expected to soon be depleted.

A report from an Israeli Ministry of Defence spokesperson claims its representatives are excluded from the approaching Eurosatory arms fair.

Russia’s PAK DA was supposed to be Moscow’s stealth answer to the American B-21 — a flying-wing bomber built to haul nuclear weapons past the world’s best air defenses. There’s just one problem. Nearly twenty years after the program began, and after a parade of finalized designs and confident deadlines, Russia still hasn’t rolled out a single prototype. What it has produced instead says a lot about why analysts have started calling the whole thing a fairy tale.

Russia Needs To Scrap The Failed “Fairy Tale” PAK DA Stealth Bomber

PAK DA Stealth Bomber Artist Rendering.

More than 100 soldiers from the Royal Bermuda R

Iran’s decision to walk away – breaking in the news right now – from the negotiating table and threatening to seal the Strait of Hormuz completely leaves Donald Trump facing a problem with no quick fix. As one former Senior Donald Trump offical who served in his first term on the National Security Council told me just minutes ago: “Trump’s Strait of Hormuz crisis is a problem looking for a solution. Trump has no good options anymore, and he knows that.

The United States, United Kingdom and Australia have launched a new trilateral “signature project” focused on developing new capabilities for unmanned underwater vehicles.
The military pact unveiled the undersea drone effort in a joint statement issued on Saturday. The partner nations will be developing “cutting-edge payloads and enabling systems” to enhance their UUV arsenals, with deliveries expected to begin next year, according to the statement. 
The announcement came after a meeting between U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.K.

Summary and Key Points: Russia has finally put its Su-57 back to work in Ukraine — but not the way Moscow once promised. Rather than risk its only fifth-generation fighter in contested skies, the Russian Aerospace Forces keep it hundreds of miles back, lobbing cruise missiles from safety.

-And even that hasn’t kept the jets out of reach: in early May, Ukrainian drones reached deep into Russia and went hunting for the Felons where they were supposed to be untouchable.

Su-57. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Su-75 Checkmate and Su-57. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

U.S. forces shot down two Iranian ballistic missiles Sunday that were launched at American forces in Kuwait, American officials said Monday morning. The missile attack and intercept came just days after a similar Iranian strike reportedly injured U.S. troops in Kuwait, and after American forces targeted Iranian command and control sites over the weekend. The exchange of fire has continued between U.S. and Iranian forces despite a nominal ceasefire.
No U.S. troops were injured in the Sunday attack, according to U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM.  The command did not identify which U.S.

One thing I know for certain is that U.S. Air Force pilots don’t hold their tongue. When I asked an elite stealth fighter pilot about the Su-57, he was blunt. “I don’t want to hold anything back: Russia’s Su-57 Felon is the worst stealth fighter on the planet. It doesn’t even have stealth characteristics. I would take an F-22, F-35, or even a J-20 fighter over that piece of garbage any day.”

Russia’s Su-57 Felon: The Problem Child Stealth Fighter 

Su-57 Felon Fighter from Russia

Su-57 Felon Fighter Ready for Action. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Su-57 Felon Fighter.

This video describes the military situation in

Summary and Key Points: Whenever the fighting stops, Russia will still be sitting on a slice of Ukrainian territory, and many observers will read that as a win for the Kremlin. It is not.

-Measured by the things that actually make a country powerful — its people, its economy, its credibility, its alliances, its independence — Putin has left Russia worse off than the day he invaded.

For three years, anyone who said Ukraine could win was waved off as naive — the numbers were against them, the bean counters insisted, more Russians, more territory, more guns. Then something shifted on the front this spring. And the people now saying the war has turned against Putin aren’t pro-Ukraine bloggers or talk-radio hosts. They’re the most cautious, establishment voices in the field — and one of them just put it in the pages of Foreign Affairs.

The group of men arrived at the Central Bank of Iraq before sunrise on March 18, 2003.
Hours before the bank officially opened for the day, Qusay Hussein—the younger of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s two sons—presented a signed letter from his father. The letter authorized a withdrawal so large that it required three large trucks to take it away.
Also Read: Operation Tapeworm: How the US Army’s most elite hunted down Saddam’s sonsAs Qusay and Saddam’s personal bodyguard watched, several men loaded stacks of $100 bills, totalling a staggering $900 million of American money.

Most commentary on Russia’s frozen reserves treats the story as one of irony. Vladimir Putin accumulated nearly $300 billion to protect Russia from Western pressure, only to watch the West immobilize that cushion the moment he needed it most, when Putin invaded Ukraine. That reading is accurate as far as it goes, but the more consequential part of the story is what happened next.

What happened to Russia’s reserves is really a story about what governments in Beijing, New Delhi, and Riyadh took away from watching it unfold, and what they have started doing about it.

Rumors in the past few days have raised fresh concerns that the Belarusian authoritarian president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, may permit Russia to use his territory to invade Ukraine for what would be a second time.

In 2022, he permitted Moscow’s military to use Belarus as a launchpad to send large convoys of an invasion force towards Kyiv, but the incursion quickly bogged down due to a combination of Ukrainian territorial defense forces ambushing these columns and mechanical breakdowns of numerous vehicles.

T-72 Tank. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Pro-Iran hackers gained access to the official Instagram account of John Bentivegna, the top enlisted guardian in Space Force, for several hours on Sunday evening.
Bentivegna’s account for his role as Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force included at least one profile post showing pro-Iranian art, and several Instagram stories showing anti-American and pro-Iranian messages were posted over the course of the evening of May 31. Photos of the hacked account and its posts spread around military social media and Reddit pages.

Chinese state media has commented on reports that J-35 fifth generation fighters are being tested for integration into the air wings of the aircraft carriers Liaoning and Shandong, which has long been speculated after the new fighters were integrated into the air wing of the supercarrier Fujian in 2025.

Reaching an area 800 miles from the border with Russia, on Sunday, 31 May, Ukrainian drones struck a Russian fuel depot, oil pumping station, and a refinery.

These attacks are another in what is becoming a regular practice of Ukraine taking out strategic sites that are hundreds of miles inside of Russia and well east of Moscow.

Neptune Missile. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

What is driving this Ukrainian air campaign is the desire to inflict maximum damage on Russian energy infrastructure.

Ryan Finnerty, Flight Global
Engineers at Boeing are advancing design work to repurpose decomissioned weapons stations for the US Air Force’s (USAF’s) B-1B Lancer supersonic bombers.

National Defense
The U.S.

Ben Wolfgang, WashT
The ability of adversaries to use commercial location data from smartphones to find and target U.S.

IntEngineering
Inside America’s high-speed race to build game-changing weapons

David A.

This video describes the military situation in

One of the most effective counter-drone systems in the largest drone war in history between Ukraine and Russia is a German anti-aircraft gun designed during the Cold War. The Gepard — a self-propelled 35 mm cannon that first entered service in 1976 — has earned recognition from Ukrainian military experts as the most effective weapon against Shahed-type drones, at a cost of a few thousand dollars per engagement.

What would happen if you woke up one morning and the internet was gone — not from a software glitch, but because someone had simply cut the wire?Threats to critical undersea infrastructure are rapidly escalating. In 2023, the Balticonnector pipeline and several Baltic data cables were damaged. A year later, four Red Sea cables were cut, disrupting a quarter of data traffic between Asia and Europe, with further incidents across the Baltic. In total, between January 2024 and July 2025, roughly 44 incidents of cable damage were recorded.

India and Vietnam have signed $629 million a contract for the export of BrahMos cruise missiles, which are expected to be used to re-equip Vietnamese Su-30MK2 fighter aircraft to enhance their long range strike capabilities. Although the BrahMos is a Russian designed missile type, its production in India has allowed it to be marketed to countries that for political reasons have sought to avoid making direct procurements from Russia, such as the Philippines which signed a $375 million procurement contract in 2022.

The Russian Aerospace Forces have re-equipped two transport aviation regiments with the Il-76MD-90A heavy transport aircraft, as continued production has allowed for the enhancement of aerial logistics capabilities. Commenting on the procurement, Military-Transport Aviation Commander Lieutenant General Vladimir Benediktov stated in an interview: “In 2025, the state defence procurement plan for us was completely fulfilled. We received the new Il-76MD-90A aircraft, which have already been re-equipped for both regiments.

Version 1.0.0

I read this book with keen interest as I’ve always wanted to know more about the Vietnam War than was fed to us by the mainstream media.
As a helicopter pilot training at Fort Rucker in the ’80s, many of my instructors had combat flight time in the conflict. So, I had a natural curiosity to learn more.
With this riveting first-person-view account, Drew Dix delivers.
A true account of the fifty-six hour battle during the 1968 TeT offensive in Vietnam which resulted in the author being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV has confirmed longstanding reports that J-10C fighters sold to the Pakistan Air Force won overwhelming victories in simulated air-to-air engagements against Qatar Emiri Air Force Eurofighter combat jets. Although Chinese media did not report on the specific exercises in which this occurred, Pakistani media reported that this occurred during the Zilzal-II joint air exercises in Qatar in January 2024, achieving a 9-0 score.

The U.S. Air Force has requested $5.03 billion for the development of the F-47 sixth generation fighter for Fiscal Year 2027, representing a 65 percent increase compared to Fiscal Year 2026. The request has been made as the fighter program approaches its Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase, with annual funding projected to remain above $3.2 billion through Fiscal Year 2030. The new phase of the program is projected to continue until late 2031, after which flight testing is scheduled to belatedly begin.

Summary and Key Points: The Soviet MiG-23 Flogger was Moscow’s first swing-wing fighter, built in the late 1960s to rival the American F-4 Phantom.

-Despite Mach 2-plus speed and over 5,000 built, it proved hard to fly, costly to maintain, and a poor dogfighter.

-Its combat record was disastrous: Syrian MiG-23s fell to Israeli F-15s and F-16s, Iraqi MiG-23s to Iranian F-14s, Libyan MiG-23s to U.S. Navy Tomcats — so bad the Soviets retired it before the MiG-21 it was built to replace.

This story makes no sense. How did David Rush get away for so many years with his serial lying about his degrees, military status, and how he was able to finagle gold and cash out of the CIA

David J. Rush was a Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) with the Central Intelligence Agency until recently.
Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) and Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service (DISES) professionals typically earn a base pay ranging from $151,661 to $228,000 annually.
David is now in the Alexandria County Jail facing Federal Charges.

Summary and Key Points: In the 1970s, under CNO Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the Navy studied the CVV — a smaller, conventionally powered carrier meant as a cheaper alternative to the nuclear supercarrier.

Pitched as a “minimum-cost” ship at $550 million, its price ballooned to $1.5 billion, and the design was compromised: only 52–60 aircraft versus a Nimitz’s 90, half the catapults and elevators, fuel for barely a day. Analysts found two CVVs would cost more than one Nimitz — so America kept building supercarriers.

USS Gerald R.

Summary and Key Points: The Northrop P-61 Black Widow was the first U.S. aircraft designed around radar — a night fighter that could find enemy planes five miles away in total darkness. Armed with four 20mm cannons and four .50-caliber machine guns, it hunted Japanese and German raiders across every theater of World War II. One Black Widow, “Lady in the Dark,” was credited with the last Allied air victory of the war — and the radar it pioneered became standard on every fighter since.

This video describes the military situation in

On Friday, U.S. military forces carried out another strike on a boat accused of trafficking drugs by sea, killing three people and pushing the death toll in these strikes to 202. 
The strike took place in an unspecified part of the eastern Pacific Ocean, and it’s unclear what military asset took out the boat. Video shared by U.S. Southern Command, which announced the strike, shows a small boat exploding in a fireball. It was the 61st strike on a small vessel in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific since Sept. 2. A day later on May 30, U.S.

Summary and Key Points: The invasion of Ukraine is uniquely Putin’s project — conceived, ordered, and justified by one man — raising a serious question: does the war end when he does?

-The 73-year-old has named no heir, and Russia has no reliable succession plan.

Putin in 2022. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

-The likeliest contenders, like hawkish ex-FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev, share Putin’s worldview and might continue the war.

-Yet a successor free of Putin’s personal stake could instead end it and blame the costs on him — making his exit the war’s biggest wildcard.

The number of homeless veterans decreased by only 387 people over the course of 2024, a smaller decrease than the change for the overall number of unhoused Americans, according to the newly released national homeless count.
On Friday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development released its findings from the 2025 point-in-time national homeless count. It found that overall homelessness in the United States dropped by 3%, with 745,652 people unhoused on a single night. However, veteran homelessness declined by just 1% between January 2024-January 2025, from 32,882 to 32,495.