Britain has ramped up its export of defensive weapons to Ukraine at the country’s “darkest hour”, the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, has announced. 

Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, has just given a press conference alongside her US counterpart Antony Blinken and said Putin is “not making the progress he’d planned”. 

Yet attention has turned towards concerns about radioactivity leaks after Russian forces damaged the high-voltage power line connecting Chernobyl and Kyiv – and cut off electricity to the infamous Chernobyl power station. 

The $2 billion confinement unit contains the original reactors of the 1986 nuclear meltdown and there is still active fuel there. In other developments:

Europe hooked

Germany has emerged as the main barrier to tougher sanctions against Russia, threatening to spark a rift in western efforts to punish the Kremlin. 

Of course, only a year after the annexation of Crimea and with shots still being fired in the Donbas, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline linking Germany and Russia was launched. 

At the time, Angela Merkel’s government faced down the barrage of warnings from the US and UK. 

Tom Rees analyses how Putin got Europe’s elite hooked on Russian gas. 

A string of major Western companies are boycotting Russia following the invasion. 

Yet here are the companies controversially staying put.

Screws loosened

For weeks, the West has been pouring lethal aid – in the form of anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles – into Ukraine. 

Yet the question remains as to whether the plan to send Polish MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine, possibly via the US air base in Ramstein, Germany, may cross a red line. 

Dominic Nicholls analyses why it risks a nuclear escalation. 

The Biden administration had been unable to send the missiles to Europe because they contained classified equipment. 

However, the US military has circumvented security concerns by removing a handful of screws from Stingers, allowing them to send the antiaircraft missiles to Ukraine.

War in Ukraine: Comment and analysis

Wednesday big-read

How Russian mothers could change the course of the war