Donald Trump’s mass voter turnout program in crucial battleground states is now principally being run by America Pac, the political action committee backed by the billionaire Elon Musk, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

The Trump campaign gambled with its general field operation for the 2024 cycle and outsourced it to Super Pacs, while it targeted its focus on turning out Trump supporters in rural areas who typically do not vote.

But while the Trump campaign once predicted having multiple Pacs drive the rest of the vote, with six weeks until the election, only America Pac has a material presence of 300 to 400 paid and part-time people knocking on doors in each of the seven battleground states.

America Pac also remains the only entity – Trump campaign or otherwise – with a target to do three “passes” of homes of likely Trump voters in every battleground state before election day.

Turning Point Action, run by the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk and touted by the Trump campaign, for instance, has a smaller footprint; it has a presence in Arizona and Wisconsin after dropping Georgia from its initial list.

The situation means America Pac now accounts for an outsize proportion of the unglamorous but critical work of door-knocking and canvassing Trump voters in battleground states to get them to return a ballot.

Since the Trump campaign does not have its own mass field program – it has a new model of “Trump 47 Captains”, volunteers targeting likely Trump supporters who do not typically vote – the campaign has little backup if America Pac hits snags.

Last week, America Pac fired the company it had retained in Arizona and Nevada to do door-knocking and canvassing.

The move to terminate the September Group had damaging consequences for Trump as America Pac lost several days of canvassing while they sought a replacement company, and lost at least some of the roughly 300 people they hired in each state.

The Trump campaign denied that it had a reliance on America Pac and said it had more than 27,000 volunteers working as Trump 47 Captains, the program in which ardent Trump supporters receive special Maga merchandise as they get more people to register to vote.

Each volunteer initially receives a list of 10 neighbors to mobilize. If they meet that target, the next tier involves canvassing 24 out of 50 likely Trump voters, followed by canvassing 45 out of 100 voters, with new perks at each tier.

“Team Trump has hundreds of staff and offices mobilizing hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country. That’s why everyone wants to take credit for our groundbreaking, data-enhanced, people-powered operation,” Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokesperson, said in a statement.

But a person involved with America Pac expressed skepticism about the reach of the Trump 47 captains and noted targeting just so-called low propensity voters in rural areas is no substitute for hitting doors in suburban areas and cities as well.

Separately, if Trump wins, it could be in part thanks to Musk, who has articulated wider political ambitions – he recently pitched to Trump to serve in his cabinet in a second term – and resultantly have outsized influence with Trump.

The America Pac operation was slow to get started after it scrapped its initial plans, and only started hiring employees at a rapid clip last month.

But it has since exploded in size. By retaining canvassing vendors for each battleground state, America Pac’s operation now involves hundreds of paid and part-time employees to knock on doors in an unusually aggressive get-out-the-vote effort, the person said.

In North Carolina and Michigan, America Pac’s vendor, Blitz Canvassing LLC, has hired more than 400 staffers in each state, the person said. America Pac has paid roughly $3.3m to Blitz to date, according to federal campaign finance filings.

Blitz is now also responsible for Arizona and Nevada after it was named as the successor to the September Group. It has a mandate to rehire as many of the fired 300 canvassers as possible, and in Nevada, to hit roughly 30,000 doors a day.

The retention of Blitz has been controversial inside Trump world, in part because Blitz is a subsidiary of a company called GP3 owned by the political consultants running America Pac. It has given rise to accusations that America Pac’s leadership is profiting twice.

For Pennsylvania and Georgia, America Pac has subcontracted to Patriot Grassroots LLC and paid about $2.3m to date. For Wisconsin, America Pac has subcontracted to the Synapse Group for about $468,000, according to campaign finance filings.

The model Naomi Campbell has been banned from being a charity trustee after a watchdog investigation uncovered widespread evidence of financial misconduct at the poverty relief charity she fronted for more than a decade.

Campbell was disqualified for five years after a Charity Commission inquiry found Fashion For Relief passed on only a tiny fraction of the millions it raised from star-studded celebrity fashion events to good causes.

The charity spent tens of thousands of pounds on luxury hotel rooms, spa treatments, cigarettes and personal security for Campbell, while unauthorised payments running into hundreds of thousands were made to one of Campbell’s fellow trustees, the commission said.

Nearly £350,000 was recovered by investigators from the charity and paid to Save the Children and the Mayor’s Fund for London, which reported Fashion For Relief to the regulators four years ago after fundraising partnerships went sour.

Campbell’s fellow trustee Bianka Hellmich, who the inquiry found received £290,000 in unauthorised consultancy and expenses payments from the charity over a two-year period was disqualified from being a charity trustee for nine years. A third trustee, Veronica Chou, was banned for four years.

The inquiry report uncovered a history of shambolic financial management and chaotic record-keeping at the charity, which was finally wound up in March.

The Charity Commission’s assistant director for specialist investigations and standards, Tim Hopkins, said: “Trustees are legally required to make decisions that are in their charity’s best interests and to comply with their legal duties and responsibilities. Our inquiry has found that the trustees of this charity failed to do so, which has resulted in our action to disqualify them.

“This inquiry, and the work of the interim managers we appointed to run the charity in place of the trustees, has resulted in the recovery of £344,000 and protection of a further £98,000 charitable funds. I am pleased that the inquiry has seen donations made to other charities which this charity has previously supported.”

Returning to British suburbia from the Brazilian Amazon is always disconcerting, but it has been doubly weird in the past few days because the London commuter belt has been inundated with volumes of rain that normally belong in the tropics.

Mini-tornadoes, flash floods and the dumping of a month’s worth of rain in a single day have flooded transport hubs, high street pubs, and the shrubs of semidetached homes.

If that sounds unnatural, it is. This weather does not belong in the safe, predictable, home counties of England. At least, not in a normal state of affairs.

But ever-greater combustion of fossil fuels has turned the world’s climate on its head. In the past week, the northern latitudes are behaving like the equatorial margins.

The leafy suburb of Woburn in Bedfordshire, for example, was drenched in a sky dump of more than 100mm (3.9in) of rain on Sunday, a month’s worth of rain in a day. That’s a downpour worthy of the height of the rainy season in my Amazonian home of Altamira, where I have lived for the past three years.

It felt similar too – thick dark clouds, brief intense bursts, drainage systems instantly overloaded – as I walked home on Monday evening through the avenues of Barnet. This weather doesn’t belong here, I thought.

Yet nowhere can rely on familiar patterns of rain or shine any more. That is also true of the Brazilian rainforest, which is alarmingly starved of precipitation.

Stretches of the Amazon River have dried up in the midst of a protracted drought over the past year or more. Desiccated vegetation has created tinder-like conditions. Neighbours back home send me messages warning of fires that creep closer to our community. It is a similar story in the Pantanal region, the world’s largest tropical wetland, and in the Cerrado savanna. Last week, more than 60% of Brazil was enveloped in smoke.

The messed-up mess we call a climate becomes more deadly every day in ever-wider swathes of the world. In the past week, floods have killed at least 384 people in Myanmar, 21 in central Europe, 10 in Morocco and six in Japan.

Social media timelines are filled with anomalous mobile phone photographs of torrents of water flowing in all the wrong places: the Sahara in north Africa, the streets of Cannes in the French Riviera, and through road tunnels under railway bridges in Slough, England.

The latter brought to mind the opening lines of John Betjeman’s 1937 poem, Slough, which decried the unthinkingly grim expansion of industrial parks, air conditioning and labour-saving homes in the run-up to the second world war:

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

It isn’t fit for humans now,

There isn’t grass to graze a cow.

We now live in a different time with a different threat. But there is the same sense that industrial society is inviting its own destruction.

The climate “bombs” that rain down on today’s world are less targeted but far more explosive. Since 1971, scientists say human-caused global heating has trapped the equivalent of 380 zettajoules of energy in the Earth system, which is 25bn times the power of the “Little Boy” atomic weapon that devastated Hiroshima in 1945. This accumulation of energy, which causes more intense storms, heatwaves, floods, wildfires and droughts, continues to mushroom because carbon emissions continue to rise.

The impacts have long been felt in places such as Altamira and elsewhere in the global south, which are less responsible for this manufactured calamity but more vulnerable to its effects. Now, after two years of record global heat, even the wealthier, guiltier parts of the world are no longer protected by concrete walls and air-conditioned environments.

Suburban floods, floating Ford Fiestas, cancelled football games and other disruptions to humdrum routines are only just beginning for the middle-class in rich countries.

Will it make a difference to public opinion and government policy? I hope so, but I wouldn’t bet on it. What is aberrant today may once again be normalised a year or two from now, further postponing the eradication of fossil fuels and forest burning, further turning the world upside down, further widening the gap between the global north and south, and making it ever stranger and more difficult for everyone to come home.

With its impressive size, striking plumage and rowdy displays, sighting a capercaillie is many birders’ dream. Only about 530 of the large woodland grouse survive in the wild, most in Scotland’s Cairngorms national park.

But in recent years, those tasked with saving the species from extinction have had to walk a line between calling attention to the birds’ plight and discouraging people from seeking them out.

Although it is illegal to disturb capercaillie during the breeding season from March to August, that hasn’t deterred birders and nature photographers, motivated by the possibility of a prestigious spot – or shot. Over the 2022 season, 17 people were found on or around the “lek”, where male birds gather to compete for the attention of females in spring, says Carolyn Robertson, the project manager of the Cairngorms Capercaillie Project.

That same year, a birdwatcher was caught on camera, flushing six capercaillie from the breeding site. The man was arrested, but let go with a verbal warning. By then the damage may have already been done.

Even fleeting disruption can “make the difference between birds breeding, or not,” says Robertson. “We know that it increases their stress levels, so there’s a high chance they didn’t come back to the area to breed that morning; they might not have returned for days.”

With so few birds remaining in the wild, human disturbance could be “catastrophic” for the species, Robertson says – but discouraging nature enthusiasts from seeking them out has proved challenging. “When people have taken photographs of capercaillie and put them online, they’ve been liked thousands of times. By the time we ask them to take them down, it’s got them so much kudos, they don’t want to do so.”

It reflects a new and increasing threat to vulnerable species and habitats around the world: social media. A new paper in the Science of The Total Environment journal has highlighted the negative impacts of online posting and photography on biodiversity.

By calling attention to rare flora and fauna – and in some cases their precise locations – nature enthusiasts posting about finds can cause others to flock to the same location, and even to deploy unethical tactics (such as playing back bird calls or using bait) to secure a sighting for themselves.

Robert Davis, a senior lecturer in wildlife ecology at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia and the paper’s lead author, says the research was “driven by collective rage” at having seen pristine natural spots and vulnerable species negatively affected by visitors.

“There’s actually probably never been a time in human history where you can share information so rapidly to so many people, and with that has come this immense pressure to systems,” he says.

Populations of the critically endangered blue-crowned laughingthrush, restricted to a small area of Jiangxi province in China, are believed to have changed their nesting habits in response to “severe” disturbance from wildlife photographers.

In 2022, packs of photographers turned up in Shetland, seeking a sight of the elusive lanceolated warbler, potentially causing the bird to abandon the area. This August, a photographer was fined more than £1,600 for disturbing a nesting European honey buzzard in Wales.

In Perth, where Davis lives with his wife, Belinda, a biologist and co-author of the paper, online attention has proved especially problematic for the state’s endemic orchids. “You can track it on social media, more and more pictures being put up of the same plant,” he says.

Sometimes, one post about a flowering orchid can result in hundreds of visitors to the site, Davis says, putting the plants at risk of being damaged or poached.

The eastern Queen of Sheba orchid, which can take 10 years to bloom and is found only in a small area of south-west Western Australia, is such a desirable find for orchid hunters that plants in the wild have had to be put under protection.

“They’ve had to fence that orchid, put cameras on it and have guardians for it,” says Davis. “That really exemplifies the extreme end.”

But asking people not to seek out and post about vulnerable species is often met with resistance, says Davis. “You get a lot of pushback from people saying: ‘Why are you the gatekeeper? Everyone has a right to see this – what’s the harm in just one person?’.”

“When something’s that rare, you could single-handedly push it to extinction.”

He acknowledges that the impact on vulnerable species is minor relative to the broader threats posed by habitat loss and invasive species. But social media perpetuates the problem, Davis says. “Ultimately, it fuels demand: the rarer something is, the more people want to see it.”

It highlights a mounting conflict between conservation aims, and those invested in seeing a species before it’s too late.

James Lowen, a natural history writer based in Norfolk, says standards among nature enthusiasts have been slipping, perhaps reflecting the ease of taking and sharing photographs online.

“There are now more people whose hobby is wildlife photography, rather than wildlife watching, and I suspect that they have not been brought up with the same attention to ethics and fieldcraft.”

That threat is having to be actively managed now, among countless others. The recent rediscoveries of the Norfolk snout moth, believed to be extinct, and the ghost orchid, not seen since 2009, generated much excitement from enthusiasts – but their precise locations have had to be obscured, for fear of further disadvantaging the species, says Lowen.

“It’s a really tight balance to walk: social media is great for drawing people’s attention, but there needs to be a level of discretion.”

Lowen himself removed capercaillie from the most recent edition of his book, 52 Wild Weekends, to reflect the impact of human disturbance on their breeding success. “We all want to see capercaillie, and to see them display – they are remarkable creatures … but absolutely, birders should stay away.”

The Cairngorms Capercaillie Project, meanwhile, has sought to harness the power of social media to save the species. Last year, it launched the “Lek It Be” campaign, urging people not to go looking for the bird or to post photographs online.

Robertson says it has already had a positive effect, with 55% fewer birders, photographers and guided groups observed around lek sites this season.

While the bird-watching community has backed the campaign, photographers have been less responsive, Robertson says – perhaps reflecting their different motivations. “Birders will talk about it, and tick a list … but [photographers] need that output, the shot – that’s what they’re there for,” she says.

Now the worst offenders may find themselves on the other end of the lens. Last year, the Cairngorms Capercaillie Project posted a video of two men caught looking for capercaillie on the lek, to discourage others from doing the same. The intent wasn’t to publicly shame them, Robertson says. “It’s about developing a social norm. We just don’t look for capercaillie any more – we leave them in peace.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

Botanists are partnering with flying paramotorists to survey rare vegetation in one of the most fragile and inaccessible landscapes in the world.

Paramotoring is a slightly eccentric way of getting around, but with a small engine strapped to their back and suspended from a paraglider, paramotorists can travel faster than walking, in a way that is far more environmentally friendly than heading into fragile ecosystems driving a 4×4. The travel method is lower in CO₂ emissions too, according to a study in the journal Plants, People, Planet.

Following a partnership between scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and from conservation group Huarango Nature, and professional paramotorists, a team of researchers were able to study plants in the coastal fog oasis deserts of Peru, a habitat that botanists have not previously been able to explore.

Known as “lomas” in Peru and “oases de niebla” in Chile, fog oases stretch some 3,000km along the Pacific coast of South America. These delicate ecosystems are home to more than 1,700 plant species, many of which are rare or endemic, and include some that rely on moisture from the Pacific fogs to survive in a land of virtually no rainfall.

Off-road vehicles can increase erosion and destroy such habitats, so four paramotorists were trained by Kew and Huarango Nature scientists in how to identify, collect and georeference the target plant species.

In November 2022, the scientists and the paramotorists from the French not-for-profit Forest Air and the Brazilian paramotor team Aita surveyed more than 15,000 hectares during a seven-day mission combining and comparing land and air efforts.

On average, the paramotorists completed their missions 4.5 times faster than the 4×4-driving ground crews. On longer missions, the ground team produced three times more CO₂ than the flying teams. Paramotorists were also able to survey specific regions not distinguished by drones or unmanned aerial vehicles.

The paramotorists made negligible impact on the fragile desert surface, leaving only a few footprints on take-off and landing. Conversely, the authors demonstrated that 4×4 vehicles damaged an area equivalent to a football pitch for every 5km driven.

Dr Justin Moat, the senior research leader at RBG Kew, said it would have taken a major expedition to reach large areas of endemic vegetation in the Peruvian desert. “Meanwhile, the paramotorists had flown great distances and returned with plant specimens and aerial photographic evidence of the vegetation within the space of two hours,” he said.

Mike Campbell-Jones, the president of Forest Air, said: “As a pilot, with many years’ experience, I have never been so motivated on a mission task or learned as much about our planet as seeing one of its most fragile ecosystems through the eyes of a scientist. The flights we made on this expedition as the Forest Air team were the most memorable of my long and colourful life.”

A notorious murderer who battered a teenage boy to death after raping him has been killed while serving a long jail stint for the “brutal and horrific” attack.

Aymen Terkmani has died in the maximum-security Lithgow correctional centre after an assault on Wednesday that left the 31-year-old critically injured.

The inmate was given medical help but paramedics declared him dead, Corrective Services New South Wales said on Thursday.

Prison authorities and NSW police are investigating.

Terkmani was serving a minimum 33-year sentence for the 2015 murder and sexual assault of 16-year-old Mahmoud Hrouk.

The teenager’s brother spotted his bloodied, half-naked body through the window of an abandoned home in Sydney’s Fairfield East the day after Mahmoud told his mother in a cut-off call that he was with his “friend Aymen”.

Terkmani’s sentencing judge, the NSW supreme court justice Lucy McCallum, said in 2017 that the then-21-year-old had subjected the youth to “unspeakable violence”.

“The offender subjected the victim to the most brutal and horrific attack, inflicting injuries too numerous to list and too gruesome to describe,” McCallum said as she sentenced him to a maximum term of 45 years.

Prosecutors had called for Terkmani to receive a life sentence.

The US Senate has voted unanimously to hold the CEO of Steward Health Care in criminal contempt for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena – marking the first time in more than 50 years that the chamber has moved to hold someone in criminal contempt.

On Wednesday, the Senate voted to hold Ralph de la Torre in contempt of Congress after the 58-year-old head of the Massachusetts-based for-profit healthcare system – which declared bankruptcy earlier this year – ignored a congressional subpoena and failed to appear at a hearing over the hospital chain’s alleged abuse of finances on 12 September.

During Wednesday’s session, Bernie Sanders, Vermont senator and chair of the Senate’s health, education, labor and pensions (Help) committee, said: “The passage of this resolution by the full Senate will make clear that even though Dr de la Torre may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even though he may be able to buy fancy yachts and private jets and luxurious accommodations throughout the world, even though he may be able to afford some of the most expensive lawyers in America, no, Dr de la Torre is not above the law.

“If you defy a congressional subpoena, you will be held accountable, no matter who you are or how well-connected you may be,” Sanders said.

Similarly, Bill Cassidy, Louisiana senator and ranking member of Help, said: “Steward’s mismanagement has nationwide implications affecting patient care in more than 30 hospitals across eight states.

“Through the committee’s investigation, it became evident that a thorough review of chief executive officer Dr Ralph de la Torre’s management decisions was essential to understand Steward’s financial problems and its failure to serve its patients,” Cassidy said of De la Torre, who was paid at least $250m by Steward Health Care as the hospital chain’s administrators struggled with facility problems, staffing shortages and closures.

Investigations by the Boston Globe revealed that as more than a dozen Steward Health Care patients died in recent years after being unable to receive adequate treatment, De la Torre embarked on various jet travels and private yacht excursions across the Caribbean and French Riviera.

The Boston Globe also revealed that De la Torre frequently used the hospital chain’s bank account as his own, including to make purchases to renovate an €8m ($8.9m) apartment in Madrid and to make donations of millions of dollars to his children’s private school.

In July, the outlet reported that the justice department was investigating Steward Health Care for potential foreign corruption violations. It also reported that a federal grand jury in Boston was investigating the hospital chain’s financial dealings including its compensations for top executives.

During Wednesday’s session, the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey condemned what he called a “culmination of a financial tragedy over the past decade”.

“Steward, led by its founder and CEO Dr Ralph de la Torre and his corporate enablers, looted hospitals across the country for their own profit, and while they got rich, workers, patients and communities suffered, nurses paid out of pocket for cardboard bereavement boxes for the babies to help grieving parents who had just lost a newborn,” said Markey.

“Dr de la Torre is using his blood-soaked gains to hide behind corporate lawyers instead of responding to the United States Senate’s demand for actions. But while he tries to run and hide, Dr de la Torre is revealing himself for what he truly is – a physician who places personal gain over his duty to do no harm,” he added.

The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, has demanded that Ukraine fire its ambassador to Washington as the feud between Donald Trump and Volodymr Zelenskyy escalated and Republicans accused the Ukrainian leader of election interference.

In a public letter, Johnson demanded that Zelenskyy fire the Ukrainian ambassador, Oksana Markarova, over a visit to a munitions factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, last week where the Ukrainian president thanked workers for providing desperately needed shells to his outgunned forces.

Johnson complained that Markarova had organised the visit to the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant as a “partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats”. The event was attended by the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who has campaigned in support of Kamala Harris.

“The facility was in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a top political surrogate for Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because – on purpose – no Republicans were invited,” Johnson wrote in a letter on congressional letterhead addressed to the Ukrainian embassy.

“The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference,” the letter continued. “This shortsighted and intentionally political move has caused Republicans to lose trust in Ambassador Markarova’s ability to fairly and effectively serve as a diplomat in this country. She should be removed from her post immediately.”

On the same day, Trump in a campaign event in North Carolina attacked Zelenskyy directly and accused him of “refusing” to negotiate a peace deal with Vladimir Putin.

“The president of Ukraine is in our country. He is making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me,” Trump said. “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal: Zelenskyy.”

The accusations against Zelenskyy came after a controversial interview with the New Yorker in which he questioned Trump’s plan to end Ukraine’s war with Russia and sharply criticized Republicans’ vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, as “too radical”.

Vance had earlier said a peace in Ukraine could entail Russia retaining the Ukrainian land it had occupied and the establishment a demilitarised zone with a heavily fortified frontline to prevent another Russian invasion.

“His message seems to be that Ukraine must make a sacrifice,” Zelenskyy said in the interview with the New Yorker. “This brings us back to the question of the cost and who shoulders it. The idea that the world should end this war at Ukraine’s expense is unacceptable. But I do not consider this concept of his a plan, in any formal sense.”

After addressing the United Nations general assembly on Wednesday, Zelenskyy is expected to travel to Washington to present his “victory plan” to Joe Biden at the White House.

In his letter, Johnson also referred to Ukrainian officials criticizing Trump and Vance in remarks to the media.

“Additionally, as I have clearly stated in the past, all foreign nations should avoid opining on or interfering in American domestic politics,” he said. “Support for ending Russia’s war against Ukraine continues to be bipartisan, but our relationship is unnecessarily tested and needlessly tarnished when the candidates at the top of the Republican presidential ticket are targeted in the media by officials in your government.”

Other top Republicans had criticized Zelenskyy this week after his remarks about Trump and Vance were published.

“I don’t mind him going to a munitions plant thanking people for helping Ukraine. But I think his comments about JD Vance and President Trump were out of bounds,” said the Republican senator Lindsey Graham, according to US-based Punchbowl News.

“With conservatives, it’s going to hurt Ukraine,” Graham said.

Vladimir Putin has escalated his nuclear rhetoric, telling a group of senior officials that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if it was attacked by any state with conventional weapons.

His remarks on Wednesday came during a meeting with Russia’s powerful security council where he also announced changes to the country’s nuclear doctrine.

The comments marked Russia’s strongest warning yet to the west against allowing Ukraine to launch deep strikes into Russian territory using long-range western missiles.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has been asking for months for permission to use British Storm Shadow missiles and US-made Atacms missiles to hit targets deeper inside Russia.

Putin said that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if Moscow received “reliable information” about the start of a massive launch of missiles, aircraft or drones against it.

Putin also warned that a nuclear power supporting another country’s attack on Russia would be considered a participant in aggression, issuing a thinly veiled threat to the west as foreign leaders continue to mull whether to allow Ukraine to use long-range weapons.

Putin said the clarifications were carefully calibrated and commensurate with the modern military threats facing Russia. “We see the modern military and political situation is dynamically changing and we must take this into consideration. Including the emergence of new sources of military threats and risks for Russia and our allies,” he said.

Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, dismissed the new nuclear doctrine, saying: “Russia no longer has any instruments to intimidate the world apart from nuclear blackmail. These instruments will not work.”

Several influential foreign policy hawks have previously pressed Putin to adopt a more assertive nuclear posture towards the west, lowering its threshold for using nuclear weapons in order to deter the west against providing more direct military support to Ukraine.

The current doctrine was set out by Putin in June 2020 in a six-page decree.

In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin frequently invoked Moscow’s nuclear arsenal, the world’s biggest, repeatedly pledging to use all means necessary to defend Russia.

He later seemed to moderate his rhetoric, but officials close to the Russian president have recently warned Nato countries they risked provoking nuclear war if they gave the green light for Ukraine to use long-range weapons.

Earlier this month, Putin said that the west would be directly fighting with Russia if it gave such permission to Ukraine – and that Russia would be forced to make “appropriate decisions”, without spelling out what those measures could be.