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Car bumpers, homemade pies … no weapons allowed: the unstoppable postal service keeping Ukraine going

In a post office 10 miles (15km) from Ukraine’s frontline, in a suburb of the eastern city of Kharkiv, business is brisk on a chilly autumn morning – despite the ballistic missiles that had shaken the city at midnight, lighting up the sky with a false dawn of flames. The customer area is fitted out with phone-charging stations “and a small co-working space, which people can use during blackouts, since we have generators”, says the branch manager, 30-year-old Yaroslav Dobronos. There is also a changing room, in which a young woman is trying on, with a critical gaze, a new pair of jeans, before repacking them and sending them straight back. Behind the counters, a miscellany of parcels are waiting for customers to collect. Each is a fragment of life lived in all its normality and fragility in a frontline community. Nova Poshta logistics hub in Kyiv, where packages are moved through a complex set of scanners and chutes before being loaded on to lorries for the journey to their destinations There are winter tyres, widescreen TVs, boxes marked Roshen (a chocolate brand owned by former president Petro Poroshenko), a folding bed, a car bumper, a package from an upmarket Ukrainian skincare brand, a bare-root tree, a set of rucksacks, a pram, a vacuum cleaner, a Russell Hobbs multicooker, and parts for Starlink (a satellite internet provider for use in remote locations). Out of one enormous, bulbous parcel pokes a fistful of camouflage net. Ukraine’s main postal service is, like the country’s rail network, one of its most vital, reliable arteries: a matter of national pride for Ukrainians and incredulity for visiting foreigners. Nova Poshta, founded 25 years ago, is one of the chief reasons that Ukraine continues to function during a time of extraordinary violence and peril. It is affordable – it costs the equivalent of between £1.50 and £2.20 to send packages of between 5kg and 10kg within Ukraine – and it connects citizens across the nation and beyond, including those at the country’s most precarious, threatened edges. Top and left: Customer Kyrylo Stepanov sends car parts such as oil and filters by post; right: Starlink components will be delivered by Nova Poshta “We used to see our jobs here as just work,” says Dobronos. “Now we see that it’s really important. We provide something of a peaceful life amid the war. In frontline areas, we are the last to leave and the first to come back.” After the lightning counteroffensive in 2022, for example, Nova Poshta resumed working in the town of Balakliia in the Kharkiv region on 12 September, four days after it was liberated. In Kherson, on 12 November that year, it delivered lorries of humanitarian aid the day after the Russian withdrawal. In such situations, the company sets up mobile offices until its premises can be deemed safe from mines, and repaired. A damaged building in northern Kharkiv, which once housed a Nova Poshta branch, October 2025 When Nova Poshta leaves a place, by contrast, there is a sense that it’s the end of the line for a threatened community, one of its most tangible links with the outside world broken. That was the case in Pokrovsk earlier this year, when its three remaining staff shut the last branch as the Russians pushed closer to the eastern Ukrainian city. “They worked in a city where there were no more supermarkets, courts, schools, water, gas and electricity, but until now there were a few small grocery stores and the Nova Poshta office,” wrote the company’s co-founder Volodymyr Popereshnyuk in a valedictory Facebook post dated 18 February. Sorting parcels at the Nova Poshta logistics hub in Kyiv Nova Poshta drivers are still willing to deliver to cities such as Kherson, where vehicles on the roads in and out are cruelly targeted by drones. Near the frontline, workers are issued with bulletproof vests and helmets. Back at the customer desk in the Kharkiv suburb, battalion commander Anton Baev, 31, is waiting to send boxes of his girlfriend’s possessions to her new lodgings. A military psychologist, she had been recently ordered to a new posting. Baev is stationed with his troops nearby. “If I could get my entire battalion delivered by Nova Poshta, I would do it,” he jokes. Anton Baev, a battalion commander, used the postal service to forward his girlfriend’s possessions Moving house by post is perfectly normal in Ukraine. “Almost every day we deal with house moves. We deliver furniture, fridges, motorcycles, everything,” says Dobronos. The postal service provides a lifeline of home comforts to military on the frontline. Weapons are prohibited: “I can’t send a mortar, though that would be nice,” says Baev. But, aside from perishable food and various hazardous items, more or less anything else can be sent and will usually arrive the next day if dispatched from within the country. “My mother sent me homemade pie, and it arrived on the frontline,” says Baev. As the morning drifts on, the air raid siren sounds. The branch is shut swiftly and without drama, then, some moments later, reopens again. Everyone is used to it. And in any case, in Kharkiv there is a fatalism around missile attacks. “The border is very close,” says Dobronos. “We don’t have much time or much hope for reaction.” The Kharkiv area premises have two above-ground “capsule” bomb shelters. Dobronos says: “During an air raid alert, we close the branch and people wait there if they need – inside we have meds, water, fire extinguishers, torches. “We know it works – when the Russians hit another branch with three Shahed drones, the capsule shelter survived.” Manager Yaroslav Dobronos stands by the ‘capsule’ bomb shelter inside the Nova Poshta branch One of the office’s more heart-breaking jobs, these days, is dispatching the possessions of fallen soldiers back to their families. “It’s always a weird experience,” says Dobronos. “Maybe you’ve seen that person in the branch, but you just don’t know.” During the day, little eddies of queues appear at the customer desks, but quickly disperse as the staff retrieve, or pack and dispatch, parcels at speed. In contrast to the meditative, slow shuffle to a counter in a busy UK post office, the monthly queue target in this branch is “zero”, and they have slipped only twice, according to a handwritten note on the office whiteboard. At one point, a young, smartly dressed man opens the small package he has received at the counter to reveal a ring set with a sparkling stone: an engagement ring for his girlfriend. He is planning to ask her to marry him a fortnight later in Paris – 1,500 miles and a world away from this suburb with its bombed-out high-rises. Maksym Kravchenko, 28, is an anaesthetist in one of the city’s hospitals. Maksym Kravchenko with the engagement ring delivered by Nova Poshta – he plans to propose to his girlfriend in Paris, far away from the frontline Dobronos points out his regulars, many of whom are sustaining businesses reliant on the postal service. Marharyta Klymova, 24, a veterinarian, is receiving some material for reconstructing her damaged premises – but she also regularly takes delivery of “meds, pills, liquids, catheters, syringes, everything. If you don’t receive the parcel, you can’t treat the animals,” she says. “I haven’t left Kharkiv even for a day. Now, business slowly but firmly goes up. There are a lot of stressed animals here.” Olena Marenych, 51, is sending back a hoodie she had ordered in the wrong size. “I’m super-happy here in Ukraine,” she says. “Home is better for me, though sometimes it’s scary.” Maksym Bilous, 33, runs an online shop selling Starlink parts: “I send them all over, but mostly to the east where fighting takes place; we adapt the equipment and install it in cars.” Top: Andrii Tomko with the textile bales he is posting to Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia; left: Olena Marenych with the hoodie she’s returning; and Olena Miroshnyk is sending out one of her gift hampers Andrii Tomko, 24, is posting huge bales of textiles to Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, as part of his family’s wholesale fabric business. A couple of times he lost parcels to fire when a Nova Poshta terminal was hit by a missile. But he had been compensated, he says. Olena Miroshnyk, 47, has a small business selling gift hampers; she is sending out several that day to customers in other parts of Ukraine. The full-scale invasion stymied her plans to open a shop; instead she has swerved towards an online business. “It’s very difficult. Last night was difficult. You invest a lot in a business, you risk a lot, but what can you do? We moved to Kyiv for half a year, then Poltava for half a year, but we decided to return – our own apartment is OK.” Vita Kramarenko, 53, has also returned to Kharkiv after two years as a refugee in Germany. “I realised Ukrainian services are best,” she says. “Despite the war, everything works and everything arrives, shelling or not. European services are a myth.” She is sending a set of curtains and curtain rails to her sister in Spain. “It’s very expensive to buy those things there, so I am sending them to her,” she says. The logistics hub of Nova Poshta in Kyiv. A large sign points out the location of the bomb shelters Before the full-scale invasion, Nova Poshta operated only within Ukraine and neighbouring Moldova. Now, initially to serve the needs of the country’s millions of refugees, it has expanded to a further 15 European countries, including Spain and the UK, where it is called Nova Post. “Even in these tough times, it is a chance for us to become a European or global delivery company,” says Nova Poshta’s co-founder Viacheslav Klymov in an interview, saying that the company now provides next-day delivery between, for example, Warsaw and Berlin. But the difficulties of running an efficient postal service during a full-scale invasion are enormous. “The safety of our customers and staff is the biggest challenge,” says Klymov. Then there is the threat from Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, which has led the company to invest in becoming “energy independent” – essentially, installing generators in local branches and, at the large sorting depots, generating power from their own gas supply via co-generation plants. When cities are otherwise plunged into darkness, Nova Poshta can keep working. Marharyta Klimova, a vet, picking up a parcel at Nova Poshta in Kharkiv Staffing is also a challenge: 4,000 workers, or 10% of the staff have been mobilised into the army, according to a Nova Poshta spokeswoman. And there have been casualties, too: 22 civilian Nova Poshta employees have been killed in Russian attacks, and 218 after being drafted into the military. The mobilisation of so many employees has provided an impetus to accelerate automation. In a vast sorting depot near Kyiv, 1.5m parcels are processed every day, largely through automated and robotised processes: after being delivered from the local post offices, packages are moved through a dizzying set of scanners and chutes before being loaded on to lorries for the journey to their destination cities. Klymov is speaking the morning after an attack had left much of Kyiv without electricity or water. Nova Poshta had put out a message apologising for a possible delay to deliveries – essentially because staff had had to take refuge in bomb shelters during the night. But the delay was expected to be counted in hours rather than days, and offices were open as usual. “The Ukrainian customer is a very strange creature,” says Klymov. “The Ukrainian customer doesn’t care about attacks, doesn’t care about an absence of electricity supply: the Ukrainian customer needs their delivery on time.” A hand-drawn doodle on a cardboard box stacked on a shelf at the Nova Poshta in Kharkiv

India police investigate final moments of vehicle in fatal Delhi blast

Police investigating the car explosion outside Delhi’s historic Red Fort that killed eight people are focusing on the final movements of the vehicle involved. The explosion on Monday occurred at about 7pm, a peak time when Delhi’s old city is usually packed with people and traffic. The Delhi police commissioner, Satish Golcha, said the explosion happened after a “slow-moving vehicle” stopped at a red light outside the Red Fort metro station. The blast started a fire that ripped through nearby cars, motorcycles and rickshaws and shattered the windows of a Sikh place of worship 500 metres away. As well as the eight people killed, about 20 were injured. In a speech on Tuesday, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, said those responsible would be brought to justice. “The conspirators behind this will not be spared. All those responsible will be brought to justice,” Modi said. Witnesses said they saw limbs ripped from bodies and scattered on the roads. “I saw the car explode while it was moving,” Dharmindra Dhaga, 27, told Agence France-Presse. “People were on fire and we tried to save them … Cars and people were burning – people inside the cars were burning.” Jai, 49, a shopkeeper, said the blast was so loud it damaged his hearing. “I heard a noise so loud my ears got blocked. Then I saw car parts flying and scattered body parts,” he said. The cause of the blast remained unknown by Tuesday morning as forensic teams and investigators from Delhi police special branch and the National Investigation Agency, which handles terror cases, scoured the site. Delhi police said they had filed a case under India’s draconian anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. According to reports, four people have been arrested in connection with the incident. In an address on Tuesday morning, the defence minister, Rajnath Singh, said: “The country’s leading investigative agencies are conducting a swift and thorough inquiry into the incident. Findings of the investigation will soon be made public.” He added: “I want to firmly assure the nation that those responsible for this tragedy will be brought to justice and will not be spared under any circumstances.” According to reports, investigators have turned their focus to the final movements of the vehicle in which the explosion is believed to have originated. On Monday night, two people were detained who were linked to the Hyundai car, which was registered in the neighbouring state of Haryana. CCTV footage is reported to show the car driving into a car park in the Old Delhi area close to the Red Fort at about 3pm and remaining there for about three hours while the driver – who appeared to be wearing a mask – stayed in the vehicle. The home minister, Amit Shah, said officials were “investigating all possible angles” and it would be “very difficult to say what caused the incident” until forensic samples had been analysed. India remains on high alert, with extra security measures imposed at airports and along border areas. The financial capital, Mumbai, was also put under high alert.

Tuesday briefing: What the BBC’s new crisis reveals about its failures – and future

Good morning. In 2004, when Greg Dyke quit the BBC in the wake of the Hutton inquiry, a much younger me was at the beginning of my media career, working at BBC Online. I remember staff felt the relatively popular director general had been the victim of the government lashing out after the death of David Kelly, and a failure to produce convincing evidence of the fabled weapons of mass destruction that supposedly supported Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq. Many BBC staff will no doubt have been feeling a similar grievance after the abrupt resignations of director general Tim Davie and head of BBC News Deborah Turness on Sunday. They departed after a week of concerted attacks on the organisation orchestrated by the rightwing press and figures closely associated with the Conservative party – particularly Boris Johnson’s administration. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to the Guardian’s media editor, Michael Savage, about what this affair tells us about the editorial issues at the BBC, the failures of its governance, the political agenda against it, and why the crisis comes at a critical juncture for the future of the nation’s original public service broadcaster. Before that, here are the headlines. Five big stories UK politics | Rachel Reeves is planning to remove the two-child benefit cap in full in the November budget, in a move that could cost more than £3bn but lift 350,000 children out of poverty. Environment | Governments failing to shift to a low-carbon economy will be blamed for famine and conflict abroad, the UN’s climate chief warned at the start of Cop30 climate talks in Brazil. France | The former French president Nicholas Sarkozy has been released from prison, after a judge ruled he could serve the rest of his sentence at home, pending an appeal. Earlier he had told a Paris appeal court that his three weeks in jail had been a “nightmare”. Protest | Ministers banned Palestine Action despite being told by their advisers it could “inadvertently enhance” the group’s profile, an official government document written three months before the proscription of the group shows. Books | Hungarian-British author David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker prize for his novel Flesh. In depth: Boardroom politics, culture war pressures and a BBC left adrift To lose one senior BBC executive may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like a crisis. The Guardian’s media editor, Michael Savage, told me that a few things are happening at the same time: “One is Michael Prescott’s letter that’s been put together listing what he says are failings at the BBC over a long period. They’re all coming from one political position – worrying the BBC has become too liberal in its views on things like transgender rights, Donald Trump and Israel’s war in Gaza.” Michael added: “Beyond that, there’s a sense that, while there may be some genuine failings, there is also a complete absence of the BBC defending itself at a crucial period, which has allowed the situation to escalate. And with the charter renewal imminent in 2027, there is an open question about what a future for the BBC might look like.” On Monday, BBC chair Samir Shah apologised for the Trump edit, admitting it “gave the impression of a direct call for violent action”, and promised a review of every item raised in Prescott’s memo. *** How does this scandal compare to previous crises? The BBC does seem to have a collective crisis every decade or so. There was the aforementioned Dyke resignation in 2004. Then, in 2012, George Entwistle resigned after being in the role just 54 days – barely longer than Liz Truss was prime minister. He went after an edition of Newsnight wrongly implicated a Conservative peer in a historic child abuse scandal in Wales while the BBC was already facing a storm of criticism over its handling of allegations against the paedophile Jimmy Savile. Compared to those seismic events, one incorrectly edited clip of Donald Trump and a litany of rightwing culture war talking points seems like rather small beer, so why has this caused such an upheaval? Michael tells me the scale of the fallout is less about the original mistake and more about the political machinery around it. “The Johnson administration appoints someone – Robbie Gibb – with a particular point of view; he then appoints the former Sunday Times political editor Prescott, who may be like-minded; then that person publishes a critical letter; and the BBC’s opponents use it to attack the organisation.” He adds: “Whatever the real editorial failings, that chain of events has led to this extraordinary outcome.” *** A question of governance Amidst that huge political pressure, Michael points to an issue of weak governance at the BBC leading to the perfect storm. Gibb, who helped launch GB News and was head of communications at Downing street under Theresa May, is just one of 13 board members at the BBC. It was a panel including Gibb that appointed Prescott to his advisory role, and it was Prescott’s letter that ultimately triggered the chaos. But Gibb has also been accused of wielding outsized influence and steering the corporation rightwards. He finds himself in prime position to do so, as one of the only board members with deep editorial experience, in a team largely focused on expanding the BBC’s potential commercial revenues. In an interview for the BBC yesterday afternoon, chair Shah said he “did not want to lose” Davie as director general, calling him “outstanding” and saying the job had taken a huge emotional toll. He rejected claims of systemic institutional bias at the corporation and said that, with regard to Middle East coverage, critics needed “perspective and proportionality” given the hundreds of hours broadcast. “I don’t think there’s a systemic bias in [the BBC being] anti-Israel – there are loads of arguments that suggest almost the opposite,” he said. Shah also denied claims that the board was politicised, adding that people had “a fanciful notion of what happens” there. *** Where was the BBC’s fightback? The BBC stalled in its initial response to the Telegraph reporting of the Prescott letter, and when it did come, Davie did not seem to offer much in the way of defending the BBC’s editorial independence. “We’re told there were people inside the BBC who wanted to be more front-footed – to acknowledge issues with the editing of Trump’s speech, but to push back against the wider claims of systemic bias that Prescott was making,” says Michael. But that didn’t happen. In her excellent analysis of the situation, Jane Martinson, the Guardian’s former head of media, said the BBC ended up looking “weak and cowardly, just when it needs to be robust and brave”. Turness has defended those she worked with in Broadcasting House, saying on Monday: “BBC News is not institutionally biased. Our journalists are hard-working people who strive for impartiality, and I will stand by their journalism. Mistakes are made, but there’s no institutional bias.” It may just be that years and years of the drip, drip, drip of criticism from the likes of the Mail and Telegraph has simply reduced the BBC management’s broader appetite for the fight – especially with Johnson’s insiders fighting their culture war from within. *** Where does this leave the government ahead of charter renewal negotiations? This all comes at the worst possible time. With charter renewal looming in 2027, the BBC is rudderless and leaderless just as the government has to start deciding how it is funded and what its purpose should be. A BBC with reduced funding and a smaller national footprint has clearly been an aim of the right for some while. Michael says this poses a question for the government: “With Reform UK continuing to rise in the polls, and political attacks on the BBC increasing, will the government decide it needs to defend and protect the corporation’s independence in this increasingly hostile environment?” The risk of Labour leaning into a populist anti-BBC sentiment is unlikely: it would be seismic, he tells me, for the government to scrap the licence fee. “If you want a BBC that makes programmes for everyone – left and right, young and old, news, drama, radio, children’s TV – then you need the licence fee or something very much like it.” BBC staff may have been heartened by the firm tone from Downing Street yesterday, where the prime minister’s spokesperson said there was “a clear argument for a robust, impartial British news service to deliver, and that case is stronger than ever”, dismissing Trump’s typically bombastic accusation that the BBC is harbouring “corrupt journalists”. Less encouragingly, the BBC confirmed it has received a letter from the US president threatening a legal case, which could prove costly to settle. According to reports, Trump appeared to be floating the figure of “no less” than $1bn (£760m). *** Who would want to take this ‘impossible job’ now? The BBC should have spent the weekend basking in the glow of the huge zeitgeist-seizing success of Celebrity Traitors. Instead it finds itself in a crisis partially of its own making. “The role of director general is becoming hugely constitutionally important,” Michael says. “Whoever gets that job will have a major say in big national conversations. The BBC also has a big role in combating misinformation and disinformation, and trying to hold the ring, as it were, on what is true and what isn’t in a very divided media landscape. “These massive jobs are vacant, and they are incredibly difficult jobs to do. Two experienced people have concluded they couldn’t continue. It’s down to the board to make the appointment, but there will be political pressure from various directions.” He continues: “It’s an absolutely crucial decision. So you need someone with experience, a big figure who can handle those issues and the ongoing political pressure. Does such a person exist? It’s going to be very hard to find them in these circumstances and with this level of scrutiny.” What else we’ve been reading Alessandro Gandolfi’s photo essay about the Netherlands (pictured above), explores how the growing climate crisis and rising seas has led the watery country to embrace it with modern, sustainable floating houses. Karen Among the perils of the digital age are the increasing prevalence of romance scams. Anna Moore hears the heartbreaking – and expensive – details from those who have fallen foul of fake love, and offers tips on how to stay safe. Martin Dr Rachel Clarke, an NHS palliative medicine specialist, has witnessed first-hand the human tragedy of the end-of-life care crisis. While the government debates assisted dying, palliative care should be more than an afterthought, she says. Karen. It is refreshing to see someone come straight out with it – Dazed have an interesting profile of Anemone director Ronan Day-Lewis, who admitted to interviewer Nick Chen that getting to make a film with his dad is “obviously nepotism”. Martin After his massive victory at the New York City mayoral elections last week, this explainer examines how new mayor Zohran Mamdani might tackle the daunting task of paying for his bold agenda of rent freezes, free buses and universal childcare. Karen Sport Racing | Lando Norris (pictured above) has played down title expectations having taken a 24-point world championship lead after the São Paulo Grand Prix. Football | After five defeats in six matches, Andrew Robertson admits Liverpool face a “huge uphill battle” to retain their title. Cricket | England’s men’s team have all arrived in Australia ahead of the Ashes, but questions linger over their preparations. The front pages The Guardian leads with “BBC board member with Tory link ‘led the charge’ over claims of bias”. The Financial Times says “Trump issues threat to sue BBC for more than $1bn over edited speech”, while the Telegraph goes with “Trump to sue BBC for $1bn”. Top story in the Mail says “Trump tells BBC: Grovel – or I’ll sue you for $1billion”, while the Sun leads with “Beeb’s billion dollar bungle” and the Times has “BBC is told: Say sorry or Trump will sue for $1bn”. The i paper examines what might come next, with “Future of the BBC license fee in jeopardy as Trump threatens $1bn legal action”. “We told the kids everything … the good & the bad” – that was the Mirror on the Prince and Princess of Wales dealing with family health issues. Today in Focus Why Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $1bn The broadcaster’s director general and head of news resigned on Sunday night. But were unforgivable mistakes made or were they victims of an internal coup? Michael Savage reports Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad Two decades ago, Portsmouth city council defied funding cuts to save its youth and play centres – and the positive impact on children and young people’s lives has become astonishingly clear. Consider Buckland adventure playground, one of six in Portsmouth, which is a feeder for a nearby youth club and is surrounded by social housing. Molly Webb, 22, described it as being a “second home”, when she was growing up, a place “full of magical memories”, and she now brings her four-year-old son there. Centres like these are disappearing in other coastal towns that have high levels of deprivation, reports Karen McVeigh in this in-depth piece for the series Against the tide. But Portsmouth has seen the payoffs, and not only for the children in the neighbourhood. The playground’s manager Nicky Andrews said she loves her work so much they’ll have to “carry me out of there in a box”. Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday Bored at work? And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply

Hopes of Irish language revival in public life as Catherine Connolly takes office

The Irish language has scored cultural breakthroughs with the film The Quiet Girl and the controversial rap trio Kneecap and is now about to acquire a new talisman: Catherine Connolly. When the independent leftwing politician is inaugurated as Ireland’s president on Tuesday, she will carry hopes of a transformational Gaelic revival. The former barrister from Galway made Gaelic a central part of her election campaign and has indicated she wishes to make it the working language of the presidency. “I will do my best to bring Irish in from the margins and use it,” Connolly told the Irish language station Raidió na Gaeltachta. The 68-year-old shocked the centre-right political establishment last month when she won a landslide in the election to succeed Michael D Higgins as Ireland’s 10th president. Her candidacy united opposition leftwing parties, energised young voters and won 64% of the vote. The inability of her centrist rival Heather Humphreys to speak Irish, in contrast to Connolly’s fluency, bolstered the latter’s appeal. The presidency is a largely symbolic post but Connolly is expected to use it as a platform for social and international issues and the promotion of Irish. “She has brought the language to the centre of national debate,” said Conchúr Ó Muadaigh, a spokesperson for the advocacy group Conradh na Gaeilge. “She doesn’t treat it as a cultural afterthought or decoration. It’s something she genuinely believes in. It’s part of her solidarity with indigenous struggles against decolonisation.” The Irish language, once the majority of Ireland’s native tongue, withered under British rule in the 19th century. Decline continued after independence despite the constitution proclaiming Irish as the first official language. Less than 2% of the population converse in Irish daily, according to census figures, although roughly 40% say they can speak the language. Exemptions from the compulsory study of Irish at school are at record level and critics say government plans to improve its teaching lack ambition. However, revival efforts have widened its use from rural western areas to towns and cities. The number of schools teaching all subjects exclusively in Irish has multiplied from fewer than 20 in the 1970s to more than 200 today, fuelling curiosity and appreciation for content in the language. The Quiet Girl, known in Irish as An Cailín Ciúin, became a standard bearer after breaking box office records in Ireland and the UK in 2022. The group Kneecap has coined new usages and given the language a punk cachet. Irish language and bilingual podcasts such as Motherfoclóir and How To Gael have proliferated, as have Gaeilgeoir TikTok creators such as the comedian and writer Eoin P Ó Murchú. The platform has 54,600 posts in Irish, a 71% growth in a year, the company said. Kara Owen, the new British ambassador to Ireland, introduced herself to the Irish people last month with a bilingual video that won widespread praise. “It’s a beautiful language and it’s helped me understand so much about Irish culture and even Hiberno-English,” she told the news site the Journal. Connolly’s presidency comes amid the language’s growing reach in Northern Ireland, which has become a proxy political battle between nationalists and unionists. Under the terms of a landmark 2022 law, Stormont recently appointed the region’s first Irish language commissioner. Activists hope Connolly’s seven-year term in Áras an Uachtaráin, the presidential residence, will be a watershed. “Despite the limitations of the post there is genuine reason to think her presidency could be a transformative moment for Irish language in public life,” said Ó Muadaigh, who is also a spokesperson for An Dream Dearg, a Northern Ireland-based campaign group. “She has the ability to show that the state can function at its highest level through Irish.”

Japan and China in growing row after PM Takaichi says Taiwan conflict could trigger military deployment

Japan and China are embroiled in a row about Tokyo’s potential military involvement in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. Beijing reacted angrily this month after Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, said an attack on Taiwan could trigger the deployment of her country’s self-defence forces if the conflict posed an existential threat to Japan. Insisting that Japan could exercise its right to collective self-defence – or coming to the aid of an ally – Takaichi said Tokyo had to “anticipate a worst-case scenario” in the Taiwan Strait. If an emergency in Taiwan involved “warships and the use of force, then that could constitute a situation threatening [Japan’s] survival, whichever way you look at it”, she told a parliamentary committee. “The so-called Taiwan contingency has become so serious that we have to anticipate a worst-case scenario.” Beijing has not ruled out the use of force to annex Taiwan – a self-governing democracy it regards as a Chinese province – under what it calls “reunification”. The row intensified at the weekend after the Chinese consul general in Osaka, Xue Jian, said in a post on X that referenced a news article about her Taiwan comments: “We have no choice but cut off that dirty neck that has been lunged at us without hesitation. Are you ready?” Officials in Tokyo condemned Xue’s post, which has since been removed, as “extremely inappropriate”. “We strongly protested and urged that it be taken down immediately,” Japan’s senior government spokesperson, Minoru Kihara, told reporters this week, adding that he was “aware of multiple other inappropriate remarks” by Xue. The dispute comes soon after Takaichi, a conservative with hawkish views on China, met Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Apec summit in South Korea, where they vowed to build “constructive and stable” relations. On Monday, Takaichi – who last month became Japan’s first female prime minister – refused to back down, but told MPs she would exercise caution when referring to specific situations involving security. Japan has long wrestled with the question of how it would respond to a conflict between China and Taiwan, which lies just 100km from its westernmost island, Yonaguni, in the East China Sea. While Japan’s postwar constitution forbids it from using force as a means of settling international disputes, a 2015 law – passed when Takaichi’s mentor, Shinzo Abe, was prime minister – permits it to exercise collective self-defence in certain situations, even if it is not directly under attack. That scenario would most likely involve Japanese support for US-led military action in the region. Lin Jian, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, said Xue’s post was a response to Takaichi’s “wrongful and dangerous” remarks on Taiwan. “China strongly urges Japan to reflect on its historical culpability on the Taiwan issue … and stop sending any wrong signals to Taiwan independence separatist forces,” he said. Karen Kuo, a spokesperson for the presidential office in Taiwan, said in a statement that Taiwan’s government “takes seriously the threatening remarks made by Chinese officials toward Japan. Such behaviour clearly exceeds diplomatic etiquette.” In a post on X, the US ambassador to Japan, George Glass, said in reference to Xue’s comments: “The mask slips – again,” adding that the Chinese diplomat’s words “threatened” Takaichi and the Japanese people. This latest spat started just a week after Beijing accused Takaichi of “egregious” behaviour by meeting with a senior adviser to Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, on the sidelines of Apec, and posting photos of it on social media.

‘I can’t breathe in this city’: inaction over Delhi’s suffocating pollution sparks rare protest

As a familiar smoky evening haze gathered over Delhi, the crowd began to assemble in their hundreds. Mothers and children, students, retirees and environmentalists were all united by a basic but desperate demand: the right to breathe safely in India’s capital. “Delhi is not a liveable city any more, it’s a death trap,” said Radhika Aggarwal, 33, an engineer who joined the protest on Sunday. “As I stand here, I’m breathing air that I know is killing me. But we see nothing but a failure by the government to do anything to stop this and clean up the pollution. No policies, no real action. So I’m here to fight for my city.” For the past decade, Delhi has held the inglorious title of being the world’s most polluted city. Pollution season has become as normalised as the monsoon, as it rolls over the city in a suffocating smog that begins in October and can last for more than four months. In the past weeks, Air quality index (AQI) measurements have regularly soared to more than a hundred times higher than is deemed safe by global heath bodies and residents routinely describe the city as akin to a gas chamber. Pollution now kills more people in Delhi than obesity or diabetes. The seeming inevitability of the pollution, and the failure by successive state governments to do anything about it, means it has often been met with apathy by residents. But on Sunday, as a rare protest against the increasingly woeful air quality erupted in the Delhi’s political centre, anger and frustration were rife. The call for Sunday’s protest had been to gather at India Gate, the country’s famed memorial to its fallen martyrs. But in the days prior to the protest, the police had made hundreds of calls and homes visits to those amplifying the protest to pressure them to call it off, even threatening legal action against them; the latest crackdown on any form of dissent in India. Saurav Das, 26, was among those who received police pressure, after he put out a call for action against pollution on social media. Though young and fit, he had recently been diagnosed with allergic bronchitis, due to the filthy air. “We wanted to gather peacefully at India Gate to send a message, loud and clear, that people are fed by failed policies and government apathy that have failed to combat air pollution,” said Das. “Instead we were met with unnecessary brute force.” On Sunday police shut down India gate to prevent the protest and within hours, officers had aggressively cleared the nearby site, detaining almost 100 protesters at police stations until late into the night, with elderly people, mothers and children among them. The next day, a police case was filed against the organisers. The reasons the capital is left to choke every winter are well documented; a lethal mix of emissions from tens of millions of cars, fires set by farmers in neighbouring states, plants that burn the city’s waste, coal fired power plants and smaller fires set by people just to keep warm. The cold weather, and lack of winds and rain, ensures the smog smothers Delhi and much of north India. Yet state and national government policies to tackle the root causes remain largely absent. Instead, those who can, seal themselves indoors with expensive air purifiers or escape to the mountains and beaches of other states, turning clean air into Delhi’s most luxury commodity – one unaffordable to most the of the city’s 30 million residents. On Sunday, much of the protester’s ire was directed at the Delhi government. In February, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which also runs the national government under prime minister Narendra Modi, won the Delhi state elections, stirring hope among residents it might finally trigger substantive anti-pollution policies at both state and national level. Instead, the new BJP state government not only went to courts to allow “green” fireworks to be allowed during Diwali celebrations – contributing to one of the city’s most polluted festival seasons in years – but has also been accused by opponents of attempting to fudge the city’s pollution data, either by halting reports from the city’s air quality monitoring centres or by spraying water on the air pollution monitors to bring the numbers down. The BJP denied tampering with pollution figures and called the accusation “politically motivated”, blaming the previous government for the ongoing pollution problem. The BJP’s multimillion rupee cloud seeding experiment – an attempt to make it rain using chemicals, in order to bring down pollution levels – proved a failure. “I can’t breathe in this city any more, I can’t take a walk without getting a terrible headache,” said Sofie, 33. “It feels like there aren’t enough masks in the world to make this air breathable.” Many among those gathered at the protest were mothers accompanied their children and signs were held aloft with messages such as “breathing is killing me”. The nearby central secretariat and parliament buildings had been rendered almost invisible by the evening’s opaque brown smog as the city’s AQI touched 500 – the healthy level is 50. “Any other city breathing this air would have declared a health emergency by now,” said Gopesh Singh, 58. “How many more millions of people have to die for the government to act?”

Ukraine war briefing: battle for Pokrovsk ‘raging on’ as Russia claims advance on town to east

Ukraine and Russia have issued conflicting accounts of fighting around Myrnohrad, an embattled town to the east of Pokrovsk, which Moscow’s forces have enveloped from almost all sides. The Ukrainian military said on Facebook on Monday that it had delivered supplies into Myrnohrad and rotated out troops fighting in the town, including those who were wounded. “Ukrainian units are confidently holding their positions and destroying the occupiers on the approaches to the town,” the statement said. “Logistics to the town are complicated, but are being carried out.” Russia’s defence ministry said on Telegram that its forces were advancing on the town, noting gains in two of its districts. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces were holding their positions around Pokrovsk and Dobropillia, a town to the north, where Kyiv says its troops have made gains. Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said Russia was concentrating about 150,000 troops on a drive to capture Pokrovsk, dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk” and in Russia’s sights for more than a year as it pushes to control the whole eastern Donetsk region. Mechanised groups and marine brigades were part of Russia’s push, he told the New York Post. “There are ongoing battles and fights raging on. There are fast manoeuvres carried out by the enemy all the time.”The battlefield reports could not be independently verified. Russian troops were also advancing on villages in the Zaporizhzhia region further south, frontline reports suggested. The Russian defence ministry said two villages there – north-east of the town of Hulyaipole – were among the three it had captured along the 1,000km (620-mile) front line over the past 24 hours. Ukraine’s DeepState military blog noted “a significant increase in grey zones”, with uncertain control in Zaporizhzhia region. Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau said on Monday that it was conducting a large-scale investigation into the country’s energy sector, alleging kickbacks in transactions involving the state nuclear power operator, Energoatom. Luke Harding reports that the bureau, which operates independently of the government, alleged that several senior figures were involved. Ukrainian media identified one of them as Timur Mindich, a businessman and associate of Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy. Mindich reportedly fled abroad hours before investigators arrived at his Kyiv apartment to carry out a search. Germany will increase financial aid to Ukraine to €11.5bn ($13.41bn) in the 2026 budget, up from €8.5bn previously planned, according to budget documents seen by Reuters on Monday. Germany is Europe’s largest contributor of military aid to Ukraine, having provided around €40bn euros since Russia’s 2022 invasion. Ukraine’s special forces said they had hit a pumping station at a Russian oil depot in the occupied Crimean peninsula overnight. “The Hvardiyska oil depot is an important element of the fuel logistics system of the occupying authorities in Crimea,” the special forces said on Telegram on Monday. “It is important for supplying military facilities and transport of the enemy army.” Meanwhile, a Ukrainian drone attack damaged civilian infrastructure in the Saratov region, the governor of the western Russian region said on Tuesday. “All emergency services were deployed to the scene,” Roman Basurgin said on Telegram. Belgium has enlisted the help of foreign armed forces to seize or track down drones that have made incursions around its airports, military bases and a nuclear plant, with officials saying it all bears the hallmarks of Russian interference. “We’re not saying it’s Russia – we’re saying it looks like Russia,” said a Belgian official, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘It’s impossible to connect any incident with an actor. We have nothing.” The official said Belgium was “working with partners to try to get our hands on a drone, or detect where it is launched from and where it’s going”. Russia has denied involvement with the drones. Lukoil declared force majeure at its Iraqi oil field, sources told Reuters on Monday, and Bulgaria was poised to seize its Burgas refinery, as the Russian company’s international operations buckled under the strain of US sanctions. The force majeure at the West Qurna-2 field in Iraq marks the biggest fallout yet from the sanctions imposed on Russian oil majors Lukoil and Rosneft last month as part of US president Donald Trump’s push to end the war in Ukraine.