With the ongoing war in Ukraine, the focus on urban warfare has returned to prominence in military reviews and analysis. Russian forces have engaged in urban battles in Kyiv, Mariupol, Kherson, and other Ukrainian cities.
The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended a four-day state visit in the United States from the 21st to the 24th of June (Chatterjee-Miller, 2023;Pandey, 2023). The leaders reached numerous agreements on tariffs, manufacturing and green energy targets (Chatterjee Miller 2023). However, the most significant agreements discussed regarded defence and security. The US company General Electric will provide fighter jet engines for the Indian Air Force.
On 31 May 2023, the Italian government announced an end to the embargo on the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia (Armellini & Adler, 2023). Italy maintained the ban between 2019 and 2020 following the escalation of Saudi Arabia’s violence against the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group in Yemen (Middle East Monitor, 2023)
Europe is again amidst a security crisis, the roots of which go far beyond the unsolved issues with post-Soviet Russia and NATO enlargement towards the East of Europe. The current invasion of Ukraine shows that two opposing international concepts are on the battleground. On the one side, there is a vision that officially supports the right of non-interference in a multipolar world whilst, in reality, abusing sovereign power, imposing it on other nations and dividing the world into areas of one-dominant country influence
Germany is preparing to permanently station 4,000 troops in Lithuania to strengthen NATO’s Eastern Flank. This was announced by German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius during a visit to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius on Monday (The Associated Press, 2023). “We explicitly acknowledge our responsibility and our obligation as a NATO member state, as the largest economy in Europe, to stand up for the protection of the eastern flank”, Pistorius stated (Pitel & Foy, 2023). Pistorius was accompanied by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who welcomed this announcement and praised Germany for its dedication to NATO’s collective defence strategy (The Associated Press, 2023).
