The news that Ukraine is using British-made drones in its deep strike campaign has prompted scornful words from Russia and talk of potential retaliation.
British drones including the Callen-Lenz Nyan have been used in Ukraine’s recent attacks well inside Russia, which have hit targets from oil refineries to retail warehouses.
Moscow is angry about the way the West is funding and arming the strikes, but has spun the story as good news: London is providing drones because it recognises that Ukraine is making no progress on the battlefield. According to one of the so-called , pro-war social media commentators, “Kyiv’s British puppet-masters are trying desperately to delay a Ukrainian defeat.”
Why average house price plunged by £7,360 in August
Average house prices nosedived by more than £7,000 this month- marking the biggest August price fall since 2018, according to new figures.
Property site Rightmove said asking prices fell by 2 per cent, or £7,360 month-on-month.
Rightmove downgrades annual house price projections
While prices usually fall in August, this is a much bigger drop than the 10-year average of 1.3 per cent.
The figures prompted Rightmove to downgrade its annual house price forecast for 2026 from a 2 per cent increase to between 0 and a 2 per cent fall.
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What is influencing the figures?
The average asking price for a home in Britain stood at £364,999 in August – 1 per cent lower than a year ago.
And it’s all down to the supply.
- The number of available homes for sale is at a 12-year high for this time of year.
- This, combined with the quiet summer holiday period, has led to lower price expectations from sellers.
- Colleen Babcock, a property expert at Rightmove, said the larger-than-usual price drop is a sign sellers are pricing much more competitively from the offset.
- “Buyers have the widest choice of homes for sale at this time of year in more than a decade, so standing out on price for the right reasons is hugely important,” she said.
A regional divide in property prices
But not everywhere is experiencing a dampening in property prices – as usual, there is a regional divide, Rightmove said.
In the North West of England, average asking prices are up by 1.9 per cent annually, beating out homes in London where prices have sunk by 3.1 per cent on average.
- The depressed figures follow a “mini bounce” in buyer demand since Andy Burnham became PM.
- Buying activity, however, remains roughly 10 per cent below 2025 levels due to the changing picture for mortgage rates, geopolitical uncertainty and October’s Budget spooking potential buyers.
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Everything you need to know about Reform’s welfare overhaul
Reform UK is preparing to unveil the biggest shake-up of the welfare system “in a generation”, with plans to abolish personal independence payments (PIP) for working-age adults and save an estimated £50bn a year.
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‘We will not pretend this is painless’
Nearly three million people would see their disability or sickness payments withdrawn or changed under the plans.
The party’s treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick, set out the proposals in an article for , ahead of a full 50-page policy paper due on Monday. He has acknowledged the human cost directly, writing: “We will not pretend this is painless.”
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What is Reform proposing?
- Reform would scrap PIP and the health element of universal credit for working-age adults. Both would be replaced with a new “health security allowance”, a single, regularly reviewed payment.
- Only claimants with “severe, enduring and high-risk” conditions would qualify for that cash support.
- Everyone else currently receiving disability-related payments would lose their cash entitlement altogether.
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A closer look at the detail
Those who would lose access to payments would instead be supported through council-run disability support accounts.
Reform estimates that 2.16 million would keep their present cash entitlement in full, while 2.89 million would see theirs modified or withdrawn.
Child payments impacted
- The party plans to extend the same approach to children’s benefits, aligning the system for anxiety, depression and ADHD with the adult changes, though only for new claimants.
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Plans modelled on Dutch system
Reform would also place a new obligation on businesses with more than five staff to take out “return to work cover” insurance, which would pay for the cost of an employee’s first two years off sick, rather than the state covering that cost through benefits.
The scheme is modelled on the Dutch system, where Reform argues disability benefit applications fell by 40 per cent after similar reforms were introduced.
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Scientists hail malaria breakthrough – what we know
A new compound has been hailed “an exciting step forward” in the fight against malaria – which kills hundreds of thousands of people each year.
Researchers at the University of Dundee, who discovered the compound, say it has the potential to simplify dosing regimens for the treatment and prevention of the illness.
A ‘novel drug-like molecule’
The new compound, called cabamiquine, is described as a “novel drug-like molecule” that can be delivered in a single dose.
An early-stage clinical trial showed that when administered with a commonly used antimalarial drug called pyronaridine, it is both effective and has a favourable safety profile in adults and adolescents.
Larger trials on the horizon
The team said the findings support the development of the combination therapy for larger trials and children.
In 2024, there were an estimated 282 million cases of malaria and 610,000 deaths from the disease worldwide. Figures have been rising in part due to resistance to common malaria medicines.
An ‘exciting step forward’
This is an exciting step forward for a compound which has great potential to simplify dosing regimens for , a disease which causes hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. We are delighted to see how the compound… is progressing into a potential medicine.
Dr Beatriz Baragana, a member of the Dundee University team that discovered cabamiquine
The ultra-nationalist news site cited one defence expert saying that use of British attack drones against Russia was “an open secret”, with another adding that so long as Britain was not actually sending troops, this was simply business as usual.
British weapons have been used by Ukraine since the start of the war, when NLAW (Next-Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon) shoulder-fired missiles proved highly effective against the invaders’ tanks. More recently, air-launched Storm Shadow cruise missiles were used to strike targets on Russian soil.
Only a few hundred Storm Shadows were provided, simply because the UK’s total stocks at the time were under a thousand. However, these drones represent a qualitatively different factor, accurate, easy to launch and relatively cheap.
The Storm Shadows supplied to Ukraine cost around £1m each and have a maximum range of around 150 miles; a Nyan has a similar range but costs under £100,000. Furthermore, while Storm Shadows need to be launched from a specially-rigged Su-24 bomber, which can be shot down beforehand, the Nyan is projected from a mobile, ground-based catapult.
Of course, no one weapons system is a game changer. Nonetheless, given the tempo of Ukraine’s drone campaign against medium- and long-range targets inside Russia, Britain’s promise to Kyiv that it will provide it with over 150,000 drones of various types over a year is a powerful practical gesture.
The Kremlin’s defence experts and intelligence agencies have known for months about the use of British-made drones against it, but now it has become public knowledge, it must decide how to respond.
Moscow has ways in which it could respond over and above the existing arm’s length campaigns of cyberattacks and disinformation. Vladimir Putin openly describes his “special military operation” as having become a proxy war with Europe, and many in Russia believe that Western companies supplying Ukraine should be considered legitimate military targets.
Last week, explosions ripped through two European facilities involved in supplying Ukraine: an arms depot in Bulgaria on Monday, a factory producing artillery rounds outside Rome on Thursday. In both cases, the authorities are still investigating the causes, but they have highlighted concerns that Russia could escalate its campaign of sabotage against European factories and supply lines.
An alleged 2024 plot to murder Armin Papperger, CEO of Germany’s Rheinmetall arms corporation was disrupted, but there continues to be the threat that Moscow could go after the directors and engineers of companies actively seeking to supply Ukraine.
However, any escalation would be risky and would generate a Western response in return.
Given the inflammatory nature of Russian rhetoric these days, as well as the rock-bottom state of the relationship between London and Moscow, it is perhaps surprising that the Kremlin is not making more of the news about British-made drones. The initial decision seems to have been to downplay it, while hinting at possible retaliation somewhere down the line.
The Kremlin is increasingly wary of public opinion in the run-up to September’s elections. Yabloko – the only party with a clear anti-war platform and even the faintest chance of getting the 5 per cent of the vote needed to make it into parliament – was last week barred from the ballot on very questionable grounds. There is no question that Putin was behind this, even if formally it was a decision by the Supreme Court.
The Kremlin seems at present unwilling to move beyond rhetoric. There is already a growing anti-war sentiment inside the country and his political technologists don’t want to rock the boat before next month’s parliamentary elections. It is not that they won’t be rigging those elections – they will – but that they don’t want to have to do so any more than absolutely necessary.
Despite Ukraine’s deep strike campaign, Putin seems to believe that this winter will allow him to force Kyiv into concessions, as his missiles hammer Ukraine’s already-degraded electricity grid and water supplies. He may feel differently if he has made no real progress by spring, and if more British drones are darkening his skies. For now, though, it would seem that he does not want to introduce yet another unpredictable variable into the equation by, as he sees it, punishing Britain.