Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of the United States has been elected the 267th pope and has stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as the new leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

He’s now known as Pope Leo XIV.

Prevost, 69, from Chicago, Illinois, is the first ever pope from the United States.

In his first words as pope, a visibly emotional Leo said to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square: “Peace be with you all.”

Addressing the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, Leo paid tribute to the late pontiff Francis, urging the crowd to remember his predecessor’s legacy before outlining his vision for the Catholic Church.

“We have to seek together to be a missionary church. A church that builds bridges and dialogue,” he said. Speaking in Italian to thousands of Catholic faithful, Leo called on people to “show our charity” to others “and be in dialog with love.”

Leo was chosen just two days after a group of 133 Cardinals gathered in conclave to select a new pontiff.

That timeline matches the previous two gatherings, suggesting that Prevost quickly impressed his peers during the secretive process.

Francis and Benedict XVI were both revealed in the evening of the conclave’s second day, while John Paul II, the longest-reigning pope of modern times, was selected on the third day in 1978.

‘An exceptional leader’

A leader with global experience, Prevost spent much of his career as a missionary in South America and most recently led a powerful Vatican office for bishop appointments. He is expected to build on Francis’ reforms.

Prevost worked for a decade in Trujillo, Peru, and was later appointed bishop of Chiclayo, another Peruvian city, where he served from 2014 to 2023. In 2015, he also received Peruvian citizenship.

The new pontiff is a member of the Augustinian religious order – which he also led for more than a decade as their prior general, which has given him leadership experience of leading an order spread across the world.

Considered a highly capable and accomplished leader, Prevost most recently led the powerful Vatican office for new bishop appointments, the Dicastery for Bishops, assessing candidates and making recommendations to the late pope. He also served as the president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.

While it is often said cardinal electors would always shy away from choosing a pope from the US, due to America’s outsized global political influence, Prevost’s long experience in Peru may have mitigated those fears among the electors.

Allen added that he is seen as an apt leader in Vatican circles because “he’s able to accomplish things without necessarily being authoritarian about the way he did things.”

“Prevost is somebody who is seen as an exceptional leader. From very young, he was appointed to leadership roles,” Allen said. “He’s seen as somebody who is calm and balanced, who is even-handed, and who is very clear on what he thinks needs to be done… but he’s not overly forceful in trying to make that happen.”

Prevost earned his bachelor’s in mathematics from Villanova University in Pennsylvania and went on receive his diploma in theology from the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago.

He was later sent to Rome to study canon law at the Pontifical Saint Thomas Aquinas University and was ordained as a priest in June 1982. Later in his career, he taught canon law in the seminary in Trujillo, Peru.

In an interview with Vatican News shortly after he became the leader of the Dicastery for Bishops, Prevost said: “I still consider myself a missionary. My vocation, like that of every Christian, is to be a missionary, to proclaim the Gospel wherever one is.”

Days of celebration

The coming days are for celebration; Leo’s name will be uttered in homilies and masses across the Catholic world, and will spark particularly joyous scenes in his home country. Adding to festivities, and to the new pope’s diary commitments, is the fact that 2025 is a jubilee year for the church – a special celebration announced by Pope John Paul II 25 years ago, which sees a busy schedule of Vatican-organized events.

But leading the largest Christian denomination through an unpredictable era will require difficult and consequential decisions. The new pope inherits a church whose image and ambitions were transformed by its predecessor; Francis pulled the priorities of the church away from social issues such as abortion, homosexuality, gender roles and contraception, advocating instead for the world’s poor, displaced and needy, and instilling a mission anchored in altruism.

Whether or not to continue that trajectory will be a defining choice for the new pontiff. Francis’ rejection of opulence and his softer tone on social issues was praised by some Western leaders, but there remains a faction in the church advocating for a stricter line on questions of sex, gender, marriage and migration.

Asked about the contributions of three women who were made members of the Dicastery for Bishops, Prevost told Vatican News: “I think their appointment is more than just a gesture on the part of the Pope to say that there are now women here, too. There is a real, genuine, and meaningful participation that they offer at our meetings when we discuss the dossiers of candidates.”

He must also choose carefully when to intervene on the world stage. Francis became increasingly political in the final years of his papacy, making the case for the rights of migrants, urging a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, and suggesting – to the ire of Kyiv – that Ukraine should wave “the white flag” and make concessions to end Russia’s war in the country.

These ongoing conflicts, and the rise of populism and authoritarianism around the world, set a complicated context in which the new pope – himself an important figure in global diplomacy – will operate.

And he must deal with crises from within, too. Francis’ failure to bring a close to the years-long scandal of child sexual abuse in the church will also reverberate through his successor’s papacy. Though he spoke defensively about his record on the matter, and took some important steps to tackle systemic issues involving abuse, the previous pope was accused by survivors’ groups of failing to hold accountable bishops and cardinals accused of covering up abuse.

Previously addressing the responsibility of combating clerical abuse, Prevost told Vatican News: “There are places where good work has already been done for years and the rules are being put into practice. At the same time, I believe that there is still much to learn.”

Last year, Francis’ commission for child protection said in its first report that parts of the church are still failing to ensure that abuse is properly reported, and raised concerns about a “lack of transparency” in how the Vatican handled cases.

The weather was bad along the front line as the hour approached. Heavy clouds and rain meant activity by the two warring parties was always likely to be on the lower side.

But as the clock approached midnight Wednesday, the time the Kremlin said its guns would fall silent for three days, the men at the National Guard monitoring center in eastern Ukraine had absolutely no faith in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ceasefire.

“My answer is simple – we don’t believe him,” said Kir, a drone special unit commander, expressing a view shared by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has repeatedly said he is only interested in an immediate 30-day pause in the fighting.

As nightfall approached Thursday, almost a full day into the Russian leader’s ceasefire, Ukrainian officials were reporting continued attacks across the front line.

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said there had been more than 500 attacks on Ukrainian troop positions over the course of the day, along with at least 10 strikes by guided aerial bombs, one of which killed a 55-year-old woman and wounded her son in the northern Sumy region.

In the southern Kherson region, a 35-year-old woman was killed in a drone strike, officials said.

Working from a nondescript building in a location we were told not to disclose, Kir and his colleagues were looking out for Russian attacks. Monitors on the desks and on the walls showed more than 100 live feeds from surveillance drones, operating across almost half the front line.

About 60 cameras were trained on the Donetsk region alone. Mavic drones only tonight, Kir explained, because of the bad weather. Usually there would be even more feeds to look at.

A few minutes after midnight, the men were reporting Russian activity. Artillery fire near Pokrovsk. A Grad rocket fired near Toretsk, and another instance of artillery fire, this time near Sloviansk. Attacks were on the low side, Kir said, though his attention was drawn to very high surveillance drone activity by Russian forces.

He was clear about Putin’s true intentions. When the Russian leader called an earlier snap ceasefire over Easter – which Ukraine said it had “mirrored” – Russia took the opportunity to re-supply positions and move troops, Kir said.

And it had benefited them, he added: “They struck successfully after Easter, and we lost some positions.”

He said he expected further infantry moves during the latest ceasefire.

The National Guardsmen had other evidence they said proved the Kremlin has absolutely no interest in peace.

Surveillance feeds have been showing them for several weeks that Russia is moving significant numbers of troops and hardware into positions just a few dozen kilometers back from the front line.

“Remember Crimea?” Kir asked, referring to Russian’s invasion of the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014, which Moscow denied at first, before moving quickly to illegally annex the territory.

“They started with a lie. And they’re still lying.”

Svitlana Vlasova contributed to this report.

The escalating conflict between India and Pakistan could be offering the world a first real glimpse into how advanced Chinese military technology performs against proven Western hardware – and Chinese defense stocks are already surging.

Shares of China’s AVIC Chengdu Aircraft rose 40% this week, as Pakistan claimed it used AVIC-produced J-10C jets to shoot down Indian fighter jets – including the advanced French-made Rafale – during an aerial battle on Wednesday.

India has not responded to Pakistan’s claims or acknowledged any aircraft losses. When asked about the involvement of Chinese-made jets, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry said on Thursday he was not familiar with the situation.

Still, as Pakistan’s primary arms supplier, China is likely watching intently to find out how its weapon systems have and potentially will perform in real combat.

A rising military superpower, China hasn’t fought a major war in more than four decades. But under leader Xi Jinping, it has raced to modernize its armed forces, pouring resources into developing sophisticated weaponry and cutting-edge technologies.

It has also extended that modernization drive to Pakistan, long hailed by Beijing as its “ironclad brother.”

Over the past five years, China has supplied 81% of Pakistan’s imported weapons, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Those exports include advanced fighter jets, missiles, radars and air-defense systems that experts say would play a pivotal role in any military conflict between Pakistan and India. Some Pakistan-made weapons have also been co-developed with Chinese firms or built with Chinese technology and expertise.

“This makes any engagement between India and Pakistan a de facto test environment for Chinese military exports,” said Sajjan Gohel, international security director at the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a think tank based in London.

Chinese and Pakistani militaries have also engaged in increasingly sophisticated joint air, sea and land exercises, including combat simulations and even crew-swapping drills.

“Beijing’s long-standing support for Islamabad – through hardware, training, and now increasingly AI-enabled targeting – has quietly shifted the tactical balance,” said Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the US-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“This isn’t just a bilateral clash anymore; it’s a glimpse of how Chinese defense exports are reshaping regional deterrence.”

That shift – brought into sharp focus by rising tensions between India and Pakistan following a tourist massacre in Kashmir – underscores a broader geopolitical realignment in the region, where China has emerged as a major challenge to American influence.

India and Pakistan have gone to war over Kashmir three times since their independence from Britain in 1947. During the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union backed India, while the United States and China supported Pakistan. Now, a new era of great-power rivalry looms over the long-running conflict between the nuclear-armed South Asian rivals.

Despite its traditional policy of nonalignment, India has drawn ever closer to the US, as successive American administrations courted the rising South Asian giant as a strategic counterweight to China. India has ramped up arms purchases from America and its allies, including France and Israel, while steadily reducing its reliance on Russian weaponry.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has deepened ties with China, becoming its “all-weather strategic partner” and a key participant in Xi’s flagship global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative. According to SIPRI’s data, the US and China each supplied about one-third of Pakistan’s imported weapons in the late 2000s. But Pakistan has stopped buying American arms in recent years and increasingly filled its arsenal with Chinese weapons.

Siemon Wezeman, a senior researcher in the SIPRI Arms Transfers Program, noted that while China has been an important arms supplier to Pakistan since the mid-1960s, its current dominance largely comes from stepping into a vacuum left by the US.

More than a decade ago, the US accused Pakistan of not doing enough to fight “terrorists” – including Taliban fighters – that it said were operating from or being supplied in Pakistan. Wezeman said that added to Washington’s existing frustrations over Islamabad’s nuclear program and lack of democracy.

“(The US) finally found India as an alternative partner in the region. As a result, (it) more or less cut Pakistan off from US arms,” he added. “China’s arms supply on the other hand significantly increased – one can say that China used the opportunity to show itself as the only real friend and ally of Pakistan.”

China has expressed regret over India’s military strikes against Pakistan and has called for calm and restraint. Before the latest escalation, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi expressed support for Pakistan in a phone call with his counterpart, calling China Pakistan’s “ironclad friend.”

Military showdown

With Pakistan armed largely by China and India sourcing more than half of its weapons from the US and its allies, any conflict between the two neighbors could effectively be a showdown between Chinese and Western military technologies.

After weeks of rising hostilities following the killing of 26 mostly Indian tourists at the hands of gunmen at a scenic mountain spot in Indian-administered Kashmir, India launched missile strikes early on Wednesday morning, targeting what it said was “terrorist infrastructure” in both Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Many analysts believe the missiles and other munitions were fired by India’s French-made Rafale and Russian-made Su-30 fighter jets.

Pakistan, meanwhile, touted a great victory by its air force, claiming that five Indian fighter jets – three Rafales, a MiG-29 and a Su-30 fighter – were shot down by its J-10C fighters during an hour-long battle it claimed was fought by 125 aircraft at ranges over 160 kilometers (100 miles).

“(It) is now being characterized as the most intense air-to-air combat engagement between two nuclear-armed nations,” said Salman Ali Bettani, an international relations scholar at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. “The engagement represented a milestone in the operational use of advanced Chinese-origin systems.”

India has not acknowledged any aircraft losses, and Pakistan has yet to provide evidence to support its claims. But a French Defense Ministry source said at least one of India’s newest and most-advanced warplanes – a French-made Rafale fighter jet – was lost in the battle.

“If … confirmed, it indicates that the weapon systems at Pakistan’s disposal are, at the minimum, contemporary or current compared to what Western Europe (especially France) offers,” said Bilal Khan, founder of Toronto-based defense analysis firm Quwa Group Inc.

Despite the absence of official confirmation and hard proof, Chinese nationalists and military enthusiasts have taken to social media to celebrate what they see as a triumph for Chinese-made weapon systems.

Shares of China’s state-owned AVIC Chengdu Aircraft, the maker of Pakistan’s J-10C fighter jets, closed 17% higher on the Shenzhen exchange on Wednesday, even before Pakistan’s foreign minister claimed the jets had been used to shoot down India’s planes. Shares in the company rose an additional 20% on Thursday.

The J-10C is the latest version of China’s single-engine, multirole J-10 fighter, which entered service with the Chinese air force in the early 2000s. Featuring better weapon systems and avionics, the J-10C is classified as a 4.5-generation fighter – in the same tier as the Rafale but a rung below 5th-generation stealth jets, like China’s J-20 or the US F-35.

China delivered the first batch of the J-10CE – the export version – to Pakistan in 2022, state broadcaster CCTV reported at the time. It’s now the most advanced fighter jet in Pakistan’s arsenal, alongside the JF-17 Block III, a 4.5-generation lightweight fighter co-developed by Pakistan and China.

The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) also operates a larger fleet of American-built F-16s, one of which was used to shoot down a Soviet-designed Indian fighter jet during a flare-up in 2019.

But the PAF’s F-16s are still stuck in an early-2000s configuration – far behind the upgraded versions currently offered by the US – while the Chinese-made J-10CEs and JF-17 Block IIIs feature contemporary technologies such as active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, Khan said.

“So, the F-16s are still a major piece to any PAF-led reprisal, but not the central or indispensable one,” he said.

Senior Col. (ret) Zhou Bo, senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy in Beijing, said if Chinese-made J-10Cs were indeed used to shoot down the French-made Rafales, it would be “a tremendous boost of confidence in Chinese weapon systems.”

Zhou said it would “really raise people’s eyebrows” particularly given China has not fought a war for more than four decades. “It will potentially be a huge boost for Chinese arm sales in the international market,” he said.

‘A powerful advertisement’

The United States remains the world’s largest arms exporter, accounting for 43% of global weapons exports between 2020 and 2024, according to data from SIPRI. That’s more than four times the share of France, which ranks second, followed by Russia.

China ranks fourth, with nearly two-thirds of its arms exports going to a single country: Pakistan.

Khan, the defense analyst in Toronto, agreed the downing, if confirmed, would go a long way in promoting China’s defense industry saying there would likely be interest from “powers in the Middle East and North Africa” who typically can’t access “the most cutting-edge Western technology.”

“With Russia set back as a result of its invasion of Ukraine, I’m sure the Chinese have begun pushing hard at Moscow’s traditional markets – e.g., Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, and Sudan – to secure big-ticket sales.”

Experts in Pakistan and China say the J-10Cs deployed by the Pakistan Air Force are likely to have been paired with the PL-15, China’s most advanced air-to-air missile – which has a reported beyond-visual-range of 200-300 kilometers (120-190 miles). The known export version has a reduced range of 145 kilometers (90 miles).

Last week, amid spiraling tensions, the Pakistan Air Force released a three-minute video showcasing its warplanes. It featured the JF-17 Block III armed with PL-15 missiles, describing them as “PAF’s potent punch”.

“From China’s perspective, this is essentially a powerful advertisement,” Antony Wong Dong, a Macau-based military observer, said of the Pakistan claims.

“It will shock even countries like the United States — just how strong is its opponent, really? This is a question that all countries potentially looking to buy fighter jets, as well as China’s regional rivals, will need to seriously reconsider: how should they face this new reality?”

But some experts have expressed caution. India’s losses, if confirmed, could stem more from poor tactics and planning by the Indian Air Force than from the perceived advancements in Chinese weapons.

“If reports of India losing multiple jets holds up, it would raise serious questions about the IAF’s readiness, not just its platforms. The Rafales are modern, but warfighting is about integration, coordination, and survivability — not just headline acquisitions,” said Singleton, the analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

What’s also not known is what intelligence India had on the PL-15.

If, for instance, it believed Pakistan only possessed the shorter-range export version, Indian aircraft might have lingered in vulnerable areas.

Rules of engagement may also have prevented Indian pilots from firing first, or firing back against Pakistani aircraft, according to Fabian Hoffman, a defense policy research fellow at the University of Oslo.

In such cases, Indian misjudgments may have made the Pakistani weaponry look more effective, Hoffman wrote on his blog.

Experts also note that India’s strikes successfully hit multiple targets in Pakistan – suggesting its missiles penetrated Pakistani air defenses, which are armed with Chinese surface-to-air missiles, including the long-range HQ-9B.

“If Chinese-origin radar or missile systems failed to detect or deter Indian strikes, that’s (also) bad optics for Beijing’s arms export credibility,” said Gohel, the defense expert in London.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken center stage at Russia’s Victory Day parade on Friday, surrounding himself by friendly world leaders in a highly choreographed show designed to show the Western world that Russia is far from isolated.

Watching as thousands of troops marched across Moscow’s Red Square, Putin stood next to his guest of honor, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

The annual May 9 commemoration of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II is one of the most important days in Putin’s calendar, and this year marks its 80th anniversary.

Traditionally, the day has been dedicated to the estimated 25 million to 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians who died during the conflict. But since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Victory Day has become more of a propaganda exercise, with Putin framing the war against Russia’s much smaller neighbor as a continuation of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War.

And while celebrations were muted in the past three years, Russia has not held back this time.

Putin and Xi were joined by scores of other world leaders, most of whom had the black and orange ribbon of Saint George pinned to their lapels. Many of them have also sent troops to march in the parade, alongside Russian servicemen.

The Russian military symbol dates back to imperial times, but it has become hugely controversial in recent years, having been coopted as a sign of support for Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine. It has been banned in a number of countries.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic, Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority were all in attendance, marking a significant upgrade to last year’s guestlist which was limited to a handful of delegations from post-Soviet states, Cuba and a few other countries.

Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia, a European Union member state, was also in Moscow on Friday. His appearance side by side with Putin was particularly significant given the EU’s tough stance against Russia over its aggression against Ukraine.

Unilateral ceasefire, breached multiple times

Last month, Putin declared a three-day unilateral ceasefire around the anniversary – an announcement that was promptly rejected by Ukraine.

“The Kremlin’s proposal for a three-day truce is not about peace, but about ensuring the safe conduct of the parade in Moscow. This is political manipulation,” Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian Presidential Office, said in a statement on Thursday.

Kyiv said that if Russia wanted a truce, it should sign up to the US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire that Ukraine has already agreed to. Russia has repeatedly refused this offer, despite multiple high-profile meetings with top US officials.

Kyiv said on Thursday that Russia had breached the ceasefire hundreds of times since it came into effect. Several civilians were killed and injured in guided bomb attacks against Ukrainian cities, Kyiv said.

Kyiv is openly indifferent to the smooth-running of Putin’s parade, saying that it “cannot be responsible for what happens on the territory of the Russian Federation” because of the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country would not be “playing games to create a pleasant atmosphere to allow for Putin’s exit from isolation on May 9.”

In the run-up to the parade, Ukraine launched several drone attacks against the Russian capital, with authorities forced to shut down all four Moscow airports on Wednesday.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania also threw in some logistical complications for international parade-goers, shutting their airspaces to diplomatic planes traveling to Moscow. Several pro-Kremlin leaders were forced to reroute their journeys to Moscow to circumvent the Baltic states.

“In Latvian society, there is a clear and principled understanding that Russian propaganda and glorification of war crimes cannot be supported or encouraged … given this context, Latvia cannot grant diplomatic overflight permits for flights facilitating participation in the 9 May event,” the Latvian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, one of the leaders affected by the closures, criticized the move, saying on Wednesday that it was “extremely disruptive.”

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic was also forced to re-route after the Baltic states said he wouldn’t be allowed to enter their airspace. According to Serbian media, he ended up flying via Baku in Azerbaijan.