In Moscow on Friday, a couple of days before Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president, two of the West’s main adversaries – Russia and Iran – will sign a strategic partnership pact.

It will deepen a relationship that has blossomed since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Should the West be worried? Not according to Russia.

“This agreement, like our treaty with North Korea, is not directed against anyone,” foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier this week, referring to a similar pact Moscow signed with Pyongyang last year.

That treaty, however, included a mutual defence clause, with both countries pledging to come to the other’s aid if needed.

It instantly rang alarm bells in Washington, Kyiv, Seoul and beyond.

And now, little more than six months later, Ukraine says it has captured two North Korean soldiers on the battlefield – proof it claims that Russia has deployed thousands of Pyongyang’s troops to the frontline.

It suggests the West’s fears were well-founded.

I expect the partnership with Iran will cause similar concern.

“Russia’s foreign policy major organising principle is now the prosecution of its war in Ukraine,” Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, told Sky News.

“Every country is assessed through the lens of what this country can bring to the battlefield effort. How can this country help Russia withstand economic pressure? And how can this relationship be instrumentalised by hard men in the Kremlin to punish the West?

“Iran neatly fits into the category.”

The US and UK have already accused Tehran of providing Moscow with ballistic missiles and drones for use against Ukraine.

Both Russia and Iran deny the claim.

But defence is an area where the two countries will cooperate more closely as a result of this new partnership, which Mr Gabuev describes as the “symbolic icing on the cake”.

“The real cooperation is the underwater part of the iceberg, where Russia purchases drones, and designs for drones and missiles and various types of weapons that it needs for the battlefield in Ukraine,” he said.

“In return, Iran gets Russian technical expertise.”

According to the Kremlin, the timing for the treaty signing is purely coincidental, and has nothing to do with Mr Trump’s inauguration.

“Let the conspiracy theorists entertain themselves,” said Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Coincidence or not, the optics are convenient for Russia.

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The pact serves as a pointed reminder to the West that the world is changing, and that, in Moscow’s view, the US-led rules-based global order is crumbling.

Mr Putin often speaks of his desire to create a multipolar world, free from Western imperialism and the hegemony of America.

He wants to show that his attempts are working, despite the West’s efforts to isolate Russia.

First North Korea, now Iran – solidarity through sanctions.

Fears have been raised over the robustness of Britain’s trade sanctions against Russia after the main government department enforcing the rules admitted it has no idea how many cases it is investigating.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), which monitors and polices flows of goods in and out of the country, says it had no central record of how many investigations it’s carrying out into Russian sanctions. It also said that while it had issued six fines in relation to sanction-breaking since 2022, it would not name the firms sanctioned or provide any further detail on what they did wrong.

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The disclosures were part of a response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from Sky News, as part of its wider investigation into the sanctions regime against Russia.

In recent months we’ve reported on data showing flows of goods, including dual-use items which can be turned into weapons, from the UK into Caucasus and Central Asian states. We’ve shown how luxury British cars are being transported across the border from the Caucasus into Russia. And we’ve shown the contrast between rhetoric and reality on the various rules clamping down on trade in Russian fossil fuels.

But despite the challenges facing the sanctions regime, information on the enforcement of those sanctions is quite scant. The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) has so far only imposed a single £15,000 fine for breach of financial sanctions – in other words those moving money in or out of Russia or helping sanctioned individuals do so.

HMRC has so far issued six fines in relation to Russian sanctions, but it refused to name any companies or individuals affected by the fines – or to provide any further details on what they were doing to break the rules. And, unlike other organisations, such as OFSI, it has never said how many cases it is working on – giving little sense of the scale of the pipeline of forthcoming action.

Asked by Sky News to provide such details under FOI legislation, HMRC said: “The number of current investigations which may involve these sanctions, regardless of the eventual outcome, is not centrally recorded.

“To determine how many investigations are within scope of your request would require a manual search of a significant number of records, held by different business areas. Not all investigations reach the level of formal cases being opened, but these investigations are still recorded as compliance activity which would need to be manually reviewed to provide an answer.”

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Mark Handley, a partner at law firm Duane Morris, has spent years monitoring the information released on sanctions cases. He said: “If you’re trying to organise an organisation like HMRC in terms of resourcing and all the rest of it, you would think that they might know how many investigations they have ongoing and how to staff all of those. So I’m surprised that they didn’t have that number to hand.”

HMRC also said it would protect the privacy of companies fined for breaking sanctions rules. The FOI response continued: “HMRC do not consider that disclosing the company name would drive compliance, promote voluntary disclosure or be proportionate.”

This is in stark contrast to other countries, notably the US, where companies are routinely named and shamed in an effort to drive compliance.

Leigh Hansson, partner at legal firm Reed Smith and a sanctions expert, said: “The US loves to name and shame, and I think from a US compliance perspective, it’s actually done quite a lot in further enforcing compliance both within the United States and globally.

“Because once you see a company [has] been fined or they’re placed on the specially-designated nationals list, all the other companies in their industry call around going: ‘hey, am I next?’

“And they want to know what it is that the company did – how did they violate sanctions?”

“One of the things the United States does in these penalty announcements is they provide background on the things the company did wrong, but these are also the things the company did right… And the information that they publish is quite helpful.”

The absence of such disclosure in the UK means both businesses and the public more widely have less clarity on the rules – which in turn may help explain why the regime has been more leaky than expected, with goods still flowing towards Russian satellite states, despite the fact that sanctions prohibit even indirect flows of goods to Russia.

Mr Handley said one consequence of the secrecy from HMRC is that “you’re operating in a vacuum, at the moment. Because the government’s not giving you the information that tells you what kind of conduct gets you to a civil settlement as opposed to a criminal prosecution”.

“So, again, even if you’re keeping the name anonymous, you can help businesses and individuals behave better and properly by giving more information,” he added.

The man suspected of abducting Madeleine McCann won’t face any charges in the foreseeable future, a prosecutor has told Sky News.

German drifter Christian B, who cannot be fully identified under his country’s privacy law, is expected to be freed from an unrelated jail sentence this year while police in three countries continue to search for evidence against him.

Prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters said: “There is currently no prospect of an indictment in the Maddie case.

“As things stand, the accused Christian B’s imprisonment will end in early September.”

Madeleine, aged three, was asleep with her younger twin siblings in the family’s Portuguese rented holiday apartment before mother Kate discovered her missing at around 10pm on 3 May, 2007.

Her parents were dining nearby on the complex with friends and taking turns to check on all their sleeping children every half an hour.

Madeleine’s disappearance has become the world’s most mysterious missing child case.

Philipp Marquort, one of Christian B’s defence lawyers, welcomed the prosecutor’s pessimism about bringing charges.

He said: “This confirms the suspicions that we have repeatedly expressed, namely that there is no reliable evidence against our client.

“We regret that we have not yet been granted access to the investigation files. We have not yet been able to effectively counter the public prejudice arising from statements made by the prosecutor’s office.”

Christian B, 47, is in jail and coming to the end of his sentence for the rape of an elderly American woman in Praia da Luz, the Portuguese resort where Madeleine disappeared.

In October, he was acquitted on a series of rape and indecent assault charges after a non-jury trial in Germany, in which several references were made to his status as the main suspect in the Madeleine case.

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The prosecutor said he was awaiting the court’s written judgment before launching an appeal against the acquittal. He believes the trial judges were biased against the prosecution.

If successful, he could apply for a new arrest warrant for Christian B to keep him in custody until a retrial with new judges.

He said: “We hope that the Federal Court of Justice will decide before the end of the accused’s imprisonment. If the Federal Court follows our legal opinion, we could apply for a new arrest warrant for the accused’s offences, so that the accused would then remain in custody beyond September 2025.

Mr Marquort said the defence team would oppose the prosecution’s appeal against the acquittal.

Prosecutor Mr Wolters has said in the past that he believes Madeleine is dead and that Christian B was responsible for her death. The suspect denies any involvement.

The case against Christian B is purely circumstantial; he’s alleged to have confessed to a friend that he abducted Madeleine, he has convictions for sex crimes against children, he was living in the area at the time, his mobile phone was close by when the young girl vanished and he re-registered one of his vehicles the next day.

The prosecutor won’t say what evidence he has to convince him Madeleine is dead, but he admitted he is still trying to find forensic evidence to link Christian B to the girl.

Jim Gamble, former head of the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre, said he had expected the prosecutor to charge Christian B soon.

“He’s implied the whole way through that he has something more than the public are aware of,” he said.

“He’s made fairly definitive statements about whether Madeleine is alive or dead so you would expect their strategy to have been to charge him sooner rather than later.

“From what he’s said today I wonder if we’re witnessing the re-positioning of something to manage the disappointment that’ll come.”

Mr Wolters, who is based in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, is investigating the case with the help of Portuguese police and detectives from Scotland Yard.