Serge in his blue anorak, Olena in her black faux fur jacket – an inconspicuous couple on a trip in Kyiv to show their daughter the capital they did so much to save three years ago.

Their clandestine work as part of self-starting groups of volunteers, heroic by the standards of any war, turned back two invading Russian convoys as they converged on Kyiv in 2022. Serge and a small group of comrades, veterans of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, took on Putin’s invaders in hit-and-run raids using pickup trucks and weapons they found in a warehouse in Sumy province.

Now Donald Trump is threatening to turn the course of history against Ukraine, by cutting US military support to the embattled nation. This could ultimately allow Vladimir Putin to hang on to the 20 per cent of the country Russia has already taken as part of a future peace deal forced on Kyiv.

World affairs editor Sam Kiley reports:

French president Emmanuel Macron has said Russia will pose a security challenge for Europe and the wider world for a long time to come, even if the war in Ukraine ends.

“Let’s not fool ourselves, this conflict will not be resolved tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow,” Mr Macron said, adding that peace in Europe required Europeans to be at the negotiating table.

His comments came minutes before the new US president Donald Trump took his oath and entered presidential office for the second time.

During the presidential election campaign Mr Trump promised to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of becoming president, without saying how he would do so.

A North Korean soldier captured by Ukraine has said he did not know who he would be fighting against or where he would fight.

In the recording of the interview, posted by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on X, the soldier says he arrived with Russia along with 100 fellow North Koreans on a ship, before being later transported by train.

The soldier, who had joined the army aged 17 as a conscript, said some of his compatriots were trained on heavy Russian military equipment – but that he did not go through this training.

“I didn’t know before coming to Russia that I would be fighting here, in Russia and I didn’t even know who we were fighting against,” the soldier told Ukrainian investigators.

“There were a lot of casualties when I was there alone, starting from the battle on Jan. 3. Overall, it’s hard to answer about such large-scale numbers.”

When asked what he knew about the world outside of North Korea, he said: “Not much.” Asked what he knows about South Korea, he said: “I only know that South Korea has fewer mountains than North Korea.”

Russian troops have taken control of the eastern Ukrainian villages of Shevchenko and Novoiehorivka, the Defence Ministry claimed on Monday.

Shevchenko is just south of the vital city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, a strategic point which Russia is slowly edging towards as it looks to cut off important Ukrainian supply routes.

Novoiehorivka lies in Ukraine’s Luhansk region.

The reports have not been independently verified.

Russia is rearming faster than previously thought and could be making preparations to attack a Nato country, a top German official has warned.

“The Russian armed forces are not just able to compensate for the enormous personnel and material losses, they are successfully rearming,” said Germany’s Maj Gen Christian Freuding.

While it is not clear that Vladimir Putin intends to attack a Nato member state, Gen Freuding said the Russian president was “clearly creating the conditions for it”.

“Production is growing, the supplies in the depots are growing,” said the head of Germany’s military task force for Ukraine, noting Russia is using Iran and North Korea to replenish its supplies of missiles, drones and tanks.

French president Emmanuel Macron has warned that the billions of euros of taxpayer money spent on Europe’s military budgets should not be used to buy only American weapons, pushing for more investment in home-grown defence industries.

Speaking minutes before the inauguration of US president Donald Trump, who has complained that Europeans do not pay enough for their defence, Mr Macron said the continent should spend more.

But he added, in a New Year address to military top brass: “We can’t raise debt together, spend more for our defence to subsidise the industry, wealth and jobs of other continents.

“When we say ‘let’s spend more for our armies’, in many countries it means, way too often, ‘buy more American materiel’.”

Mr Macron said France now had “Europe’s most efficient army” and met Nato’s military budget target of 2 per cent of GDP, but could not rest on its laurels at a time when the US might withdraw troops from Europe.

And he suggested that 2 per cent might not be enough “when the world is going off track”.

US president Donald Trump has said he will meet his Russian counterpart president Vladimir Putin but added that a date for the meeting had not been set.

Mr Trump, who took office yesterday, also said he will try to end the Russia-Ukraine war as quickly as possible.

A Russian disinformation campaign is seeking to support the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) campaign ahead of the country’s February election, a think tank has found.

An analysis of hundreds of German-language posts on X over the past month have exhibited patterns of Russia’s Doppelgaenger disinformation campaign against the West.

The campaign spreads links to falsified Western news outlets sharing fake information, a German foreign ministry report published last June. Russia has consistently denied involvement.

Recent posts have blamed the Greens for Germany’s economic woes, criticised chancellor Olaf Scholz’s support for Ukraine, and spoken in favour of the AfD, CeMAS said.

The tracked posts share links to falsified German news websites or to articles on authentic ones supporting their narrative, and have achieved over 2.8 million views, CeMAS said.