More than 80 years ago, the crew of the USS New Orleans, having been hit by a Japanese torpedo and losing scores of sailors, performed hasty repairs with coconut logs, before an 1,800-mile voyage across the Pacific in reverse.

The front of the ship, or the bow, had sunk to the sea floor. But over the weekend, the Nautilus Live expedition from the Ocean Exploration Trust located it in 675 meters (2,214 feet) of water in Iron Bottom Sound in the Solomon Islands.

Using remotely operated underwater vehicles, scientists and historians observed “details in the ship’s structure, painting, and anchor to positively identify the wreckage as New Orleans,” the expedition’s website said.

On November 30, 1942, New Orleans was struck on its portside bow during the Battle of Tassafaronga, off Guadalcanal island, according to an official Navy report of the incident.

The torpedo’s explosion ignited ammunition in the New Orleans’ forward ammunition magazine, severing the first 20% of the 588-foot warship and killing more than 180 of its 900 crew members, records state.

The crew worked to close off bulkheads to prevent flooding in the rest of the ship, and it limped into the harbor on the island of Tulagi, where sailors went into the jungle to get repair supplies.

“Camouflaging their ship from air attack, the crew jury-rigged a bow of coconut logs,” a US Navy account states.

With that makeshift bow, the ship steamed – in reverse – some 1,800 miles across the Pacific to Australia for sturdier repairs, according to an account from the National World War II Museum in Louisiana.

“‘Difficult’ does not adequately describe the challenge,” Schuster said.

While a ship’s bow is designed to cut through waves, the stern is not, meaning wave action lifts and drops the stern with each trough, he said.

When the stern rises, rudders lose bite in the water, making steering more difficult, Schuster said.

And losing the front portion of the ship changes the ship’s center of maneuverability, or its “pivot point,” he said.

“That affects how the ship responds to sea and wind effects and changes the ship’s response to rudder and propellor actions,” he said.

The New Orleans’ officers would have had to learn – on the go – a whole new set of actions and commands to keep it stable and moving in the right direction, he said.

The ingenuity and adaptiveness that saved the New Orleans at the Battle of Tassafaronga enabled it to be a force later in the war.

After making it across the Pacific from Australia to the US naval yard at Puget Sound, Washington state – facing the right way this time – the New Orleans undertook permanent repairs. It later participated in actions across the Pacific, including the decisive battles of Saipan and Okinawa, which led to the US gaining airfields that enabled the final blows to be made on Imperial Japan.

The ship was awarded 17 battle stars for its actions in the Pacific, tying it for the third most such decorations in the Pacific theater, according to the World War II Museum.

The New Orleans’ bow was found during the 21-day Maritime Archaeology of Guadalcanal expedition of Iron Bottom Sound by Nautilus Live, a cooperative effort among NOAA Ocean Exploration, the Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute, the University of New Hampshire and the Naval History and Heritage Command.

Iron Bottom Sound was called Savo Sound before World War II, but Allied sailors gave it its current moniker for the huge numbers of warships that sank in battle there.

According to the expedition, five major naval battles were fought there between August and December 1942, resulting in the loss of more than 20,000 lives, 111 naval vessels and 1,450 planes on all sides.

Before the expedition, “fewer than 100 of these US, Japanese, Australian, and New Zealand military ships and planes have been located,” it says on its website.

The expedition began on July 2 and continues until July 23. Its continuing searches are being live streamed at nautiluslive.org.

Germany summoned the Chinese ambassador to the Foreign Ministry on Tuesday after saying China’s military had laser targeted a German aircraft taking part in an European Union operation in the Red Sea.

The flare up in tensions comes as concerns mount in the EU about Chinese influence on critical technologies and security infrastructure in Europe.

“Putting German personnel at risk and disrupting the operation is completely unacceptable,” said Germany’s Foreign Ministry on social media platform X.

There was no immediate response from China’s Foreign Ministry, and the Chinese Embassy in Berlin did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Germany’s Defense Ministry said the aircraft, taking part in the EU’s ASPIDES mission which protects international sea routes in the Red Sea, had been contributing a Multi-Sensor Platform, or “flying eye” for reconnaissance of the area since October.

A Chinese warship, which had been encountered several times in the area, had laser targeted the aircraft with no reason or prior communication during a routine mission flight, said a ministry spokesperson. The incident took place at the beginning of July.

“By using the laser, the warship put at risk the safety of personnel and material,” said the spokesperson, adding the mission flight was aborted as a precaution and the aircraft landed safely at a base in Djibouti.

The deployment of the MSP in ASPIDES has since been resumed, he said.

The MSP is operated by a civilian commercial service provider and German armed forces personnel are involved, said the ministry, adding the data collected significantly contributes to awareness for partners.

China has previously denied accusations of firing or pointing lasers at US planes. Incidents involving a European NATO member and China are more unusual.

In 2020, the US Pacific Fleet said a Chinese warship had fired a laser at a US naval patrol aircraft flying in airspace above international waters west of Guam. China said that did not accord with the facts.

For a fleeting moment, Ukraine’s conflict may have come full circle.

In the past 48 hours, US President Donald Trump has perhaps said his most forcefully direct words yet on arming Ukraine. And in the same period, the Kremlin have given their blankest indication to this White House that they are not interested in a realistic, negotiated settlement to the war.

Let us start with Trump’s comments on arming Ukraine, a reversion to a basic bedrock of US foreign policy for decades – opposing Russian aggression. “We’re going to send some more weapons,” the president said Monday of Ukraine. “We have to – they have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard.”

Behind him, his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nodded, despite this contradiction of the administration’s announcement days earlier of military shipments being stopped. What did Trump actually mean? He was short on detail.

A Pentagon spokesman later said that “at President Trump’s direction, the Department of Defense is sending additional defensive weapons to Ukraine to ensure the Ukrainians can defend themselves while we work to secure a lasting peace and ensure the killing stops.”

The about-face came days after Volodymyr Zelensky’s call with Trump on Friday, in which the Ukrainian leader said the two men spoke of joint weapons production, and air defense.

Zelensky urgently needs more Patriot interceptor missiles, which are the only way of taking down Russian ballistic missiles, and which only the US can authorize trade in. Trump spoke a day earlier with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has offered to buy Patriots from the US to supply to Ukraine. Enough is afoot to have led Zelensky to declare on Saturday his Trump call was “the best conversation we have had during this whole time, the most productive.”

Trump’s failure to provide details may be strategic, or a by-product of his occasional disdain for them. But while he may sound briefly a little more like his predecessor, Joe Biden, in terms of arming Ukraine, herein lies one stark difference. Biden publicly announced in agonizing detail every capability he gave Kyiv, perhaps hoping the transparency would avoid a sudden unexpected escalation with Moscow.

Instead, Biden ended up with an excruciating public debate with Kyiv about every new system, and arms shipment, during which every seemingly impossible demand – from HIMARS rockets, to tanks, to F-16 fighter jets, to strikes inside Russia by ATACMs – was eventually acceded to. The plain, open ladder of American escalation was laid bare to the Kremlin. Trump perhaps seeks to avoid that by saying less.

But after barely six months in office, Trump finds himself back where Biden always was, after trying almost everything else – cosying up to then criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin, falling out and making up with Zelensky, and spurning before eventually backing Europe. But the timing of his latest conversion, however enduring, reveals the desperation of this moment in the conflict.

The most recent, record Russian use of drones to attack Kyiv exposed possibly critical shortcomings in the capital’s air defenses. They would only have worsened without being resupplied, at a time when Ukraine has reported 160,000 Russian troops are massing to the north and east of the frontlines. The months ahead will be unpredictable and critical for Kyiv, even with renewed US military support.

Trump’s reversal may have stopped panic edging towards the risk of collapse. Why the shift?

Trump has always tried playing nice with Putin. Patient diplomacy, gentle words, and even last week’s brief pause in military aid – a Kremlin demand for a deal – still did nothing to change Putin’s position. The Kremlin does not want peace. And so Trump has learned slowly, rejecting the travails of recent history, that Russia is an opponent.

The end of the US’ longest war in Afghanistan, in which Biden withdrew fast in the wake of a hasty deal signed by Trump with the Taliban, led to scenes that haunted Trump’s predecessor and remain a potent stick with which Republicans beat Democrats. The repetition of a similar rout of American allies in Ukraine, or Eastern Europe, would be an indelible stain on the Republican or MAGA record. That is not imminent, or even that likely for now. But the seeds of it lie perhaps in any success for Putin’s planned aggression in the coming months.

Meanwhile, after six months of toying with the ideas of diplomacy, the Kremlin is back where it started too: willing to accept a peace only if it is surrender by another name. Its recent goal has been achieved: it has flattered the White House’s belief that it could talk out an end to the war, and taken enough time in talks that Russia’s summer offensive is now adequately manned, and the ground below these troops hard.

As recently as Monday, Putin’s top diplomat was repeating Russia’s most maximalist set of demands. Sergey Lavrov told a Hungarian newspaper that the “underlying causes” of the war must be eliminated, and gave a long, expansive list of impossibles, including the “demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, lifting sanctions on Russia, rescinding all lawsuits against Russia, and returning the illegally seized Western-based assets.”

He added to that a requirement that Ukraine pledge to never join NATO, and also that occupied Ukrainian territory be recognized as Russian, including parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson that Moscow hasn’t even seized yet. It was a dizzying echo of Russia’s demands when it engaged in diplomacy for the first time in Istanbul, in the opening weeks of the war, as its soldiers shot civilians dead in the suburbs of Kyiv.

Putin’s rationale for rejecting real diplomacy is simple. He has sold this war (falsely) as an existential clash between Russia and its traditional values, and a liberal, expansionist and aggressive NATO. It is a binary moment in Russian history, his narrative insists. To entertain a short, albeit deceptive ceasefire on American terms would contradict the urgency of that false story, and risk undermining the skimpy morale of his troops, whose lives his commanders often fritter away in brutal, frontal assaults.

Putin can mollify Trump with talk of his desire for peace. But he cannot let slip the façade of the motherland being under assault. His retreat back to type has been shorter and easier than Trump’s. But still the Kremlin sees the enemy where it always has been, and where it always needs to be, for its war of choice to continue ending the lives of so many Russian men early.

And so, for a brief moment, Putin and Trump find themselves back where Russia and the US were in 2022. Moscow has tens of thousands more troops reportedly amassed to invade Ukraine yet again. Diplomacy seems pointless. Washington needs to help defend Ukraine or risk global embarrassment – the demise of its military hegemony. And Ukraine is still there, in the middle, watching both powers on either side vacillate and spin, yet holding on.