In further comments on his Truth Social app, Donald Trump said “many countries” would send warships to keep the strait of Hormuz open, without providing details on which countries would do so. He said he hoped the UK, China, France, Japan, South Korea and others will send ships to the area.
At 12.33pm on 2 March, Valentinos Pangalos was ordered to activate sirens at Paphos international airport in Cyprus. An emergency had been declared. A suspicious object – thought to be a drone packed with explosives – had been detected heading towards the facility. Barely 12 hours earlier, an Iranian-made, Shahed-type drone had smashed into a hangar at RAF Akrotiri, raising the alarm further. The airport needed to be evacuated immediately. “In 24 years of doing this job I’d never been asked to do anything like it,” said Pangalos, among the longest-serving officers at the island’s civil defence force. “To receive such an order, so abruptly, was intense.” But, he said, it was just the beginning. The US-led aerial bombardment of Iran, and the retaliatory attacks that have followed, has put the eastern Mediterranean island on alert – and at the forefront of security concerns – in a way not experienced since 1974, when a coup aimed at union with Greece led to Turkish forces invading and occupying its north. Officials say phones in the civil defence force’s cramped operations room have been ringing off the hook for days, amid initial reports of other attempted drone strikes from Lebanon – barely 150 miles away. “People have felt very scared. They’ve been panicking since the drone attack,” said Pangalos, now forced to spend long nights and days in the force’s shabby headquarters on the outskirts of Nicosia. Older Cypriots with memories of the invasion, and the traumatic displacement of refugees that followed, are among those most loudly voicing fears. “At all hours we’ve been receiving calls, especially from the elderly, asking where the nearest refuge is and what they should do,” Pangalos said. “Unfortunately, there aren’t many of us here because we’re so understaffed.” Behind her file-covered desk, the civil defence’s chief officer, Maria Papa, concedes that the emergency caught Cypriot authorities off guard. “This security crisis has exposed just how ill-prepared we are,” she sighed. “Improvement is needed all round, starting with shelters, our staff being increased and the building we are standing in. I’ve been requesting changes for years.” Pinboards in the foyers of apartment blocks have begun to fill with lists of nearby neighbourhood refuges, for residents to only discover that many are pokey garages or dilapidated cellars in dank, unkempt buildings. The interior minister announced this week that about 480 of the 2,480 bomb shelters listed with authorities were unsuitable, inaccessible, private or did not exist at all. Papa is leaving her post in the civil defence within days, and local media outlets claim this is directly related to the dismal state of the country’s shelters. Faced with the stark reality, President Nikos Christodoulides admitted action was overdue. “We’re not at all happy with the state of the shelters,” he told reporters after it was announced that no more than 45% of the 1 million people living in Cyprus could be accommodated in the bunkers currently available. “I’m not going to embellish the situation, especially in a country where 52 years ago we had an invasion and occupation,” he said, referring to the presence of 35,000 troops in the country’s breakaway Turkish-held north. “The first thing that should have happened was [the construction] of shelters.” Christodoulides subsequently announced that a national coordinator would be appointed “based on European standards” to more effectively respond to crisis incidents. Legislation has also been drafted to give constructors incentives to build bunkers in apartment blocks to make up for the shortfall. “To date, we’ve asked people to make shelters available out of the goodness of their heart,” Papa said. “It’s been entirely voluntary.” As cries of state incompetency have grown, so too have demands for change. In the coming weeks, Papa said Israeli civil protection experts would be visiting as authorities look towards Israel, home to some of the toughest civil defence laws in the world, and elsewhere, for best practices. Enhanced early warning systems are also being worked on. “We mustn’t forget that Cyprus is actually very safe,” said Papa. “It’s the British bases that have been targeted but we are also up against a siege mentality, the result of 1974.” Some even say that the sight of European warships and fighter jets forming a protective cordon around the island, at the request of Nicosia, has reinforced worries that the island is being dragged into the wider conflict with Iran. “I won’t hide it, I’m scared,” said Yiota Andreou, 67, who runs a pastry shop in Nicosia and lives within view of the US embassy. “Why are all these ships here, if we are as safe as they say? It’s terrible that shelters are in this state, that governments have turned a blind eye, wasted money and not cared at all about us.” Stefanos Stefanou, who heads the island’s main opposition, the leftwing AKEL, told the Guardian it was now vital there were “effective and fast solutions” to improve a civil protection system that frequently had let the country down. “It’s clearly not working,” he said, citing deadly forest fires last summer where civil defence units were also caught off-guard. “People fear what they perceive and in Paphos, and the areas around the British bases, where sirens have been sounding, there’s been a lot of panic, people rushing to supermarkets to buy food, incredible scenes. The time has come for solutions that will allow everyone to feel safe.”
Greenhouse gas emissions in Germany have again missed targets set by the Climate Protection Act and barely fell at all in 2025. Emissions decreased by just 0.1% last year compared to the previous year, according to data from the German Environment Agency. The country’s emissions in 2025 were equivalent to 649m tonnes of CO2, worse than those forecast by the expert group Agora Energiewende, which anticipated a 1.5% drop year-on-year. In 2024, a more significant drop of 3.4% was recorded. Germany’s environment minister, Carsten Schneider, criticised the lack of improvement at a conference in Berlin on Saturday. The Social Democrat said that despite an increasing acceptance of electric cars and heat pumps, overall progress was “too slow” and urged citizens to accelerate their adoption of renewable power sources for both environmental and security reasons. “What benefits the climate also increases our security and economic strength,” he said. “Every additional kilowatt-hour of renewable energy makes our country less dependent on oil and gas and our energy supply more secure.” Despite this, both Schneider and the German Environment Agency remained optimistic that the country could achieve the 2030 climate target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 65%, compared with 1990. Schneider welcomed the “growing enthusiasm for climate protection technologies” such as electric cars and heat pumps. “And there are more newly approved wind power projects than ever before. This gives hope that progress will once again pick up speed in the years to come,” he said. Emissions will have to decrease by an average of 42 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year from 2026 onward, more than 40 times the reduction recorded last year, to meet the 2030 reductions target. In 2025, Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions were 48% below the level of the 1990 base year. Schneider said it was “particularly urgent” to reduce emissions in the transport and building sectors – where emissions rose last year – to avoid the costly purchase of emission allowances from other EU member states or fines. The pursuit of climate targets in Germany, a priority for the previous government of Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, appears less certain under the mandate of conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz. His government, which has been in power since May 2025, has instead advocated easing environmental standards. Germany is Europe’s largest economy and its manufacturing powerhouse, and globally is behind only the economies of the United States and China in size.
After pulling on white cotton gloves, Arthur Bondar carefully takes a handful of 4cm by 9cm negatives from an old cigarette box and holds them up to the light of his study window. Inverted images of a woman on a horse, a group of women tending cabbages in a field, laughing figures at the seaside, a woman posing as a military ship sails by, hover in front of him, almost ghostlike. Although they are tiny, he is able to make out key details such as the insignia on a uniform, or the name of a ship, that trigger his curiosity and give him a starting point for his research. Arthur Bondar examines some of his negatives. Photograph: Oksana Yushko/The Guardian Group photo of the young girls from Reich labour service at the lake, 1935-39, taken by an unknown photographer. All archival photos: Arthur Bondar private collection Young girls from Reich labour service at the lake, Lower Saxony-Central, Germany, 1935-39, taken by an unknown photographer. He bought the images depicting women from the Reichsarbeitsdienst, a female labour force that served the Nazi Reich, from a German seller online. It is the latest addition to a burgeoning collection of about 35,000 negatives from the second world war that the Ukrainian-Russian photojournalist and publisher has been amassing since 2016. Mostly he only knows what he has bought once he has flattened and scanned the negatives, comparing his purchases to “buying a black cat in a black sack”. An artillery crew firing at the enemy, 1st Ukrainian Front, 1943–44. Photograph: Olga Ignatovich Left: Soviet artillerist, Berlin, Germany, May 1945. Photograph: Valery Faminsky. Right: a portrait of a local young woman in her house, USSR, 1941. Photographer: Wagner He only buys negatives – taken by either amateur or professional photographers everywhere from the Soviet Union to the United States – to ensure he is getting the most unadulterated images of the war. “Negatives are photographic truths that make it difficult to distort history. Prints on the other hand might well have been manipulated,” he says, referring in particular to the Soviet military practices of “sometimes pasting two images together to create a collage, or cutting dead soldiers out of negatives”. Arthur Bondar’s second world war archival collection. Photograph: Oksana Yushko/The Guardian Bondar smuggled his photographic treasures out of Moscow, where he had been living for over a decade, in eight separate hauls during 2023 – leaving his own photographic archive behind in safe-keeping, “hoping to retrieve it one day”. He brought them over the border, first to Georgia, and later to Germany, where he and his wife, Oksana, a Ukrainian-Russian artist and photographer from Kharkiv, now live in exile (or self-imposed relocation, as they refer to it). In doing this he risked at the very least the confiscation of his negatives, a fine and, in the worst case, imprisonment. Many of the images, despite being legally bought, would probably have been considered by Russian censors to dishonour the “defenders of the fatherland” through their honesty, including the vulnerable way they depict soldiers (showing distress and injury as well as humanity and humour). Since 2020, this has been a prosecutable offence in Russia. Cleaning the streets between the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate, Germany, May 1945. Photograph: Valery Faminsky Suburbs of Berlin, Germany, May 1945. Photograph: Valery Faminsky Prisoners of Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland, late January 1945. Photograph: Olga Ignatovich “To boot, I was a Ukrainian doing this ‘dishonourable’ act,” says Bondar, who was born and grew up in a military family in Krivoy Rog, central-southern Ukraine. In the event, although he was interrogated, he managed to get the images out. Bondar says his archive acts as a counterpoint to the “comfortable” narrative of the second world war – celebrating it as a triumph rather than a tragedy – that Moscow uses to justify its invasion of Ukraine, embodied in its propaganda slogan “we can do it again” – meaning conquering Ukraine like it once did Nazi Germany. Captured Glogau, a fortress city in Silesia, Germany (now Głogów, Poland), March–April 1945. Photograph: Olga Ignatovich The only surviving member of a tank crew, Seelow Heights, Germany, April 1945. Photograph: Valery Faminsky Bondar is dedicated to preserving and sharing the images in his archive. The war raging in his homeland makes him all the more determined to show “all the sides of war, above all its stupidity and uselessness”. He has uploaded the photographs to a carefully curated website, published hardback books with them and held numerous exhibitions, such as the one now running at a museum dedicated to the Battle of the Seelow Heights, the most vicious and bloody episode in the operation to seize nearby Berlin from Nazi control in the spring of 1945. It features the images of Bondar’s first and most precious find, Valery Faminsky. Photographs by Valery Faminsky from Arthur Bondar’s collection. Photograph: Oksana Yushko/The Guardian “I had never before seen pictures like these,” Bondar says, recalling the sense of awe he felt on first setting eyes on Faminsky’s works, after an advert was posted by his family. He pulls out Faminsky’s neatly arranged homemade cardboard boxes bound by white army-issue medical tape, full of the photographer’s negatives. Each is wrapped in a crisp piece of paper, signed with a description of what, where and when. Faminsky, who died in 1993, had originally been exempt from going to the front due to poor eyesight, despite desperately wanting to, with the military leadership telling him: “What good is a blind photographer to us?” Unloading a wounded soldier at the field hospital in Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, Germany, May 1945. Photograph: Valery Faminsky Left: A US Army technician holding a puppy in a doghouse upon arrival at the unit, Berlin, Germany, October 1945. Photograph: Sam Jaffe. Right: between battles a Soviet fighter pilot, Captain V Popov, feeds pigeons on the tail of a fighter aircraft, Kalinin Front, Soviet Union, 1943. Photograph: Olga Ignatovic In 1943, he finally got to go, aged 31, for the Military History Museum in what is now St Petersburg, which sent him to collect pictures documenting how first aid was administered to the Red Army, which explains his many depictions of wounded soldiers. But he went way beyond his brief. His army accreditation enabled him to move freely to photograph German civilians and Soviet soldiers in non-staged, highly humanistic scenes of everyday wartime life. “It is ironic to me that the legacy of a man with poor eyesight has been to give us one of the most enlightening views of war possible,” Bondar says. A jumbled selection of negatives by Olga Ignatovich, one of only seven female photographers working for the military, were handed over to Bondar in a shoebox in Moscow in 2020. He has since neatly ordered all 1,500 of them and scanned them frame by frame. Some were too disintegrated by mould to save, “a metaphor for the fading memories,” Bondar says. A frontline photographer like Faminsky, Ignatovich, too, was forgotten after the war. A jazz band entertaining troops at an air unit. Soviet Union, 1943. Photograph: Olga Ignatovich Some of her images, including photographs of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which were used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials, were, for decades, even attributed to her far more famous photographer brother, Boris. Auschwitz prisoners liberated: Red Army soldiers leading the survivors out of the death camp, Poland, late January 1945. Photograph: Olga Ignatovich Bondar searched for her grave for months before finally coming across her snow-covered, white marble headstone in the winter of 2020-21. “The only information anyone could provide was that she died in Moscow in 1984.” Although Ignatovich worked for the Soviet media and her images were consequently used for propaganda purposes, Bondar is struck by the authenticity of many of them. “She got people to smile for the camera,” Bondar said, “maybe they were surprised at being photographed by a woman. She was less interested in the fighting than she was in depicting the individuals caught up in it.” Bondar has frequently been contacted by people from Siberia to New York, excited to discover either themselves or a relative in the images. After verifying their claims, he has sent them copies of the particular photograph in high resolution. Arthur Bondar. Photograph: Oksana Yushko/The Guardian He feels haunted and thrilled not only by the millions of negatives that will have been discarded on rubbish dumps or left decaying in attics, which are forever lost to the world, but also by the scores of packages of unprocessed negatives stored floor to ceiling in cardboard boxes in his home in northern Germany. Even if he stopped adding to them, he says these “amount to about 20 to 30 years of work”, and he expresses a heartfelt wish to find an institute that might choose to collaborate with him.
The boss of one of the world’s largest fertiliser companies has said global food supplies could be badly damaged this year if the Iran war becomes an extended conflict. Svein Tore Holsether, the chief executive of Norway’s Yara International, has called on global leaders to consider the impact that soaring food prices will have in some of the world’s poorest countries “before it is too late”. He said: “Given the importance of fertiliser, this is something that can seriously impact crop yields if the war continues for an extended period. “This is a regional conflict with global implications and it goes straight into the food system.” The cost of the raw materials in fertilisers has rocketed since the war started two weeks ago as a third of the world’s urea and about a quarter of globally traded ammonia, which are key components in the plant nutrient, comes from the Gulf. Prices of urea have increased by about $210 a tonne, rising from $487 a tonne the week before the attack on Iran to $700 now. Holsether said: “If the strait of Hormuz was closed for a year it would be catastrophic. We are talking nutrition for plants, and if they don’t get the nutrition, then you will see significant reductions in the farm yield.” “For some crops, if they don’t get the fertiliser, you can see a reduction of up to 50% in the first harvest,” he added, referring to European summer crops including early potatoes. Established in Norway in 1905 to combat European famine, Yara is the world’s largest producer of nitrogen-based mineral fertilisers and has plants in the Netherlands, France, Germany but also India and South America. Holsether said the fertiliser industry had been hit by “a double impact”: supplies of raw materials from the Gulf being choked off; and the price of gas, needed to capture nitrogen from the air, rocketing. He said production in Qatar and Iran had been reduced as a direct impact of the war, while some governments in Asia had ordered rationing of gas. “When gas prices increase as much as they do now, it goes straight to the cost of producing fertiliser for all,” Holsether said. He said Europe would always be able to outbid poorer countries, raising concerns about neighbours in Africa and beyond. “The countries that are most vulnerable still pay the highest price. “In a global auction for fertiliser, Europe will have a stronger buying power than poorer parts of the world, we need to keep in mind the magnitude of this before it is too late,” he added. The UN World Food Programme has said rising food and fuel prices driven by the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East could have ripple effects that will worsen hunger for vulnerable populations in the region and beyond.
Donald Trump said on Friday that US forces had “obliterated” military targets in a raid on the island of Kharg in Iran and warned that crucial oil infrastructure there could be next, in the latest escalation of the war of words between Washington and Tehran. “For reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on the Island,” Trump wrote on social media. “However, should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision.” The flow of oil and gas from Iran and the Gulf has moved centre stage in the ongoing conflict in recent days. Kharg lies about 15 miles (25km) off Iran’s coastline and is the main facility for the export of the country’s oil. Iran has effectively closed the narrow strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes, sending oil prices surging and raising the prospect of major damage to economies worldwide. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump also called on “Iran’s Military, and all others involved with this Terrorist Regime” to “lay down their arms, and save what’s left of their country, which isn’t much!”. He also accused what he calls “The Fake News Media” of failing to accurately portray the joint US-Israeli offensive, launched two weeks ago. The US president’s comments prompted a defiant response from Iran, where senior military officials reiterated a threat to attack any US-linked oil and energy facilities across the Middle East if its oil infrastructure was hit. Iran has so far responded to the joint US-Israeli offensive, which is entering its third week, with daily attacks on oil and other infrastructure around the Gulf region, as well as against Israel. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesperson for Iran’s joint military command, warned of attacks on “all oil, economic and energy infrastructures belonging to oil companies across the region that have American shares or cooperate with America”. More than 1,400 people are reported to have been killed in Iran, where residents report relentless bombing. Thirteen have been killed in Israel, and about 20 in the Gulf. In his first public comments, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, last week vowed to keep the strait of Hormuz shut and urged neighbouring countries to close US bases on their territory or risk being attacked themselves. No images have been released of Khamenei since an Israeli strike at the start of the war that killed much of his family, including his father and wife. Iran says the new supreme leader was wounded, but an official said on Friday he was not “impaired”. Trump meanwhile declined to publicly give an end date for the conflict, telling reporters: “It’ll be as long as it’s necessary.” Analysts have suggested that Trump will seek to end the conflict soon to prevent a deep global economic crisis. Experts told the Guardian earlier this week that military actions directed toward Kharg would lead to a further dramatic increase in oil prices, already surging since the war began on 28 February. “We may see the $120 (£90) a barrel price we saw on Monday heading to $150 if Kharg were attacked,” said Neil Quilliam of the Chatham House thinktank. “It’s too vital for global energy markets.” Last week, Trump called the radical Islamist leaders of Iran “deranged scumbags” and said it was an honour to kill them. Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, told a press conference in Washington that Iranian leaders were “desperate and hiding, they’ve gone underground”. Hegseth also said that Mojtaba Khamenei was wounded and probably disfigured. On Saturday, multiple alarms sounded in Israel, warning of incoming missiles and drones launched by Iran and Hezbollah, the Tehran-backed militant Islamist movement in Lebanon. Gulf states reported continuing Iranian drone and missile attacks directed against both US bases and civilian infrastructure. In Lebanon, the humanitarian crisis deepened, with nearly 800 people killed and 850,000 displaced, as Israel launched waves of strikes against Hezbollah and warned there would be no let up. Concerns that the US might seize Kharg rose when officials in Washington said that 2,500 more marines and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli had been ordered to the Middle East. Marine expeditionary units are able to conduct amphibious landings, but they also specialise in bolstering security at embassies, evacuating civilians and disaster relief. The deployment does not necessarily indicate that a ground operation is imminent or will take place. US forces have suffered casualties, including the deaths of all six crew members aboard a refuelling aircraft that crashed in western Iraq.
An explosion has damaged a Jewish school in Amsterdam in what the city’s mayor described as “a deliberate attack against the Jewish community”. The explosion early on Saturday in a residential neighbourhood on the south side of the city caused limited damage, the mayor, Femke Halsema, said in a press release, as police and firefighters arrived at the scene quickly. No injuries were reported. The police had CCTV footage of a person placing the explosive device, Halsema said. Security at synagogues and Jewish institutions in the Dutch capital had already been heightened after an overnight arson attack at a synagogue in central Rotterdam on Friday. Later that day, police arrested three men, aged 18 to 19, and a 17-year-old boy. Officers stopped a car that was driving suspiciously near another synagogue, with the description of the driver matching one of the perpetrators of the attack on the synagogue. Police said they were launching a “large-scale investigation into this serious incident” and appealed for witnesses to come forward. “It is not yet clear whether the suspects planned to detonate an explosive or set fire to another synagogue as well,” a police spokesperson said in a statement. No potential motive was given for the arrests. An unverified video showing an explosion near a building resembling the targeted synagogue was circulated on social media on Friday, and police said they were examining this as part of their investigation. In neighbouring Belgium, an explosion caused a fire at a synagogue in Liege on Monday. Halsema said of the school attack: “This is a cowardly act of aggression against the Jewish community. Jewish people in Amsterdam are increasingly confronted with antisemitism. This is unacceptable.” Concerns about possible attacks against Jewish communities around the world have risen since the US and Israeli attacks on Iran and the response from Tehran.