Russia appears to have suffered a “catastrophic failure” in a test of its Sarmat missile, a key weapon in the modernization of its nuclear arsenal, according to arms experts who have analyzed satellite images of the launch site.

The images captured by Maxar on Sept. 21 show a crater about 60 metres (200 feet) wide at the launch silo at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. They reveal extensive damage that was not visible in pictures taken earlier in the month.

The RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is designed to deliver nuclear warheads to strike targets thousands of miles away in the United States or Europe, but its development has been dogged by delays and testing setbacks.

“By all indications, it was a failed test. It’s a big hole in the ground,” said Pavel Podvig, an analyst based in Geneva, who runs the Russian Nuclear Forces project. “There was a serious incident with the missile and the silo.”

Timothy Wright, research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, said the destruction of the area immediately surrounding the missile silo was suggestive of a failure soon after ignition.

“One possible cause is that the first stage (booster) either failed to ignite properly or suffered from a catastrophic mechanical failure, causing the missile to fall back into or land closely adjacent to the silo and explode,” he told Reuters.

James Acton, nuclear specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, posted on X that the before-and-after satellite images were “very persuasive that there was a big explosion” and said he was convinced that a Sarmat test had failed.

The Kremlin referred questions on Sarmat to the defense ministry. The ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment and has made no announcements about planned Sarmat tests in recent days.

The US and its allies are closely watching Russia’s development of its nuclear arsenal at a time when the war in Ukraine has pushed tensions between Moscow and the West to the most dangerous point for more than 60 years.

Since the start of the conflict, President Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly that Russia has the biggest and most advanced nuclear arsenal in the world, and warned the West not to cross a threshold that could lead to nuclear war.

Repeated setbacks

The 35-meter-long (115 feet) RS-28 Sarmat, known in the West as Satan II, has a range of 18,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) and a launch weight of over 208 tons. Russian media say it can carry up to 16 independently targetable nuclear warheads as well as Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles, a new system that Putin has said is unmatched by Russia’s enemies.

Russia had at one point said the Sarmat would be ready by 2018, replacing the Soviet-era SS-18, but the date for deployment has been repeatedly pushed back.

Putin said in October 2023 that Russia had almost completed work on the missile. His defense minister at the time, Sergei Shoigu, said it was set to form “the basis of Russia’s ground-based strategic nuclear forces”.

IISS analyst Wright said a test failure did not necessarily mean that the Sarmat program was in jeopardy.

“However, this is the fourth successive test failure of Sarmat which at the very least will push back its already delayed introduction into service even further and at most might raise questions about the program’s viability,” he said.

Wright said the damage at Plesetsk – a test site surrounded by forest in the Arkhangelsk region, some 800 km (500 miles) north of Moscow – would also impact the Sarmat program.

The delays would put pressure on the serviceability and readiness of the ageing SS-18s the Sarmat is meant to replace, as they will have to remain in service for longer than expected, Wright said.

Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian and Soviet arms control official, said he expected Moscow to persist with the Sarmat, a product of the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau.

He said the Russian military had shown itself keen to preserve competition between rival designers and would therefore be reluctant to depend on Makeyev’s rival, the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology, as the single source of all missiles.

Police in Spain have arrested five people accused of scamming two women out of 325,000 euros ($362,000) by pretending to be Hollywood star Brad Pitt online.

Ten other people were also investigated as part of Operation Bralina, which spanned eight provinces, according to a statement from the Guardia Civil published Monday.

One woman lost 175,000 euros ($195,000) to the fraudsters, while another lost 150,000 euros ($167,000). Of that total, police managed to recover 85,000 euros ($95,000).

Both victims were contacted via a Brad Pitt fan site by fraudsters who managed to convince them that the actor wanted to invest in various projects with them, police said.

“In order to find their victims, the cyber criminals studied their social networks and put together a psychological profile of them, discovering as a result that both women were vulnerable people suffering from depression and a lack of affection,” reads the statement.

“They also used instant messaging platforms to exchange messages and emails with the two women until they thought they were chatting via WhatsApp with Brad Pitt himself, who promised them a romantic relationship and a future together.”

Both women ended up making numerous bank transfers to the person they thought was Pitt, until they realized they had been scammed and went to the police.

Investigators found that, as part of the scam, a network of bank accounts were created using fake identity documents. “Mules” were also used to help to launder money through their own bank accounts in exchange for a small payment.

China says it successfully fired an intercontinental ballistic missile into the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday, a rare public test that comes amid growing tensions with the United States and its regional allies.

An ICBM carrying a dummy warhead was launched at 8:44 a.m. Beijing time and fell into a designated area in the high seas of the Pacific Ocean, the Chinese Defense Ministry said in a statement. It did not specify the missile’s flight path or landing location.

The ministry said the launch, by the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, was part of its routine annual training and was not directed at any country or target. It comes as China and Russia conduct joint naval exercises in nearby seas close to Japan.

China “notified relevant countries in advance,” state news agency Xinhua said in a separate report, without specifying who it notified.

The launch “effectively tested the performance of weapons and equipment as well as the training level of the troops, and achieved the expected objectives,” Xinhua reported.

This is the first time China has publicly announced a successful ICBM test in the Pacific Ocean in more than four decades.

In 1980, China celebrated the successful test of its first ICBM, fired into the South Pacific from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the country’s northwestern desert.

Under leader Xi Jinping, China has bolstered its nuclear capabilities and revamped the PLA’s Rocket Force, an elite branch overseeing the country’s fast-expanding arsenal of nuclear and ballistic missiles.

In the past few years, satellite photos have shown the construction of what appears to be hundreds of silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles in China’s deserts, and the US Defense Department is predicting exponential growth in the number of nuclear warheads in Beijing’s arsenal in the next decade.

China held more than 500 operational nuclear warheads as of 2023 and will probably have over 1,000 warheads by 2030, the Pentagon said in its annual report on Beijing’s military last year.

A missile fired from Lebanon was intercepted near Israel’s economic center Tel Aviv on Wednesday, Israel’s military said, in a rare attack far from the front lines of the conflict with Hezbollah.

“Following the sirens that sounded in the Tel Aviv and Netanya areas, one surface-to-surface missile was identified crossing from Lebanon and was intercepted by the IDF Aerial Defense Array,” the Israeli military said.

There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

Since the outbreak of conflict between Israel and Hamas last October, Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets and drones from Lebanon targeting northern Israel.

The missile intercept comes days after Israeli strikes targeting the militant group killed more than 500 people across Lebanon. Monday was the deadliest day in Lebanon in nearly two decades.

Hezbollah has not yet commented on the attempted attack on Tel Aviv.

Flights at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport continued as usual, the airport’s spokesperson said.

Sirens were heard Wednesday in the central city of Netanya for the first time since October 7, 2023, according to Israeli authorities.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Money is often tight for university students, but for Chinazom Arinze, a limited income was an opportunity that sparked a business venture.

While studying law at Babcock University, in Nigeria, and working part-time at a car dealership, she set up a side hustle, informally launching AutoGirl in 2019. Initially also a car dealership, it evolved into a platform that connects people looking to rent out their vehicles with people who want to hire them.

“I think I was about 19 or 20 at the time,” Arinze recalls. “I was just doing it because it was fun, and it did bring some money, but then it grew a lot larger than I expected. I started getting consistent customers.

“I started my business with zero money; the only thing that I had leverage upon was connections. I used my network from the car dealership I worked in, and social media.”

Arinze says she knew car owners who wanted to monetize their vehicles and knew she could match them with people looking for short-term hires, especially tourists. While there are established car rental companies in Nigeria, such as Hertz and Budget, Autogirl’s vehicles come with drivers, and Arinze says her company offers a greater range of cars and “competitive prices.”

One of the cheapest rentals on Autogirl’s website at the time of writing was a Hyundai, priced at 45,000 naira ($27) per day, and one of the most luxurious was a 2018 Lexus, costing approximately 2.85 million Naira ($1,722) per day. The company lists the average income for its vehicle owners as 7 million naira ($4,230) per car.

As her side hustle grew into a thriving business, Arinze realized she couldn’t do things alone.

“For a good few years, it was just me. I was the secretary, I was the social media manager, I was everything … I was working around the clock,” says Arinze, now aged 26. “The only time I wasn’t working was when I was sleeping and even then, if a customer had an issue at night, I was the only person, so I’d be the one they would call and I’d have to resolve it.

“I had to start bringing people on. I brought (on) a social media manager, an admin manager, finance people and an operations team that works 24/7.”

Now, with more than 3,000 customers, and more than 12,000 rides under its belt, Autogirl also offers boat and even private jet rentals through its website. This June, the company expanded into Ghana and plans to launch in Benin later this year.

Empowering women

Arinze concedes that it hasn’t always been easy for her to work in a male-dominated industry. She says she took classes in auto mechanics and produced social media reviews of cars to demonstrate that she knew what she was doing: “I showed them I had knowledge and then people would say, ‘Oh, she’s not a clueless young girl.’”

To encourage other women to follow her path, Arinze recently launched the Autogirl Women Empowerment Programme, which offers free classes in driving, mechanics and affiliate marketing, and hopes to also provide internship opportunities. Arinze says they plan to train 60 women before the end of November.

Ultimately, she sees Autogirl expanding elsewhere in Africa, and eventually beyond. ‘‘We want to be the Airbnb of vehicle rentals in Africa and ultimately the world,” Arinze says.

“The way people thought that Airbnb did not have a chance because there are hotels all over the world is how people think about us and traditional car rentals — but people pay for more flexibility and variety and that’s what we offer.”

After nearly a year of fighting in Gaza, Israel is ramping up hostilities with Hezbollah in Lebanon, with covert operations targeting communications devices and a ferocious bombing campaign that has left hundreds dead.

The fight against Hamas has strained the Israeli military, with soldiers receiving little respite, officials citing army shortages, the economy facing its steepest decline in years, and growing public pressure for a ceasefire and a hostage deal.

It is unclear whether Israel intends – or will feel compelled – to launch a ground invasion into Lebanon. But the question looms: Can the country take on a second front?

Since October 8, the day after Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel, there has been regular cross-border fire between Hezbollah and the Israeli military. Hezbollah first fired at Israel to protest the war in Gaza, demanding a ceasefire there as a condition to end its attacks.

The stakes were raised last week when Israel injured thousands of people across Lebanon, detonating pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah. Escalating exchanges of fire have followed.

Should Israel enter full-scale war with Hezbollah, experts say it will face a much stronger threat than Hamas – and commensurate costs.

Over the weekend, the group launched one of its deepest strikes into Israel, with the Israeli military reporting impacts in Kiryat Bialik, Tsur Shalom and Moreshet near the port city of Haifa, around 40 km (25 miles) south of the border.

The cross-border exchange over the past year has already led to more than 62,000 residents being evacuated from their homes in Israel’s north, and the deaths of 26 Israeli civilians and 22 soldiers and reservists, according to Israeli media. Ahead of the weekend’s escalation, over 94,000 had been displaced and more than 740 killed on the Lebanese side, including some 500 Hezbollah fighters, according to Reuters. Israeli strikes since Monday alone have killed at least another 558 people and led to the displacement of 16,500, according to Lebanese authorities.

Here are some of Israel’s main challenges in a potential wider conflict with Hezbollah:

A stronger enemy

Iran’s closest regional partner, the Shiite Islamist group has not only showcased more sophisticated weaponry over the past year, but it also boasts strategic depth through its allies and partners across the Middle East – including in Iraq and Yemen.

While Israel’s military capabilities have improved since its last war in Lebanon in 2006 – when the Jewish state did not yet have its Iron Dome defense system – so has Hezbollah’s arsenal.

Military analysts estimate Hezbollah to have between 30,000 and 50,000 troops, but earlier this year its leader Hassan Nasrallah claimed it has more than 100,000 fighters and reservists. The group is also believed to possess between 120,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles.

Its biggest military asset is the long-range ballistic missile, of which it is estimated to have thousands, including 1,500 precision missiles with ranges of 250–300 kilometers (155–186 miles).

During the weekend attack, Hezbollah said it targeted Israel’s Ramat David airbase with Fadi 1 and Fadi 2 missiles, longer-range weapons that are believed to have been used for the first time. The base is some 30 miles from the Lebanese border.

The Israeli military did not respond to queries about whether the base was impacted. Israeli emergency services reported that three people were wounded in the attacks.

⁠Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank in Washington DC who focuses on Iran and its proxies, said that the “warhead weight of these projectiles is reminiscent of the heavy Burkan IRAM (improved rocket assisted munition) first introduced last winter against Israel by Hezbollah, but at considerably longer range.”

Orna Mizrahi, a Hezbollah expert at INSS said that much of Israel’s ability to fight a two-front war rests on US support.

“The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) can fight both fronts for a long time, and we have the capabilities to do it if we have the ammunition from the Americans,” Mizrahi said, adding that if there is a full-scale war, the US will likely intervene to support Israel.

Israel also has a huge intelligence advantage, most notably seen in last week’s audacious attacks on Hezbollah’s communications.

Stretched military

Israel is a small state and its military manpower is not limitless. As it gears up for a possible second war, the IDF is diverting some of its key divisions from Gaza to its northern border.

“When you are fighting more than one front, you cannot invest too much in every front,” Mizrahi said. “So it will be a different way of fighting.”

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant last week said that “the center of gravity is moving north,” and that “forces, resources, energy” are now being moved.

Among those units is Israel’s elite 98th Division. Also known as Utzbat HaEsh, this paratrooper division is believed to consist of 10,000 to 20,000 troops, according to Israeli media.

Guzansky said that diverting resources toward Lebanon does not mean the Gaza war is over, but that Netanyahu feels compelled to deal with the northern front amid mounting domestic pressure to facilitate the return of evacuees from the area.

Analysts and army officials cited in Israeli media have also repeatedly said the IDF is suffering from shortages.

At the outset of the war with Hamas, the military recruited about 295,000 reservists in an effort to boost its manpower. But that number is proving insufficient.

The fighting in Gaza and elsewhere has also taken its toll on soldiers, of whom 715 have so far been killed since October 7, including in the north.

“This is the longest (war) of its kind in Israel’s history, longer than the War of Independence in 1948,” Guzansky said, adding that this is Hezbollah and Iran’s goal, “to weaken Israel gradually.”

“To fire rockets every day, on a low scale, and to occupy the IDF, to overstretch the IDF,” he said.

An economy in decline

Israel’s economy has been one of the biggest casualties of the war in Gaza, taking a sharp blow from the early days of the October 7 attack. Thousands of businesses suffered as reservists abandoned their civilian lives to take up arms, and the country’s economy is shrinking at an alarming rate.

“It’s devastating on the Israeli economy, on Israeli society,” Guzansky said, adding that the impacts will live on for years to come.

Of all 38 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Israel showed the sharpest economic slowdown between April and June of this year, the organization said in its quarterly report.

According to OECD data, Israel’s economy shrank by 4.1% in the early months of the war, and continued to contract, albeit at a slower rate, throughout the first and second quarters of 2024.

The contracting economy comes as Israel’s military spending skyrockets. Earlier this year, Amir Yaron, the governor of Israel’s central bank, warned that the war is expected to cost Israel up to 253 billion Israeli shekels ($67 billion) between 2023 and 2025, Israeli media reported. That’s almost 13% of Israel’s GDP, in addition to regular military expenditure, which has stood at an annual 4.5% to 6.5% of GDP, according to World Bank data.

An expansion of the conflict has also impacted Israel’s credit rating, making it more expensive to take on debt, with multiple rating agencies downgrading the country since the war began.

In a statement last month, credit ratings agency Moody’s warned that an all-out war with Hezbollah or Iran could have significant “credit consequences for Israeli debt issuers.”

A legitimacy crisis

A second front, especially one that could be far more damaging to Lebanon than to Israel, could be the final straw for many countries already critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, experts said.

The global sympathy that Israel received in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack has turned into sharp criticism due to Israel’s devastating reaction, as it now faces accusations of war crimes and genocide in international courts, which it strongly denies.

Domestically, while Israelis showed a greater appetite for fighting at the outset of the Gaza war, polls show that domestic support has waned over the last months.

On support for a war with Hezbollah, Israelis appear split on the matter.

A survey published by the Israel Democracy Institute think tank in July found that 42% of Israelis think their country should pursue a diplomatic agreement with Hezbollah, despite the chances of an additional conflict in the future, while 38% think Israel should pursue a military victory against the group, even at the cost of significant damage to civilian areas.

Despite the split in opinion, there is now less support for war with Hezbollah compared to responses in late 2023, the poll said.

Guzansky said that pressure for war is likely more palpable in northern Israel, where “people that don’t have businesses anymore, families (are) broken apart… people (are) being killed.”

Many of these residents, who have lived close to the frontline for nearly a year, believe that “only a full-scale war can change the reality in the north,” he added.