SWITZERLAND - Volodymyr Zelensky said Europe was weak and fragmented in a speech at Davos, attacking its leaders for being too indecisive to stand up to Russia, China or Donald Trump. The Ukrainian president said European powers were too busy arguing among themselves to join together and become a “truly global power”. In a remarkably aggressive address to the World Economic Forum on Thursday, he said the countries funding the Ukrainian war effort “love to discuss the future but avoid taking action today”. He singled out the decision to send “40 soldiers” to Greenland as insufficient to protect the island. The Ukrainian president mocked European nations for sending too few troops to the island for any meaningful defence. “Forty soldiers will not protect anything,” he said. “What message does that send to Putin, to China – and even more importantly, what message does that send to Denmark, your close ally?”

SWITZERLAND - The audience in Davos this week enjoyed the privilege of hearing one of the most statesmanlike speeches delivered in years by a national leader. The world is “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition”, said the speaker. We are witnessing “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics is submitted to no limits, no restraints… there is a strong tendency for countries to go along, to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will bring safety. Well, it won’t.”

USA - Trump: Watching Iran closely, we have a massive armada heading in that direction. Trump added that he threatened Iran with US airstrikes if the Islamic Republic's regime carried out hangings of protesters and political dissidents as planned, and Tehran backed down as a result. "We're watching Iran. We have a lot of ships going that direction just in case... We have a massive fleet heading in that direction, and maybe we won't have to use it. We'll see." He also threatened that the administration would set a 25% tariff on anyone dealing with Iran. This will take effect "very soon," he warned.

SWITZERLAND - US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace is taking shape. It was launched in Davos at the World Economic Forum on Thursday with a signing ceremony for its charter members. This is an important move for the US administration and provides an opportunity to cement the initiatives that Trump has pursued. The Trump doctrine in his second term has focused heavily on ending conflicts around the world. He claims to have helped end eight conflicts. The Israel-Hamas War is one of the most important. While in Switzerland, Trump said, “Once this board is completely formed, we can do pretty much whatever we want to do. And we’ll do it in conjunction with the United Nations.” Much work remains to be done now that the board is being formed. It remains to be seen whether more European countries will join. It is also unclear if other large countries, such as Russia, will join.

SWITZERLAND - It was the morning after the night before, and the world leaders who were still assembled at Davos dutifully approached and took a seat next to the commander-in-chief at the top table. There were a few whispered words with the boss, a pat on the back for some as they signed a large book, and off they went, the first members of President Trump’s Board of Peace. If 24 hours can be a long time in politics, the last day at Davos had been an eternity as the world turned on Trump’s every whim. It was at about 9 pm on Wednesday evening, just as diplomats were settling down for another glass of chilled Riesling, that the biggest bombshell broke. A few hours after Trump ruled out military intervention in Greenland (itself a bombshell), it emerged that he was dropping his threat of tariffs against EU countries too. You could almost hear the sighs of relief across the mountain village. “The worst has been avoided,” said one diplomat, after a week of high theatrics on all sides.

SWITZERLAND - Donald Trump's quest to gain control of Greenland appeared to have taken a leap forward at a high-stakes showdown with America's European allies in Davos. And it was the result of a familiar Trump negotiation strategy. Before his appearance at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort on Wednesday, Trump started by setting out a maximalist position that would cause widespread outrage. The president suggested he might invade the icy wasteland, which would constitute an attack on NATO ally Denmark, of which Greenland is an autonomous territory.

SWITZERLAND - NATO secretary general Mark Rutte has delivered a reality check to Donald Trump, telling him that one NATO soldier died for every two Americans in Afghanistan after the US President doubted the Western alliance. Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland yesterday, Trump said, 'I'm not sure that they'd be there for us if we gave them the call', as he tried to rally momentum for his now-abandoned plan to acquire Greenland from Denmark. 'I know them all very well. I’m not sure that they’d be there. I know we’d be there for them. I don’t know that they would be there for us,' the US President said.

GREENLAND - Greenland’s importance has not changed, even if the recent spotlight makes it feel that way. The island sits astride the shortest route between North America and Eurasia. That means that any long-range missile, bomber, or hypersonic system launched between the US and Russia would need to pass near or directly over Greenland. From Washington’s point of view, it’s a strategic necessity rather than a diplomatic provocation, and the island plays a key role in the defence of North America. Greenland is also part of the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap, a North Atlantic corridor that’s long been used to track Russian submarine movements from the Arctic into the Atlantic. During the Cold War, this choke point was critical for tracking Soviet naval assets – and it’s becoming so again.

SWITZERLAND - BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink - the new "mayor of Davos" after founder Klaus Schwab resigned last April - used the opening of the World Economic Forum this week to deliver an unusually stark warning to the global elite: Artificial intelligence, if left on its current trajectory, risks deepening inequality, hollowing out the professional class and becoming the next great failure of modern capitalism. “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than in any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies, that wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain,” Mr Fink said, adding "Most of the people affected by what we talk about here will never come to this conference. That’s the central tension of this forum: Davos is an elite gathering trying to shape a world that belongs to everyone."

USA - New York Times bestselling author and Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer details in his new book how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “using our openness and generosity against us” by sending thousands of future military pilots posing as civilians to the United States to learn how to fly. Schweizer’s latest exposé, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon, delves into the little-known concern of Chinese pilots being sent to the US for training with “virtually no oversight” before returning and serving in their own country’s military. “The People’s Republic of China has a pilot problem,” the investigative journalist writes in The Invisible Coup. “Beijing needs five thousand pilot cadets every year to meet the demand for both military and civilian pilots. Because the Chinese military tightly controls the country’s airspace, it can domestically produce only about 1,200 pilots a year. So, Beijing quietly erected a system to train three thousand of them a year in the United States.”

USA - With many Americans still recovering from multiple blasts of snow and unrelenting freezing temperatures in the nation’s northern tier, a new storm is set to emerge this weekend that could coat roads, trees and power lines with devastating ice across a wide expanse of the South. The storm arriving late this week and into the weekend is shaping up to be a “widespread potentially catastrophic event from Texas to the Carolinas,” said Ryan Maue, a former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It is likely to expand as far south as Texas and into the East. The storm has been named Winter Storm Fern by The Weather Channel. According to The Weather Company forecasters, Fern could affect over 180 million in the US with snow and/or ice, over half the nation’s estimated population.

USA - A “devastating pest” known as the New World screwworm is dangerously close to the United States, American health officials warn. The parasitic screwworm has been found in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which is just across the border from Texas. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health alert Tuesday advising health departments stay ready to identify the screwworm and treat cases if they see them. The New World screwworm flies lay their eggs in animals’ wounds, noses, ears, eyes or mouths. Their eggs develop into parasitic larvae, or maggots, that feed on the surrounding flesh as they burrow deeper. The CDC says the screwworm primarily impacts livestock animals, but the flies can lay eggs on any warm-blooded animals, including people and pets.

UK - The Royal Navy is to turn its back on the Middle East as its last remaining ship in the region sails home. HMS Middleton is Britain’s sole vessel in the region following the decommissioning of frigate HMS Lancaster late last year. However, the minehunter, which is almost 42 years old, is expected to return to the UK this year, potentially as early as March. There are no plans to replace the ship, which is based in Bahrain, leaving Britain without a fighting presence in the Gulf for the first time since 1980. The move has been branded a “terrible error” by a former head of the Navy, while defence analysts warned it signalled an end to Britain as a “global” naval force. “The idea of global Britain is all but over. On the size of the Navy we have got, it is simply not doable.” That end of Britain’s Gulf presence could have far-reaching diplomatic and operational consequences.

GERMANY - Germany is rearming – and fast. It is a sentence that would have been impossible to imagine a decade ago. And one that, a few decades ago, might have sent shivers down your spine. But today, we live in a different world. A world where Russia’s war machine is up and running and poses a threat to all of Europe. When Olaf Scholz, the then-chancellor, made a speech in February 2022, just a few days after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he acknowledged: “We are living through a watershed era… And that means that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.” It became known as his “zeitenwende” or “turning point” speech. Ulrike Franke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told The Telegraph’s Battle Lines podcast: “I think it really is important to note how much of an earthquake this zeitenwende speech was. It rang in a new era in terms of how Germany even discusses military and the armed forces and all of that.”

UK - The Royal Navy has nine nuclear-powered submarines. Four of them are the Vanguard class, tasked with providing the nation’s strategic deterrent and armed with Trident nuclear ballistic missiles for this purpose. They are entirely taken up by that task. The other five subs are the Astute class, conventionally armed, nuclear-powered attack boats: the only other submarines that we have. Just one of the Astute boats, HMS Anson, is believed to be fit for sea at the moment. She departed Faslane naval base in Scotland on January 10 and she has just arrived for a port call in Gibraltar. Soon she will depart, headed for Perth in Australia, to join the Submarine Rotational Force (West) as part of the trilateral Australia, UK and US (Aukus) submarine agreement.