4 Ideas to Explore

1. Ex-chief of Ukrainian Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi highlights that “a growing number of Western analysts now argue that Russia has effectively lost the war,” pointing to what they see as “evidence that the conflict is approaching its end.” “That is a dangerous misreading of the war,” Ukraine’s current ambassador to the U.K. warns in a commentary for The Telegraph. “If the measure is whether the Kremlin achieved its original political objectives, then clearly it has not. But defeat requires more than failure to achieve initial ambitions,” according to Zaluzhnyi—whom WaPo’s David Ignatius has described as someone who “has always been a truth-teller in this war.” In a longer version of his commentary published by Interfax-Ukraine, Zaluzhnyi observes that “in the end, we cannot speak of victory on the battlefield for either Russia or Ukraine. On the one hand, Russia cannot even theoretically conquer all of Ukraine by military means; on the other hand, Ukraine for now cannot liberate the occupied territories by military means.”
2. In his description of “How Ukraine Figured Out Trump World” to FP’s Ravi Agrawal, former Ukrainian Foreign Minister and Belfer Center Senior Follow Dmytro Kuleba explains that “we have to understand that in 2026 and beyond, the war will be decided in the air, not on the ground,” echoing Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “So whoever is better equipped for a war in the air will get an upper hand,” Kuleba says, acknowledging that as “this war is becoming more and more aerial… there will never be enough Patriots to intercept all the ballistic missiles.” In Kuleba’s view, “Putin is waiting for the winter to come because he believes that will be a good time to crush Ukraine.” He predicts that “either Russia will cease to exist as an imperial project, or Ukraine will cease to exist as an independent, sovereign and European project.”
3. Former CIA Director David Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic of Mental Help Global argue that “Ukraine is conducting a campaign with few precedents in military history,” not just holding the line, but “imposing persistent strategic pressure on a much larger adversary by attacking Russia’s front lines, air defenses, fuel depots, logistics and military infrastructure and by trying to isolate occupied Crimea.” Writing in WSJ, the two authors describe this as “adaptation warfare,” in which “the side that adapts faster imposes costs on its enemy.”
4. In an article for The Economist, Western-sanctioned Russian billionaire Andrey Melnichenko argues that four scenarios for post-war Russia are being discussed in the West. “The first imagines a humiliated Russia, lingering on the periphery of the West,” while “in the second scenario, Russia ends up in China’s orbit,” he writes in the commentary, entitled “Why a broken Russia is bad for the world.” “The third scenario is the fragmentation of Russia, which would rapidly become unmanageable. There would be a struggle over the nuclear arsenal, resources, borders and history,” Melnichenko warns. “The final possibility is for Russia to become a fortress: closed, mobilized, in permanent siege,” according to Melnichenko. He argues that “the choice… is not between love for Russia and hatred of it,” but between “a Russia whose behavior is predictable and one whose trajectory is unknown.” 
   1. The Economist claims that Melnichenko’s decision to speak publicly is “the most stunning” warning yet from inside Russia’s elite that “their country has reached a dead end.” 
   2. Holman Jenkins argues in WSJ that Melnichenko’s plea to “bail out Russia” roughly on the terms Putin floated “four years ago” only shows “how behind-the-curve Mr. Putin and his allies remain in dealing with his situation.”
   3. Fyodor Lukyanov of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy calls Melnichenko’s Economist piece an “extraordinary” fact, concluding that “Russia’s potential is enormous, but it will have to be unlocked in a different way—which is precisely what Melnichenko writes about.”

I. U.S. and Russian priorities for the bilateral agenda

Nuclear security and safety:

“Atoms for War: How Rosatom Has Preserved Its Global Business amid the Ukraine War,” Russia.Post (summary of Bellona report), 07.08.26.

• The summary notes Bellona’s “key finding” that, despite the invasion of Ukraine, Rosatom “remains one of the Kremlin’s most extensive and effective state organizations operating abroad,” using nuclear plant construction, fuel exports and “decades-long infrastructure ties” to create “long-term dependencies.” Rosatom’s strategy of “low-threshold diplomacy” presents cooperation as “technical, economic and climate-related rather than political,” while building, financing and fueling plants, training staff, and handling regulation and waste so that “countries that build nuclear plants with Rosatom’s assistance become hooked on Russian nuclear infrastructure for decades,” the authors write.
• According to the report, Rosatom has so far faced only a “hybrid sanctions model”: some subsidiaries and individuals are targeted, but “the core of Rosatom’s business model” endures because “such Russian services cannot be replaced quickly.” Bellona stresses that dependence is slowly declining in Europe and the United States, while Rosatom pivots to the “Global South,” building 19 of its 20 current foreign reactors in Asia and Africa and deepening ties with China, even as it encounters “delays, financing difficulties and growing competition” and takes on “riskier” projects in Iran and elsewhere.
• See this link/these links for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs:

• No significant developments.

Iran and its nuclear program:

“Trump Sought an Iran War Exit. Putin Pushed On in Ukraine. Now Both Are Stuck,” Anton Troianovski and Paul Sonne, New York Times, 07.12.26.

• Troianovski and Sonne contrast Trump’s six‑week air war on Iran with Putin’s fifth year of “trying to bomb a smaller country into submission,” arguing both wars show “the limits of military force.” They cite U.S. hawks such as Jack Keane, who complained that Washington “lost our leverage by stopping the campaign,” and note that Trump moved from vowing to “destroy their missiles” in February to saying it would be “a little bit unfair” for Iran not to have ballistic missiles if others do. By contrast, Putin has tied himself to specific goals—controlling “all of Ukraine’s Donbas” and blocking NATO expansion—making it “much harder… politically and strategically” to change course.
• The article emphasizes costs: for Putin, “an estimated 350,000 to 450,000 dead Russian soldiers and a sputtering economy,” with Russians “increasingly fatigued by the war,” while Iran’s conflict has triggered fresh attacks on shipping and retaliatory U.S. strikes. Yet Putin “has stood firm,” repeating maximalist demands and telling Russians on June 28 that “saving the Kyiv regime is not part of our plans,” even as Ukrainian deep strikes cause fuel shortages. Trump, by contrast, has talked openly about the domestic price of war, saying that continuing in Iran could have meant “possibly going into a depression,” and, Robert Malley notes, can more easily claim success because his “stated goals have been all over the map.”

“Trump talks tough on Iran and Russia. For now,” Max Boot, Washington Post, 07.13.26.

• Boot argues that at the Ankara NATO summit Trump executed “two head‑spinning U‑turns,” noting that a month earlier he praised Iran’s leaders as “strong” and “smart people” who are “not radicalized,” but after new attacks in the Strait of Hormuz called them “scum,” “sick people,” and “vicious, violent people” and revoked their oil sanctions waiver. On Ukraine, Boot writes, Trump shifted “from hostility to sympathy,” moving from a “famously contentious” Oval Office clash with Volodymyr Zelensky to telling reporters in Ankara that Zelensky has “done an amazing job” and promising to let Kyiv manufacture Patriot interceptors, even though “it’s difficult to know what to make of the pivots, because Trump could very easily revert to his earlier positions tomorrow.”
• The author contends that Trump’s Iran and Ukraine policies remain “muddled,” saying the president “plainly does not want a resumption of full‑blown war with Iran” but is drifting toward “a low‑level conflict that alternates between periods of peacemaking and warfighting without achieving Trump’s stated aim of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program,” effectively starting another “forever war.” Boot warns that the Iran conflict “has adverse consequences for Ukraine,” because the United States and its Middle East allies will “keep dipping into scarce stockpiles of missiles, including the ones used for air defense,” while Ukraine’s promised Patriot production will take years — Germany’s licensed plant, he notes, will not deliver missiles until 2027.
• If Trump is “serious about helping Ukraine,” Boot argues, he should “dig into the depleted U.S. Patriot stockpiles,” “urge America’s allies to do the same,” and finally provide Kyiv with Tomahawk cruise missiles to amplify its successful “deep strikes” on Russian refineries. He concludes that the United States has “no good options” with Iran but can “readily ratchet up the pressure” on Russia by supplying more long‑range weapons, imposing secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil, and backing efforts to send “$300 billion in frozen Russian funds to Kyiv,” insisting that Trump “needs to show that his words are followed by actions, or else U.S. credibility, already at a low ebb, will continue to deteriorate.”

See these links for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

• "Regional Strategy of the Islamic Republic of Iran," Maxim Alontsev, Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), 07.13.26. (In Russian.) (This organization is affiliated with the Russian authorities.)
• "The US-Iran Peace Process: A View from Israel," Dmitry Maryasis, Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), 07.13.26. (In Russian.) (This organization is affiliated with the Russian authorities.)

Humanitarian impact of the Ukraine conflict:

“Russia’s slow murder of a Ukrainian town,” Anna Husarska, Washington Post, 07.09.26.

• Anna Husarska writes that Oleshky, cut off from Kherson after Russia blew the Antonovsky bridge and then “flooded Oleshky in June 2023 by blowing up the dam in Nova Kakhovka,” is now “slowly starving.” All roads are “mined and exposed to Russian drones, so food deliveries rarely get through,” she notes, while “the Russians not only don’t provide food for the residents under their occupation, as they are obligated to do,” but “steal the food that Oleshkians have squirreled away” or bought at “exorbitant prices.” Former policewoman Ksenia Arkhipova tells her “no humanitarian aid had reached the town in the last four months,” and describes a June convoy where “one driver was burned alive,” another is in intensive care and a third “awaits amputation of his leg. No ambulance could reach him.”
• With perhaps 1,700 people left from a prewar 24,000, Husarska says they endure a “modern Holodomor”: “They have no electricity, no water, no gas and no heating.” Residents “pull water up from wells,” burn shattered doors and trees for fuel, and the sick and elderly in photos are “sick and old… so scavenging for water and firewood is not an option.” Evacuation routes cost “$300 to $400 per person” and can mean “4,000 miles through Russia” and multiple countries; yet, she writes, “Ukrainians are not giving up,” as volunteers like Arkhipova have guided “some 160 people to safety,” proving that “no one is coming, so they organize DIY evacuations. These patriots are made in Ukraine.”

“Ukraine Brings the War to My First Russian Home,” Gregg Opelka, Wall Street Journal, 07.08.26.

• Gregg Opelka reflects on Ukraine’s drone strike against “Russia’s largest oil refinery, in the Siberian city of Omsk,” which Volodymyr Zelensky hailed by saying, “Siberia, too, is now within reach of Ukrainian precision strikes.” For Opelka, the attack “didn’t go unnoticed,” because Omsk was “moy pervyy russkiy dom, my first Russian home,” where he worked at the Omsk Musical Theater from 1990 to 1992 and has “dozens of friends and colleagues still living there.” A U.S.-based friend sent him a photo taken from an Omsk apartment window that showed “how close the drone came to the dozens of apartment buildings surrounding the plant,” and he notes that Omsk “hadn’t been” struck since 1919, when it was capital of the anti‑Bolshevik “White Movement.”
• Recalling that Omsk “was a zakryty gorod, or closed city, because of its military operations and its oil factories,” Opelka describes standing in food lines and eating “beet mountain” at his hotel during Soviet shortages, yet feeling that “faraway Omsk seemed like the safest place on earth.” Now, he writes, Levada polling suggests “roughly 76% of Russians said they support the Russian armed forces’ actions in Ukraine,” though he questions this under censorship; another Omsk‑born friend tells him, “It pains me to see that so many of the population still support Putin and the war he started.” “As someone who lived and worked there, it pains me too,” Opelka concludes, as the war finally reaches his “first Russian home.”

See this link for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

• “Parliamentary Elections in Occupied Ukraine Risk Backfiring for the Kremlin,”  Konstantin Skorkin, Carnegie Politika, 07.10.26.

Military and security aspects of the Ukraine conflict and their impacts:

“Ukraine Is Redefining Modern Warfare,” David H. Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic, Wall Street Journal, 07.07.26.

• David Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic argue that “Ukraine is conducting a campaign with few precedents in military history,” not just holding the line but “imposing persistent strategic pressure on a much larger adversary by attacking Russia’s front lines, air defenses, fuel depots, logistics and military infrastructure and by trying to isolate occupied Crimea.” They contend that “Ukraine almost certainly can’t destroy Russia’s war machine, but if it can keep enough of that machine disrupted, degraded and short on fuel, it can change the strategic equation,” pointing to strikes that have hit “refineries, oil terminals, pumping stations, air-defense systems, headquarters, logistics nodes and infrastructure,” producing “Russia’s worst nationwide fuel shortages in years” and turning Crimea from “Vladimir Putin’s prized symbol of conquest” into “a liability.”
• The authors describe this as “adaptation warfare,” in which “the side that adapts faster imposes costs on its enemy,” and say Ukraine is pursuing a World War II–style oil and logistics campaign “by different means,” using “drones, missiles, commercial communications technology, intelligence networks, special operations, software adaptation and operational ingenuity” instead of fleets of bombers or submarines. They argue that Kyiv’s approach—“a refinery today. A radar tomorrow. A fuel depot the next night”—forces Russia “to defend everywhere, repair constantly, disperse assets, reroute logistics,” and offers three lessons for the U.S.: build “substantial, resilient strike networks,” treat refineries, ports and grids as “strategic terrain,” and make “adaptation itself… a military capability,” as the core question shifts from whether Ukraine can survive Russia’s mass to “whether Russia can withstand Ukraine’s adaptation and persistent pressure.”

“The Ukraine Lesson Taiwan Keeps Missing,” David Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic, Foreign Affairs, 07.08.26.

• David Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic argue that Ukraine’s experience shows drones matter less on their own than as parts of an integrated system. Cheap, remotely piloted platforms have reshaped combat, but only because Ukraine built the right “ecosystem”: the Sky Fortress network of thousands of acoustic sensors; the Delta command‑and‑control system that fuses data from land, sea, and air; a dedicated Unmanned Services Force; and a domestic industry producing some seven million missiles and drones a year. Ukrainian firms update software every week or two and hardware every few weeks, shrinking acquisition cycles from years to weeks.
• Taiwan, they contend, has mostly missed this lesson by treating defense as something to buy rather than build. It has long favored traditional manned systems and U.S. doctrines while neglecting its own strategic concepts. Lawmakers cut funding for indigenous drones to preserve billions for U.S. platforms, sidelining its world‑class tech sector, even as China manufactures drones by the millions. Given its dependence on seaborne imports and exposure to massive Chinese missile forces, Taiwan must urgently develop expendable unmanned maritime swarms, a homegrown Delta‑like network, and dense, locally produced, layered air and missile defenses.

“Do not assume Russia has lost the war,” Valerii Zaluzhnyi, The Telegraph, 07.08.26. Clues from Ukrainian Views.

• “A growing number of Western analysts now argue that Russia has effectively lost the war. They point to Ukraine’s successful strikes on logistics, attacks on critical infrastructure and the steady erosion of Russia’s military position as evidence that the conflict is approaching its end. That is a dangerous misreading of the war. It reflects a tendency to interpret events through the lens of individual battlefield successes rather than the wider strategic picture.”
• “Modern warfare no longer rewards tactical victories in the way it once did. Advances in drone technology, precision strike capabilities and surveillance have transformed the battlefield, making decisive breakthroughs extraordinarily difficult for either side. This is no longer a war of swift maneuvers. It is a war of attrition.”
• “Russia lacks the military capacity to conquer Ukraine outright. Equally, Ukraine does not currently possess the means to liberate all occupied territory by force alone. The military balance has become one of mutual denial rather than decisive victory. Has Russia therefore lost? If the measure is whether the Kremlin achieved its original political objectives, then clearly it has not. But defeat requires more than failure to achieve initial ambitions. Russia continues to fight, occupies substantial Ukrainian territory and has shown no intention of ending the war on terms that would amount to an admission of defeat. Nor can Ukraine yet claim outright victory.”
• “Russia still possesses deeper reserves of manpower and industrial capacity in several critical sectors, including ballistic missile production. Air defense alone cannot fully offset that advantage. The other decisive variable is international support. Ukraine’s ability to sustain the war depends heavily upon continued backing from its allies.”
• “The decisive question is not who captures the next village or destroys the next ammunition depot. It is which society can continue to bear the economic, military and psychological burden of a prolonged conflict, while maintaining the international support necessary to sustain it.” “That, rather than any individual tactical success, will determine how and when this war ends. Too many analysts remain focused on the daily movement of the front line. They risk missing the larger strategic reality.
• “In looking for an end to the war, the conversation returns to Nato....The war in Ukraine has exposed uncomfortable questions about whether Nato is equipped for the conflicts of the 21st century.”
• “Europe’s future security will ultimately depend not only on those prepared to defend themselves, but also on those willing to lead a new strategic vision for the continent. Ukraine has demonstrated that it is prepared to do the former. The unanswered question is who is prepared to do the latter.”

“Defeat of Russia or Fantasies Before Disaster,” Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Interfax.ua, 07.08.26. Longer version of the Telegraph piece above. Clues from Ukrainian Views. Machine-translated.

• “Because of scientific and technological progress, it has become practically impossible to complete tactical missions on the ground. Significant, tangible successes in striking logistics and infrastructure are only temporary. Depending on how adequately the Russian military leadership reacts, these effects will inevitably come back at us with the same or even greater force.”
• “Thus, it is beyond common sense to talk about achieving a political goal—victory in war—through tactical actions on the battlefield or even through effective strikes on logistics and critical infrastructure. It is therefore obvious that information about individual tactical successes and painful blows to logistics and infrastructure should not inspire fantasies about a quick end to the war.”
• “For Russia, however, this option remains available, which allows it to focus on carrying out relatively significant tactical tasks—such as the current offensive on Kostyantynivka, and earlier on Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. Carrying out similar tasks on our side—given the lack of means to protect against new weapons and, as a consequence, the impossibility of constantly suffering large numbers of casualties—is becoming increasingly impossible. As a result, we now have a situation at the front where achieving operational, let alone strategic, objectives is impossible, and the accomplishment of tactical missions happens outside any overall strategy and therefore does not affect the general situation.”
• “In the end, we cannot speak of victory on the battlefield for either Russia or Ukraine. On the one hand, Russia cannot even theoretically conquer all of Ukraine by military means; on the other hand, Ukraine for now cannot liberate the occupied territories by military means.”
• “The front remains an important theater of war, but the ways we assess it have changed. The movement of the line of contact remains important in informational and strategic terms, particularly with regard to territory, but it is probably no longer decisive for ending the war; it is only one of several arguments. Therefore, recording and stabilizing this line is critically important. “

“How Ukraine Figured Out Trump World,” Ravi Agrawal interviewing Dmytro Kuleba, Foreign Policy, FP Live, 07.10.26. Clues from Ukrainian Views.

• “I believe the biggest challenge in handling President Trump is not to make him change his position but to sustain his position that favors your interests.”
• “That strategy is to placate, make offers, accept what Trump offers to you, if he doesn’t cross your red lines, while quietly continuing the strategy of decoupling.”
• “This war is becoming more and more aerial, and there will never be enough Patriots to intercept all the ballistic missiles.”
• “We have to understand that in 2026 and beyond, the war will be decided in the air, not on the ground. That phase is over. So whoever is better equipped for a war in the air will get an upper hand.”
• “I believe that a fair and accurate way to describe the reality of the war would be to say that Ukraine has stabilized the pressure Russia puts on it and has found the way to increase the pressure it puts on Russia.”
• “The situation for Ukraine in the war overall has improved. It’s premature to call it a turning point.”
• “I think Putin is living through his Joseph Stalin moment. And if he actually talks to anyone, I think it’s him. Stalin’s moment is when everything is falling apart around you, you do not give in. You tighten the screws. You double down on your effort, sending the message, ‘Nothing can break me.’”
• “Putin is waiting for the winter to come because he believes that will be a good time to crush Ukraine, its energy system, and the resilience of its people… Putin is always waiting. Waiting for a change that will favor him.”
• “I do not expect… I do not see where a cease-fire may come from. … I think we will spend the rest of 2026 in a war, in a state of very active fighting, primarily in the air.”
• “Putin does not recognize [European leaders] as equals. Putin wants to negotiate with Trump, with the United States of America.”
• “I don’t believe that this war will end in a negotiated settlement where every side will get something and we’ll leave the table unhappy, but the price of that unhappiness will be the end of hostilities. I think this war will end with the collapse of one of the parties to it.”
• “Either Russia will cease to exist as an imperial project, or Ukraine will cease to exist as an independent, sovereign, and European project. … These two entities—Ukraine and Russia, in their current forms—are incompatible. They cannot coexist. Both sides believe firmly that the loss in this war will mean the end for them.” 

“Zelenskyy says ‘battle in the sky’ will decide outcome of war with Russia,” Christopher Miller, Financial Times, 07.06.26.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the war’s “decisive phase” has shifted “from land and sea to the air,” arguing that after Ukrainian forces halted Russia on the ground and pushed much of its Black Sea fleet away with naval drones, “the next battlefield becomes the sky.” He insists “we have moved into the air domain. And in the air, we are already competitive,” but calls anti‑ballistic defense “the major weakness [for Ukraine] in this equation.” In Monday’s attack, Ukrainian authorities report “at least 15 people were killed and 43 injured” in a barrage involving “hundreds of drones and dozens of ballistic and cruise missiles,” during which Ukraine “failed to intercept any of the 29 ballistic missiles launched,” despite having U.S. Patriot and French SAMP/T systems in “extremely short supply.”
• Zelenskyy links this vulnerability to Ukraine’s 1990s decision to give up what was then the world’s third‑largest nuclear arsenal: “without nuclear weapons, you are no longer part of the club that others fear attacking… instead, you become part of the club that can be attacked.” He says if partners “do not abandon Ukraine financially” and “every kilometer of Russian advance continues to cost them tens of thousands — and sometimes hundreds of thousands — of personnel,” then “the decisive struggle will take place in the skies,” pressing NATO to share air‑defense technology and license Patriot production because “there will never be enough Patriots for everyone.”

“Chat with David Ignatius about the war in Ukraine and foreign affairs,” Washington Post, 07.13.26.

• Q: What are the chances Europe will join Ukraine in removing Russia from its territory? Or will this end up like Korean Armistice?
  • David Ignatius: “I think Europe is moving ever-closer to a real security partnership with Ukraine (and against Russia). I think full removal of Russian forces is some ways off, but if Ukraine holds on through what will be a tough summer, strong European support and a reinvigorated relationship with the U.S. will put them in a much stronger position. What I would really like Europe to do is accelerate the EU accession process and create an interim status for Ukraine—which in itself would be a defeat for Russia.
• Q: Is General Zaluzhnyi more popular and intellectually equipped to be president than Zelenskyy?
  • DI: “Gen. Zaluzhnyi has always been a truth-teller in this war, and he's one obvious transitional post-war president. Another is Gen. Budanov, former head of military intel, who is younger and more erratic but also a charismatic figure. I have unbounded respect for Zelenskyy's toughness and bravery. By the force of his character, he has gotten Ukraine through this mess. But his presidency won't forever. I will be curious to see what emerges from yesterday's cabinet reshuffle.”
• Q: What are the chances that Putin will use tactical nukes or biologic if he is backed into a corner?
  • DI: “Chance is greater than zero. But… the Chinese have said publicly and privately that they oppose expansion of the war into these new domains.”
• Q: Is Russia in as much trouble as I've been reading?
  • DI: “From what I see, the Russians are indeed in real trouble. Hermann Graf, the head of Putin-friendly Sberbank, said two weeks ago that the war was not sustainable economically. But I see no evidence that Putin is ready to throw in the towel. Quite the contrary, he seems more likely to escalate—against Ukraine with more ballistic missile attacks and against Europe with more attacks that come closer to outright war. He may also order a full military mobilization, which could overwhelm Ukraine's much smaller army. But I'm still betting on Ukraine, on the theory that for them, survival is victory.”
• Q: How come Russia's buddy China sells drone parts to both Russia and Ukraine?
  • DI: “China seems to play both sides of everything. Sun Tzu: Win wars without fighting.”

“‘This will lead to the collapse of the state as such’: A serving Russian general on mistakes, lies, and a drawn‑out war,” interview conducted by Dmitry Kolezev with a person he claims is an anonymous Russian general, Kolezev’s Telegram channel, 07.08.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine-translated.

• The general says “there is stagnation at the front,” describing Russian advances as “tactical squeezing out of the enemy using the results of continuous fire destruction,” because assault units move only after “practically complete clearance” and “there are no forces for simultaneous fighting on the ground and in the air, hence the low pace.” The General Staff’s promise to take Donbas by year‑end, he argues, would require “replenishing losses of at least 55–60,000 people a month,” which is “obviously impossible,” so the demand is “a kind of trick… so as not to be accused of professional incompetence,” with real hopes pinned on “an internal political crisis in Kyiv” and “pressure from Trump.”
• He says Putin “understands” reality but wants “maximally positive” reports: “lies of a truly cosmic scale are perceived positively, not punished and not investigated,” and the people are treated as “a herd of poorly developed banderlogs.” Air‑defense failures stem “first of all from incompetence,” with experienced commanders removed and rooftop Pantsirs in Moscow “the height of cretinism… an illusion of effectiveness.” Escalation against Europe and nuclear use are “complete fantasy… there is no such military‑economic potential,” but new mobilization is “quite possible,” since Peskov has already declared that the “special military operation has grown into a war.” Objectively, he says, “peace talks are necessary on any reasonable terms,” warning that without a mental shift away from great‑power imperialism Russia faces a “North Korean variant” and, if the war drags on more than “half a year to a year,” a militarized society with “demands for regional independence” and “a mass of internal armed conflicts” over resources that “will lead to the collapse of the state as such.”

“Ukraine Finally Has a Theory of Victory. Will It Work?,” Christian Caryl, Foreign Policy, 07.09.26.

• “We’ve reached a turning point,” Serhii, a 46-year-old Ukrainian army officer  told me during my visit to Sloviansk in late June. The Ukrainians, he said, are striking devastating blows against Russia’s energy infrastructure, vital logistics, and the factories that produce critical components for its high-tech weaponry. He particularly applauded Kyiv’s campaign to sever the supply lines that provide Russian forces in occupied Crimea with ammunition, fuel, and food. So how long will it take to cut off the peninsula entirely? “I think we can do it by the end of the summer,” he answered.” Contrast this estimate with RM’s assessment based on Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT group’s July 7, 2026, data. The latter indicates that in the past four weeks (June 9–July 7, 2026), Russian forces make a net gain of 31 square miles of Ukrainian territory (slightly larger than the size of Manhattan Island). In comparison, during the previous four-week period (May 12–June 9, 2026), Russia lost a net of 1 square mile, according to DeepState’s data.
• “For the first time since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s military leaders have worked out a coherent strategy for victory—a plan designed to play to Kyiv’s strengths and exploit Russian weaknesses. Mykhailo Gonchar, the president of the Strategy XXI Center for Global Studies in Kyiv, told me that the Ukrainian leadership now believes that it can “cut off a significant share of the revenues financing the [Russian] war budget, trigger a fuel crisis, and surgically sever the critical links in the defense-industrial supply chain, thereby reducing—or even preventing—the production of precision-guided weapons.” The ultimate goal of this and other elements of the new strategy: to stymie Moscow’s ability to continue the war while keeping Ukrainian casualties to a minimum.”
• “The plan for now is to keep squeezing Moscow until something breaks. Let’s hope, for the Ukrainians’ sake, that that will happen sooner rather than later.”

“Ukraine Remade Air Defense, but Russia Has Changed Its Attacks,” Siobhán O’Grady and Liubov Sholudko, New York Times, 07.06.26.

• O’Grady and Sholudko report that Ukrainian crews, facing “limited supplies and nonstop Russian barrages,” radically rewrote Patriot doctrine: where a battery would normally fire two or more interceptors, “the Ukrainians learned to often fire just one interceptor at incoming ballistic missiles,” switched Patriots to manual so they wouldn’t waste rounds on “slow-moving, inexpensive drones,” and adopted “shoot and scoot” plus $30,000 decoys to protect systems worth “roughly $1 billion.” Yet they stress that these clever adaptations “cannot overcome a shortage of interceptors.” In one recent attack “that killed at least 12 people,” Russia launched “68 missiles and 351 drones”; “none of the 23 ballistic missiles were intercepted,” though “most of the cruise missiles were.”
• So far this year, Russia has fired “521 ballistic missiles at Ukraine, more than twice as many as in the same period in 2025,” and Ukraine has “knocked down 164 of them,” the authors write—about 31%—compared with roughly 90% interception of long‑range drones and 80% of 722 cruise missiles. With Patriots and PAC‑3s in “short supply globally,” resupply is “a slow trickle,” and Zelensky pleads for a U.S. production license, arguing that letting Ukraine build critical components would also give Washington access “whenever needed,” while front‑line commanders warn that “civilians are dying — entire families are being killed” as they ration every shot.

“Ukraine’s Shortage of Patriot Missiles Leaves Kyiv Undefended,” Anastasiia Malenko and Alistair MacDonald, Wall Street Journal, 07.07.26.

• Malenko and MacDonald report that Russia’s latest strike on Kyiv, which “killed at least 12 people and wounded close to 50,” exposed that Ukraine has “virtually run out of Patriot interceptors that stop ballistic missiles”: in that attack Ukraine “was unable to intercept any of the 23 Russian ballistic missiles” aimed at the capital. Overall this year, Ukraine has intercepted “around 90% of Russia’s long-range drones” and “80% of the 722 cruise missiles fired at it,” but “70% of the 522 ballistic missiles fired by Russia got through Ukraine’s defenses,” a ratio “set to worsen as Ukraine’s inventory of Patriot interceptors runs dry,” they write.
• They note that Patriots are the “only way for Ukraine to reliably stop ballistic missiles,” whose reentry speeds are “several miles per second,” yet Ukraine is just one of “around 20 countries… waiting in line” for interceptors that take “more than two years to manufacture.” Lockheed Martin delivered “around 620” PAC‑3s in 2025 and plans to “more than triple production to about 2,000 a year, but only by 2030,” while RTX is increasing PAC‑2 output from “about 240… to around 420 a year by the end of 2027.” Already‑limited stocks were further strained when the U.S. and Gulf states fired “dozens” of Patriots “almost daily” against Iranian missiles, prompting Zelensky to warn that every delay “means the loss of lives” and that “missiles for Patriots are needed not in warehouses right now, but in Patriot units in Ukraine.”

“There’s a New Way of War, but Is It Evolution or Revolution?” Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, 07.06.26.

• Yaroslav Trofimov writes that “the character of warfare is changing fundamentally,” as drone‑centered combat and cheap precision munitions turn what used to be “the safe rear hundreds of miles away from the front line” into contested space, and “the proliferation of cheap sensors” makes massed armored thrusts “much more difficult.” Autonomy using AI is already “a major enabler”: Ukrainian drones “patrol the highways of occupied southern Ukraine, looking for targets like fuel trucks using AI pattern recognition and then pursuing them on their own,” while Russia fields Molniya drones “that don’t have a human in the loop”; Helsing’s Gundbert Scherf calls autonomy the coming “game‑changer,” and Palantir’s Louis Mosley says 2026 may be remembered “as a year in which a major breakthrough in military technology was made—akin to gunpowder.”
• Ukraine has pioneered a “mental revolution” in procurement: with drones responsible for “over 90% of enemy losses,” brigades earn “e‑points” for confirmed hits and convert them via the Delta network into funds to buy new systems directly through a classified marketplace, turning weapons into a constantly updated “subscription service.” Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh says engineers now “sit down… with the troops and figure out what is the problem and how to solve it together,” but generals such as Sweden’s Michael Claesson insist this remains an evolution, not a clean break, and Gen. Carsten Breuer warns that while forces must adapt fast, they “cannot pause deterrence and tell the adversary to come back in 2039.”

“A Robot Army Remakes Ground Warfare in Ukraine,” Maria Varenikova and Paul Mozur, The New York Times, 07.13.26.

• Varenikova and Mozur report that “battalions of ground robots—tracked and wheeled machines that deliver supplies, haul ammunition, evacuate the wounded, lay mines and, increasingly, hold land—now conduct thousands of missions every month,” becoming “an indispensable tool for Ukrainian infantrymen who spend monthslong rotations in buried bunkers hiding from flying drones.” At the cutting edge, “unmanned ground vehicles are doing what once seemed a generation away: assaulting and capturing enemy trenches,” and in April, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces had seized “a Russian‑held position using only land and aerial drones, without putting a single soldier on its own side in direct danger.”
• The authors describe how mechanics‑turned‑officers such as Capt. Oleksandr Kharkovets and Sgt. Dmytro Ivanov began bolting hooks, machine guns and medical stretchers onto remote‑control buggies after brutal urban fighting convinced them that “machines can do this.” Ukraine now fields units like the K‑2 Brigade’s unmanned ground systems battalion, with “more than 500 soldiers and over 600 robots” and missions where robots “covered up to 80 percent of tasks without people — all transportation and deliveries,” because, as one officer put it, “we simply cannot afford to lose personnel.” Robots are “smaller and slower than pickup trucks, but harder to spot from above,” and when they are destroyed, “no one dies,” the commanders note.
• Beyond logistics, ground robots now “take prisoners on their own and deliver them to Ukrainian soldiers,” and have held positions alone for weeks: one tracked vehicle with a .50‑caliber gun “stood watch, alone, for 45 days,” heading out each morning and returning at night to recharge, while Russians “never learned it was a machine.” New automated turrets “to shoot down airborne drones” have already worked “dozens of times,” and Ukraine plans to produce 50,000 ground robots in 2026, more than double last year’s output. “War has no fixed tactics,” Sergeant Ivanov says; “everything works through the ability to assess, think ahead and improvise endlessly. Every day is different.”

“Putin is running out of options. The Russian leader may want to escalate his war — but that is harder than it sounds,” Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, 07.06.26.

• Gideon Rachman writes that Ukraine’s long‑range strikes have produced “Russia’s biggest fuel crisis in decades,” with smoke “billow[ing] over St Petersburg” and “long queues” at Moscow petrol stations, contributing to a sense that “the tide has turned… Putin is going to lose,” as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it. Yet Rachman stresses that Western officials estimate Russia is still feeding the “meat‑grinder” at a rate of “35,000 killed or wounded a month,” and that after “more than four years of costly fighting” there is “little to suggest that Russia is on the cusp of a decisive breakthrough,” even if Putin might try to throw in more troops or resort to “more indiscriminate strikes,” such as the missile and drone attack that “killed 30 civilians in Kyiv last week.”
• He identifies “four main escalation avenues”—conventional offensives, nuclear weapons, a direct NATO clash, and “hybrid warfare”—but argues Putin’s options are constrained. Nuclear threats, dropped “throughout the conflict,” are now “taken less seriously,” with Western decision‑makers believing Xi Jinping has warned against their use and one official saying Putin has “devalued the currency.” A direct attack on NATO is judged “unlikely,” since for four years he has “avoided direct confrontation” and opening a second front in the Baltics could “go badly wrong,” leaving hybrid operations—plots like bombs in DHL parcels or attempts on Western executives—as the remaining, but still risky, escalation path.

“Putin May Escalate, but Ukraine Is Winning,” John Kennedy and Jacob Parakilas, Foreign Policy, 07.07.26.

• John Kennedy and Jacob Parakilas write that “in recent months, Ukraine’s fortunes have rebounded dramatically,” arguing that Kyiv’s “increasingly robotized, automated armed forces have slowed Russia’s advance to a bloody crawl and in many cases even won back territory.” They note that “by some measures, Ukraine is in the process of retaking more of its territory this year than at any point since 2023,” and that “the number of casualties sustained by the Russian armed forces is also increasing, and the casualty ratio has turned more in Ukraine’s favor,” reflecting a strategy “to supplant soldiers with robotic assets to safeguard and preserve Ukraine’s limited manpower reserves.”
• The authors emphasize that Ukrainian drones and missiles “now rain down nightly on Russian targets hundreds of miles from Ukrainian territory,” striking “military assets, military-industrial facilities, and—more recently—targets of economic significance,” and that “thanks to strikes on Russian oil facilities, Moscow was denied the full benefits of the sustained rise in prices that accompanied the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.” They argue that “Ukrainian strategists have long maintained that it is only by imposing costs inside Russia that they can weaken Putin’s position,” and that this judgment “increasingly looks right” as Russians face “mounting costs of war and a bleaker, more isolated future,” with German Gref saying “I don’t think there is a single person in the country whose concerns are anything other than bringing the military actions to an end as soon as possible.” For that reason, they conclude, “the reality is that Ukraine is winning,” and “pushing for a just peace is still the morally and strategically correct course of action, and it is paying off.”

“Ukraine has already won the war against Russia, Finnish president tells CNBC,” Elsa Ohlen, CNBC, 07.07.26.

• Speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, Finnish President Alexander Stubb argued that “Ukraine has already won the war against Russia,” insisting that Kyiv has preserved its “independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity despite more than four years of full-scale invasion.” “Look at things from a Moscow perspective,” he said: in four years of active war “they have advanced 60 kilometers. In World War II, they went from Moscow to Berlin, that’s 1,400 kilometers. You have to ask yourself: ‘Who has won, who has lost?’ I say Ukraine has won,” even as he stressed that “Zelenskyy needs air defense, and that’s where we need to help Ukraine as much as possible.”
• Stubb framed Ukraine as central to NATO’s future, declaring that “Ukraine needs NATO, but NATO needs Ukraine as much as the other way around,” and tying Kyiv’s battlefield resilience to a broader shift toward “NATO 3.0,” in which Europe takes on more of the defense burden while the U.S. rebalances. Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson echoed him, saying “Russia is certainly not winning the war against Ukraine right now, that’s quite obvious, Ukraine is having spectacular successes,” and warning that “Russia is hoping for Europe to get tired of this war,” so the key question is “on whose side is time.”

“The Ukraine war’s big lie: Can Kyiv ever win?,” Thomas Fazi, UnHerd, 07.09.26.

• Thomas Fazi argues that Brussels’s claim “the tide is turning,” echoed by Ursula von der Leyen and others, is “a coordinated narrative push” not supported by facts. He recalls that the 2023 counteroffensive “was a catastrophic failure, producing mass casualties and negligible territorial gains,” and contends that today, despite Ukraine’s deep‑strike drone campaign “reaching as far as Saint Petersburg and Moscow,” “the Russian army continues to advance on the battlefield,” citing Moscow’s announcement of Kostiantynivka’s capture and gains “around Chasiv Yar and Toretsk… around Lyman and Rai‑Oleksandrivka.” Economically, he notes that while Russian output is “faltering,” the IMF in April raised its 2026 GDP forecast to “1.1%,” while cutting Germany, France and Italy to “0.8%, 0.9% and 0.2%,” arguing that “Russia remains in a better position than much of the EU.”
• Fazi points to Ukraine’s “busification” — “kidnapping of conscription‑age men off the streets” — and EU moves to exclude men aged “23 to 60” from temporary protection as proof “things are going badly for Ukraine,” and calls the drone campaign “less like a game-changer than a sign of desperation.” He warns that sustained strikes on Russian cities risk “embolden[ing] the more hawkish voices in the Kremlin” and changing Moscow’s calculus about hitting European hubs, stressing that “nobody in the West knows where Russia’s red lines lie” and that a grinding war of attrition “it cannot win militarily” makes a negotiated settlement with “territorial concessions from Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees” the only realistic path.

“Russia closes in on city that made the Kremlin glitter,” Christopher Miller, Financial Times, 07.11.26.

• Christopher Miller calls Kostyantynivka “an important link in Ukraine’s so‑called ‘fortress belt’, which stretches north through the urban cities of Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, Slovyansk and Lyman and protects what remains of Kyiv‑held Donbas.” Sitting on a main highway and rail junction, it has served “as a crucial section of the Donetsk defenses and a logistical hub,” so its loss would “put those other cities in the region under greater pressure” and give Russia “a foothold for a deeper offensive into the sparsely populated lowlands to the west.” Before the war the city had “about 70,000” residents; now “some 2,000” remain, living “without gas, water, electricity or medical assistance,” entirely inside a drone “kill zone” where most troop movement in and out is “on foot, with troops walking several miles.”
• Miller notes that Kostyantynivka’s fall would be “Moscow’s most significant advance in months” toward its goal of taking all Donbas—Russia already occupies “about 75 per cent of Donetsk” and almost all of Luhansk. But the cost is stark: CSIS estimates Russia has suffered “1.4mn casualties between February 2022 and June 2026,” versus “525,000 to 625,000” for Ukraine, and Ukrainian commanders say Russia is currently losing “about 30,000 to 35,000 soldiers… each month.”
• So far Russia has not felt the need to significantly alter its strategy, said Emil Kastehelmi, co-founder of the Finland-based Black Bird conflict analysis group that tracks the war, even as the ratio of personnel losses to territorial gains worsened. “The life of an individual Russian soldier is not considered valuable,” he said.

“Land–Air–Land: Ukraine’s offensive against the logistics of the occupied territories enters a new phase,” Re:Russia, 07.09.26.

• Re:Russia notes that Russian casualties reached “39,290 personnel in June,” the highest since March 2025 and “25% above the average monthly losses of the previous five months (31,300),” even as territorial gains fell to “around 85 square kilometers” in June and “15 square kilometers in May.” By their calculation, that means “each square kilometer captured in June cost more than 460 personnel losses,” and over May–June “730 personnel” per square km, compared with about “115” losses per km during the 2024–25 offensive when Russia seized “around 2,700 square kilometers.”
• The piece highlights a parallel “logistics offensive”: according to Ukraine’s General Staff, Russian transport‑vehicle losses hit “12,900 vehicles in June,” nearly four times the 2025 monthly average of 3,300, with OSINT analyst Clément Molin geolocating 784 destroyed trucks in May–June—214 in May (7 per day), 570 in June (19 per day), and 295 in the last 10 days alone (29 per day). At least “26 strikes” hit bridges in occupied areas in June (16 road, 10 rail), “nearly 80%” on links to Crimea, including repeated attacks that temporarily disabled the Chonhar bridge and destroyed the bridge near Rozdolne. With traffic on the R‑280 Novorossiya highway down “70%,” a UN‑confirmed “severe fuel crisis and electricity disruptions” in occupied Kherson, and “more than 150,000” Russian troops dependent on southern corridors, the authors say the next six weeks will test whether dominance in low‑altitude airspace and strangled logistics can translate into ground change.

“The War in Ukraine Is Shifting Against Putin but He Isn’t Giving In,” Alexander Ward, Marcus Walker, Thomas Grove, Wall Street Journal, 07.10.26.

• The authors report that Russia’s offensive is yielding “ever-smaller gains at the front line” while losses “exceed recruitment.” Analysts cited say Russian battlefield casualties have outstripped new recruits “since last winter,” and some estimate Russia is now losing roughly 30,000 troops a month. Yet territorial gains are modest: in Donetsk, infantry are only “slowly infiltrating the city of Kostyantynivka,” and, unlike earlier phases when Russia was inching forward along “almost the entire more than 700‑mile front line,” advances are now confined to narrow sectors, with “both sides advancing in different places.”
• On the Ukrainian side, the piece notes that deep‑strike drones have hit refineries and energy infrastructure “from Moscow and St. Petersburg to deep within Siberia,” contributing to a nationwide fuel crunch and threatening diesel shortages for the Russian military. At the same time, Ukraine’s own vulnerability is quantified: Zelensky calls ballistic missile strikes “Russia’s last major advantage,” as recent barrages on Kyiv saw Ukraine intercept none of nearly 30 Russian ballistic missiles. Former commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi concludes that “the military balance has become one of mutual denial rather than decisive victory,” framing the conflict as a long war of attrition where casualty and strike statistics, not sweeping offensives, define the balance.

“The Geography of Coercion: Russian Missile and Drone Campaigns in Ukraine,” Marcus Welsch, Yasir Atalan, Benjamin Jensen, and Erik Tiersten-Nyman, CSIS, 07.07.26.

• The authors argue that “Russia’s missile and drone campaign in Ukraine is a coercive strategy built around geography,” using long‑range firepower “to disrupt logistics, strain critical infrastructure, pressure civilians, and impose cumulative costs on Ukraine’s ability to fight, repair, govern, and negotiate.” They write that damage has “increased sharply,” becoming concentrated in “frontline and southern regions as well as areas with industrial, energy, and port infrastructure and major urban centers,” so that “modern coercion turns infrastructure, distance, and civilian vulnerability into political leverage.”
• According to the brief, Russian strikes reveal that Moscow is “aimed at logistical nodes that support Ukraine’s battlefield operations,” while “strategic industrial bases, energy infrastructure, ports, and major urban centers have become recurring targets” in a “classic punishment strategy.” The authors describe an expanding “drone‑dense kill zone near the front,” with Shahed‑type drones enabling Russia “to expand the scale, frequency, and geographic reach” of attacks, and note that winter campaigns “increase pressure on Ukraine’s power grid, heating systems, and repair capacity during periods of maximum civilian and industrial dependence.”
• The study concludes that Russia seeks “success through cumulative pressure rather than decisive shock”: missile and drone strikes “have not broken Ukrainian political cohesion” but have imposed “recurring costs for air defense, repair capacity, energy resilience, logistics, and civilian life.” The authors contend that future wars will hinge on “ports, rail nodes, substations, fuel systems, industrial zones, and urban centers,” and that cheap one‑way attack drones “force defenders to protect more places, spend more resources, and make more difficult choices about what to defend—and what to leave vulnerable.”

“Ukraine’s Logistics Targeting Raises Questions for Russia’s Rear Defences,” Emily Ferris, RUSI, 07.07.26.

• Emily Ferris writes that Ukraine’s “logistical lockdown” has become “a sustained and coordinated series of attacks on Russia’s military supply chains and fuel supplies,” revealing “serious weaknesses in Russia’s rear defenses.” By zeroing in on routes around Crimea, especially the R‑280 Novorossiya highway and bridges such as Genichesk, Chongar and Armyansk, Ukraine has left “delivery routes to Crimea… blocked,” forced freight into “long vulnerable convoys,” and turned trucks backed up at pontoon crossings into “easy prey for drones,” while simultaneous waves of strikes timed with events like SPIEF and the ASEAN summit “had a more sustained effect, creating long delays in both civilian and military cargo deliveries,” she notes.
• These attacks expose what Ferris calls Russia’s “geographic loss of strength gradient”—its “substantive problems… in protecting and maintaining the connectivity of its long and vulnerable supply chains” far from bases—and raise “important questions about how Russia can protect its critical national infrastructure deep behind the front line,” from ports and railways to refineries in Siberia and the Far East. Patchy air defenses and “a lack of drone‑intercept weapons” have forced Moscow into stopgaps such as Soviet‑era armored trains and BARS mobile fire teams, which “do not appear to be particularly effective” against stealthier Ukrainian drones; longer‑term ideas like an underground oil pipeline to Crimea would be costly and “technically creat[e] a new target for attacks,” the author argues.
• Ferris adds that “technically, Ukraine could probably disable the Kerch Bridge and sever its links to the Russian mainland,” making its destruction a “symbolic coup,” but warns that “politically, there is a risk that such a move would be met with disapproval by Ukraine’s allies” and could “prompt a serious escalatory move from Russia.” Ukraine has therefore tried to “frustrate Russia’s military supply chains while avoiding dense civilian areas… and maintaining pressure on Moscow without inducing significant escalation,” yet “thus far, it does not appear that the strategy is sufficient to bring Moscow to the negotiating table,” she concludes.

“Inside the Secret Factory That Supplies Ukraine’s War Drones,” Vivienne Walt, The New York Times, 07.11.26.

• Walt describes cradling “a lethal killing machine” at “a secret location in southern Germany,” noting that the 26‑pound HX‑2 attack drone “looks so simple that it is easy to forget its role in a surging multibillion-dollar industry, the Russia-Ukraine War — and maybe even in Europe’s future security.” “There’s a transformation in defense economics,” one expert says, as Helsing and other start-ups harness “disruptive innovation” and venture capital to mass‑produce A.I.-powered war machines costing “as little as €17,500,” the author wrote.
• “The urgency was clear, or at least clear to us,” Helsing co‑founder Gundbert Scherf said, explaining that the company’s mission from 2021 was “to do more in defense and give Europe a stronger footing,” even when “it was virtually impossible to raise money for defense in Europe.” According to Walt, thousands of Helsing drones have been “battle-tested under fire in Ukraine” with “mission success rates … around 70 percent,” and investors see “enormous” market opportunities.
• The author notes that Helsing is already building “the company’s first unmanned fighter jet, named CA‑1 Europa,” designed to strike “deep inside an adversary like Russia” by 2029 and to fly “for a small fraction of the cost of one regular fighter jet.” “If you don’t have a pilot, you can conduct completely different, more dangerous missions,” a company executive argued, while analyst Alexander Blanchard warns that booming arms investments reflect thinking “that we are on course for a larger conflict in Europe.”

“Is Ukraine’s Decentralized Drone Innovation a Blip or a Revolution?” Charles Dainoff, Geoffrey Fain Williams, and Robert Farley, Foreign Policy, 07.10.26.

• Dainoff, Williams, and Farley describe Ukraine’s “front-brewing” drone ecosystem, where “small industrial workshops develop and produce drone designs” that are then “reworked extensively by local technicians before they are deployed in combat,” with update cycles “as little as three weeks.” This decentralized model, born of necessity, has “substantially frozen the front” and enabled “a campaign of interdiction against Russian logistics,” creating “an exponential rate of innovation at the front” even if it is “costly in terms of time and duplicated effort.”
• They stress that the pattern is not unique to Ukraine: in Sudan, Myanmar, and even in limited India‑Pakistan skirmishing, both sides are “rapidly adjusting their technologies,” and one of the most striking innovations—using fiber‑optic cables to guide drones through jamming—first seen in Ukraine in March 2024, has now been adopted by Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Azawad Liberation Front in Mali. Historically, they note, weapons like the Land Pattern Musket (“Brown Bess”), introduced in 1722, and later interchangeable‑parts firearms epitomized “centripetal” mass production, whereas today’s drone wars show a “strong pattern of centrifugal development.” Whether this remains a transitional stage before new standards emerge, or a lasting shift that reshapes procurement over “10 or 20 years,” will determine how revolutionary Ukraine’s model really is.

“Chechen Recruitment: The Failure of Operation ‘Dances on Khreshchatyk,’” Investigations Desk, Novaya Gazeta Europe, 07.06.26.

• Novaya Gazeta Europe reports that Ramzan Kadyrov has secured Kremlin favor and a fifth term largely by claiming to have supplied “more than 70,000 fighters” and vast amounts of equipment to the Ukraine war, despite Chechnya’s tiny population and meager official incentives. The investigation, based on interviews with 178 families of the dead and current and former security officials, finds that the “Kadyrov army” was built through a mix of elite Rosgvardia units packed with Kadyrov’s relatives, coerced recruitment by local police (who had to go themselves or find and arm a “volunteer”), and an early, precedent‑setting scheme to release convicts from the notorious Chernokozovo prison in exchange for service at the front.
• The article reveals that Chechen Rosgvardia units were deeply involved in planning the initial invasion, including a scheme to seize Hostomel airport and march on Kyiv; commanders promised an easy “parade” and filmed bombastic videos, but panicked when columns were ambushed and casualties mounted. When Viktor Zolotov ordered these units redeployed from near Kyiv to storm Mariupol and demanded that SOBR “Akhmat” be sent, aide Daniil Martynov called Grozny “under panic,” and Kadyrov “the same day ordered all commanders… to return with their units to Chechnya,” the authors report. According to a senior source, when Zolotov threatened Martynov and the Delimkhanovs with desertion charges, Kadyrov exploded and told him that “Chechens take orders not from Zolotov or Shoigu, but from Kadyrov — and Zolotov and Shoigu can go to hell,” then quietly replaced his relative‑heavy elite units with “riffraff” volunteers, ex‑police in disgrace, and released prisoners.
• To conceal this retreat, the investigation says, Kadyrov’s team flooded social media with staged footage: archive clips of units filmed in Russia and Belarus, choreographed formations of local police “ready” to deploy, and even a fake “staff meeting seven kilometers from Kyiv” shot in the basement of SOBR “Akhmat,” where jailed commanders such as Magomed Tushayev and Hussein Mezhidov were brought out of their cells to stand behind Kadyrov. At the same time, prominent “volunteer” recruiters such as General Apti Alaudinov and disgraced ex‑police chief Ayub Kataev were told to assemble and lead their own detachments, promising 300,000 rubles cash and arming men from Chechnya’s vast black‑market stock of unregistered weapons, while Kadyrov himself managed to send only a handful of distant relatives to the front before pulling his closest kin back to safety.

“The Next Phase in Ukraine’s War With Russia: The Battle for Minds,” Carlotta Gall and Oleksandr Chubko, The New York Times, 07.13.26.

• Gall and Chubko describe how Maria Berlinska, “revered in Ukraine as a main driver behind the use of drones in the war,” has now formed a new nonprofit, Victory Neurones, and gathered officials and experts in Kyiv to focus on “what they see as the war’s next crucial phase, the battle for minds.” “Wars begin and end not in the trenches, but in people’s heads,” she told the meeting, arguing that while drones have enabled Ukraine “to hold its front lines by killing three to four Russian soldiers… for every Ukrainian fatality,” they “would not win the war” if Vladimir Putin orders a mass mobilization.
• According to the authors, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said “the situation in Russia is already beginning to shift,” claiming Ukraine is “beginning to overtake Moscow’s dominance of electronic warfare and drones” and now “all that is left is to catch up with them in the information war, where Russia is No. 1 in the world.” S.B.U. acting chief Maj. Gen. Yevheniy Khmara told the gathering, “We neutralize Russian information operations and organize our own,” but stressed that “success can be achieved only together.”
• The article notes that experts define cognitive warfare as encompassing “propaganda, disinformation, hybrid attacks and psychological operations,” with Russia “a leader in the domain since Soviet times.” Serhii Demediuk warned that “when you try to debunk something, you only reinforce the message,” while analyst Maria Kucherenko urged Ukrainians to relearn Russian language and society: “It is not a question of whether Russian culture is great or not. It is a question of our survival, of finding Russia’s weak points for asymmetric methods of influence. Because we will not win this war symmetrically.”

“Propaganda Sustains Russians Fighting in Ukraine,” Tatiana Vorozhko, Anna Vyshniakova, and Peter Pomerantsev, Foreign Policy, 07.08.26.

• The authors report on a survey of 1,060 Russian POWs conducted by Ukrainian NGO LingvaLexa showing that “belief in Russian propaganda is widespread,” with “76 percent of respondents” endorsing at least one of 18 Kremlin narratives and more than 60 percent accepting even the most extreme claims (that Ukraine’s leaders are “Nazis,” that “NATO has biolabs,” or that Ukrainian forces use civilians as shields). Measuring conviction on a 0–10 scale, they find that soldiers who “fully embraced propaganda were six times more likely to view the war as completely legitimate,” and about half of these strong believers felt “completely ‘fused’ with the Russian world ideology.”
• Most striking, “43 percent of respondents did not attribute full human characteristics to Ukrainians,” placing them at “just 88 percent of full human development,” with dehumanization rising from 36 percent among weaker believers to 54 percent among strong ones—despite many simultaneously claiming Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” While only 12.8 percent of all POWs said they would rejoin the army, “roughly one third” of strong believers expressed some willingness and 22 percent were ready to return to combat roles. The authors argue this evidence shows propaganda is not incidental “background noise” but a “functional instrument” that dehumanizes Ukrainians and sustains Russia’s capacity to wage war, with potential implications for holding propagandists legally accountable.

See these links for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

• “Ukraine Launches Latest Summer Campaign of the War, with Drone Attacks Precipitating a Fuel Crisis in Russia, “Nikolay Mitrokhin, Russia.Post, 07.06.26.
• "Inside Ukraine’s Game-Changing Drone Industry," Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Viktor Koziuk and Ilona Sologoub, Project Syndicate, 07.07.26.
• "Bringing the war to Putin’s front door: Is Ukraine’s energy strike strategy working?" Efrat Lachter, Fox News, 07.11.26.
• "Ukraine’s drone revolution shows Russia is dangerously unprepared. But, so is America," Chuck DeVore, Fox News, 07.10.26.

Military aid to Ukraine:

“Washington said Ukraine’s Patriot shortage was solved. Lockheed and RTX hadn’t been told,” Daniel Thomas, Euromaidan Press, 07.10.26.

• Daniel Thomas notes that at Ankara Trump told Zelenskyy, “We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving ’em enough,” but in reality “Trump did not actually grant the license,” with CBS reporting that Lockheed Martin and RTX “had not been informed” and key terms “still had to be negotiated.” Even a finalized license “would not deliver a single interceptor soon,” experts say, because “the two big challenges in producing missiles are the engines and the guidance systems,” and foreign producers still depend on U.S. subcontractors for Patriot guidance.
• Meanwhile, the article stresses, “Kyiv needs Patriots today”: in the 6 July strike, it “downed none of nearly 30 ballistic missiles,” after Russia fired five to six times as many Iskanders annually as the U.S. produces PAC‑3s (“roughly 800 a year against about 600”). Thomas quotes scholar Marc DeVore warning that the license lets Washington “check off a box and say, ‘We’ve solved the problem,’” and retired NATO deputy commander Richard Shirreff calling Ankara “an exercise in papering over the cracks,” since it “lets America off the hook” while offering “no strategy to defend Ukraine’s skies until production begins,” leaving Kyiv to scramble for loans of interceptors from nearly 40 partners as a stopgap.

“Trump Will Let Ukraine Make Patriots,” Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, 07.08.26.

• The editorial board notes that while Trump was “his usual bumptious self” in Ankara, “the bigger and better news was real progress on the defense of Ukraine and Europe,” as he announced the U.S. “will grant Kyiv a license to make Patriot missile batteries.” With Ukraine “running short on the Patriots it needs to intercept Russian ballistic missiles” and having intercepted “as few as four of 46 missiles fired in a ballistic trajectory” since July 1, the board stresses that “this is Russia’s last major advantage.” Citing Ukrainian estimates that Russia can now produce “60 to 65 Iskander ballistic missiles a month,” while Lockheed made “only about 600 Patriots last year,” they welcome Trump’s pledge that America will “show Kyiv how to make Patriots,” even if he admitted “we haven’t yet informed the company… but that’ll work out all right.”
• Calling the move “a defensive situation as opposed to an offensive,” Trump also backed Ukraine’s deep‑strike campaign, saying those attacks are “an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end,” since “the more pressure on Mr. Putin, the sooner he may conclude he needs an exit from the war of aggression he started,” the board concludes.

“How to get Patriot missiles to Ukraine,” Editorial Board, The Washington Post, 07.07.26.

• The editorial board notes that in the latest Russian barrage “of the 29 ballistic and hypersonic missiles in the barrage, [Ukraine] intercepted exactly zero,” because “Ukraine is out of Patriots, the U.S.-made air defense missiles it has used to defend itself since 2023.” Volodymyr Zelensky warned that “as long as Patriot missiles remain in our allies’ stockpiles, Russia is only encouraged to keep ‘vanquishing’ residential buildings,” while the board argues that “the main impediment to peace is Russian President Vladimir Putin,” who has “dug in his heels, demanding Ukraine hand over territory his army has failed to seize by force.”
• They suggest the obstacle isn’t money but “fear”: European governments “hold interceptors that could be handed to Kyiv in weeks” but worry that “Washington, busy refilling its Iran-drained magazines, will ever help them rearm.” The board urges Donald Trump, at the Ankara NATO summit, to promise that “any country that releases Patriot interceptors to Ukraine would move to the front of the line as production ramps up,” backed by firm contracts and expanded licensing for European production—even if that means U.S. replenishment “may have to slip, perhaps to the end of the decade.” That trade‑off, they argue, is worth it because “standing by as Kyiv gets battered will underline for both Moscow and Beijing that determination pays dividends,” whereas getting Patriots to Ukraine “can help conclude a bloody conflict” as “Putin’s war machine has stalled on the battlefield” and Russian civilians already “feel the sting” of Ukrainian strikes on refineries.

“Ukraine’s Six-Part Strategy to Survive the Global Run on Patriot Missiles,” Alistair MacDonald, Anastasiia Malenko, and Marcus Walker, Wall Street Journal, 07.08.26.

• The authors say Kyiv is responding to its Patriot shortage with “six things” it is doing to mitigate Russia’s ballistic threat. 
  • First, Ukraine seeks to “be efficient with Patriots,” using a layered system and saving the missiles “for ballistic missiles,” often firing just one interceptor instead of the usual two or three.
  •  Second, it aims to “shoot the arrow-maker, not the arrow,” extending its long‑range campaign from refineries to “missile-component plant[s]” in Penza and Volgograd. 
  • Third, Ukraine is working to “hide defense industries,” spreading production around the country and abroad, sometimes “in a suburban house” or underground, because “the best protection against ballistic missiles is concrete.”
  • Fourth, Kyiv is trying to “find alternatives to the Patriot,” from licensing production in Germany to domestic projects such as Fire Point’s FP‑7 and cheap ABM missiles from European startups, even though “it isn’t clear when [they] will enter service.” 
  • Fifth, ordinary Ukrainians are urged to “take shelter,” with “tens of thousands of Kyiv residents” sleeping in the metro as the Patriot shortage forces people to take air‑raid warnings seriously again. 
  • Finally, Ukraine hopes to “hurt Russia until it stops,” using growing long‑range capabilities to hit refineries and infrastructure and, in theory, push Moscow toward at least a “partial ceasefire” on deep strikes—though so far, the authors note, “Russian 
  • President Vladimir Putin has shown no inclination to accept any kind of truce.”

“Inside Lindsey Graham’s Final Mission: Saving Ukraine,” Robbie Gramer, Vera Bergengruen, and Yoko Kubota, Wall Street Journal, 07.13.26.

• The authors recount that on Friday in Kyiv, standing outside St. Michael’s monastery after meeting Volodymyr Zelensky, Lindsey Graham declared, “I’ve never been more optimistic than I am today… We have a magic moment in time here,” as he pushed a Russia sanctions bill he believed could “finally end” Moscow’s assault on Ukraine. He left Ankara “tired but elated” after a NATO summit where Trump “praised the alliance and embraced Ukraine,” and told Sen. Richard Blumenthal about the revised sanctions package, “This is a big effing deal—we all did good,” hours before he was pronounced dead.
• For more than a year, Graham had been “urging both Congress and the White House to back a Russia sanctions bill” aimed at tightening “the economic noose around Moscow,” even as he navigated Trump’s “hot‑and‑cold approach to Ukraine and NATO,” the authors write. In Ankara he lobbied Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over dinner, met both Zelensky and Syrian President Ahmed al‑Sharaa, and, in a striking shift, said the new Syrian leader “deserved an opportunity to rebuild the country,” underscoring his continued clout as a foreign‑policy power broker.
• In what became his swan song, Graham traveled overnight by train to Kyiv for his 10th wartime visit, toured a SkyFall drone factory—saying “it would be a huge mistake for America not to work with Ukraine in the drone space”—and announced that he and colleagues had “reached an agreement with the Trump administration” on the sanctions bill, telling reporters “it means it’s going to become law.” Colleagues such as Rep. Michael McCaul credited him with helping keep Trump engaged because “President Trump likes a winner,” while Sen. Jeanne Shaheen urged Congress to pass the package and fulfill Graham’s “long‑held dream of an independent and secure Ukraine.”

Punitive measures related to Russia’s war against Ukraine and their impact globally:

“A day before his death, Graham was in Ukraine, announcing a breakthrough,” Noah Robertson, Mariana Alfaro, and Theodoric Meyer, Washington Post, 07.13.26.

• The authors recount that on Friday in Kyiv, standing before captured Russian equipment, Sen. Lindsey Graham declared that after “more than a year of excruciating negotiations with the White House” he had finally secured a deal to advance a bipartisan sanctions bill “aimed at tightening the economic noose around Moscow,” saying, “We have the best chance since I’ve been coming here in the last five years to get Putin to the peace table.” His sudden death from an “aortic dissection,” they write, has injected uncertainty into a “moment of triumph for Ukraine,” which has lost a key Republican backer who served as “an envoy to President Donald Trump.”
• Lawmakers such as Rep. Michael McCaul argue that “the best thing Congress could do to honor his legacy would be to pass that bill,” which would “seek to punish countries for purchasing Russian oil,” while Sen. Richard Blumenthal says “this time feels monumentally different because we have White House support.” Yet aides caution that “it was Graham’s baby” and “no one is going to push it like he did,” even as broader trends—retirements by GOP Russia hawks like Thom Tillis and Don Bacon, and growing isolationist factions—raise doubts about long‑term U.S. backing for Kyiv.
• The article notes that Graham’s “political canniness and personal relationship with Trump would be hard to replace,” with Ukraine’s ambassador Olga Stefanishyna saying “he really was one of the people speaking Trump’s language.” McCaul credits him as “a central figure in lobbying the president to remain in the NATO alliance” and to keep aiding Ukraine, recalling that “he played golf because he could get the president’s ear for nine or 18 holes,” while Ukrainian officials now “were concerned about their future standing without a key Trump whisperer,” even after a warmer Trump‑Zelensky meeting in Ankara.

Ukraine-related negotiations: 

“The Time Is Ripe for Russia-Ukraine Peace Talks, But Putin Could Escalate Conflict,” Thomas Graham, CFR, 07.10.26.

• Thomas Graham argues that recent developments—Trump’s “cordial” July 8 meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, praise for Ukraine’s “recent success on the battlefield,” and agreement to “license the production of Patriot interceptors to Ukraine”—have reinforced the narrative that “the tide has turned in Ukraine’s favor,” as Kyiv has “brought Russia’s advances on the battlefield to a halt,” caused “a gasoline shortage across the country” with deep strikes, and “isolat[ed] Russian-annexed Crimea from the rest of Russia.” Yet he cautions that Ukraine still faces “a deepening demographic crisis, growing economic havoc, and the mounting costs of reconstruction,” and “needs to end this conflict as soon as possible.”
• Graham notes that Putin is “not backing away from his maximalist demands,” recently expanding them to include all of “Novorossiya,” and has “stepped up massive air strikes on Ukrainian cities, exploiting widening gaps in Ukraine’s air defenses” that Patriot licensing “will do nothing to close… in the near term.” He warns that while a “remote prospect” of overt NATO invasion remains, Russia will likely “ratchet up hybrid attacks” as Europe re-arms, and that “persistent warnings… of a coming war, in the absence of any substantial diplomatic contact, only heighten the risk of accidental war.” He argues “intensive diplomacy is urgently needed now,” led by Washington via shuttle talks and a framework of a ceasefire along the line of contact, closer—but non‑NATO—security ties for Ukraine, and “no further NATO expansion eastward,” offering both sides something they can claim as victory and serving as a first step toward a longer negotiation on European security.

“Putin and Trump Back on The Path to Peace: Will the Kremlin succeed once again in exploiting the rift between Europe and the United States?,” Re:Russia, 07.07.26.

• Re:Russia argues that Vladimir Putin’s theatrically staged 3 June military briefing, with “persistent and demonstrably false claims of battlefield success,” was aimed less at Russians stuck in fuel queues than at Donald Trump ahead of their 4 July call, “mark[ing] the launch of a new round of negotiations on Ukraine.” Valery Gerasimov’s boast that Russia had captured “636 square kilometers” in June and “more than 3,000 square kilometers” this year, despite OSINT estimates of under 800 square kilometers in 2024 and “less than 100 in June,” is presented as an “alternative military reality” designed to let Putin claim he can still win and thus justify continuing the war while reviving the 2025 “spirit of Anchorage,” in which Trump believed Putin was winning a war of attrition and thus “entitled to demand concessions from Ukraine.”
• The authors note that Yuri Ushakov now carefully curates accounts of “warm and trusting” Putin‑Trump calls and that Putin again blames a “European party of war” for blocking a peace deal Trump “is particularly keen to secure” before U.S. midterms, casting European support for Kyiv as “the principal obstacle to peace.” At the same time, they stress that, “from Europe’s perspective he appears closer than ever to war,” highlighting Putin’s order to identify those “inciting the continuation of the war in Ukraine” for “possible adoption of appropriate decisions,” Dmitry Peskov’s claim the conflict has become “a real war” with the West already helping target Russian assets, and rising fears in Warsaw and Baltic capitals—based on intelligence warnings—of Russian “hybrid attack” scenarios, all intended, they argue, to deter Europe from shaping any eventual Trump‑Putin settlement while Ukraine’s actual battlefield position improves.

See this link for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

• “Unlocking peace in Ukraine,” Anatol Lieven, Le Monde/Quincy Institute, 07.04.26.

Great Power rivalry/new Cold War/NATO-Russia relations:

“War Has Become Pointless,” Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, 07.06.26.

• Stephen Walt revisits Clausewitz’s dictum that war must serve clear political aims and argues that, in today’s world, “war is increasingly pointless.” Surveying U.S. conflicts since 1945, he writes that “with the exception of the first Gulf War in 1991 and the trivial invasion of mighty Grenada in 1983, its track record is unimpressive,” and concludes that “instead of making the United States more secure or more prosperous, almost all of these wars left the country worse off than it would have been had it never fought them,” including Trump’s Iran war, which he calls “a strategic disaster.”
• Walt extends this critique to other powers: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Russia’s “equally costly quagmire” in Ukraine that has yielded “about 20% of Ukraine’s original territory,” and Israel’s repeated campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah, where “tactical victories never seem to deliver lasting strategic benefits” and Gaza has turned it into “a pariah state.” By contrast, he notes, “China… has stayed out of all these wars and concentrated on building power at home,” showing that remaining aloof while others “punch themselves out in ruinous wars turns out to be a smart strategy.”
• He identifies four structural reasons why aggressive war no longer “meets Clausewitz’s criterion:” nuclear weapons cap what can be achieved; modern nationalism makes societies “fight like tigers against a foreign aggressor;” globalization means “it is generally easier for states to get what they want through trade than through war;” and technology—from drones to IEDs—has expanded Barry Posen’s “contested zone,” making it far easier to defend than to conquer. Walt concludes that “self-defense is getting easier and aggressive wars are increasingly pointless,” and urges readers to remember this “the next time some clever think tanker, lobbyist, or self-serving foreign leader” sells a quick, easy war.

“NATO Is Still a Sick Puppy,” Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, 07.13.26.

• Walt argues that “the 2026 NATO summit is now history, though it wasn’t exactly historic,” describing Ankara as “a deliberate and mostly successful effort to ignore the obvious tensions, avoid big headlines, and kick the can down the road.” “The alliance is a sick puppy,” he writes: when every summit begins in fear that “its strongest member will blow it all up and withdraw” and ends in relief that disaster was averted, “it’s hardly a reassuring sign of strategic alignment or shared values.” NATO’s core problem is “structural,” he contends, because members no longer face “the same clarifying, focus‑the‑mind threat environment” as in 1949 and “the glue binding Europe and the United States together was eroding long before Trump got into politics.”
• The author maintains that a necessary “new division of labor” has been poisoned by Trump’s “explicitly predatory approach” toward allies, from “false claims that the European Union was created to ‘screw the United States’” to “repeated threats to seize Greenland” and “recurring flirtations with” Vladimir Putin. Walt believes Europe now assumes “the U.S. commitment is no longer reliable,” sees Trump as “a doddering, rich uncle,” and is using a quiet Ankara summit to “gain the time and U.S. weaponry they need” while steadily “reducing dependence on the United States,” so that a seemingly calm meeting should not be “mistake[n]… for evidence of NATO’s robust good health.”

“Putin May See an Opportunity to Destroy NATO,” Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal, 07.06.26.

• Gerard Baker notes that in Russia’s “disastrous war on Ukraine, the Russian military has suffered 1.4 million casualties, a third of them killed in action,” and that the economy “is faltering, as fuel and labor shortages and higher prices eat into his people’s living standards,” even as “enemy drones are reaching deeper into his territory.” Despite that, senior European figures tell him the chance of a Russian move on NATO is “real and rising,” with officials estimating it will be “at least five years before their militaries are close to being capable of replacing U.S. capabilities in Europe.”
• Baker stresses Trump has “2½ years left in office,” creating a “narrow window of opportunity for Russia to make a move,” and cites intelligence reporting that U.S. officials warned Warsaw “Russia may attack the country,” while a NATO commander listed risks from a “Russian seizure of islands in the Baltic” to an incursion to “assist” the Russian minority in Estonia. Though none would be a “full‑scale invasion,” Baker argues that “if NATO failed to respond, its credibility would be in tatters,” potentially “a fatal blow to an already weakened trans‑Atlantic alliance” at a moment when the U.S. is “militarily depleted” after the Iran war and facing a “cold‑to‑simmering war with an axis of resistance… from Beijing through Tehran to Moscow.”

“Europe braces for a Russian provocation,” David Ignatius, Washington Post, 07.06.26.

• Ignatius reports that U.S. officials are warning allies that the Ukraine war “may be entering a dangerous new phase” as Moscow appears to weigh limited strikes or incursions against NATO members such as Poland or the Baltic states, betting Washington wouldn’t respond. “I’d say escalatory risk is real, and growing — mostly because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is under growing pressure at home and losing on the battlefield,” former CIA director William Burns wrote in a message to Ignatius, and NATO capitals are now hearing similar alerts from the CIA, even though intelligence agencies do not yet see Russian troop movements toward NATO borders.
• The column details reports from Polish, Baltic, French, Dutch and British sources about possible “armed provocations,” hybrid attacks, or military probes, from GRU units on Baltic territory to incidents near Kaliningrad and Belarus, and a Russian aircraft repeatedly approaching the U.K. carrier HMS Prince of Wales. As Russia absorbs “more than 30,000 casualties a month” and Ukraine strikes deep into its energy infrastructure, Ignatius writes, Putin must decide whether to keep actions below the threshold that triggers Article 5 or “take a harder punch, in the expectation that Trump wouldn’t respond,” while Russian elites such as Sberbank chief Herman Gref warn the economy “simply cannot survive for a prolonged period” under current pressures.

“Q&A: NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen. Alexus Grynkewich,” Air & Space Forces Magazine, July 2026.

• Grynkewich says Russia’s air and missile forces “have not been subject to the same level of attrition” as its ground troops, stressing that bombers, fighters, and ballistic‑ and cruise‑missile platforms “are there,” with production of replacement missiles continuing. Paired with “one‑way attack drones,” this gives Moscow “considerable firepower and considerable potential” for “combined aerospace attack” that NATO must be ready to counter, even as Russia pursues ongoing modernization, including the Su‑57 and its “big six weapons programs,” which he says “we’re watching… very closely.”
• He argues that NATO’s force planning and capability targets are being reshaped directly by the Ukraine war, warning allies not to “build me an armored brigade today” that looks like a 2021 model, but to account for the “evolution of operations” seen on Ukraine’s battlefields. Drawing on lessons that the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation is “pulling… out of Ukraine” through war games and analysis, Grynkewich says allies must ramp up spending to 3.5 percent of GDP and invest in capabilities—across all domains—that reflect drone‑dense, missile‑heavy, high‑tech warfare as practiced by Russia and Ukraine.
• On readiness, Grynkewich insists that as NATO shifts to what he calls a “warfighting headquarters,” the alliance is “ready today” to “defend every inch of alliance territory,” even as exercises and new capabilities will make it “more ready tomorrow.” He frames his role as giving “direct feedback to the political level” of 32 nations on “what I need them to do to make those plans work,” and says it has been “incredible to watch how allies are stepping up,” with Europeans filling senior commands and taking more responsibility as the U.S. adjusts the NATO Force Model to reflect global commitments while Europe braces against continued Russian aggression in Ukraine.

“The United States Will Miss the Old NATO When It’s Gone,” Fareed Zakaria, Foreign Policy (syndicated from the Washington Post), 07.10.26.

• Fareed Zakaria notes that non‑U.S. NATO members have raised defense spending from “1.4% of their combined gross domestic product on defense in 2014” to “close to 2.3%” in 2025, while Trump has proposed a “staggering $1.5 trillion defense budget” for FY 2027, underscoring that U.S. spending was never just about NATO but about deterring Russia, countering China, and global power projection. As Europe’s budgets grow, he argues, the continent will become “less dependent on the U.S., and less deferential to it,” complicating Washington’s assumption that allies will always line up behind U.S. strategies and sanctions—especially given Europe’s control over frozen Russian assets, SWIFT, and its own sanctions regimes.
• Zakaria warns that a more heavily armed, less U.S.-reliant Europe will have its own preferences on Russia, Iran, and China, and that European officials “now speak openly of the need to reduce dependence on U.S. hardware” out of fear that a future Trump administration could “withhold software upgrades, spare parts or operational support.” While he welcomes Germany’s long‑overdue rearmament, he notes that “size and power matter”: a Germany that “spends vastly more than its neighbors” will inevitably revive anxieties in France, Poland, and smaller states. The “genius” of post‑1945 U.S. strategy, he concludes, was to make it unnecessary for Europeans to act like traditional great powers by putting them under a U.S. umbrella; as that arrangement erodes, Americans may “come to miss the old NATO—not because it was fair, but because it was the most successful security system the world has ever known, with America at its center.”    

“Trump, Ukraine, and the NATO Summit: A Love Story,” Michael Froman, CFR, 07.10.26.

• Froman opens with Machiavelli’s question of whether “it be better to be loved than feared” and says this “complex dynamic of fear and love was on full display in Ankara.” After the closed‑door session, he notes, President Donald Trump declared, “There was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity,” even though leaders had arrived “biting their nails” and “fear was certainly thought to be the safer bet,” given Trump’s description of NATO as a “paper tiger” and his repeated threats to withdraw U.S. troops, the author wrote.
• The author argues that European “strategic autonomy” and the EU’s ReArm Europe and SAFE programs “demonstrate a seriousness of purpose toward balancing and hedging against the United States,” while new NATO goals of “3.5%” defense spending by 2035 and surging budgets “would likely be materially lower were it not for Trump instilling fear.” He explains that under “NATO 3.0,” Europe assumes “primary responsibility for its own conventional defense,” as Washington becomes “Europe’s primary arms supplier and the provider of NATO’s nuclear deterrent,” even while reviewing its “roughly eighty‑thousand‑troop presence in Europe.”
• “Ukraine was in many respects the big winner in Ankara,” Froman contends, citing NATO allies’ pledge of “€70 billion in assistance” (excluding the United States) and Trump’s announcement that Ukraine will be licensed to produce Patriot interceptors. Over a year, he writes, Ukraine has shifted the narrative to being “not only holding on, but winning,” by “making (modest) territorial strides,” “damaging Crimea,” and “striking oil facilities across Russia,” and “Trump likes a winner.” Yet he warns that Trump “might also be just what the doctor ordered” even as the “side effects, including a loss of trust in the United States as Europe’s fundamental security partner, will outweigh the material benefits over time.”

“What Europe and NATO must do to be ready for war,” Ursula von der Leyen and Mark Rutte, The Economist, 07.05.26.

• Ursula von der Leyen and Mark Rutte argue that “Europe’s era of outsourcing much of its defense is now over,” insisting that “if we want to prevent war, we have to be ready for it.” They write that European NATO allies and EU states are “rearming and re-energizing the defense industrial base,” with “new factories… opening,” existing ones “adding shifts and production lines,” and “even civilian car manufacturers… repurposing factories to produce components for the defense sector,” as “drones, unmanned ground vehicles, electronic-warfare systems” become “necessary for our armed forces to deter, protect and defend.”
• Yet “there are still gaps in our defense capabilities,” they warn, citing the need for “more fighter jets, air-to-air refuellers, ships and submarines, air defense and missile defense, drones and counter-drone systems,” while support to Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East has put “extra pressure on military stockpiles” that current capacity “can’t keep up with.” With Russia’s economy “quite simply geared to wage war,” investing “more than 40% of its state budget in defense” and “churn[ing] out military equipment around the clock,” and with China, Iran and North Korea also expanding, they argue that only deep cooperation “from California to Kyiv, Copenhagen to Warsaw, Oslo to Ankara” can build an industrial base “capable of producing at scale and at speed,” delivering “more, better and faster” as the foundation of credible deterrence.

“Europe braces for a Russian provocation,” David Ignatius, Washington Post, 07.06.26.

• David Ignatius reports growing concern that “an embattled Russia appears to be weighing whether to escalate the conflict with limited strikes or military incursions against European NATO countries such as the Baltic states or Poland—betting that the United States wouldn’t intervene.” Former CIA director William Burns told him that “escalatory risk is real, and growing—mostly because Putin is under growing pressure at home and losing on the battlefield,” as Ukraine pounds Russian refineries and Russia responds with some of “the heaviest” missile barrages of the war while Kyiv runs low on Patriots.
• According to Ignatius, CIA warnings have amplified European reporting that Moscow may be “dusting off” plans for provocations ranging from hybrid attacks on Polish infrastructure to GRU incursions in the Baltics or moves from Kaliningrad, at a moment when “European leaders don’t know how President Donald Trump will react.” He notes that figures such as Poland’s Donald Tusk and Latvia’s intelligence services openly speak of a “critical” few months, even as Russian elites like Sberbank’s Herman Gref warn the economy “simply cannot survive for a prolonged period” under current pressures; Ignatius argues that only Trump, “the would‑be peacemaker,” can now both deter escalation and “push the two bloodied combatants toward a peace agreement.”

“Five Takeaways From the NATO Summit,” Daniel Michaels, Wall Street Journal, 07.08.26.

• Daniel Michaels distills the meeting in Ankara into five lessons.
  • First, he writes, “NATO lives to defend another day,” noting that Trump’s threats had raised fears the alliance “could fall apart after more than 75 years,” but “the message coming out of Ankara is they definitely still want it and are willing to spend billions to reinforce it,” even if “whether NATO displays enough… unity and military strength to deter Kremlin hostilities remains an open question.”
  • Second, Michaels says “Ukraine is back in the White House’s good graces,” contrasting Trump’s early remark that Zelenskyy “didn’t ‘have the cards’ to play against Russia” with the summit, where “he got a high-profile bilateral chat with Trump” and the declaration stated that Ukraine “contributes to trans-Atlantic security” and that NATO members “stand united in our unwavering support for Ukraine.” 
  • Third, he observes that “Europeans are getting money out of the door,” as “European defense outlays rose almost 20% last year over 2024” and “tens of billions of dollars in orders and deals… were meant as a sign allies are stepping up;”
  • Yet, fourth, “turning money into weapons is slow,” since “European militaries still lack vital capabilities” and Mark Rutte admits, “you need a couple of years to really get them going.” 
  • Finally, Michaels concludes that “flattery keeps Trump engaged in NATO,” noting Rutte is criticized for “fawning over Trump,” but that Trump himself emerged saying, “They like the job I’m doing… They said, ‘We love you, sir. We love you.’”

“Behind the Scenes of NATO, Europe Is Falling Apart,” David Broder, The New York Times, 07.07.26.

• David Broder argues that while EU leaders talk up an “Independence Moment” and “self-reliance,” the bloc is “cracking up” internally: “At the continental level, Europe is coming together, as leaders boast of the bloc becoming ever more resilient. But at the member-state level, Europe is cracking up, as domestic politics becomes ever more volatile.” In Germany and France, he notes, far-right parties are now “closer to power than at any time since World War II,” and across Europe “parties long at the center of European politics have lost once-loyal electorates, as frustrated voters turn to eclectic alternatives.”
• Broder contends that the EU’s pandemic-era shift toward collective borrowing and its €800 billion NextGenerationEU program briefly suggested a capacity to “build resilience,” but “the largess went only so far:” cash “just plugged holes in budgets,” Green Deal targets were watered down, and the post‑Ukraine focus on rearmament has become “the bloc’s unifying cause” without “creating jobs in bulk nor mitigat[ing] against the price shocks that are so troubling European citizens.” Instead of rewarding leaders’ security posture, he writes, “rising numbers are cynical and alienated—and increasingly drawn to the far right.”
• Behind it all, Broder sees a paradoxical dependence on Donald Trump: his hostility has spurred calls for autonomy even as European elites “submitted to an unequal deal” on gas and tariffs “to ensure Mr. Trump’s continued commitment to European defense,” showing that “America still calls the shots.” True self‑reliance, he argues, would mean Europe acting as “a pillar of the global system,” focusing on green transition, rule of law, and diversified partnerships with the Global South and a more pragmatic China policy, so that “for the benefit of its own citizens, the European Union needs to do more than answer to Washington’s expectations” and “start to win back voters tempted by the siren song of nationalism.”

“How Europe Can Get Putin’s Attention: The Continent Must Overcome Its Russia Predicament,” Alexander Gabuev, Foreign Affairs, 07.07.26.

• Alexander Gabuev argues that European leaders such as Alexander Stubb, Emmanuel Macron, and Giorgia Meloni are right to say “we should talk to Putin” not only about ending the war in Ukraine but also about stabilizing a dangerously deteriorating Russia‑Europe relationship. He warns that both sides are entering a “danger zone:” Russia is rapidly expanding its missile and drone stockpiles as arms‑control regimes unravel, while European states are boosting their own long‑ and medium‑range capabilities and even revisiting nuclear options, risking a reprise of the most perilous phases of the Cold War.
• With Europe no longer able to count on consistent U.S. engagement, Gabuev contends it must establish its own high‑level channel to the Kremlin and deal directly with Putin, who monopolizes decision‑making. He proposes a “coalition of the willing”—at least France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and a frontline state such as Finland—to send a confidential letter seeking guardrails, hotlines, and talks on a new European security framework, while affirming that rearmament is driven by Russian behavior and will persist while the threat remains. Even if Putin is not yet ready for serious talks, early European outreach could encourage elite dissent in Moscow, maintain European unity, and prepare the ground for a later settlement involving the United States.

“How Europe would fight without America,” Ben Hall, Charles Clover and Henry Foy, Financial Times, 07.07.26.

• The authors write that European powers are “beginning to think the unthinkable”: “How would Europe defend itself without America?” After “12 months in which European governments have lost trust in U.S. President Donald Trump’s willingness to come to his allies’ aid,” an “unusually dangerous moment” has emerged as Washington cancels deployments, launches a posture review that “some countries will fail,” and runs down stockpiles in the Iran war, forcing Europeans to consider a NATO that is “less American” and “increasingly European-led.”
• Militarily, commanders admit NATO’s doctrine is out of date: “our tactical/operational conceptual thinking rather stopped in about 1991,” says Deputy SACEUR Johnny Stringer, while exercises show Ukrainian drone units “won hands down” against Swedish forces. Without U.S. capabilities to “destroy Russian air defenses,” Europeans may struggle to secure the skies and will need a more “porcupine” defense of fortifications, pervasive surveillance, AI‑enabled targeting and “cheap mass‑produced drones and missiles,” an approach “pioneered by Ukraine.”
• Politically and industrially, Europe is trying to move from just “adding European muscle to a body still dependent on an unreliable U.S. brain” toward a “new European way of war” built on regional leadership, faster procurement and “good enough” low‑cost weapons inspired by Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missile and Turkey’s defense sector. Yet, as Jana Puglierin notes, “the major problem is trust”: states that long “trusted the U.S. more than any of their European partners” now doubt Washington, but “that doesn’t lead to more trust in each other automatically,” even as, in François Heisbourg’s words, “we’re going to have to set up our own shop.”

“In NATO’s Next Act, Can Europe Lead?,” Steven Erlanger and Lara Jakes, The New York Times, 07.07.26.

• Erlanger and Jakes write that European leaders arrive in Ankara “with the alliance under threat,” having “come to accept that the alliance is changing—and will have to rely far less on Washington for the conventional defense of Europe.” Radoslaw Sikorski describes “NATO 3.0” as a phase in which “Europe will take more of the burden for conventional defense and the U.S. will be more of a cavalry-over-the-hill kind of ally,” even as Mark Rutte promises to “breathe life into the concept of NATO 3.0: A stronger Europe in a stronger NATO.”
• The authors note that Washington is “withdrawing troops and capabilities from Europe” while demanding allies stick to a pledge to spend 5% of GDP on defense and resilience, with Ambassador Matthew Whitaker warning there may be “benefits for those who pay up and difficulties for those who lag.” Yet “European armies do not have enough troops,” budgets are stretched, and critical “strategic enablers”—long‑range missiles, air defense, satellites, intelligence coordination—will be hard to replace as U.S. assets are cut, raising doubts about deterrence if “there will be fewer American troops, fewer high-tech American capabilities and doubts that Mr. Trump would come to NATO’s aid in all circumstances.”
• Command and nuclear credibility are central worries. Matthew Kroenig argues that even in NATO 3.0, “you still need U.S. leadership, high-end U.S. capabilities, nuclear deterrence and enough American conventional power on the ground to show that the U.S. has skin in the game,” since “there is a connection between troops on the ground and nuclear credibility.” Former NATO official Camille Grand bluntly says, “If there is only one American soldier left in Europe, it has to be” the American supreme commander; otherwise, with “not a lot of European defense cooperation,” Europe still lacks clear answers to how it “organize[s] a united response” if Russian troops mass on a NATO border and “the Americans [are] missing.”

“NATO ponders how to defend Eastern Europe as America pulls back,” The Economist, 07.02.26.

• German Leopard tanks and Puma IFVs “in fancy dress to hide them from hostile drones” train on Lithuania’s border with Belarus, as the 45th Panzer Brigade becomes a permanent deployment “for the first time since the end of the cold war.” The article notes that under “NATO 3.0” America demands Europeans “take the lead for their own conventional defense, while America provides a nuclear umbrella,” yet a German think tank finds Europe remains “strategically dependent on the United States across the entire military chain of operations.”
• American forces “are dwindling”: a U.S. tank brigade has left Poland and Lithuania, troop levels have dropped “from about 100,000… to about 80,000,” and rapid‑reaction assets are being reassigned, calling the “NATO Force Model” into question. Without the U.S. “operating system” of ISR, long‑range fires, air defenses and airlift, Ruben Stewart argues, what disappears “is not mass, but integration,” forcing Europeans into a “war of denial, attrition and endurance” that “would look more like Ukraine than the battlefield we would hope for.”
• The piece stresses that any conflict will unfold “in the shadow of nuclear weapons,” and asks how credible U.S. deterrence remains if Washington “doesn’t want to send their conventional troops to fight for Latvia or Poland.” Britain and France vow there is “no extreme threat to Europe that would not prompt a response by our two nations,” but the Economist concludes Europe cannot yet achieve full autonomy and must both “curb dependence on America” and “begin with helping Ukraine,” since a stronger Ukraine buys time for Europeans to rearm and organize.

“The NATO Summit’s Successes,” John R. Deni, Wall Street Journal, 07.09.26.

• John R. Deni writes that the Ankara summit “came in like a lion and went out like a lamb,” with “the worst outcomes… avoided” despite pre‑summit controversies over “Greenland, the American commitment to NATO’s mutual-defense clause, Europe’s role in the Iran War, and allied burden-sharing.” Those political disagreements “didn’t disappear,” he notes, but allies “were able to avoid a more significant public rupture,” and President Trump ended up praising “the unity and affection he perceived at NATO’s roundtable,” while allies made “significant improvements to their shared security.”
• Deni stresses that “the primary purpose of any alliance gathering is to convey the appearance, if not the reality, of unity,” both to “reassure” members and to “deter potential adversaries like Russia.” By that standard, he argues, the summit was a success: it did not resolve every dispute, but it signaled that, for now, NATO’s political center is holding and the alliance remains focused on collective defense rather than fracturing in public.

"NATO Is Going Strong, Actually," Charles Kupchan, The Atlantic, 07.12.26.

• “The quiet reality is that NATO, albeit wounded, is actually going strong. The alliance is resilient enough to withstand the abuse heaped upon it by a U.S. president, and too vital to the security of its members for either Europeans or Americans to allow it to fall prey to Trump’s whims,” the author writes.
• “But the facts speak louder than Trump’s demeaning rhetoric. Some 80,000 U.S. troops remain in Europe. … Most European members of NATO are in the process of acting on Trump’s call for major increases in defense spending … In Ankara, allies announced close to $50 billion in new defense contracts, another $30 billion in investments in energy infrastructure, and $80 billion in military assistance to Ukraine both this year and next. That’s real money,” the author argues.
• “The alliance is weathering the Trump era because of a simple reality: Europe and the United States still need each other. Russia is for now focusing its territorial ambitions on Ukraine, but a country on NATO’s eastern flank could be next. And although Europeans are investing in their own defense, they still need U.S. military power to deter and, if necessary, defeat Russia,” according to the author.

See these links for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

• "What the NATO Ankara Summit Missed," John Hemmings, and Jemima Tilly Kingdon-Jones, The National Interest, 07.09.26.
• “Europe Will Defend Itself ‘With Blood, if Necessary,’ Macron Says,” Mark Landler, The New York Times, 07.13.26.
• "‘NATO 3.0’ and Europe’s security future," Tarja Cronberg, European Leadership Network (ELN), 07.07.26.
• “Europe’s Strategic Trap: Why Russia’s Sub-Threshold Coercion Is Succeeding and How to Stop It,” Markus Iven, Ethan Mansfield, Nicole Eichstaedt, and Tim Sweijs, HCSS, 06.30.26.
• "The NATO summit in Ankara and the new alliance model: what's changing for Russia," Vadim Kozyulin, Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), 07.13.26. (In Russian.) (This organization is affiliated with the Russian authorities.)
• “The dangerous logic of NATO 3.0,” Dmitry Trenin, RT, 07.06.26. (This organization is affiliated with the Russian authorities.)

China-Russia: Allied or aligned?

Podcast: “No limits? Testing the China-Russia relationship, Fiona Hill, Patricia M. Kim, and Jonathan A. Czin, Brookings Podcast, 07.07.26.

• “The China-Russia partnership is highly consequential. Both countries want to reshape the international order in a way that is more favorable to themselves and align against U.S. pressure. 
• China and Russia view each other as their closest strategic partner because of their shared interests in countering U.S. pressure and reshaping the international order in a way that is more favorable to themselves. 
• Though the partnership is strong, there is deep mistrust, competing interests, and a desire to preserve their strategic autonomy in the relationship which limits the extent of their closeness. 
• President Trump has pushed away allies and increased global instability, changing the way Russia considers the global order—and potentially will affect the China-Russia relationship. But the U.S. will be unlikely to drive a wedge between the two states.”

“China in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan: From Economic Presence to a New Security Role,” Rollan Ismail, Ifri, 07.06.26.

• Ismail argues that “over the past three decades, China’s influence in Central Asia has steadily expanded, but in the last three to five years this process has entered a markedly accelerated phase,” with Beijing “effectively revis[ing] both its strategy and its operational approach toward the region” after 2022. He writes that China is evolving “from a predominantly economic partner into an increasingly significant political actor and, in some cases, a provider of security,” moving “beyond its traditional focus on trade and energy imports” into “regional security and military-technical cooperation.”
• The report contends that Beijing is “building its own security architecture in Central Asia” and that the “securitization of Chinese influence is fostering growing yet largely concealed competition within the framework of the Sino-Russian partnership,” even as Russia remains deeply entrenched. According to the author, rising “dependence on Beijing’s resources and political support” is compelling Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to “seek new ways of preserving their strategic autonomy,” while a “more complex reconfiguration of external power relations” emerges rather than a simple replacement of Russian influence.

Missile defense:

• No significant developments.

Nuclear arms:

“In The Latest Russia-Belarus Non-Strategic Nuclear Exercise, Putin and Lukashenka Show Teeth,” Gabriela I. Rosa-Hernandez, FPRI, 07.10.26.

• Gabriela Rosa‑Hernandez explains that Russia and Belarus’s mid‑May exercise, billed as the first joint training on “the management of strategic and tactical nuclear forces” since their nuclear‑sharing deal, went well beyond symbolic drills. According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, it involved “more than 64,000 troops, 7,800 units of military hardware… over 200 missile launchers, over 140 aircraft, 73 surface ships, and 13 submarines,” and included filmed mock transfers of nuclear warheads from a Russian convoy to Belarusian Iskander‑M units in the field. Russian 12th GUMO chief Igor Kolesnikov has stated that his directorate will retain custody of warheads “at all points until they are ordered released,” and the exercise, Rosa‑Hernandez notes, showed Belarusian crews practicing that hand‑off and “simulated a launch” after covert relocation.
• What makes this round notable, she argues, is the visible integration of Belarusian non‑strategic forces into Russia’s broader “strategic deterrence” framework: while a Belarusian Iskander launch from Kapustin Yar was staged, Russian strategic assets such as Yars ICBMs and Tu‑95 bombers also drilled, and General Valery Gerasimov described the exercise as a surprise “check of nuclear forces” with “delivery and transfer of nuclear munitions” to both Russian and Belarusian units. She places these moves in the context of Moscow’s fears of NATO encirclement—Zapad scenarios focused on Poland, alarm over Finnish and Swedish accession, and concerns about a blockade of Kaliningrad—and argues that the growing conventional‑nuclear interlock in Belarus is part of an effort “to systematize readiness and integrate conventional‑nuclear related procedures into routine military activities.” For NATO, she concludes, this is a still‑maturing, somewhat incoherent arrangement—but also a live process of experimentation that needs to be watched as Moscow looks for new ways to bolster its coercive leverage while bogged down in Ukraine.

“Losing in Ukraine, is Putin finally down to his nukes?,” Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet, The Hill, 07.10.26.

• Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet argue that “it was no longer a question of whether Russia loses in Ukraine, but only when,” and say today Putin is “once again rattling the nuclear saber, as his military loses, on average, 30,000 troops a month in Ukraine” while Kyiv’s deep strikes “are pummeling the Russian economy.” They note that in May the Russian Defense Ministry boasted it had delivered “nuclear munitions to field storage points” in Belarus, and that an IISS study logged 144 drone incidents “around nuclear weapons and nuclear energy” sites in Europe since late 2024, concluding Moscow is “manipulating nuclear risks to turn up the pressure on Western capitals” and acting with “substantial impunity.”
• The authors contend Putin is “essentially down to his nukes in Ukraine” but insist that “nuclear weapons are not a viable or winning option,” writing that he “keeps raising the specter of nuclear war only because he knows, militarily speaking, that he is out of conventional military options.” Ultra‑nationalists may “clamor… to nuke Ukraine,” but they argue Putin “will not use nukes in Ukraine” because “NATO would respond in force,” and even a covert nuclear incident to “scare Europe into submission” is unlikely. “Putin’s play when it comes to nukes is a pure bluff,” they conclude.

"Russia and America Are Rediscovering the Limits of Nuclear Weapons," Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, 07.13.26.

• “Henry Kissinger often said that nuclear arms are ‘weapons in search of a doctrine.’ After the Cold War, some strategists have tried to figure out what, exactly, these weapons could buy them beyond deterrence. The answer, as it turns out, is: nothing,” the author writes.
• “Two wars taking place right now are cases in point. The ongoing American attacks on Iran and Russia’s desperate campaign of atrocities in Ukraine … Among other painful lessons, the Americans and the Russians are learning, again, that their impressive array of nuclear weapons does not offer them a victorious path out of such conflicts,” according to the author. 
• “The Cold War showed that strategic deterrence works to keep the peace among the nuclear-armed powers. It also showed that these arms have almost no use in regional conflicts. With two nuclear superpowers embroiled in two such wars, revisiting America’s 20th-century experiences and learning from them is crucial,” the author argues.
• “Nothing of consequence will be done to reform nuclear strategy while Trump is in office. But it’s not too early for the United States to look at the wars in Ukraine and Iran and draw some important conclusions,” the author writes.
  • “First, nuclear weapons cannot replace conventional power.”
  • “Second, the United States must wrench itself out of its Cold War mindset.”
  • “Finally, the United States needs a complete overhaul of its defense strategy.”
• “In the meantime, a new Congress can start examining some of the Pentagon’s requests that involve nuclear weapons—and start canceling them. One Cold War nuclear spending spree was enough,” the author concludes.

“A three-way nuclear arms race,” Editorial Board, Financial Times, 07.11.26.

• The FT editors warn that China’s recent submarine-launched ballistic missile test in the Pacific is a marker of a “three-sided” nuclear arms race replacing the old U.S.–Soviet dyad. They note that Beijing’s warhead tally is “about 620 now” and “forecast to expand… to 1,000 by 2030,” as it moves toward a full triad of land-, air- and sea‑based systems capable of striking U.S. targets from bastions near its coast. With the lapse of New START this year—removing the 1,550‑deployed‑warhead cap on each of Washington and Moscow—there are now “no legal caps in place,” and the United States has “roughly 1,900 warheads held in reserve” it could “upload” onto launchers, while Russia has “about 2,600 in its stored stockpiles.”
• The editorial warns that U.S. planners fear being “heavily outmatched by a combined Chinese-Russian arsenal” and that visible expansion by all three could “spur others to expand or develop their own nuclear capabilities,” especially as wars in Ukraine and Iran, doubts over Trump’s commitment to the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and Putin’s “saber-rattling” already unsettle allies. The board urges Washington and Moscow to reinstate New START and seek a new framework that “ought to include Beijing,” arguing that without renewed arms control “the more weapons exist, the greater the risk of a catastrophe.”

See these links for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

• "Russia and America Are Rediscovering the Limits of Nuclear Weapons," Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, 07.13.26.
• "How does France’s nuclear deterrent contribute to the defense of Europe?" Jean-Louis LOZIER, IFRI, 07.10.26.
• “Thirty years later, the ICJ’s advisory opinion on nuclear weapons still matters, Jana Baldus, European Leadership Network, 07.08.26.

Counterterrorism:

• No significant developments.

Conflict in Syria:

• No significant developments.

Cyber security/AI: 

“The moral case for AI weapons,” Trae Stephens and Katherine Boyle, Washington Post, 07.07.26.

• Trae Stephens and Katherine Boyle acknowledge fears of “automated armies—without human oversight or decision-making” but argue that, given “a technological arms race with its adversaries,” there is “a moral argument for the U.S. to create a superior technological arsenal first: to wage wars of precision rather than wars of indiscriminate strikes, and to protect human life, civilian and combatant alike.” Rooting their case in updated just war theory, they contend that AI‑enabled, tightly governed systems can better meet enduring principles of proportionality, right intention, legitimate authority and last resort than today’s cruder, less discriminating weapons.
• The authors warn that “if the West lays down its arms or pauses building critical technologies, it will do so alone,” noting that Russia is building autonomous drones and China is racing toward military “intelligentization,” with Chinese doctrine describing “AI weapons” as early as 2011. They cite examples such as autonomous air‑defense tasking or swarming unmanned systems to deny aggression against Taiwan as cases where “would anyone deny the operational effectiveness—or ethical use—of automated weaponry?” In their view, a U.S. framework that keeps an “unbroken chain of command and accountability” over AI systems makes war “more ethical and less likely,” whereas failing to “build better and faster” would cede the field to adversaries using AI “divorced from human judgment and accountability, exactly as the pope and others rightly fear.”

“Hackers Rebrand to Thwart Cyber Defenses,” Angus Loten, Wall Street Journal Pro Cybersecurity, 07.13.26.

• Loten reports that “established ransomware hackers are resorting to brand makeovers in a bid to throw off cybersecurity and law enforcement efforts by re-emerging with new identities—and often more menacing names,” turning ransomware into “a game of whack-a-mole.” As AI and automation help defenders “pinpoint patterns in attacks attributable to well-known hackers,” groups respond by changing names, infrastructure, and tools, so that, as Microsoft’s Steven Masada puts it, “rebranding and reinvention [are] an increasingly common feature of the cybercrime ecosystem,” while ZeroFox’s Adam Darrah notes that the ecosystem “doesn’t shrink, it reorganizes.”
• Symantec found that attacks by “GodDamn Ransomware” showed “significant overlap” with a previous group, Beast, itself a repackaging of Monster, all using similar tools to disable Windows defenses and encrypt data with a “God8Damn” extension. ReliaQuest likewise says the Helix data‑extortion crew “closely mirrors” tactics used by BlackFile and shares infrastructure with ShinyHunters, illustrating how groups cycle through identities while keeping their playbook.
• Rebranding can also be “a simple marketing tactic,” Google’s Kimberly Goody says, in a “crowded and competitive” cybercrime marketplace where new names attract buyers for DIY ransomware kits. CrowdStrike’s Adam Meyers warns that sanctions can backfire, pointing to Evil Corp, which has “rebranded itself multiple times over the past six years” so that “we could sanction these guys, but they’re just going to change the name and then we have to re-sanction them. We’ll never catch up,” while Sodexo’s Brian Carlson argues that the best‑defended organizations are those “continuously learning, adapting and responding as the threat landscape evolves.”

“There Will Be No AI Uprising. It Will Quietly Swallow the Bureaucracy and Gain Control Over People,” Konstantin Remchukov, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 07.12.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine-translated.

• Remchukov, drawing on Yuval Noah Harari’s lecture “AI Hacks the Code of Human Civilization,” argues that the real threat is not a robot revolt but that “AI is no longer just a tool in human hands, but an agent capable of acting independently” whose “natural habitat… is bureaucracy.” In his summary of Harari, humans have created a world “filled with data, texts and bureaucratic processes in which AI reigns as a fish in water,” so that “AI does not need a revolution to seize the world, it can do this by gradually penetrating bureaucratic structures and gaining control over information flows,” taking over trust‑based systems in banking, education, justice and even war as people begin to “rely on algorithms more than on other people.”
• While Western theorists “torment themselves with existential fears,” he writes, China is acting: a new 2026–2030 education plan makes AI literacy “a key competence of schoolchildren and students,” turns AI into “a basic skill of the masses,” and “embeds AI into the very mechanics of school,” from exams and assessment to teacher training. Chinese universities have scrapped 12,200 “outdated” programs and opened 10,200 new AI‑related specialties, and cities such as Beijing already provide AI education in more than 1,400 schools. Remchukov warns Russian education leaders that “if China begins to train AI‑natives from the lower grades, how many years will delay cost systems of education that are still discussing whether to allow students to use neural networks?” and cautions them “not to sleep through the moment when you find yourselves needed by no one in the new world — not even by yourselves.”

 See these links for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

• “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Terrorism,” Daniel Byman and V.S. Subrahmanian, CSIS, 07.10.26.
• "Russia’s place in the AI race," Valeria Pozychanyuk, The Bell, 07.07.26.

Energy exports from CIS:

“See How Ukraine Is Taking Out Russia’s Refineries,” Alexander Osipovich, Alistair MacDonald, and Ashley Cai, Wall Street Journal, 07.13.26. For visualization, visit the WSJ site.

• The authors report that “Ukraine is targeting Russian energy infrastructure with its growing fleet of long-range drones and missiles, causing fuel shortages in one of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers and embarrassing President Vladimir Putin.” They write that in “dozens of strikes since this spring, Ukraine has pounded oil refineries across its larger neighbor, hitting all of Russia’s 10 biggest plants,” and that “more than one-quarter of Russian refining capacity has been knocked offline, analysts estimate,” with Kyiv’s drones reaching “as far away as the Siberian city of Omsk, about 1,500 miles from Ukraine.”
• According to the article, “Russia’s once vaunted air defense, mainly built to defend against ballistic missiles and crewed aircraft, is increasingly being overwhelmed by Ukraine’s drone armada,” as Kyiv fields “a handful of domestically produced types of long-range drones” and has “added a new cruise missile, the Flamingo, to its arsenal.” Refineries have proved “vulnerable targets,” with some strikes hitting “key processing units built with Western-made technology that is difficult for Russia to replace,” the authors note.
• The result, they write, has been “fuel shortages and lengthy lines of cars at gas stations, including in parts of Russia far from the front lines,” with “fuel-rationing measures… in effect in 56 regions of Russia” by late June, according to Mediazona. Putin has said that “the authorities are working to restore fuel supplies,” and “on Wednesday Russia ordered a ban on diesel exports in response to the crisis,” the authors report.

“Meeting with Members of the Government on Fuel and Transport,” Vladimir Putin, Kremlin.ru, 07.08.26.

• “Today we are discussing the fuel and transport sectors of Russia, how they are operating under current conditions and how they will develop.”
• “Involving small and medium‑sized businesses in this sector is also in demand and encouraged; we will work even more intensively in this regard. Of course you are absolutely right: the wider the network, the more difficult it is to inflict damage on it.”
• “Rosneft now covers about 89% of daily retail consumption in the region, including supplies to private companies and private filling stations.”
• “We must, of course, ensure the needs of state bodies, law‑enforcement agencies and the security services. That is obvious. But, bearing in mind that citizens should not feel an excessive burden, a decision on subsidies should be taken as quickly as possible.”
• “It is absolutely clear that the enemy is trying to damage the economy and, most importantly, is trying to create a nervous atmosphere in society.”
• “We understand that this task is impossible. The resilience margin of Russia’s energy system is very high, one of the highest in the world.”
• “We simply need to organize work together with the vertically integrated companies and reach agreements more quickly, so that they do not confine the product exclusively to their own distribution networks and their own filling stations, but supply the necessary fuels to independent filling stations as well.”
• “The proposals of Governor Kobzev should also be taken into account, and we must as quickly as possible deploy opportunities for small and medium‑sized businesses to produce petroleum products, and do everything to ensure that everything functions normally.”
• “If some support is needed from my side… these are temporary measures. They are clearly connected with attempts to disrupt the holiday season for our citizens in the south of the country, including in Crimea. But measures to support the people who live there and who have come there on vacation must be taken now, not at some later time.”

Climate change:

• No significant developments.

U.S.-Russian economic ties:

• No significant developments.

U.S.-Russian relations in general:

• No significant developments.

II. Russia’s domestic policies 

Domestic politics, economy and energy:

“Russian Attitudes Are Shifting as the War’s Effects Come Home,” Maria Snegovaya and Jade McGlynn, CSIS, 07.07.26.

• Maria Snegovaya and Jade McGlynn write that since 2022 the Kremlin has tried to “normalize” its war and “insulate ordinary Russians from its costs,” but Ukraine’s strikes on refineries and infrastructure now mean the war’s effects “come home,” causing “flight delays, airport closures, and, more recently, worsening fuel shortages.” They distinguish between pro‑war “hawks,” about 15% who are “more ideologically driven” and rally to shocks, and “loyalists” (35–40%) who “mainly aspire to be left alone” and “are more likely to withdraw their support for the war in response to such shocks, especially those that affect them personally.” Polls show “roughly two thirds of respondents consistently favor a ceasefire through mutual concessions,” and a record “81% of respondents say they would support ending the war tomorrow,” even though “only about 18%” back returning occupied Ukrainian territory.
• The authors argue that “economic conditions appear to matter more than military developments,” noting that as growth has stagnated since early 2026, the share saying their finances improved fell from 20 to 13% while those reporting deterioration doubled to 41%, and for the first time since 2006 “a majority… say local economic conditions are getting worse.” They highlight that Ukraine’s “long-range sanctions” on Russian refineries are “military attacks imposing tangible economic costs,” producing queues “from Moscow to Irkutsk” that are experienced as “one of the domestic costs of a war Russia chose and continues to wage” and are “likely to further erode support for the authorities and increase public preference for ending the war,” especially among loyalists.

“The Budget Is No Longer a Compass: Where to Look for the Erosion of Putin’s Regime,” Alexandra Prokopenko, Carnegie Politika, 07.01.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine translated.

• Prokopenko argues that the most serious erosion of Putin’s system is not in dramatic elite splits or opinion polls but in the “quiet” dismantling of fiscal rules and parliamentary control under the pressure of a long, expensive war. In June, she notes, the Duma took just 72 hours to give the Finance Ministry power to raise spending and exceed the legal debt ceiling without amending the budget law or seeking new approval—justified as needing to react “every day” to a worsening situation. With the federal deficit for January–May already at 6 trillion rubles (2.6% of GDP), double last year’s level and above the 3.8 trillion planned for all of 2026, and the liquid part of the National Wealth Fund down to about 3.4 trillion, she writes, even Russia’s traditionally proud “budget discipline” is being sacrificed, turning the budget from an anchor of expectations into a closed “internal war ledger.”
• The result, Prokopenko contends, is a more brittle, poorer, and angrier Russia, where business and regions pay the war’s growing bill through higher inflation, elevated interest rates, and opaque, shifting rules. She notes that war costs—from extra 2 trillion rubles requested by the security bloc for 2026 to ballooning payouts for some 352,000 confirmed war dead and large numbers of wounded—are increasingly kept off the books, while companies are forced to fund their own air‑defense measures against Ukrainian drone attacks without tax relief, and regions get debt repayments pushed to 2030 to free cash for war‑related spending. In this environment “the economy doesn’t collapse, but it doesn’t develop either”: with no clear budget horizon, firms shorten planning cycles, hoard liquidity, and under‑invest, leaving the state as the only actor planning long‑term. Prokopenko concludes that as reserves and tax slack are exhausted, the war is ever more financed directly by households and business, and that the regime’s slow‑motion abandonment of fiscal rules and transparency is “what decline actually looks like,” rather than a spectacular palace coup 

“Russians are growing anxious and angry,” The Economist, 07.08.26.

• The Economist reports that “the war has come home and is everyone’s problem,” describing Moscow’s southbound stations where “trains heading towards Crimea are spookily empty, the khaki is more prominent and there is a pervading sense of anxiety.” A Kremlin‑friendly pollster, FOM, found that 55% of Russians now say their colleagues and relatives feel anxious, up from 40% last year, while petrol is rationed, “drivers wait two or three hours” for 20–30 liters, and some stations have “run dry.” In Crimea and Novorossiysk, retail fuel sales have been banned for ordinary citizens, and one Rostov stall‑owner curses “their ideas and grand ambitions,” lumping together “Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Emmanuel Macron and local governors,” and lamenting, “We used to live just fine. Now all you do is scramble from one problem to the next.”
• The article says focus‑group researcher Elena Panfilova sees the mood turning “from frustration to seething hatred of the authorities,” driven by “the widening gap between reality and the Kremlin’s rhetoric.” While Putin reads from an autocue that “everything is operating steadily and with a substantial margin of resilience,” shopkeeper Valery replies, “The only way out is to stop [hostilities]… We have been hearing upbeat reports that ‘Russian troops are confidently advancing along the entire front line’ for all four years. Yet if you look at the maps, everything is bogged down in a swamp.” Talk of renewed mobilization is “intensifying,” with reports from Penza of men “grabbed in public and in door-to-door sweeps,” prompting one woman to say, “I forbade my husband from leaving the house… We keep the curtains drawn all day.” Dissent is more open: a former soldier’s video warning that abuses could make “the army… turn its weapons on the Kremlin” drew 20 million views, and an advertising worker in Nizhny Novgorod sums up the spreading despair: “Nobody understands what all this is for, other than perhaps to satisfy Putin’s ego… All we can hope for now is that he dies.”

“A Breakdown of the Equilibrium: A sharp deterioration in public sentiment is accompanied by a communication vacuum between the public and the authorities,” Samuel Greene and Graeme Robertson, Re: Russia, 07.10.26.

• Greene and Robertson write that “the rapidly escalating petrol crisis is reshaping both the information agenda and the social atmosphere in Russia,” coming “at the height of the tourist season” after “the effective loss of Crimea and most of the Caucasian Black Sea coast from the country’s holiday repertoire.” Citing FOM and Levada polling, they note that Ukrainian drone attacks on refineries and Moscow “dominated respondents’ recollections” by June 20, and within days the “rapidly growing petrol crisis” was mentioned by roughly “one third of those who recalled at least one memorable event,” while 54% now report that “anxiety predominates among the people around them.”
• The authors argue that the wartime “bubble of support” has “virtually been exhausted,” with June data showing that “the erosion has fully spread to the president as well,” as assessments of “the country’s situation, of almost all state institutions, and of Putin himself became synchronized.” They highlight a sharp fall in consumer‑sentiment indices and a “breakdown of the authoritarian equilibrium,” as “television’s share of Russians’ information landscape continues to decline,” trust in TV is eroding “even among pensioners,” and the Kremlin, having restricted YouTube and Telegram while lacking a functioning alternative, finds itself “without reliable channels through which to communicate their preferred interpretation of events.”

“The man who would change Russia,” Leaders, The Economist, 07.09.26.

• The Economist’s editors argue that Andrey Melnichenko’s decision to speak publicly is “the most stunning” warning yet from inside Russia’s elite that “their country has reached a dead end.” They note that queues “for fuel and fistfights at filling stations,” Ukrainian isolation of Crimea, and forced enlistment mean “the Ukraine war has come home to Russia,” contradicting Vladimir Putin’s repeated promises that the “special military operation is on track and a breakthrough is at hand.” While stressing that “the Russian economy is not about to collapse and people are not about to rise up,” they say Russians “increasingly feel that their country has reached a dead end,” and that in such conditions Mr. Putin may “try to reassert his authority by escalating the war and repressing people at home,” with Melnichenko even fearing “the use of a tactical nuclear weapon” to terrorize Europe.
• The leader highlights Melnichenko’s four long‑term scenarios: Russia could “collapse into anarchy” as warlords fight over resources and nuclear weapons; become a “sullen, dangerous dependency” of China or a humiliated “impoverished dependent” on Europe; or “turn inward, like North Korea, a closed fortress under siege… in a state of permanent war against the world.” The only alternative, they say, is reforms that end “one-man rule,” make Russia “predictable to the outside world” and give elites and citizens real “sovereignty” at home—echoing the 1905 precedent, when industrialists forced Nicholas II to accept the October Manifesto after defeat by Japan, and warning that today “grinding on, escalation and reform would each carry costs,” but that “Russia needs reforms that last.”

“Why a broken Russia is bad for the world,” Andrey Melnichenko, The Economist (By Invitation), 07.09.26.

• Andrey Melnichenko argues that the war in Ukraine exposes a “deeper failure”: the modern world has “lost the mechanism that once allowed major powers to exist within a single security system without denying each other’s status,” so “moral formulas begin to substitute for architecture, and punishment is mistaken for strategy.” He contends that “sovereignty is a necessary condition of any stable global‑security architecture,” insisting that “destroying sovereignty does not resolve the security problem; it removes the only mechanism through which the problem can be addressed.” Western visions of post‑war Russia that seek “the destruction of that sovereignty or its radical limitation,” he warns, would produce either a humiliated Russia on the West’s periphery, a dependent Russia “in China’s orbit,” a fragmented Russia with “a struggle over the nuclear arsenal,” or a “fortress: closed, mobilized, in permanent siege”—all “structurally” unstable and dangerous.
• Melnichenko says that in Moscow’s eyes the conflict is “a war against the West as a whole,” and that the West’s open‑ended “support Ukraine for as long as it takes” avoids the harder question of “what security order should ultimately exist in Europe, and what place does Russia hold within it.” He argues that a mere war of attrition “cannot” achieve Russia’s original objective of being “a participant rather than a managed object” in Europe’s security order, and that pushing a nuclear‑armed system “to the edge” on the assumption escalation can be precisely managed rests on a “false assumption.” He calls instead for a future in which “major powers again learn to respect each other’s sovereignty,” contending that for outsiders “the choice… is not between love for Russia and hatred of it,” but between “a Russia whose behavior is predictable and one whose trajectory is unknown,” and concluding that “the most important thing is that we step back from the abyss” so a next generation can “arrange the world differently.”

“Too Little, Too Late, a Putin Oligarch Speaks Up,” Holman W. Jenkins Jr., Wall Street Journal, 07.11.26.

• Holman Jenkins argues that Andrey Melnichenko’s plea in The Economist for the West to “bail out Russia” roughly on the terms Putin floated “four years ago” only shows “how behind-the-curve Mr. Putin and his allies remain in dealing with his situation.” He notes that “a NATO‑backed Ukraine is using long‑range strikes to make Russia’s hold on the peninsula increasingly tenuous” and that Putin’s latest signaling binge—threats of war with NATO to stop Western support—can’t “put the war back in the box it once occupied.” Even if NATO failed to respond to “a Russian grab at Estonia or other vulnerable territory,” Jenkins contends, it would not end “Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia with Ukraine’s own weapons,” and would more likely push Germany, Poland, the U.K., and the Baltics “to assist Ukraine with more urgency and less restraint.”
• He calls a cease-fire “at present lines… the best Mr. Putin could get,” saying “gone, if it ever existed, is the idea of Ukraine ceding additional unconquered terrain,” and argues that “the problem always has been Mr. Putin”: either he must exit, or the West would have to “impose a settlement to prop him up at the expense of 40 million Ukrainians,” something “unrealistic” even at “peak Trump.” Melnichenko’s suggestion that a lobby would continue the war “even in Mr. Putin’s absence,” Jenkins says, underscores how the Kremlin still treats the conflict as “existential”—but with the West “more united than ever behind Ukraine,” future outcomes now rest on “a stack of wild cards” inside Russia rather than any grand bargain. 

“Business After Globalization: A New Phase,” Fyodor Lukyanov, Russia in Global Affairs, 07.09.26. (This organization is affiliated with the Russian authorities.)

• Lukyanov starts from what he calls an “extraordinary” fact: The Economist has published an article by “a major Russian businessman who continues to work in Russia, does not set himself against the Russian authorities and is under sanctions.” He argues it is “naive” to think a “leading British ideological publication” printed Andrey Melnichenko’s piece out of love of pluralism; instead, his “fairly candid reflections” on Russia’s challenges are being framed as proof of a “split in the Russian ruling class” and “rebellious moods” in big business. In Lukyanov’s view, the actual logic of Melnichenko’s argument “not only does not interest the British audience, it is even contraindicated,” because it would “destroy the neat picture of the world” in which Russia can only be “saved” by repenting and returning to the Western track.
• Lukyanov contends that Melnichenko is grappling with a different reality: post‑2022 “punitive measures” have turned Russia’s business community itself into a target and made the old, globalized model of activity “simply no longer possible.” He presents Melnichenko’s argument as that of a large Russian business which has “ceased to be globalized” in the sense of being “built into a common scheme with a single center of control,” has “lost illusions of equality with Western players,” but still “has not ceased to be comprehensively international.” For Lukyanov, Melnichenko is saying the new priority must be “reliance on one’s own national base, its expansion and development—not against the rest of the world, but in favor of finding mutually acceptable forms of coexistence and cooperation,” and that this marks “a completely new goal compared with the era of liberal globalization, which has ended.”
• “Russia’s potential is enormous, but it will have to be unlocked in a different way—which is precisely what Melnichenko writes about,” Lukyanov concludes.

“Melnichenko’s Proposal…,” Tatyana Stanovaya, R.Politik Bulletin No. 13 (186), 07.13.26.

• Stanovaya calls Andrei Melnichenko’s July 9 essay in The Economist “one of the most significant and potentially pivotal events of Russia’s wartime history,” arguing it is the first time since Khodorkovsky’s 2003 arrest that a major businessman “not in exile, still inside Russia” has effectively tried to claim a political role by sketching an alternative to Putin’s war. After a 2025 meeting where he sought Putin’s tacit okay to “become more involved in public life,” and a 2024 realization that Trump’s victory meant “there is no global world. There are no global rules,” Melnichenko pivots from building a borderless business empire to proposing “sovereignty turned inwards”: a strong but pragmatic Russia focused on its own development, in which the creative class “must build its own world inside Russia on its own standards.” In Stanovaya’s reading, he offers an implicit bargain — Russia respects Ukraine’s sovereignty, the West respects Russia’s — and, while avoiding regime questions by saying it is “not a question of who governs, but of what is being built,” he is really pointing toward post‑Putin “democratisation and liberalisation, with state institutions that are strong but not abusive,” and a war ended “as quickly as possible, with full respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty.”
• R.Politik reports that Melnichenko informed Kremlin chief of staff Anton Vaino and that Putin “appears simply not to have grasped the role Melnichenko was trying to claim,” misreading the text as merely demanding respect for today’s Russia and missing that he is positioning himself as the man to “build the new Russia that would deserve it.” Stanovaya situates the essay in a wider shift among tycoons who “regarded the war as a catastrophe, and despised Putin for ruining Russia’s future,” and now believe “his days are numbered” even without a coup plan or agreed successor. Many assume, perhaps naively, that Putin’s departure will end the war and reopen the path to normalization with the West; against that backdrop, she concludes, Melnichenko’s piece is “the first significant sign not merely of discontent with the war and with Putin’s policy, but of a first attempt to act — very cautiously, minimising the political risk — in the direction of a Russia after Putin.”

“In the Dragon’s Teeth: Will the Rotenberg Clan Share Shoigu’s Fate?,” Mikhail Komin, Carnegie Politika, 07.10.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine translated.

• Komin argues that a wave of arrests targeting managers tied to Arkady and Boris Rotenberg—longtime judo partners and key cronies of Vladimir Putin—resembles the earlier purge of former defense minister Sergei Shoigu’s clan. He notes that investigators have revived a 2015 case over alleged 800 million ruble thefts at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport to detain Konstantin Makhov, a longtime fixer for the Rotenbergs’ mega‑projects such as the Ust‑Luga gas‑processing plant, and Aleksandr Neradko, ex‑head of Rosaviatsiya, while other figures in their rent network, including ex–Aeroflot chief Mikhail Poluboyarinov and former VEB deputy chair Artem Dovlatov, have come under pressure. According to Komin, this is almost certainly sanctioned “personally by Vladimir Putin” and hits multiple segments of the clan’s patronage web, putting even the brothers themselves “on the hook” without formally charging them.
• The author links the crackdown to a perceived “failure on a fundamental war‑related issue,” just as Shoigu’s downfall followed the Prigozhin mutiny; for the Rotenbergs, he argues, it was the absence of “dragon’s teeth” fortifications when Ukrainian forces pushed into Russia’s Kursk region in 2024, despite the clan’s control over the regional construction empire. Komin stresses that the Rotenbergs’ position is still stronger than Shoigu’s—built over decades of state contracts from the Crimean Bridge to the school‑textbook monopoly “Prosveshchenie” and now a trillion‑ruble Ust‑Luga LNG project—but the arrests deal a “double symbolic blow” by targeting both that flagship gas complex and an old prestige project at Domodedovo. With the security services unlikely to stop once unleashed and other elite groups eyeing weakened assets, some of the clan’s key lieutenants are already seeking parliamentary immunity, suggesting that even in Putin’s inner circle “personal risks have sharply increased” in the fifth year of the Ukraine war.

“People’s Front Forum ‘Everything for Victory!’,” Vladimir Putin, Kremlin.ru, 07.10.26.

• Putin said that the decision 15 years ago to create the All‑Russia People’s Front “has fully justified itself,” because it brought together “people like you,” adding, “I bow low to you for everything you do.” He praised the Front for always being “at the cutting edge of the problems the country is solving” and providing “feedback with the people,” noting that it currently monitors “552 instructions of the President” which, he stressed, “do not come from the ceiling… they arise from people, from their problems.”
• Turning to the war against Ukraine, Putin emphasized that the Front “works directly with people: with the fighters and with their family members,” and linked Russia’s resilience to its efforts: “You have united more than 20 million people… and citizens voluntarily… directed almost 70 billion rubles to the goals of the special military operation. That is why, undoubtedly, victory awaits us.” He concluded that “today there is nothing more important than this,” and that Russia’s “strength lies in the fact that we always overcome all difficulties and all fears… and that is why we will always move only forward.”

See these links for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

• "Russia’s War Against Its Own Future," Eric Rudenshiold, The National Interest, 07.10.26.
• "War chokes Russian stock market, again," Alexandra Prokopenko and Alexander Kolyandr, The Bell, 07.11.26.
• "Prices are rising, or fuel problems are starting to impact prices," Tatyana Rybakova, The Moscow Times, 07.08.26. (In Russian.)
• “The Communist Mystique,” Sergey Radchenko, The Ideas Letter, July 2026.

Defense and aerospace:

•  No significant developments.
• See section Military aspects of the Ukraine conflict and their impacts above.

Security, law-enforcement, justice and emergencies:

• No significant developments.

   

III. Russia’s relations with other countries

Russia’s external policies, including relations with “far abroad” countries:

“How Putin Turned Japan Into a Den of Spies, Jane Bradley, Michael Schwirtz and Adam Goldman, The New York Times, 07.12.26.

• The authors report that “soon after troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Western leaders expelled hundreds of Russian spies from their capitals,” yet “dozens of those banished spies have turned up in an unexpected place: Japan.” They write that “the country’s weak espionage laws and flourishing high-tech industry have made it a crucial piece of the Russian war effort,” noting that “ninety percent of Russian missiles and drones contain Japanese components, according to Ukrainian government estimates.” Japan has long been “known as a spy paradise,” they add, because postwar constraints “keep the country’s intelligence services weak.”
• At the center of the story, Bradley, Schwirtz and Goldman explain, is “a secretive Russian military intelligence unit known as the 20th Directorate,” whose officers, “posing as diplomats or businesspeople,” work “to buy or steal battlefield technology and smuggle it into Russia.” They write that “the man overseeing the 20th Directorate’s operation in Tokyo maintains a cover identity as an employee of the Russian state airline Aeroflot” and identify him as “Maksim Vladimirovich Filchenkov.” This network, the authors argue, helps explain why “Russia persists in part, officials say, because of its continued access to technologies like those it acquires from Japan.”
• According to the authors, “Ukrainian officials have presented Japan with evidence that its technology is being used in Russian attacks,” sending repeated diplomatic notes listing “dozens of recovered Japanese-made components including circuit boards, transmitters and semiconductors.” “I hope you take this information into account when considering further restrictions against Russia,” one Ukrainian letter urged. Japanese lawmaker Akihisa Shiozaki concedes, “We have a sense of crisis about this situation,” while the Foreign Ministry calls Russia’s invasion “an outrageous act that shakes the very foundations of the international order.” Nevertheless, the reporters conclude, “Russian spies appear to be operating right under the noses of the Japanese authorities.”

“Wagner’s Remnants Are Running an Opioid Empire in the Center of Africa,” Nicholas Bariyo, Wall Street Journal, 07.11.26.

• Bariyo reports that “the remnants of the Russian mercenary group Wagner have established a new foothold along the upper reaches of the Oubangui River,” where they “run a drug empire in the Central African Republic beyond the reach of law enforcement, or even Moscow itself.” Centered on high‑dose tramadol—“the poor man’s cocaine”—the trade “has given Wagner fresh impetus,” enabling up to 500 fighters to control gold and timber resources, with the Global Initiative estimating “$180 million a year from its illicit gold exports,” while tramadol trafficking provides “an additional revenue stream,” the author writes.
• According to Bariyo, Wagner’s veterans, now led by “Prigozhin’s son, Pavel Prigozhin,” have “effectively captured the state,” integrating into the army and militias and supplying tramadol even to the presidential guard and youth militia the Sharks. Researchers say “tramadol is being taken in massive doses” so that “fear vanishes and agitation surges as combatants enter a pharmacological trance,” and Bariyo notes that the drug-fueled violence has helped push battle fatalities in mineral‑rich regions up “by nearly 20% to about 500 over the past year.”

Ukraine:

“Ukraine fears that with Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sudden death, it will have a weaker link to Trump,” Samya Kullab and Will Weissert, Washington Post, 07.13.26.

• Kullab and Weissert write that with Lindsey Graham’s death, “Ukraine lost a close ally in President Donald Trump’s orbit,” leaving leaders in Kyiv “grappling with the implications for their war-torn country.” They recall that just two days earlier, standing in St. Michael’s Square beside “the burned-out remains of Russian military equipment,” Graham had told reporters that “sweeping new hard-hitting economic sanctions against Russia… were finally within reach” and said he would return to Washington to advance the proposal. Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Merezhko called it a “huge and absolutely unexpected loss,” saying Graham “was truly indispensable” and “the closest link between Ukraine, our president and Trump.”
• According to the authors, Zelenskyy said he was “deeply saddened” by Graham’s sudden death, noting that the senator had visited Ukraine “10 times since Russia’s full-scale invasion” and “had been with Ukrainians ‘when it was most needed.’” “We were in constant dialogue and will miss that greatly,” Zelenskyy wrote, while parliamentary speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk praised Graham as a “steadfast friend of Ukraine” whose support was “principled and resolute” and expressed confidence that his push for tougher sanctions “would be carried forward despite his death.” Analyst Oleksandr Kraiev observed that “Graham is even more well-known and more popular among Ukrainians than many Ukrainian politicians” and warned that without him, Ukraine could lose “an influential advocate with direct access to Trump.”
• The piece stresses that Graham was “a political phenomenon now rare in a Republican Party in which Trump has absolute control,” because he “steadfastly held onto more traditional conservative foreign policy values” that included “staunchly opposing Russia” and backing NATO, even when this “often put him at odds” with the MAGA movement. Although Trump “frequently ridicules” insufficiently loyal Republicans, he “remained close to Graham and listened to him, especially on foreign policy matters,” the authors note; Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Graham “exulted” over prospects for new Russia sanctions and urged that passing the bill would be a “fitting tribute,” while Merezhko admitted, “I even don’t know who might be as important for us now in Trump’s entourage.”

“Zelenskyy shakes up the cabinet,” Ben Aris, bne IntelliNews/Radio Moskva, 07.13.26.

• Aris writes that Volodymyr Zelenskyy has announced “a major government reshuffle” in which Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko “will go to Washington as ambassador now that Ukraine‑U.S. relations are back on,” and is likely to be replaced by Naftogaz CEO Serhii Koretskyi. He calls this “the fourth major shake‑up,” arguing that Zelenskyy “does this periodically, and not always for the right reasons,” and that since ousting a “highly competent technocratic government” in 2023 “the point then was not that the government was doing a bad job… but that he didn’t control his ministers.” In Aris’s view, Zelenskyy is “gathering the strings to himself again,” because “the only practical way to operate in this sort of environment is to build a team based on personal loyalty,” even though Ukraine already has the anti‑corruption trio of NABU, SAPO and the Anti‑Corruption Court.
• The author warns that Zelenskyy’s mention of changes to law‑enforcement agencies “raises the fears that the president will try again to take the anti‑corruption organs under his direct control,” recalling his previous attempt with “the infamous Law 21414 that would have gutted the anti‑corruption reforms.” Aris suspects “this reshuffle is in preparation for a mooted general and presidential election in the autumn,” noting that Budanov now heads the presidential administration and that Zelenskyy reportedly asked Valerii Zaluzhnyi “not to run” and “Zaluzhnyi said no.” Against a backdrop where “Ukraine is losing, according to these reports,” with Russia making “slow but steady progress in Donbas,” Ukraine “appears to have now run out of Patriot interceptor completely,” and manpower is dwindling much faster than Russia’s, Aris concludes that “the clock is ticking for the AFU” even as Russia’s economy has proved “a lot more robust than anyone was expecting.”

See these links for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

• "[Lindsey Graham] The Honorable Gentleman for Ukraine," Simon Shuster, The Atlantic, 07.12.26.
• “Russia Captured Chernobyl. The Wildlife Cameras Kept Recording,” Emily Anthes, The New York Times, 07.08.26.
• “Evacuating Art From Ukraine’s Front Lines,” Pau Torres Pagès, Foreign Policy, 07.10.26.

Russia's other post-Soviet neighbors:

• No significant developments.

See this link for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

• “Can Europe Help Secure Armenia-Azerbaijan Peace?,” Taras Kuzio, The National Interest, 07.07.26.

Footnotes

1. The “strategy is to placate, make offers, accept what Trump offers to you, if he doesn’t cross your red lines, while quietly continuing the strategy of decoupling,” according to Kuleba.

The cutoff for reports summarized in this product was 10:00 am Eastern time on the day this digest was distributed. Unless otherwise indicated, all summaries above are direct quotations. 

AI was used in production of this digest.

*Here and elsewhere, the italicized text indicates comments by RM staff and associates. These comments do not constitute a RM editorial policy.

Slider photo: In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service, emergency personnel work on the site of a Russian air attack in Sumy, Ukraine, Saturday, July 11, 2026. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)