Russia's full-scale war on Ukraine will soon enter its fifth year. Mysterious incidents of so-called "hybrid warfare" are mounting in Europe, increasing tensions. And in the UK, military chiefs have warned we must prepare for war if we want to avoid it. But if the unthinkable happened, and war with Russia broke out, could the UK fight for more than just a few weeks?

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"We are not planning to go to war with Europe. But if Europe wants to, and starts, we are ready right now." So said Russian President Vladimir Putin on 2 December, accusing European countries of hindering US efforts to bring peace in Ukraine.

To be clear, it is extremely unlikely that the UK would ever find itself in a war with Russia on its own, unsupported by Nato allies.

But Putin's words were an uncomfortable reminder that a war between Russia and Nato countries, including the UK, was not as remote as people hoped.

How war could look in the tech-age

"Well that's odd. I've got no signal on my phone." "Me neither. I'm offline. What's going on?" That scenario, hypothetically, is just one way we could know that a war with Russia had begun, or was about to. (I should add that there can also be other, perfectly benign, reasons for a loss of signal.)

That signal interruption could be followed by an inability to make bank payments for essentials like food and fuel.

Food distribution would be disrupted, electricity supplies compromised.

There are many ways of fighting a war, and not just the physically destructive wave of drones, bombs and missiles so tragically familiar to the citizens of Ukraine.

Our modern, tech-driven society is highly dependent on the network of undersea cables and pipelines that connect the UK to the rest of the world, carrying data, financial transactions and energy.

Covert activity by Russian spy vessels, such as the Yantar, is widely believed to have scoped out these cables for potential sabotage in a time of war, which is why the Royal Navy has recently invested in a fleet of underwater drones equipped with integrated sensors.

In a war, these hidden, unseen actions, combined with an almost inevitable attempt to "blind" Western satellites in space, would seriously hamper the UK's ability to fight, as well as potentially wreaking havoc on civil society.

At a recent conference in London entitled Fighting the Long War, organised by the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), a Whitehall think tank, military and political figures came together to discuss whether the UK's current armed forces would be in a position to sustain a protracted conflict before they ran out of everything from troops, to ammunition to spare parts.

"There remains little evidence that the UK has a plan to fight a war lasting more than a few weeks," argues Rusi's Hamish Mundell. "Medical capacity is limited. Reserve regeneration pipelines are slow… The British plan for mass casualty outcomes appears to be based on not taking casualties."

With classic British understatement, he says: "This could be considered an optimistic planning assumption."

He adds that to fight a long war you need proper back-up. "It demands a second and even third echelon; personnel, platforms and logistics chains that can absorb losses and continue the fight. Yet this depth is notably absent from current British force design."

Russia's 'low quality' army

"There are shortfalls in ammunition, artillery, vehicles, air defence, and people, with limited to no ability to regenerate units or casualties," says Justin Crump, CEO of Sibylline, a private intelligence company.

Two of the biggest military lessons to come out of the Ukraine war are firstly, that drones are now integral to modern warfare, at every level, and secondly, that "mass", or sheer volume of personnel and military hardware, matters.

Russia's army is generally of a very low quality. Its soldiers are poorly equipped, poorly led and poorly fed. Their life expectancy in the deadly "drone zone" of eastern Ukraine is short.

UK Defence Intelligence estimates that since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 Russia's army has suffered more than 1.1 million casualties – that is killed, wounded, captured or missing.

Even conservative estimates put the number of Russians killed at 150,000. Ukraine has also suffered catastrophic casualties but numbers are hard to ascertain.

But Russia has been able to draw on such a massive pool of manpower that it has so far been able to replace its estimated 30,000 monthly battlefield casualties with fresh blood.

Russia's economy has also been on a war footing for more than three years now: an economist has been placed in charge of the Defence Ministry, while its factories churn out ever more supplies of drones, missiles and artillery shells.

According to a recent report by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Russia has been producing each month around 150 tanks, 550 infantry fighting vehicles, 120 Lancet drones and more than 50 artillery pieces.

The UK, and most of its Western allies, are simply not anywhere near this point.

Analysts say it would take years for Western Europe's factories to come close to matching Russia's mass-production of weapons.

"The land war in Ukraine has shown beyond doubt that mass is absolutely vital for anybody that is going to face Russia on land," says Keir Giles, a Russia expert at Chatham House think tank.

"And having deep reserves vastly greater in number than the standing regular armed forces has been shown to be essential."

How national service conversations backfired

France and Germany have both recently moved to revive a system of voluntary military service for 18-year-olds.

The UK's former Head of the Army, Gen Sir Patrick Sanders, suggested in 2024, the year he retired, that the UK should train what he called "a citizen army" to fight a land war in the future. The idea was shot down by No. 10.

"I think it's a cultural thing within the UK," says Ed Arnold, senior research fellow at Rusi.

"So if you look at the states that are now looking towards [military service] - like Sweden, Germany and France - they are states who culturally still have an institutional memory of when they had that system.

"We haven't had national service since the 1960s and attempts to have that national conversation around it have pretty much backfired."

"The reality is, our armed forces cannot survive on a diet of government spin, over-the-horizon spending commitments and hollow rhetoric," Sir Ben Wallace, who was Defence Secretary in the Conservative government from 2019 to 2023, told the BBC.

Responding to this, a spokesperson for the current Labour Defence Secretary, John Healey, told me: "This characterisation is baseless.

"We increased defence spending by £5bn this year alone, signed 1,000 major contracts since the election and increased MOD spending with British businesses by 6% above inflation in the last year."

He points to a new defence agreement with Norway, a £300m new investment in the Royal Navy's laser weapon and a £9bn investment into armed forces housing, adding: "We're a government investing in the transformation of our forces, investing in our British service personnel... to create jobs and growth in Britain's communities."

But this is not about party politics. It's about whether UK defence has been under-funded for so long that it has now reached the point where the country is dangerously vulnerable in several areas, notably air defence.

There are also problems of timing and inefficiency.

Defence contracts often take years to come to fruition. Billions of pounds have been spent on Ajax, an overdue armoured vehicle project still beset with problems. Meanwhile, Nato officers have been warning Russia could be in a position to launch an attack on a Nato country within three to five years.

At the end of the Cold War (between Nato and the Soviet Union) in 1990, when I was a young infantry Captain in the Army Reserves, the UK was spending 4.1% of GDP on defence.

The following year it deployed over 45,000 troops to help evict Iraq President Saddam Hussein's invading army from Kuwait in operation Desert Storm.

Today, with multiple pressures on the economy, the government is striving to meet a target of 2.5% of GDP by 2027, while Russia spends close to 7%.

On paper, the British Army numbers around 74,000 but Rusi's Ed Arnold points out that once you subtract medically non-deployable soldiers, defence attaches around the world and others not part of formed units, then its actual deployable strength is only 54,000. That is less than the average number of casualties Russia takes in two months in Ukraine.

In the event of a war, says Justin Crump of Sibylline, on land the (British) Army would most likely be degraded – incapable of fighting effectively - within weeks, once committed, though he adds "much depends on the form of the conflict".

Suggestions the UK is already 'at war'

Some commentators have suggested that the UK is already "at war" with Russia. They are referring to what is known as "hybrid" or "grey-zone" warfare, which includes events that are often deniable, such as cyber-attacks, disinformation and the alleged launching of drones close to airports and military bases in Nato countries.

But worrying as these are, they pale compared to the crisis that would be triggered by a Russian military attack on a Nato country, especially if it involved seizing territory and people being killed.

There are several potential flashpoints here, where Nato military chiefs fear that Putin, if he were allowed to achieve his aims in Ukraine, could eventually move on to seek new targets for aggression.

One potential target is the Suwalki Gap, a 60-mile (100km) stretch of border between Poland and Lithuania, both Nato countries. This is all that separates Russian ally Belarus from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast.

Seizing that border and opening up a route along it would, in theory, give Moscow direct access to its strategic base on the Baltic.

The Baltic states themselves are other potential flashpoints. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were all once part of the Soviet Union and were ruled from Moscow.

They all voted for independence and have since joined Nato, but all have Russian-speaking minorities and hence there is a risk that Mr Putin could be tempted to send his troops across the border "to protect them from persecution".

The eastern Estonian town of Narva, for example, is an obvious potential target here, as the majority of its population speak Russian and it sits just across the river from the giant Russian fortress of Ivangorod.

A UK battle group comprising some 900 British military personnel has been stationed in Estonia, about 80 miles west of Narva, since 2017.

In the event of war, the plan goes, it would be hurriedly reinforced to brigade strength of around 3,000 or more.

Another possible flashpoint is the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, which is administered by Norway but where Moscow already has a toehold in the coal mining town of Barentsburg.

Litvinenko, Skripal and hostile acts on UK soil

The UK may well be Putin's enemy number one, having been one of Ukraine's staunchest allies, and having pushed for more powerful weapons to be delivered to help its defence.

Hostile acts on UK soil that have been linked to President Putin include the murder with radioactive Polonium-210 of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 - a public inquiry concluded that Putin "probably" approved his assassination - and the attempted murder of former Russian military intelligence officer turned MI6 agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, using the nerve agent, Novichok.

Dawn Sturgess, a mother-of-three, later died after she sprayed the Novichok, disguised as perfume, on her wrists. Putin was "morally responsible" for her death, an inquiry concluded last week.

Lord Anthony Hughes, the inquiry chair, said: "I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorised at the highest level, by President Putin."

Russia, which has always denied involvement in the attacks and suggested more than 20 different possible explanations for Ms Sturgess's death, described the report's findings as "tasteless fairy tales".

But the UK is also a core member of the Nato alliance. While questions are certainly raised in private over the reliability of the current US administration in the White House, it is hard to envisage the UK ever having to fight Russia on its own.

"A pure UK-Russia conflict is not likely and can be disregarded, practically," says Mr Crump. "We would definitely fight with allies, although Russia would most likely only launch a conflict if it felt Nato would break."

The wild card here is US President Donald Trump.

While the chairman of Nato's Military Committee, Adm Cavo Dragone recently assured me that the US president was absolutely committed to defending the Nato alliance, others are not so sure.

Would Trump, for example, go to war to defend the Estonian town of Narva?

"There is no one-size-fits-all answer to what the United Kingdom is actually capable of," concludes Keir Giles of Chatham House, "because there are so many different situations under which it could be challenged by Russia."

As a society, the UK – unlike Poland, Finland and the Baltic States – is unquestionably not ready for war. Even serious preparations for such an eventuality would be both expensive, unpopular and politically risky.

But Mr Giles of Chatham House offers some sobering advice to the British public: "Recognise that the rights and freedoms and prosperity that they take for granted are in fact under threat and that freedom does not come for free."

"And understand that lives will have to change. And this is not the fault of the current government or even its predecessors — it's their fault that it is so expensive, but the root cause of the problem is in Moscow."

Top image credit: Ministry of Defence /PA Wire/ Getty Images. Picture shows soldier in non-combat scenario

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The UK's asylum system is affected by inefficiencies, "wasted public funds" and a succession of "short-term, reactive" government policies that have moved problems elsewhere, the National Audit Office (NAO) has said.

As part of its analysis, the spending watchdog looked at a sample of 5,000 asylum claims lodged almost three years ago, in January 2023.

Since then, 35% (1,619) of those asylum seekers had been given some sort of protection such as refugee status, and 9% (452) had been removed from the country. But 56% (2,812) still did not have a final outcome in their case.

The Home Office welcomed the analysis, which it said supported "the case for fundamental reform of the asylum system".

Most of the cases in the remaining group (2,021 out of the 2,812) remained in a sort of "limbo", with no appeal lodged.

The NAO's chief analyst, Ruth Kelly, told reporters: "They've had their claim refused, but they're staying in the system with their case unresolved, and that's because of the difficulties in removal."

A shortage of other types of accommodation means that large numbers of asylum seekers whose cases are not closed are being housed in hotels. The cost of accommodation in 2024-25 was £2.7bn.

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of Refugee Council, said of the January 2023 analysis: "The NAO's finding that more than half of people who applied for asylum almost three years ago still don't have an outcome is shocking."

He said the report mirrors what the Refugee Council's front-line services see every day, "an asylum system that is simply not functioning, where people wait months or even years for a decision… and costs keep rising".

The NAO's report criticises how successive governments have dealt with the current surge in small boats crossings that began in 2018.

"Interventions have tended to be reactive and focused on fixing an urgent problem in one part of the system only, such as intake or initial decisions, without a clear view of the effects on other parts," the report says.

"Increases in speed of processing have sometimes come at the expense of the quality of decisions, and improvements in one area have shunted problems elsewhere."

The NAO gave the example of former prime minister Rishi Sunak's drive to clear the legacy asylum backlog in 2023, which then shifted pressure onto the appeals stage, simply creating another backlog in the courts.

Shortage of judges

Ruth Kelly said one of the most critical factors now was a shortage of specialist immigration judges to hear appeals.

"There's a severe capacity shortage with judges," she said. "And judges told us there are poor incentives for working in the immigration and asylum tribunals… because of the taxing and the complex nature of the work, and also because of negative media attention, which makes it harder to recruit judges."

The NAO said it would be looking for evidence that the government was now moving away from "short-term, reactive fixes" towards a "sustainable whole-system approach".

It said the current lengthy delays in the system "erode public confidence in the system's fairness and effectiveness".

The NAO also found that it was impossible to track individual cases through the whole asylum process because there is no "unique asylum case identifier" shared by Home Office, court service and local authority computer systems.

The report says that because the asylum applications are subject to fluctuating demand with significant peaks, it was important to build a flexible and resilient system that can respond to increases and decreases in demand.

Ruth Kelly, the NAO analyst, said the government needed to avoid reverting to "that pattern of counter-productive quick fixes that we have seen in the past".

A Home Office spokesperson said: "The home secretary recently announced the most sweeping changes to the asylum system in a generation to deal with the problems outlined in this report.

"We are already making progress – with nearly 50,000 people with no right to be here removed, a 63% rise in illegal working arrests and over 21,000 small boat crossing attempts prevented so far this year.

"Our new reforms will restore order and control, remove the incentives which draw people to come to the UK illegally and increase removals of those with no right to be here."

UK adults spent over half an hour longer online every day in 2025 than they did during the pandemic, according to an annual survey of internet habits by the regulator Ofcom.

The Online Nation report found on average, people in the UK spent four hours and 30 minutes online every day in 2025 - 31 minutes longer than in 2021.

Psychologist Dr Aric Sigman told the BBC this was not a problem in itself, but what mattered was "what this time is displacing and how this may harm mental health".

He added the "good news" was society was "beginning to question online time more critically".

In a year where the major UK Netflix drama Adolescence won praise and politicial attention for shining a light on misogynistic online content, the survey found adults were feeling less positive about the impact of the internet overall.

Only a third (33%) said they felt it was "good for society" – down from 40% in 2024.

However, nearly two thirds of people still believed the benefits of being online outweighed the risks.

And many adults said they found the internet to be a source of creativity, with roughly three quarters agreeing being online helped them to broaden their understanding of the world.

Children wary of 'brain rot'

The report also explored children's experiences of being online.

While more than eight in ten aged 8-17 said they were happy with the amount of time they spent on the internet, they also recognised there were negative impacts of endlessly scrolling on smartphones.

The term "brain rot" was used by some children surveyed to describe the feeling they were left with after spending too long on their devices.

It has become a popular phrase to describe overconsuming online posts and videos considered to be the opposite of mentally challenging.

And Ofcom found across four of the main services used by children - YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and WhatsApp – up to a quarter of the time 8 to 14-year-olds spent online was between 2100 and 0500.

VPN use more than doubles

From 25 July, Ofcom required websites operating in the UK with pornographic content to "robustly" age-check users, under the Online Safety Act.

Some people began using a virtual private network (VPN) at this time - tools which can disguise your location online to allow you to use the internet as though you are in another country.

The increase indicates people are likely using them to bypass requirements of the Act.

After the age checks became mandatory, the survey said VPN use more than doubled, rising from roughly 650,000 daily users before July and peaking at over 1.4 million in mid-August

But it also found the number had since declined to around 900,000 in November.

ASMR 'relaxing'

The report also found 69% of children aged 13 to 17 said they used online services to help with their wellbeing, either to relax or improve their mood.

More than half named ASMR as a tool they had used in particular to help them relax.

These videos became an online phenomenon more than a decade ago - which some people claim causes them to feel a tingling sensation.

It has led to an entire industry of online creators making special content viewed on platforms such as YouTube.

But children were not solely positive about their online experiences.

Seventy percent said they had issues with self-improvement media - involving toxic messaging or body shaming.

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A federal judge in New York has ruled the US Department of Justice can publicly release grand jury materials from Ghislaine Maxwell's sex trafficking investigation.

US District Judge Paul Engelmayer said he was ordering the release of material because of a recent law passed by Congress, which requires the justice department to publish files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein by the end of next week.

In his ruling, he said the court would put in place mechanisms to protect victims from the release of materials that would "identify them or otherwise invade their privacy".

Maxwell was convicted in 2021 for her role in luring underage girls for Epstein, her former boyfriend, to exploit. Epstein died in prison in 2019.

Prosecutors argued Maxwell recruited and groomed girls, some as young as 14, between 1994 and 2004, before they were abused by Epstein.

Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence, was moved from a Florida prison to a new minimum-security facility in Texas in August, after she was interviewed by Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche about Epstein.

In a letter to Judge Engelmayer, Maxwell's legal team said she did not take a position on the justice department's motion to release the grand jury material.

Representative Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which has released thousands of files and messages it subpoenaed from Epstein's estate, said the unsealing was a "victory for transparency".

"These files are now part of the Epstein files held by the Department of Justice, and must be turned over to the Oversight Committee in response to our subpoena," he said.

The order to publish the records followed a similar ruling from a judge in Florida on Friday, which allowed for the unsealing of documents related to the state's investigation against Epstein that began in 2005.

Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law in November after previously rejecting calls to release the files.

The law "applies to unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials" that relate to Epstein and Maxwell, a court order said.

The justice department has until 19 December to publicly release all the information from federal investigations into Epstein, though the law also allows the department to withhold files that involve active criminal investigations or raise privacy concerns.

Florida and New York judges had previously refused to unseal grand jury materials related to Epstein, citing federal rules that require grand jury processes to be kept secret.

But after Congress passed the bill to release the Epstein material, the justice department made the same request, arguing the legislation's "clear mandate" should "override" those secrecy rules.

French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu faces a crucial test on Tuesday as the country's divided parliament prepares to vote on a 2026 budget bill.

If Lecornu fails to win a majority in the National Assembly for his social security budget, it bodes ill for the main budget bill which follows and which needs to be voted through by the end of the year.

It could also pose awkward questions over his authority to lead the government, though for the moment there is little expectation he will resign.

Appointed in September by President Emmanuel Macron, Lecornu has devoted himself exclusively to the uphill task of guiding 2026 budget legislation through the two chambers of parliament.

Since snap elections called by Macron in June 2024, the more powerful chamber, the National Assembly, has been split into three roughly equal blocs – centre, left, and far-right -- none of which is capable of commanding a majority.

Lecornu is Macron's fourth prime minister since then – the two previous incumbents Michel Barnier and François Bayrou having both been forced to resign after trying to rein in France's burgeoning debt. Barnier stepped down exactly a year ago after failing to push through the 2025 social security budget.

In the French system, there are two budgetary laws – one that raises and allocates money in the social security system, including hospitals and pensions; and the principal one that covers everything else, from defence to education. For years both have run on massive deficits.

Widely acknowledged for his discretion and diligence, Lecornu needs to convince enough deputies from the 11 different parliamentary groups that failure to vote the budgets through will plunge the country into even deeper financial gloom.

His main target has been the Socialist Party (PS) with around 70 MPs, many of whom are uncomfortable in their erstwhile electoral alliance with the far-left France Unbowed party.

In major concessions to the PS, Lecornu promised to suspend Macron's key second-term reform increasing to 64 the statutory age of retirement, and also to refrain from using a government power (known as 49-3) to force through the budget laws without a vote.

Socialist leaders Olivier Faure and Boris Vallaud have praised Lecornu's sense of compromise and are urging their deputies to support the social security budget.

But by giving ground to the centre-left, Lecornu has potentially lost support in his own camp on the centre-right, where important figures such as former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe say the bill will do little to redress the country's fast deteriorating public accounts.

Tuesday's vote was set to be very close, with the far-right National Rally and its allies (140 or so deputies) and the far-left France Unbowed (71) both set to vote no, along with the Ecologists and Communists (55 altogether). A majority in a full chamber is 288 MPs.

Lecornu is hoping to win over some individuals on the left with promises of more spending on hospitals. And he hopes opposition from within his own camp will be limited to abstentions rather than votes against.

If the social security budget fails to pass, it would almost certainly mean that the main budget for 2026 would also fail. As a result the government would probably introduce a special law to allow the state administration to continue functioning from 1 January using 2025 allocations.

Though a personal blow to Lecornu and his low-key political methods, few expect that he would immediately step down in such a scenario.

By voluntarily abandoning the use of the 49-3, the prime minister in effect gave MPs the chance to amend the government's budget text to their hearts' content. If the text then fails, he calculates, the blame will fall primarily on heads in parliament.