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Ukraine war briefing: Wildberries attacks shake Russian economy and banking

The Kremlin has acknowledged it may have to prop up online retailer Wildberries – which has lost 10% of its warehousing capacity and huge amounts of stock in Ukrainian drone attacks. Kyiv has said its forces are attacking “Russia’s Amazon” because of its role in supplying Moscow’s army. The Kremlin acknowledged the government had discussed possible support for Wildberries. A senior industry source told Reuters that Wildberries was in a difficult situation and might have to seek government support, most likely through state-controlled banks, in order to maintain operations. An ‌executive at Ukraine’s leading arms producer Fire Point has said Wildberries is being targeted by Ukraine partly because of its partnership with state-controlled bank VTB. Denys Shtilerman, Fire Point’s co-founder and chief designer, in an interview posted on 27 July with the Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon, described Wildberries as the largest borrower in Russia and said its demise would lead to the collapse of a large number of banks, including VTB. Wildberries and its rival Ozon are central to the Russian government’s plans to spur economic growth as Moscow faces mounting budget pressures from increased military spending and a broader economic slowdown. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov lavished praise on Wildberries for providing assistance to third-party sellers whose goods were stored in damaged warehouses. Those sellers have been clamouring for support. One of them, Marina Gorshkova, told her Instagram audience of 1.3 million people that she was appealing to “the country’s leadership” and there were a million registered users on Wildberries who needed help. Wildberries said that ⁠it had ⁠so far paid out 40 million roubles (US$508,582) to ⁠the families of those killed or those ⁠injured in Ukrainian drone attacks ‌on its ‌warehouses. Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office has asked Ukraine’s top prosecutor to consider launching criminal proceedings against Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, according to a ⁠letter made public on Tuesday. Lukashenko allowed Vladimir Putin to use Belarus as a launchpad for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Ukrainian ⁠president’s office said an exiled opposition group, the Belarus Democratic Forum, had asked Kyiv to prosecute Lukashenko ⁠for war crimes, genocide and “state terror”. Lukashenko’s administration did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. There is no current ‌prospect of Lukashenko appearing before a Ukrainian court, but Dmitry Bolkunets, secretary general of the Belarus Democratic Forum, said a prosecution would “significantly increase the personal legal and security risks faced by Lukashenko” and would be an act of historical justice. “It could have a profound impact inside Belarus, because Lukashenko would take it very personally and be deeply concerned about the consequences.” Ukraine and Iran’s foreign ministers spoke on Tuesday, Kyiv said, adding it wants to avoid an “escalation” after a Ukrainian attack on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea. Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday said Kyiv had carried out long-range strikes in the Caspian Sea against vessels carrying military cargo involving Iran. Andriy Sybiga said he reiterated to his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, that “all of Ukraine’s actions are aimed solely at defending our country from Russian aggression and never intended to target civilian vessels or people”. Araghchi claimed that Sybiga had assured him the attack was “unintentional and Ukraine seeks no escalation”. However, Ukraine did not appear to publicly characterise the attack as unintentional, and Sybiga said he emphasised to Iran the need to “end any support for Russia’s war against Ukraine”. Ukraine suffers much damage and many casualties in Russian attacks that use Shahed drones either bought from Iran or built to its designs. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said after meeting Donald Trump at the White House: “We talked ‌with the president about licences for producing interceptors for the Patriots and other ideas that could help.” Zelenskyy said he had met with officials from Lockheed Martin – one of the companies that produces Patriot interceptors – and teams were working “to move to co-production as quickly as possible”. “We also talked about diplomacy [with Trump] – it is important to step up the diplomatic process,” Zelenskyy said, referring to the lack of peace talks with Russia. Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have agreed to visit Ukraine for the first time, two sources familiar with the conversations told Reuters. The US Senate took the first steps toward passage of a sweeping Russian sanctions bill on Tuesday. The legislation would penalise countries that continue to buy Russian oil, gas and other exports. The bipartisan 86-12 procedural vote came hours after a funeral for Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the bill’s chief negotiator. Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with senators just before the vote. The bill provides exceptions for countries that import less than 15% of their natural gas from Russia and are taking steps to reduce those imports. Some Democrats are hesitant that it might give Trump additional powers to recklessly impose tariffs elsewhere and on other countries.

Trump pausing Iran attacks shows US military power is not enough on its own

Has Iran won a war it didn’t start against the United States? It is not a victory in any conventional military sense: about 3,500 Iranians have been reported killed and the US-led bombing has caused anywhere between $150bn and $270bn of damage. Yet Donald Trump’s decision to pause, rather than intensify, the 13-night summer bombing campaign in effect represents a degree of recognition that the US cannot achieve its stated goals by military power alone. “Iran’s initial standard for victory was simply to survive,” said HA Hellyer, a Middle East expert with the Royal United Services Institute. “If anything, that’s been raised. The regime has demonstrated it is not going anywhere, and Tehran has changed the calculus on the strait of Hormuz”. The past five months are a clear demonstration of how an asymmetric conflict can flip the tables. All Iran, helped by its extensive and mountainous geography, has needed to do is maintain enough of a missile and drone capability to scare merchant shipping from using the strait of Hormuz. It is a low bar Iran’s military is still clearing. Two tankers were attacked sailing north of Oman last week. One of them caught fire in the engine room and had to be evacuated, before being towed to Oman, one of a handful of serious attacks on merchant shipping that took place during the nearly two-week July escalation of fighting. The US, meanwhile, has spent at least $38bn and used more than 1,000 Tomahawk and 1,100 Jassm $2.6m cruise missiles, according to estimates by the CSIS thinktank, to bomb targets in Iran, a third and a quarter of total stockpiles. The Tomahawks, which cost up to $3.6m each, might not be replaced until 2031. It is surprising that the US has allowed key munitions to be run down at such speed. On Monday, Trump tried in part to blame Ukraine, arguing that “so much was given” to Kyiv in military aid – though the reality is that Ukraine was never given long-range cruise missiles, only Patriot air defence systems. Patriot missile interceptors were more heavily depleted, by 1,000 or so, or 50% of the total US stockpile, raising questions as to how well the US can continue to defend its bases in the Gulf. More were used during the 38 days of heavy fighting in the spring than the 600 or so that Ukraine has said it had received during four years of war. A fresh escalation in the Red Sea by the Houthis, Iran’s allies in Yemen, complicates the picture further. The rebel group kept out of the first phase of the US-Iran war in the spring but, as Saudi Arabia seeks to redirect oil traffic through the Red Sea, they have stepped up attacks, targeting a refinery in the Saudi city of Jizan on Saturday. The US’s stated central war aim, meanwhile, may have repeatedly shifted but it has always been maximalist – whether it was regime change (as demonstrated by the killing of Ali Khamenei), destroying Iran’s entire missile programme or, as most frequently stated, preventing the country from having a nuclear weapon. Yet the US has no means of enforcing this level of demand without committing ground forces in numbers to occupy Tehran – an unlikely move that the US has not shown signs of preparing for. Donald Trump’s previous threats to bomb Iranian power plants to try to force the regime’s capitulation have raised concerns they would amount to war crimes, and he dropped them in April and again last week. “I don’t think the Iranians can be bombed into accepting US terms,” said Peter Ricketts, a former UK national security adviser. “Until the US accepts it can’t get its way by bombing, Iran has effective leverage. Tehran can absorb the pain, and they know they can close the strait with the economic impact it has on the US.” The resulting situation is what Ricketts calls an “escalation dominance” that he says favours Iran. Tehran, faced with US pressure to abandon its nuclear programme, can string out peace negotiations, wait for the White House to get impatient and restart bombing, then close Hormuz until the US has to stop attacking because the oil price is tto high for too long. The question then becomes who gains as unstable equilibrium endures. Tehran may well believe it has leverage as the US heads towards midterm elections in November, given how unpopular the war is. Just a third of all Americans support the war, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey out on Tuesday, though that rises to 71% of Republicans. Laurel Rapp, from the Chatham House thinktank, said that “a resumed ceasefire and promise of future talks is the least bad option for Washington” – though whether that is attractive to US ally Israel, whose prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has his own election to fight in October, is another source of uncertainty. But if Tehran may have short or medium-term leverage, any idea that it has won the war is exaggerated. Hellyer argues that Iran, long struggling under western sanctions, cannot afford to rebuild without an agreement with the US: “Ultimately this isn’t sustainable for Iran, because its economy isn’t going to be able to survive”.

Paco Robles obituary

My family friend Paco (Francisco) Robles, who has died aged 99, was one of the last survivors of the largest ever single day’s migration into the UK, when on 23 May 1937 about 4,000 people arrived in Southampton fleeing the Spanish civil war. Paco, who was 10 at the time, and his younger sister, Maria Jesus, were among 3,800 children on board the ageing former cruise ship the Habana, along with volunteer teachers, priests and supporters. Two aunts of mine, Poppy and Chloe Vulliamy, had become involved in helping to get the children out of the country, and Chloe ran the first two hostels that Paco stayed in, as well as the last to close, in 1951. In 2017 Paco unveiled a blue plaque at the first house, in Wherstead Park in Suffolk, near Ipswich, and spoke emotionally of Chloe’s role as his surrogate mother. He was delighted to discover that the tree he had climbed there remained intact, 80 years later. Paco was born in León, in north western Spain, to Martina (nee Hernando), a maid, and Germillano, a deputy for the Socialist party in the city. When Paco was young the family moved to the Basque Country, where his father worked in the chemical department of a steelworks in Bilbao. After the nearby town of Guernica was heavily bombed by German and Italian planes in support of General Franco’s nationalist forces in April 1937, his parents managed to get him and his sister on board the Habana. Life on arrival was not easy; the UK government refused to provide any public funding for the care of the children, and so Paco was educated at volunteer-run residential homes known as a “colonies” – where he encountered my aunt Chloe. Once Franco had attained victory over the republicans in the civil war, he demanded the return of the niños who had left – but that often proved impossible. In Paco’s case, as in many others, there was nothing to go back to: his father had been imprisoned, the family home had been stolen, and his mother was struggling to survive, with little food to eat. He therefore remained in Britain, and worked over the years in various jobs, including at a munitions factory, a bakery and as a labourer on a farm. Like many of his fellow Habana refugees he felt neither Spanish in Spain nor British in the UK. But his experiences left him skilled in connecting and communicating with people, and throughout his life he maintained his Spanish connections, including as a strong supporter of the Basque Childrens’ Association and as a regular visitor to a Spanish social centre in London, where he lived. Paco married Maria Román, a factory worker, in 1949; she died in 2012. He is survived by their three children, Elena, Fernando and Maria, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Canadians spent $3.3bn less on travel to US in 2025 after Trump’s return to office

Canadians spent $3.3bn less on travel to the US in 2025 than in the previous year, as Donald Trump’s hostile policies towards his northern neighbour continue to incur an economic cost, new government data shows. The research also indicates that Canadians are not bucking travel overall and instead have replaced US vacations with other international destinations, in a rebuke to Trump’s tariff regime and the president’s continued musings on annexing Canada. “Following the change in the US administration in early 2025 and the implementation of America First policies, Canadian travel sentiment shifted abruptly,” said authors of the report published by Statistics Canada, the country’s national statistics agency. Total US travel spending in 2025 amounted to $18.8bn, down from $22.1bn in 2024. In contrast, Canadian spending on travel abroad, excluding the US, grew by $3.6bn in 2025, to a total of $22.8bn. Canadian visits to Europe increased by nearly 14% compared with 2024, while visits to Asia increased by almost 17%. Those increases offered a stark contrast to the dwindling US visits. Overall in 2025, return trips to Canada from the US by vehicle and by plane dropped by about one quarter compared to 2024. The highest travel declines were recorded in July 2025, when border crossings fell by about one-third from the previous year. Those plummeting border crossings through nearly the entire year were “the deepest and most sustained on record”, the agency said. Since digital record-keeping began in 1972, declines of more than 30% have only ever been seen in September 2001, after the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Looking at 2026 data so far, Statistics Canada said the drop in leisure travel to the US was continuing. Return trips to Canada from the US this year are at similar levels seen at the end of 2025, which saw a 27% decline between October and December, it reported. The data signals “a persistent shift away from the United States by Canadian residents in their travel preferences”.

Almost 4,000 people evacuated from tourist sites near Bordeaux as wildfires rage in France and Spain

Nearly 4,000 people have been evacuated from tourist sites on France’s Atlantic coast as the return of winds and extreme heat jeopardises firefighters’ battles to contain wildfires raging in France and Spain. The precautionary evacuation order in France, which covers campsites, holiday villages and other tourist accommodation around the resort of Lacanau to the west of Bordeaux, exacerbated a wildfire emergency described by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, as the “toughest” situation the country had dealt with since the second world war. On a visit to a crisis centre in Bordeaux on Tuesday, Macron warned that “the coming weeks will be tough and we have to hold out”. In Spain, meanwhile, a woman who had been injured in a wildfire in the southern province of Almería this month died in hospital, bringing the death toll from that blaze to 14. The woman, who was not named, died at Seville’s Virgen del Rocío university hospital where she had been treated since suffering severe injuries in the wildfire, a hospital spokeswoman told AFP, without giving further details. In France,Rémi Lassoureille, a fire commander in the Gironde department, was quoted by Le Monde as saying that the blaze there, which has destroyed 42,000 hectares (104,000 acres) of forest, was “relatively under control”, although firefighters feared a “potential flare-up of the fire on its north-west flank towards Lacanau”. “That is why we decided to evacuate the campsites,” he said. Other large fires have been contained in the nearby Landes, where thousands of evacuees were allowed to return home, and the Écrins massif in the French Alps, although one in the Gros Bessillon massif in the Var area of south-east France has not yet been fully brought under control. Wildfires in France, Spain and Italy have forced the evacuation of about 330,000 people over the past week, with Spain entering Europe’s fourth intense heatwave of the summer attempting to contain some of the worst forest fires in the country’s history. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said the country faced “difficult hours, complex hours” before the new heatwave, which is forecast to begin on Wednesday and warned about the urgency of responding to the climate emergency. He later said authorities were beginning to “see light at the end of the tunnel in the fight against wildfires”. Spain’s interior ministry announced the end of evacuation orders for 15 municipalities on Tuesday afternoon in rare good news. A fire in the hilly terrain of Ávila, west of Madrid, has become Spain’s largest on record, burning 50,000 hectares. A firefighter, Javier García, told Associated Press he had never faced anything like it in his two decades protecting woodlands and rural communities. “This doesn’t have a precedent,” he said, adding that the ferocity of the wildfire was forcing firefighters to fundamentally change their tactics by prioritising evacuations and property protection because of the danger from fast-moving walls of flames and blazes too powerful to attack directly. “The evolution is alarming,” García said. An EU spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen said a number of firefighting planes and helicopters from member countries had been deployed to France and Spain. She said it was “important to clarify that no country can maintain alone all the resources that are needed to tackle every possible natural or other disaster and crisis”. EU officials have said wildfires could still be burning until early November in what threatens to be a record-breaking year of burnt land area. Wildfire weather across the bloc has been more severe this year than ever before, according to data up to 22 July from the European Forest Fire Information System. In France, which had broken its full-year record for burnt area by then, and in Spain, the cumulative numbers of fires in 2026 have also set new records. European wildfires have struck at the same time as ferocious North American ones, with hundreds of blazes continuing to devastate the western US and swathes of Canada. Meanwhile, torrential rains have flooded countries across Asia. “The climate alarm is blaring, from every direction,” Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said on Tuesday. With Europe now facing another heatwave, he said the human and economic costs of the climate crisis were reaching “national emergency” levels. “These spiralling disasters are now the lived reality for billions in a world getting rapidly hotter, as humanity moves too slowly from fossil fuels to clean energy and to protect forests,” he said. Western Europe had a wet winter and also, in some parts, a wet spring, which encouraged heavy plant growth. It has been followed by a dangerously hot and dry summer, with back-to-back heatwaves forcing moisture from plants and leaving behind a surplus of fuel that has fed the flames. The climatic drivers have been made worse by the long-running abandonment of farmland that used to fragment the landscape, preventing small fires from growing into blazing infernos. “If the issue of fuel load isn’t addressed, I think we’re going to have to get used to [fires too strong to put out],” said Dr Jesús Notario del Pino, a soil scientist at the University of La Laguna in Tenerife. “As many forestry specialists and engineers often say: what we don’t manage, the fire will.” Dr Thomas Smith, a wildfire scientist at the London School of Economics, said: “If I was holidaying on the coast of Spain or the south of France, I would make sure I have any fire alerts or fire weather apps installed on my phone and familiarise myself with the evacuation plans for the hotel or residence. It’s very important to understand that timely evacuation saves lives.” The June heatwave would have been “virtually impossible” without the added heat from more than a century of carbon pollution, a rapid analysis found last month, while the level of soil dryness in western Europe was made five times more likely by climate breakdown, according to a separate study from the same international research network last week. Estimates of the death toll from the heatwaves, from national public health agencies and independent scientists, suggest they have claimed at least 10,000 lives. Stiell said: “The science on the cause is unequivocal: global heating, driven by humanity burning colossal amounts of coal, oil and gas, is making protracted heatwaves, severe floods and violent mega-storms more frequent, more intense and more costly. “What needs to be done is equally clear: leave coal, oil and gas behind faster, scale up renewables, and protect people where the impacts are already hitting hardest.”