Le Journal

The maverick theatre-maker Pip Simmons, who died two years ago aged 80, is captured on stage and off in a book by photographer Sheila Burnett documenting the radical troupe’s years of European touring Continue reading...

Popular Mavic drone will be replaced by homegrown option with longer range, says minister; digital transformation of Ukraine defence ministry and military announced. What we know on day 1,428Ukraine’s new defence minister has announced troops will begin fielding a homegrown replacement for the Chinese-made DJI Mavic drone. Reliance on China for drones and components has been a major concern for Ukraine given Beijing’s close relationship with Moscow. The retail-grade Mavic is used widely for aerial reconnaissance on the frontlines by both sides, even though Ukraine already builds many of its own “suicide” attack drones – as well as defensive versions used to take down Russian drones. Mavic drones are prized by Ukrainian army units, who are often supported by volunteer groups that continuously run campaigns to source Mavics and raise funds to buy them. Mykhailo Fedorov, the defence minister, said: “We will have our own Mavic analogue: the same camera, but with a longer flight range.” Fedorov did not disclose the manufacturer of the Ukrainian version.Fedorov on Tuesday promised a sweeping data-driven overhaul of Ukraine’s military to reward commanders achieving results on the battlefield and give Ukrainian forces the upper hand. Fedorov said he would start by overhauling the vast defence ministry’s management and spending, emphasising the importance of “the mathematics of war”. He promised a mission control system for drone flights and for artillery crews to increase the data available about crews’ performance and effectiveness. Fedorov said Ukraine would establish a system allowing its allies to train their military artificial intelligence models on Kyiv’s combat data collected throughout the war including combat statistics and millions of hours of video taken by drones.A Russian air attack cut power to more than a million Kyiv residents and affected substations carrying power from Ukraine’s nuclear plants on Tuesday. Ukrainian officials had warned in recent days that Moscow would target nuclear-related facilities. The UN atomic watchdog said several substations critical for nuclear safety were affected by the attack, while power lines to some other nuclear plants were affected.Drone and missile strikes killed four people: three in the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia and one in the Kyiv region surrounding the capital. Other regions in the east, south and north of Ukraine also came under attack. “In Kyiv alone, as of this evening, more than one million households remain without power,” said Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his Tuesday evening address. “And a significant number of buildings have no heating, more than 4,000 apartment buildings.” Authorities in the northern region of Chernihiv bordering Russia said 87% of the population was without power.All off-site power was also temporarily lost at the Chornobyl plant – where the reactor destroyed in the world’s worst civil nuclear catastrophe is entombed and requires constant monitoring for safety. “While Russian officials speak about the ‘importance’ of power lines, their forces deliberately strike substations, directly endangering nuclear safety,” said Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha.A new round of peace talks at the weekend between US and Ukrainian officials was followed on Tuesday by a meeting at Davos in Switzerland between envoys for presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Kiril Dmitriev, the Russian envoy, said their meeting on a possible peace deal to end the war had been “very positive” and “constructive” and claimed that “more and more people are realising that Russia’s position is right”. Dmitriev met Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.Zelenskyy urged the US to pile more pressure on Moscow, saying it had “not yet had the strength” to stop Russia. “Can America do more? It can, and we really want this, and we believe that the Americans are capable of doing this,” said the Ukrainian president. Zelenskyy said some of the…

For years, Beijing has struggled to gain a foothold in Greenland, in part because of US and Danish unity. Trump’s fraying of that alliance could create the opening it needsAccording to Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, China and Russia must be having a “field day” about Donald Trump’s plans for Greenland, which Kallas says will divide Nato.But according to Trump, his plans are motivated by a desire to counter the very threat that Kallas identified. “World peace is at stake! China and Russia want Greenland, and there is not a thing that Denmark can do about it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday. Continue reading...

Trump’s demand for Greenland is a throwback to the 1884 Berlin conference: a transaction of land and people driven by a might makes right worldviewThe announcement on 17 January that Washington will impose punitive tariffs of 10% to 25% on eight European allies – unless they facilitate the “complete and total purchase” of Greenland – is likely to be the death knell of the post-1945 transatlantic order. By linking the territorial sovereignty of a Nato ally to trade access, the US has transitioned from Europe’s security guarantor to a 19th-century imperial rent-seeker.This is a moment of profound rupture. For decades, the western world believed that raw imperialism had been relegated to the past among advanced industrial powers. Even China, for all its assertiveness, largely couches its ambitions in the language of revanchism – the “reclaiming” of lost territory. Washington’s current demand for Greenland, by contrast, is a throwback to the age of the 1884 Berlin conference: a transaction of land and people driven by a might makes right worldview.Christopher S Chivvis is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former US national intelligence officer for Europe Continue reading...