View from London | The National

Hello from The National and welcome to the View from London – your weekly guide to the big stories from our London bureau Marking 1,000 days of war is not something anyone wants to contemplate. But no-one could have planned the rush of events surrounding the Ukraine-Russia war milestone on Tuesday. Ukraine used the ATACMS weapons for the first time in the Bryansk border region. The US granted Kyiv limited permission to use ATACMS – which stands for Army Tactical Missile Systems and is pronounced “attack-ems" – inside Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin updated Russia's nuclear doctrine to respond to any “massive conventional attack” with its nuclear weapons. The decree says that an attack against Russia by a non-nuclear power with the “participation or support of a nuclear power” will be seen as their “joint attack on the Russian Federation”. Speaking in Warsaw with his colleagues from Italy, France, and Germany, Poland's Foreign Affairs Minister Radek Sikorski said their meeting sent a “clear message of unity and solidarity with the Ukrainian people”. European countries have shown readiness “to take over the burden of military and financial support for Ukraine in the context of a possibly limited US commitment", Mr Sikorski said. “For the first time here in Warsaw, the five largest EU member states have said they are in favour of European bonds to finance defence. This is a real novelty.” In a joint statement, also signed by the UK and Spain, ministers said they would use “all available levers”, including the economic and financing power of the EU, to strengthen their security and defence. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy commemorated 1,000 days of war with a speech in parliament, in which he said that next year will be decisive in determining who wins the war. He also foresaw Kyiv may have to wait for the end of Mr Putin's rule in Russia to reclaim its full internationally recognised territory. “Perhaps Ukraine will have to outlast someone in Moscow to achieve all its goals,” Mr Zelenskyy said. Parliament's foreign affairs select committee is back in action this week after a hiatus for the July 4 general election. Emily Thornberry is the new chair and among the members is Abtisam Mohamed , the first MP of Yemeni descent. That heritage was relevant to the inquiry into UK soft power that the committee is conducting. I was in the stalls yesterday as she was among committee members asking about the closure of BBC Arabic radio. Even the BBC director general has acknowledged an own goal as British adversaries have taken up the medium-wave frequencies of the Arabic service in Lebanon, for example. Jamie Angus, the former director of the BBC World Service, said the move to axe the radio service and its Farsi equivalent was counter-productive, particularly at a time of digital transformation when the UK needed to keep pace with its best-funded rivals. "The World Service should be thinking about how to do transformational new technologies like AI," Mr Angus said. "The demographics in the Middle East are extraordinary. You have very young populations growing in particular in these conflict-affected areas, including in Palestine-Gaza and other countries in the region. "People will pick and choose between providers and they'll know what the source is that they're getting – and understand the assumptions behind it – but they'll kind of graze amongst multiple different providers, including BBC Arabic." A day earlier the committee heard a similar message of retreat from Philip Barton, the head civil servant at the Foreign Office. The massive cuts, mostly notably to international development spending, have had a significant impact on Britain’s “soft power”. “In some quarters we were seen as slightly having withdrawn from that area, where we were global leaders in that space,” Mr Barton told the committee, adding that at least in some areas there was rebuilding. “I think we're now stepping back into that effectively. We've lost a bit of capability and we're rebuilding that … and I think we are regaining some lost ground.” The recent budget contained an additional spending boost for the World Service. Remember the old saw that Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role in the world? Here's the thing. Even on the new frontier of the semiconductor race, this is true today. Britain has fallen behind the rest of the world in that race, not only losing out to the US and Asia but even trailing in Europe. In this strategically critical growth market, the UK has no broad, large-scale maker able to go head-to-head with Infineon in Germany, NXP in the Netherlands and the Franco-Italian STMicroelectronics. Britain did well with an outfit called Arm , whose processor is used in mobile phones and other electronic devices, but the country lacked the breadth and capacity to make this a cornerstone of a new Silicon Valley. This week Chris Blackhurst picks up on a Policy Exchange report that recommends the government jumps in to build UK capacity in compound semiconductors. What’s missing is an open-access foundry that could “play the same sort of role for firms that design or make compound semiconductors as silicon-based foundries play in Europe, the US and Asia." Read the write-up here .