Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

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At times this year, it has been difficult to pin down where the Trump administration stands on the war in Ukraine. Under Joe Biden, America’s position was clear: the Russian invasion was illegal and the US and its allies would do everything in their power – short of actually taking up arms – to bring the conflict to an end and secure a just and lasting peace for Ukraine.

This involved hundreds of billions of dollars in military and other aid and unrelenting diplomatic pressure. This was clearly not enough, and with Russia regularly issuing bloodcurdling nuclear threats, Biden and his advisers baulked at supplying Kyiv with the weapons that might have helped swing the conflict in Ukraine’s favour.

Since Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term, however, his administration’s mercurial approach to diplomacy has kept everyone guessing. The president’s position has oscillated between contempt for the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and warmth towards the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to anger at Putin and affection towards Zelensky.

It would be wrong to say that the US president hasn’t poured energy into securing some kind of deal with Russia. An article in the New York Times this week counted eight phone calls with Putin, five meetings between his envoy Steve Witkoff and the Russian leader and an in-person summit in Alaska.

But when news of a new peace plan emerged last week, it appeared as if the US had become, for all intents and purposes, the Kremlin’s interlocutor. Developed in Miami by Witkoff and Russian businessman Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the plan called for international recognition of Crimea and all land occupied by the Russians – by force – since 2014 as being henceforth sovereign Russian territory. Ukraine would also have to cede the remainder of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, where fighting continues. Kyiv would have to accept restrictions on the size of its army and the door to Nato membership would be closed.

It reads like Putin’s original wishlist and is neither just nor fair, writes Selbi Durdiyeva, an expert in transitional justice at Nottingham Trent University. Nor does the deal pass muster legally. Durdiyeva walks us through the main objections. She also points out that research has shown that peace agreements imposed over the top of one party’s objections and interests and with no mechanism for accountability, more often than not fail to last.

Read more:
Any peace deal in Ukraine must be just and fair – the plan proposed by the US and Russia was neither

Once details of the deal were revealed, European leaders scurried to come up with a response. A revised and slimmed down plan was developed, which deferred some of the key points – including decisions on territory or Ukraine’s Nato membership – to a later date to be discussed between Zelensky and Trump. It also beefed up the language around security guarantees. This is the mechanism by which a peace deal would ensure that Russia cannot simply regroup and attack Ukraine again.

But while security guarantees are vital, Zelensky and his aides will be only too well aware of how flimsy they can be without real teeth. Ukrainians remember the Budapest Memorandum signed by Russia, the US and the UK in 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear arsenal – the third largest on the planet – in return for an agreement by all parties to henceforth respect Ukrainian sovereignty and the country’s internationally recognised borders.

At the risk of stating the obvious, that didn’t work out well for Ukraine. But as Jennifer Mathers points out, the agreement struck in Budapest was hardly robust when it came to guaranteeing Ukrainian security. It pledged, if Ukraine were to be attacked or threatened “with a nuclear weapon”, that the signatories would refer the situation to the UN security council.

Mathers, whose research in international relations at the University of Aberystwyth has a strong focus on modern Russian history, reports that the then president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, remarked after the deal was done (prophetically as it turns out): “If tomorrow Russia goes into Crimea, no one will raise an eyebrow.”

Read more:
Ukraine peace deal will hinge on security guarantees – but Kyiv has been there before

Meanwhile, the killing continues. The Washington-based military thinktank, the Institute for the Study of War, says that while the progress on the battlefield remains extremely slow (it estimates that at the current rate, Russia could take until August 2027 to occupy the whole of the contested Donetsk region), the long-range strikes campaign against Ukraine’s cities is taking an increasingly heavy civilian toll.

Much of the killing, on both battlefield and in Ukraine’s cities, is being done by drones, which are estimated to be responsible for 60 to 70% of military deaths and thousands of civilians, in contravention of international law, according to the UN.

But, as Matthew Powell notes, just as drones have transformed the way this conflict has been waged, so technology is already being developed, which, it is hoped, will counter the devastating effect of unmanned aerial vehicles. This is a story as old as warfare itself. As soon as a new class of weapon has proved successful in battle, scientists and engineers find a way to thwart it.

Powell describes two weapons being developed by the British army and navy, which could be deployed relatively soon and which, it is hoped, will go a long way towards countering the threat posed by drones. Both are what’s known as “direct- energy weapons”. One, DragonFire, fires a laser capable of finding and shooting down targets from a distance of one metre. It can lock in on an object as small as a one-pound coin.

The other uses a pulse of directed radio waves to disable a drone’s internal electronics. It has the advantage of not having to lock on to one target (handy when there is cloud cover or fog) and can potentially be used to knock out several targets at once (handy when facing a swarm of drones).

Read more:
Drones have changed warfare. Two new weapons might be about alter its course again

Cry the beloved country

For two years, Sudan has been riven by a horrific civil war. Sudan’s army and the powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), have struggled for control of the central African country. Reports of massacres have become distressingly common, including of thousands killed when El Fasher, the capital of the western Darfur region, was captured after a lengthy siege.

An international group of researchers travelled to Sudan’s southern border, where they interviewed nearly 700 people who were trying to cross into South Sudan. Many of them had already crossed the same border, fleeing the civil war in South Sudan – now they were trying to get to a precarious safety there.

Many of the most harrowing stories were of the sexual violence experienced by women. And the horrifying finding by the research team was that it was adolescent girls who were most at risk. The Conversation’s Insights team worked with the researchers to compile this report, which will shock and upset in equal measure.

Read more:
‘I have to talk about it so that the world can know what happened to women and girls in Sudan’ – rape and terror sparks mass migration

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– ref. Ukraine: deal or no deal? – https://theconversation.com/ukraine-deal-or-no-deal-270850

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Fay Bound-Alberti, Professor in Modern History and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, King’s College London

When he saw the newspaper headlines in 2002, James Partridge was furious. Severely burned in a fire at 18, he spent his life advocating for people with “visible difference” through charities like Changing Faces and Face Equality International. Yet he found himself used as tabloid fodder in discussions about face transplants: how much better might James look with one?

The question emerged during a wave of publicity surrounding the UK’s bid to undertake the world’s first face transplant. Plastic surgeon Peter Butler and his team at the Royal Free Hospital in north London argued they were ready, claiming that nothing could match a face transplant for restoring appearance and function after severe injury.

The debate had been building for decades. The first successful kidney transplant in 1954 showed that replacing organs was possible. Since then, surgeons have transplanted hearts, lungs and most recently, hands. Some surgeons saw a natural progression: “a face is just like a hand”, they argued. But not everyone agreed.

James Partridge, for one, described the idea of face transplantation as ethically fraught and potentially harmful. As he argued in his commentary on the UK proposals, the procedure risked sending a message that disfigurement must be “fixed” at any cost.

The risks were already clear. Early reviews noted the potential for graft rejection, life-threatening infections, cancers and other complications linked to lifelong immunosuppressants. Yet the UK media were enthralled, especially after reports suggested the Royal Free team had identified a 14-year-old burns survivor as a potential first patient.

Partridge stepped in. He persuaded Sir Peter Morris, then President of the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS), to convene an expert working party. The resulting RCS report advised against proceeding at that stage. The psychological implications of giving someone a new face were unknown, making fully informed consent impossible. And what would it mean for others living with facial differences, if the surgical message implied their faces were not good enough?

Then everything changed. On November 27 2005, a French team led by Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernard carried out the world’s first partial face transplant. The recipient was Isabelle Dinoire, a 38-year-old woman mauled by her pet Labrador after taking an overdose. When she woke on her sofa and tried to smoke, she couldn’t. In the bathroom mirror, she discovered the dog had chewed off part of her face.

At a press conference a few months later, Dinoire drank from a cup with new lips, spoke quietly, and expressed gratitude to surgeons and the donor.

Dinoire’s story became a global media spectacle.

In 2006, the RCS shifted position. Recognising that face transplants were now a surgical reality, it suggested they could proceed – but only with extreme caution. By that time, however, the UK programme had lost momentum, while centres in China, the US and elsewhere moved ahead.

Two decades on, only around 50 face transplants have been performed worldwide. Some patients have required re-transplantation after graft failure, but long-term survival data remains limited.

A face, it turns out, is not like a hand. Failed hand grafts can be removed; a rejected face leaves few good options. And immunosuppressants still carry significant risks.

Dinoire’s experience also underscores the psychological toll. She struggled with depression and intense media scrutiny, describing herself in one interview as feeling like a “circus animal”.

These are not the kinds of issues kidney or liver recipients usually face. A face is visible, social and symbolic. We meet the world with it; we recognise ourselves in it. Questions of identity, belonging and self-recognition sit at the centre of face transplantation.

James Partridge understood this. In his 2015 reflection on Dinoire’s operation, he praised her for taking what he called “a leap into the dark”. But he also warned that innovation must not outrun psychological support or a deeper understanding of what faces mean to people who live with visible difference.

At the same time, wider cultural pressures have only intensified. Social media has been linked with rising appearance anxiety among young people. Cosmetic surgery rates have climbed in recent years, and research also shows high rates of suicide and thoughts of suicide among people with body dysmorphic disorder, when perceived flaws in appearance become overwhelming. For this reason, surgeons often describe face transplants as “life-enhancing” rather than “life-saving”.

Understanding how and why faces matter – how they ground identity, relationships and social life – is far more complex than any single operation can capture. In my forthcoming book, I explore how faces act as a foundational marker of identity.

Twenty years after Isabelle Dinoire’s transplant, the world is still learning what it means to give someone a stranger’s face. The surgery itself is possible. The long-term consequences – medical, psychological and cultural – remain deeply uncertain.

Fay Bound-Alberti receives funding from a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship

– ref. A stranger’s face? The unresolved questions of face transplantation 20 years on – https://theconversation.com/a-strangers-face-the-unresolved-questions-of-face-transplantation-20-years-on-270698

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Brian J. Phillips, Reader (Associate Professor) in International Relations, University of Essex

The US escalated its dispute with Venezuela on November 24 when the state department added the Cartel de los Soles to its list of foreign terrorist organisations. It claims the network is a drug trafficking organisation led by the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro. The reality is more complicated, but either way, the designation has serious implications.

The Cartel de los Soles is an interesting choice for the foreign terrorist organisation list. While it is indeed foreign to the US, it is probably not a terrorist organisation as most people understand them. Whether it is even an organisation in a formal sense is also up for debate.

The term “terrorist organisation” has traditionally been used for groups with political motivations. This includes groups that want to impose their religion on a country, or groups that are fighting for the political rights of an ethnic minority. Criminal groups like drug trafficking organisations, on the other hand, are mostly devoted to making money illicitly.

This distinction is important because some research, including my own, shows that counterterrorism tactics can lead to adverse consequences when used against criminal groups. The targeting of cartel leadership in Mexico, for example, has often led to more bloodshed as newly fragmented groups fight viciously for control of drug markets.

Experts also do not consider the Cartel de los Soles a formal organisation, but rather an informal network of individuals involved in the drug trade. There does not seem to be one single leader or other indicators of an organisation such as a clearly defined membership or meetings. No “member” of the group seems to use the term Cartel de los Soles.

Journalists in Venezuela started using the term Cartel de los Soles in the 1990s as a figure of speech for corrupt military officials apparently involved in the drug trade. Soles means suns in Spanish, and high-level military officers in Venezuela wear sun-shaped badges on their uniforms.

Venezuela’s geography helps it play a key role in the cocaine trade. While some cocaine is produced in Venezuela, even more passes through the country from neighbouring Colombia towards Europe and the US.

This creates an opportunity for corrupt officials – of which there are many in Venezuela – to profit substantially. Many sources say high-level Venezuelan generals are involved in the drug trade, but it is difficult to know exactly how widespread the problem is.

Implications of designation

A foreign terrorist organisation designation has several legal ramifications. First, “material support” for the group becomes a crime, so a person can be prosecuted for donating to or doing business with a designated organisation. Second, people deemed to be associates of the group could possibly be barred from entering the US. And third, US financial institutions with any funds connected to the group will need to report these to the US government.

It is unclear if the designation will actually affect the cartel’s supposed leaders given they have long been subject to US economic sanctions anyway. Venezuelan interior minister Diosdado Cabello, who is alleged to be a leader in the network, has been subject to sanctions since 2018. The US government already sanctions suspected drug traffickers through laws such as the Kingpin Act.

Venezuela’s government has denied the existence of the Cartel de los Soles, describing the new terrorist label as a “vile lie to justify an illegitimate and illegal intervention against Venezuela”. But it’s worth emphasising that a terrorist designation does not necessarily justify or authorise war, which Venezuelan officials seem to fear. The legislation behind terrorist listing does not mention military actions.

A terrorist designation is also meant to communicate US government priorities. It creates focal points for US agencies, while also signalling to other countries the threats they should join the fight against and the groups they should not support.

A US terrorist designation can be powerful. Other countries, especially US allies like the UK and Australia, have followed American terrorist designation patterns for decades. In 2008, the US designated the Somalia-based Islamist militant group al-Shabaab as a foreign terrorist organisation. Australia followed suit the following year, with Canada and the UK doing so soon after.

However, the pattern has not held so far in 2025 as the Trump administration has started to add criminal groups to its list of foreign terrorist organisations for the first time. This began in February, when the US government listed eight criminal groups, mostly Mexican drug cartels.

Few countries have joined the US in declaring these groups as terrorist organisations. European countries, for example, generally do not seem to see these groups as threats worthy of their terrorist lists.

As for the Cartel de los Soles, several countries have made pronouncements similar to the US terrorist designation. However, these are all Latin American countries like Argentina and Ecuador that currently have Trump-allied conservative governments. There has not been a wider international response, even from traditional US partners like Canada.

This is not ideal for the US government, as international cooperation is highly important for confronting transnational challenges like drug trafficking. The Trump administration’s approach of labelling criminal groups as terrorists does not look set to be adopted by most of its longtime allies.

Brian J. Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles: what are the implications of its US ‘terrorist’ designation? – https://theconversation.com/venezuelas-cartel-de-los-soles-what-are-the-implications-of-its-us-terrorist-designation-270627

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Leon, Researcher – Centre on Migration, Policy & Society, University of Oxford

The UK government is expected to soon publish its ten-year child poverty strategy, designed to tackle the root causes of poverty for children.

Poverty is an issue for families from all backgrounds. But it is often particularly acute for the children of people born outside the UK. These families may not be permitted to access benefits because of their immigration status.

Instead, they may receive help from local authorities who, research my colleagues and I conducted shows, are operating a parallel welfare system – one that’s patchy and poorly resourced.

Or these families may get no help at all. They may avoid asking for support, fearful that contacting governmental services will jeopardise their families or their ability to stay in the UK.

Current Home Office proposals to extend the time migrants must spend in the UK before becoming eligible for settled status, and to introduce further welfare restrictions, may deepen poverty. This would not only prolong the time children and families have no access to public funds but also increase the number of children and families affected.

The government’s child poverty strategy must address the effect of immigration policy if it is to improve the lives of all children.

No recourse to public funds

The UK’s current “no recourse to public funds” immigration policy was formalised through the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. It restricts access to most income-based welfare benefits for large numbers of people residing in the UK. It applies to most people holding temporary or time-limited visas to enter or remain in the UK.

These could be people on a time-limited work visa, health and care workers and students. It can include people who have come to the UK because they are married to or the family of a British person, and people building lives in the UK who have leave to remain on routes to settlement.

It is also applied by default to people with an irregular immigration status. This covers European nationals without EU settled status, families who have overstayed their visas and those awaiting an immigration decision.

The no recourse to public funds policy is aimed at “temporary migrants”. But many children in households subject to the policy are British-born or have spent most of their childhood in the UK. The policy is one of the biggest contributors to poverty, destitution, and social exclusion among children in resident migrant families.

In 2024, over half a million children – 578,954 – under the age of 18 were recorded as having a visa or leave to remain in the UK, which generally comes with a no recourse to public funds condition.

While not all of them will experience poverty, children in migrant families living in the UK are at a disproportionately high risk of poverty and destitution. No recourse to public funds restrictions mean that families cannot access any benefits regardless of need. These include child benefit, universal credit, housing and disability-related benefits.

The Home Office maintains that there are existing safeguards, comprising of local authority social care teams with a statutory duty to provide a basic safety net to families facing destitution. While these safeguards can offer a lifeline to some, the system was designed for families at risk of destitution, the most severe hardship. It wasn’t intended to alleviate poverty or to be a substitute for the social security system.

The parallel safety net

Local authorities are, essentially, forced to provide a parallel welfare system, at a significant and unfunded cost. Our findings indicate that local authorities spent an estimated £65 million supporting families with no recourse to public funds in 2021-22.

However, at best, local authorities provide below-poverty-level weekly subsistence payments and substandard temporary accommodation for families with no recourse to public funds. However, there is a significant discrepancy in the level of support provided. With no clear statutory minimum rates, vulnerable families face a postcode lottery.

In some areas, a lack of financial policy means families receive only vouchers and foodbank referrals, while others rely on already-stretched social workers to define acceptable amounts. Many families end up turning to charities and food banks for emergency support.

There is no official data on the number of families with no recourse to public funds receiving local authority support across the UK. Through conducting our own survey, the local authorities that did respond reported supporting 3,108 of these destitute families, including 5,831 children between 2021-22.

However, many authorities do not record this data and were therefore unable to provide figures. Our research estimates the true number across all UK local authorities to be closer to 5,400 families, including around 10,500 children.

Even this estimate is unlikely to truly represent the wider need. Many parents do not ask for help. They are afraid that seeking help from statutory services will jeopardise their visa or future applications to remain in the UK. “I didn’t face them as I heard horrible, horrible stories,” one parent told us.

“I was told that if I didn’t have a safe and good home for my kids, they would take my kids,” another said. “People feel scared, so they won’t ask for help.”

The lack of support from the central government goes beyond just the finances. While there are some pockets of good practice within some local authorities, without statutory guidance for social care teams in England, many councils fail to provide the information, accommodation and support that families with children facing destitution are legally entitled to. We spoke to families who described the process of accessing support as humiliating, distressing and intrusive.

To tackle child poverty over the next decade, addressing both the impact of these welfare restrictions and the severe limitations of the parallel safety net system is vital. In the meantime, if local authorities are expected to provide a safety net, they need – at a minimum – dedicated central government funding and clear statutory guidance to fulfil their duties effectively.

Without this support, growing pressure on an inadequate system will continue to mount. The true cost will extend far beyond the overstretched budgets of social care teams.

As part of her research on migrant destitution, Lucy Leon has previously received research funding from the Aberdeen Group Charitable Trust (formerly known as abrdn financial fairness trust) and is currently receiving research funding from Trust for London.

– ref. To truly tackle child poverty, the UK needs to look again at migration – https://theconversation.com/to-truly-tackle-child-poverty-the-uk-needs-to-look-again-at-migration-270335

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ruth Patrick, Professor in Social Policy, University of Glasgow

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has taken decisive action in getting rid of the two-child limit – a policy that has held a totemic place in the UK for more than a decade. Since 2017, this policy has limited the means-tested support that families can receive from the state to the first two children in a household, with some specific exceptions.

But now, the two-child limit is to be scrapped from April 2026. My own research has shown how the limit often leaves families struggling to meet essential costs, and forced to forgo everyday activities. This could even be things like reading children a bedtime story as parents instead hunt round supermarkets for discounted food.

Both the two-child limit and the benefit cap (a ceiling on the support that a household where no one works 16 hours a week can receive, and which remains in place) were launched at the height of the UK’s austerity years.

At the time, the public were being served sensationalised portrayals of people receiving social security support. Politicians were happy to denigrate social security recipients too.

Amid claims of seeking to create more fairness in the tax and social security systems, politicians returned to binary divisions between “strivers” and “shirkers”. These representations bore little relationship to reality but they appeared to be electorally popular. And they provided the rationale to take a wrecking ball to what remained of the social security “safety net”.

Announcing the two-child limit in an emergency budget in 2015, the then chancellor, George Osborne, spoke of the need to support families while being fair to “working” people. This ignored the reality that millions of families require social security to top up the incomes they receive from paid employment.

The narrative does not align with the realities of in-work social security recipients – 2.7 million UK workers receive universal credit, a third of total recipients. And 59% of those affected by the two-child limit live in working households.

Neither is it possible to divide the UK into those who do and do not pay taxes. Everyone pays them, both through income taxation and taxes on goods and services. Some taxes, such as VAT, even leave those with the least handing over a much greater share of their income every time they pay for an item.

Hard realities

In introducing both the benefit cap and then the two-child limit, the Conservatives were seeking to change the behaviour of the people affected by these policies. In the case of the two-child limit, there was the suggestion that claimants would think differently about how many children they could afford to have, or change their employment patterns.

And in the case of the benefit cap, they hoped people would move into work. Or, where high rents were the issue, that people would move into cheaper properties.

But all of this was a mirage, and research I have undertaken with colleagues has shown how both of these policies fail. This failure is complete even in the terms set out by those who introduced them.

That is, with the two-child limit, there has been almost no noticeable impact on fertility, nor have there been changes to employment.

None of this is surprising because no one knows what their future holds. As Reeves argued in the budget, people lose their jobs, get sick or die prematurely. That’s why the social security system should be there to support people, providing help when times are hard.

The same applies with the benefit cap. The cheaper homes that the Conservatives hoped families would move into simply do not exist in many parts of the UK. Families living under the cap often face real and serious barriers to employment such as a lack of good childcare and poor transport links. These are not addressed by simply limiting financial support.

Instead, these policies create and deepen poverty and hardship. Both have directly resulted in rapid rises in poverty risks, especially for vulnerable groups like larger families, single parents and people with disabilities.

Read more:
In the struggle to get Britain working, the long shadow of austerity could be part of the problem

Given all of this evidence, it is surprising that the two-child limit was not scrapped earlier. Perhaps it has endured in part because of the pervasiveness of anti-welfare rhetoric – the prevalence of the language of “scroungers” and “skivers” that sociologists describe as constituting an “anti-welfare commonsense”.

While Reeves’ decision to axe the two-child limit prompted some predictably negative headlines, the vast majority of the UK public (83% according to recent polling) actually wants to see action on child poverty.

When kids can have the very best childhood possible it is good for all of us. Children free of poverty now will become adults who are more able to flourish and make a real and lasting contribution as workers, parents or carers in future.

Reeves set this out in her budget speech, and it would be great to hear more of these arguments from her and others in Labour in the weeks and months ahead. Perhaps this could even begin a reset of the UK’s relationship with social security after those long years of austerity.

Ruth Patrick leads research projects that are funded by various charitable foundations, including Nuffield Foundation, Trust for London and The Robertson Trust. She is a member of the Labour Party.

– ref. The-two child limit failed – all it did was increase poverty – https://theconversation.com/the-two-child-limit-failed-all-it-did-was-increase-poverty-270841