Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have signed an agreement promising that Russia and North Korea will help each other in the event of "aggression" against either country.
The pact "cements a rapidly blossoming partnership that has worried the West" said the BBC. It a sign that in the "spiralling confrontation" with the US and its allies over Ukraine, the Russian leader is "willing to challenge Western interests like never before", said the Associated Press.
The pact envisages mutual military assistance between the two Crink nations if either is attacked and declares that Russia could provide weapons to the North Korea, a move that could "destabilise the Korean Peninsula and reverberate far beyond".
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The Pentagon has ruled that Ukraine's military can use US-supplied long-range missiles to strike targets deeper inside Russia if it is acting in self-defence.
The announcement came as Putin warned that Moscow could arm the West’s enemies with long-range missiles if Ukraine uses NATO-supplied weapons to strike Russian territory.
Meanwhile, writing for The Telegraph, leading military historian Richard Overy said that as the world "tilts towards global conflict", it is already "too late to stop World War 3".
Russia
Russia's invasion of Ukraine triggered the "worst crisis in Russia's relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis", said the Daily Mail. "Even talk of a confrontation between Russia and Nato – a Cold War nightmare of leaders and populations alike – indicates the dangers of escalation as the West grapples with a resurgent Russia 32 years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union."
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that failure to fend off Russia's aggression could spiral into confrontation with Nato. "And that certainly means the ThirdWorldWar," he has said.
In March, a Russian cruise missile violated Nato airspace less than a week after Putin warned that a direct confrontation between Russia and the Western military alliance would be "one step away from a full-scale World War Three", said Time.
Then, in June, Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the Russian lower house of parliament's defence committee, said Moscow could reduce the decision-making time stipulated in official policy for the use of nuclear weapons if it believes that threats are increasing, reported Reuters.
If Putin remains "undeterred" in Ukraine, he will "almost certainly try his luck" in the Baltics, said Dominic Waghorn, Sky News's international affairs editor – "because he will assume the alliance is too spineless to stop him". That view would likely be reinforced if Donald Trump were to carry through with his threats to pull America out of Nato if he wins the US presidential election in November.
North Korea
Since talks with Trump in 2019 broke down over disagreements about international sanctions on Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un has "focused on modernising his nuclear and missile arsenals", said Sky News.
In his New Year's Eve address, he warned that the actions of the US and its allies have pushed the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war. And he announced that the hermit kingdom had abandoned "the existential goal of reconciling with rival South Korea", said The Associated Press.
While no direct military action has been launched from North to South since then, there are signs tensions are gradually rising. The two sides have been involved in a "tit-for-tat" balloon war in recent weeks, said The Independent, with North Korea floating 200 balloons filled with rubbish and waste last month. That was in response to "activists" from the South, who have been sending balloons "carrying propaganda material about their democratic society and memory devices with K-pop music videos", into the North.
The South has since scrapped a "2018 non-hostility pact aimed at lowering military tensions", the paper added, indicating the "psychological warfare" had "tipped over into real escalation".
The scrapping of that pact has subsequently meant animosity rising across the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), where the South has been playing "propaganda and K-pop music to the North using loudspeakers", said the BBC. Earlier this week its soldiers fired warning shots "by mistake" at North Korean troops who had inadvertently crossed the border, though this prompted "no notable movement from the North". However, the sister of Kim Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong, said previously that the North would launch "new counteractions" if the South did not cease with its actions along the DMZ.
The increasing hostility has already seen the US become further involved, conducting a "precision-guided bombing drill with Seoul" along the peninsula for the first time in seven years as a "warning against North Korea", said The Independent.
Middle East
US officials are concerned about an escalation of conflict between Israel and Lebanon, which could develop into a greater regional conflict.
The US has "publicly and privately" urged its allies in Israel to temper "back-and-forth strikes" that have been ongoing since the conflict in Gaza began late last year, said The Independent.
The Israel Defence Force (IDF) killed a senior Hezbollah commander in strikes earlier this month, which in turn led the group to fire more than 170 projectiles into Israel territory in response.
While militia group Hezbollah has said it is "not seeking all-out war with Israel", it has steadily increased the "scope and intensity of its attacks", stoking concern that this "war of attrition" will eventually spark "full-scale conflict", said The Guardian. That scenario would be "devastating for both sides", and almost certainly draw Iran into direct conflict with Israel.
Iran is Hezbollah's key backer and any conflict between Lebanon and Israel would likely begin a widespread war across the Middle East due to its "complex web of alliances and rivalries", said The Independent. Any direct conflicts between Iran and Israel could then see the US brought directly into the fighting.
The US and France have led negotiations between Hezbollah and Israel to try and defuse tensions and quell the tit-for-tat strikes, while the Americans are also eager to push through a ceasefire deal to stop the conflict in Gaza. However, there remains "considerable daylight between Israel, Hamas, and the US" over a ceasefire agreement, with Benjamin Netanyahu "yet to publicly endorse the plan".
China
It has long been assumed that the greatest threat to geopolitical stability is the growing tension between China and the US in recent years, most notably, over Taiwan and the question of its sovereignty.
Beijing sees the island nation as an integral part of a unified Chinese territory. It has, in recent years, adopted an increasingly aggressive stance towards the island and its ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which it has denounced as dangerous separatists,but who won an unprecedented third term earlier this year. At the same time, the US has ramped up its support – financially, militarily and rhetorically – for Taiwan's continued independence.
While most experts agree an imminent escalation is not on the cards, Beijing and Washington have become "desensitised" to the risk these circ*mstances pose, and in the "militarisation of foreign policy and the failure to grasp the full significance of that militarisation, the pair are one accident and a bad decision removed from a catastrophic war," said Foreign Policy.
Any invasion "would be one of the most dangerous and consequential events of the 21st century", said The Times last April. It would "make the Russian attack on Ukraine look like a sideshow by comparison".
Human costs aside, a military conflict between the world's two biggest economies would lead to "a severing of global supply chains, a blow to confidence and crashing asset prices", said The Guardian's economics editor Larry Elliott. "It would have catastrophic economic consequences, up to and including a second Great Depression."
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