Putin is under pressure from all sides. Now he's urgently seeking allies

After more than four years of war, Russia’s dominance in Ukraine shows signs of weakening and Vladimir Putin is now calling on allied countries for help.

While Russia has always lost soldiers at a faster rate than Ukraine, its seemingly endless stream of replacements seems to be running out. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones are now striking Crimea, where rich Russians like to holiday, as well as the culturally and strategically significant cities Moscow and St Petersburg.

The Russian President invited Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko for talks in Russia on Friday, in what analysts characterised as an unprecedented sign of nervousness from Putin, who would normally expect unwavering loyalty from such a state without the need for quid-pro-quo diplomacy.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

Putin suffered another blow on Sunday with the announcement that Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić would be stepping down.

Natia Seskuria, senior research fellow for Russian and Eurasian Security at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), thinks the loss of this long-term ally is “hugely significant” for Moscow. She said that any shift towards Europe was a “big loss” for under-pressure Putin, following a similar setback when Hungary elected a pro-Europe government earlier this year.

Seskuria believes this is what prompted his invitation to Lukashenko and believes that it won’t be the last. “He’s doing these bilateral meetings more often given the current circumstances. I think we may see a more diplomatic engagement, maybe personally from Putin or from the Kremlin officials because it is more important than ever to keep the allies now.”

On Sunday, Russian President told state television that Ukrainian strikes had caused fuel shortages. “Putin admitted that Russia is experiencing problems,” said Seskuria. “As much as he tried to also communicate that these are the problems that they will be able to deal with, I think it’s quite important that the issue is becoming so critical that even Putin has not been able to hide it and carry on as if nothing is happening.”

She thinks this public admission of Russia’s struggle, as well as what leaders can see for themselves from the reports of strikes and casualties, will lead smaller European states to reconsider their support for Russia.

“I think given the current situation, all these countries, except maybe North Korea and the heavily isolated countries that are completely detached from the global economy, would reconsider relationships with Russia because there are a lot of risks that are coming with this relationship,” she said.

This may be particularly true if Kyiv starts applying pressure on these allies, as it did with Belarus a few weeks ago, giving Lukashenko an ultimatum and calling for the removal of its radar facilities that Russia had used to strike Ukraine.

The fact that Ukraine’s drones are able to strike so far into Russia may also be causing fear among neighbouring nations like Belarus, according to Seskuria.

Dr Peter Braga, a lecturer in post-Soviet politics at University College London, agrees that Russia’s reaching out to Belarus is a sign of the war’s trajectory. “Russia is leaning more on Belarus because things are not going well in its own war against Ukraine,” he said.

Belarus is of particular strategic importance in the war. Its border with Ukraine was used to launch the full-scale invasion in February 2022, so it makes sense that Putin would start a ring-round of European allies here.

Since April, Putin has been rapidly scaling up infrastructure along the 1,000km border between the two countries, sparking fears that he could be planning another ground offensive from this entry point. “This is a genuine threat for Ukraine,” Braga said. “By the time that’s finished, Russia would need to station about 70,000 troops up there in order for a ground offensive to take place coming from Belarus into Ukraine. The general consensus is that if anything is going to happen along that borderline, it’s going to happen in autumn.”

According to Braga, Putin kept Lukashenko in place, though the two men reportedly “really do not get on”, on the principle that it was better to deal with “the devil you know” when the country is at war.

In recent years, Belarus has trodden a careful line, trying to align itself with the West without upsetting Russia, which it relies on both economically and for security. Some within the diplomatic community now think Lukashenko might seize this moment to move closer to the West and seek its independence from Moscow.

“Lukashenko is very good at finding wiggle room and then exploiting something,” said Braga. “So Putin is aware that Lukashenko is quite crafty, and if there was some way that he could get himself out of something or cause some issue for Russia, he’ll try to do that. So perhaps this is literally Putin telling him, ‘no funny business’.”

“Russia is running out of friends,” said Keir Giles, associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia programme at Chatham House. He believes that as European allies assess the current military situation and potentially have second thoughts about backing Putin, the Russian President will be looking to consolidate support in Asia.

“It makes sense [that Putin would look outside Europe] because they’re looking for ways to avoid being isolated, and that’s been the underlying driver for their programme globally,” he said.

Loyalty to the Kremlin is less likely to be depleted in central Asia and beyond because of “decades of old Soviet influence operations, which equated communism with nationalism, post-colonialism, independence movements, all of that kind of thing very successfully,” added Giles.

Russia has positioned itself as an “anti-colonialist power” in these areas to great effect, and how well it is doing in the Ukrainian war is not about to shake that impression.