The prospects for progress seemed dim Monday as delegations from Russia and Ukraine met in Turkey. While the meeting marked the second round of direct peace talks in just over two weeks, it came against a backdrop of intense attacks by both sides in the more than three-year-old war.

With Russian forces having escalated drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian cities in recent weeks, Ukraine launched an attack that destroyed more than 40 Russian aircraft, hitting five separate Russian air bases in a surprise assault Sunday that represented one of the most devastating and embarrassing blows to Moscow’s war machine since Russian forces invaded Ukraine.

The Ukrainian president said the planning for the attack, called the “Spiderweb” operation, took 18 months. The operation involved 117 Ukrainian drones hitting Russian military bases across the country, from outside Moscow to Siberia.

South Koreans are overwhelmingly expected to elect as president a veteran liberal politician who has advocated for closer relations with China and North Korea over his long career. Still, political pundits and analysts in Seoul say Lee Jae-myung, who has a massive lead in most polls before the Tuesday election, lacks a mandate to change the country’s alliance with the U.S.

Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports from Seoul that Mr. Lee has raised alarm among American defense hawks. Some warn he’s too soft on China and its ruling Communist Party, and has a penchant for anti-Tokyo rhetoric that could damage the three-way security alliance that the U.S. has long sought to foster with South Korea and Japan — two of the most prominent democracies in Asia.

South Korea’s election on Tuesday is two years earlier than expected. It was moved up on the calendar because of the impeachment of conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who had promoted the three-way alliance and embraced an aggressive stance on China. 

China on Sunday accused Mr. Hegseth of pushing a “Cold War mentality” and stoking “bloc confrontation.” The allegations came on the heels of Mr. Hegseth’s speech Saturday at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, where he warned that the threat of a Chinese military strike on Taiwan could be “imminent.”

Mr. Hegseth told the summit that the Trump administration is moving to prevent an attack on Taiwan by strengthening military deterrence that will be carried out in overt and covert ways. “But if deterrence fails,” he said, “we will be prepared to do what the Department of Defense does best: fight and win, decisively.”

While Chinese military forces have dramatically increased their own activities around Taiwan and elsewhere in the region in recent years, China’s foreign ministry said Sunday that the U.S. is turning the Pacific into a “powder keg” by deploying assets to the region. Beijing warned the Trump administration to “never play with fire” over Taiwan.

Iran’s “corrupt government” wants hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions and frozen assets “lifted while being permitted to remain a threshold nuclear weapons state that threatens Israel and the rest of the region,” writes Joseph R. DeTrani, a former high-level U.S. intelligence official and opinion contributor to Threat Status.

Iran and other nonnuclear weapons states have a right to pursue peaceful civilian nuclear programs. But Tehran has a “record of subterfuge,” Mr. DeTrani writes.

“What makes Iran different from other nonnuclear weapons states,” he writes, “is that Iran is a designated state sponsor of terrorism, providing its proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis the support, weapons and training necessary to foment instability throughout the Middle East.”

Retired CIA Clandestine Services Officer Daniel N. Hoffman homes in on the history of Russian espionage inside the United States.

“This June will mark 15 years since the FBI arrested 10 Russian deep undercover intelligence officers, known as ‘illegals,’ in an exquisite Justice Department counterintelligence operation code-named ‘Ghost Stories,’” he writes.

Mr. Hoffman, an opinion contributor to Threat Status, outlines how the case undergirds “leverage” that the Trump administration should realize it has as it “seeks to negotiate a diplomatic off-ramp for Russia’s barbaric invasion and illegal occupation of Ukraine.”

• June 2-4 — AI+ Expo, Special Competitive Studies Project

• June 3 — CNAS 2025 National Security Conference | America’s Edge: Forging the Future, Center for a New American Security

• June 4 — Campus Communism: How the CCP Compromised Harvard and U.S. Higher Education, Hudson Institute

• June 4 — America’s “Golden Dome” Explained, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• June 4 — The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East with Sen. James Risch, Hudson Institute

• June 26 — The Realities of an Invasion of Taiwan, Stimson Center