Russia Analytical Report, April 27–May 4, 2026

4 Ideas to Explore

  1. “First, I think there's more restlessness in Russia, but I don't see any precursors of a coup,” David Ignatius said when asked “What would be the impact of a Russian coup?” during a Q&A with WaPo readers. “That said, a post-Putin government will emerge eventually—and it will govern a nation that has been battered badly in Ukraine and is weaker, poorer and more disoriented than in decades,” he continued. “That's a recipe for a very chaotic situation in Russia—with possibilities for democratic change but also big risks of fragmentation and warlordism,” he warned in the May 4 Q&A. Ignatius weighed in on the probability of a coup in Russia hours after FT, CNN, iStories and other outlets reported, some of them citing a European intelligence agency, that Russia’s Federal Protective Service (FSO) has sharply tightened Vladimir Putin’s security amid intensified fears of a coup or assassination. Putin and his FSO bodyguards are reportedly especially concerned about drone attacks on the Russian leader, leading him to work for weeks in underground bunkers. Putin spends more time in these bunkers micromanaging the war while having grown detached from civilian affairs, people who know the Russian leader and a person close to European intelligence services told FT.
  2. A WSJ analysis says the Iran war has become a live-fire lab for China, Russia and North Korea to study U.S. power and weaknesses. Washington has showcased new capabilities, such as AI‑aided targeting and debut use of the PrSM missile—while burning through Tomahawks, Patriots and other key munitions, which could take years to replace. Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang are drawing lessons on what to stockpile and how to ensure their nuclear and command systems survive a U.S. strike, according to WSJ’s Chun Han Wong and his co-authors. Russia, in particular “gets a deeper look at how American weapons are faring against Iranian arms with overlapping drone technology. Such insight is valuable to Russia in its war against Ukraine, which has been heavily reliant on U.S. arms, or in a future conflict against the U.S.’s NATO allies in Europe,” they write.
  3. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has increasingly adopted first‑person‑view (FPV) drones that are modelled on systems that “wreaked havoc in Russia and Ukraine” and are controlled by fiber‑optic cables, which cannot be jammed, according to WSJ and NYT. Israeli officials concede they were inadequately prepared to defend against Hezbollah’s fiber-optic drones, which have a range of 20 kilometers (around 12.5 miles), and are now scrambling to adopt Ukrainian measures, such as acoustic sensors, to counter a threat that has migrated from the front in Ukraine to Israel’s borders. That Hezbollah and Hamas may resort to using FPV drones against IDF is something some Israeli experts warned about as early as February 2024.* 
  4. Former Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi said the Russian-Ukrainian war is increasingly about how each side “sells” the outcome as victory. “For both Russia and Ukraine, [the war] is increasingly a question of how to sell the outcome as victory. Someone will gain territory and people and call that ‘victory;’ someone will lose almost everything yet still try to sell it as ‘victory’ to their people. That’s the current problem,” Zaluzhnyi explained in a conversation with students of the Kyiv School of Government. The ex-commander—who is currently Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.K.—also admitted that the Russians are “moving faster technologically, scaling up attacks on our logistics and making it impossible for us to mass forces and go on the offensive. Talking now about us ‘recapturing’ something large-scale is naive; it’s practically impossible—unless with machines.” “Likewise, we hit their logistics so they cannot form a strike fist and be in Dnipro tomorrow,” he said. Zaluzhnyi also argued that “without a clear goal, without strategy, our actions—losing people and the economy—won’t lead anywhere.”1

 

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

Nuclear security and safety:

“Chernobyl Is Still a Current Event, Forty Years Later,” Corey Hinderstein, Carnegie Endowment, 04.30.26.

  • Hinderstein argues that “the Chernobyl accident is not yet history and is still a current event”: vast areas remain uninhabitable, “nearly a trillion dollars has been spent,” and public opinion on nuclear power is still sharply split. She recalls that investigations traced the disaster to “technical overconfidence, lack of information sharing, and the inability of contrary views to be heard,” with a 1992 IAEA report citing “lack of feedback of operating experience” and “lack of clear lines of responsibility” as “critical factors.” RBMK design flaws “withheld from the wider public—and from the reactor operators themselves” meant they “did the exact wrong thing” during a safety drill, turning Chernobyl into a global symbol of opacity and hubris.
  • She warns against “overindexing on the 1986 accident”: RBMKs are few and upgraded, and Chernobyl also spurred positive changes like the World Association of Nuclear Operators and “a drive toward continuous improvement and transparency.” Yet “not all the lessons… have been learned”: Fukushima shared “lack of transparency,” “failure to address known safety shortcomings,” and the belief “that a severe accident was simply impossible.” She criticizes attempts by the Trump administration to “weaken U.S. nuclear regulation,” turning rigor into a “stalking horse” for rapid deployment, and cautions that “a rush to build, overreliance on best-case-scenario assertions, and intolerance for voices that raise legitimate concerns are all recipes for history repeating itself.” With Russia striking Ukrainian nuclear sites and Iran’s facilities now in play, she concludes that “a nuclear accident anywhere is a nuclear accident everywhere” and “for all time,” so any nuclear expansion must rest on “strong regulations, community engagement, information sharing, and transparency” — and “perhaps the rarest resource: humility,” because “the greatest nuclear safety risk is complacency.”

“Lessons from Chernobyl, 40 Years Later,” James Holmes, The National Interest, 05.02.26.

  • James Holmes writes that “some catastrophes are useful,” and calls Chernobyl “a disaster with continental sweep” whose “stench…emanated as much from political dysfunction as from engineering woes.” He recalls that “the Soviet Communist leadership in Moscow was slow to acknowledge that an accident had even taken place,” and notes that Mikhail Gorbachev later speculated that Chernobyl, not perestroika, was “the ‘real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.’”
  • According to the author, his late colleague Igor Khripunov argued that Chernobyl “alerted the Soviet leadership and international community to the critical importance of ‘safety culture’ within the nuclear complex,” because “a lackadaisical, no‑care safety culture is a flimsy bulwark against disaster.” Holmes cites Edgar Schein’s definition of culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions…taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel,” adding that “an institution endowed with a vibrant safety culture is made up of people who feel in their marrow that potential dangers menace the organization.”
  • The author explains that after the Cold War, the concept of “nuclear security culture” emerged alongside safety culture: “Safety hazards are impersonal…Security is very different,” focused on “credible insider and outsider threats” such as “theft, sabotage, unauthorized access…[and] illegal transfers of hazardous substances.” Holmes believes that “cultural guardianship…constitutes the supreme act of leadership” and concludes that “eternal vigilance is the price of nuclear security. This is the lesson of Chernobyl.”

North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs:

“Russia’s approach to Northeast Asia in wartime,” Alexandre Mansourov, Brookings Institution, 04.30.26.

Iran and its nuclear program:

“Iran War Gives U.S.’s Rivals a Real-Time Look at Its Firepower,” Chun Han Wong, Thomas Grove and Timothy W. Martin, Wall Street Journal, 05.01.26.

  • The authors argue the Iran war has become a “living laboratory” for China, Russia and North Korea to study both U.S. strengths and vulnerabilities. They see new U.S. capabilities – over 13,000 targets struck since Feb. 28 with AI‑assisted precision, debut use of the PrSM and a new Lucas one‑way attack drone – but also watch “how quickly the U.S. depleted key munitions,” especially Tomahawks and Patriots, with a CSIS study estimating four of seven key munition types have burned through more than half of prewar inventories. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich warns “the Russian war economy is in high gear,” while replacing U.S. missiles could take “up to six years.”
  • Russia, in particular “gets a deeper look at how American weapons are faring against Iranian arms with overlapping drone technology. Such insight is valuable to Russia in its war against Ukraine, which has been heavily reliant on U.S. arms, or in a future conflict against the U.S.’s NATO allies in Europe,” according to Chun Han Wong and his coauthors.
  • Iran’s cheap drones, many based on or supplied with Chinese tech, have repeatedly damaged U.S. systems including THAAD radars in Jordan and the UAE, and Russia has already used Shaheds in Ukraine to overwhelm Patriot batteries by pairing swarms with hypersonic missiles. Adm. Sam Paparo told Congress that Beijing “see[s] the power of small, low‑cost munitions,” and analysts say both Xi and Putin are drawing lessons on what to “stockpile, develop and build” to ensure nuclear forces and command‑and‑control survive a U.S. first strike. For Kim Jong Un, the war reinforces the deterrent value of nukes and validates his decision to “perpetuat[e] our nuclear possession,” while North Korea tests cluster‑armed missiles and suicide drones similar to those now shaping combat in the Gulf.

“How Russia Helps Iran,” Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, 05.03.26.

  • The board argues that while Trump is “clear‑eyed about the threat from Iran,” he views Russia “with Kremlin‑colored glasses,” ignoring extensive Russian support to Tehran. Germany’s foreign minister says Moscow is “evidently supporting Iran with information about potential targets,” and expert Ilan Berman told Congress that Russian help is “one of the reasons why we have American service members injured or dead in the Middle East.” A German report cited by the editors says Russia’s foreign intelligence service compiled lists of Iranian sites surveilled by U.S. satellites and shared them so Tehran could evacuate “potentially vulnerable facilities.”
  • They note Russia has upgraded Shahed drones to be “deadlier and harder to intercept,” with EU foreign‑policy chief Kaja Kallas saying Gulf attacks “likely incorporate Russian tech upgrades,” and debris from a Shahed that hit a British base in Cyprus showing Russian hardware to evade jamming. Moscow is also supplying Iran with $589 million in advanced MANPADS, aiding its satellites and missile programs, and giving “tactical advice” from Ukraine. Against this backdrop, the board calls Trump’s decision to extend sanctions relief for Russian oil “tough to square,” warning that “Mr. Putin wants to harm the U.S. and its allies.”

“Russia: Little Room for Maneuver, Big Gains?” Sabine Fischer, SWP, 04.30.26.

  • Sabine Fischer recalls that Russia “was once a leading great power in the Middle East,” whose 2015 intervention in Syria “saved the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad.” As relations with the West deteriorated over Ukraine, Moscow “expanded its relations with the states of the Middle East and the Gulf region,” with Iran becoming “a particularly important partner”: Tehran supplied “Shahed drones” in 2022–23, and in 2025 the two states signed a comprehensive partnership to “work together toward a new, post‑Western world order,” the author notes.
  • Today, however, “Russia is on the sidelines in the Middle East,” Fischer writes. In 2024, Moscow could offer the ousted Syrian dictator “only asylum,” and it “had nothing to counter” the renewed attack on Iran. According to the author, the Trump administration “acts without any regard for Russian interests in the region,” US and Israeli bombs have damaged “Russian facilities in Iran,” key Russian‑Iranian infrastructure projects are endangered, and Russia’s cautious mediation offers “were ignored by all sides,” undermining its self‑image “as a great power in a multipolar world.”
  • Yet Fischer argues that the entanglement of the wars against Iran and in Ukraine “could ultimately benefit Russia.” Moscow profits from “rising oil prices, relaxed US oil sanctions, and the waste of air‑defense missiles that are vital for Ukraine’s survival,” allowing it to continue its “war of annihilation” largely undisturbed. More importantly, she contends, by attacking Iran “the United States has boxed itself in,” while Russia does “the little that is in its power” by providing Iran with satellite data, UN support, and arms cooperation, hoping that US “self‑weakening” will eventually help Moscow achieve its goals “in Ukraine, in Europe, and in the world”—though “Russia has no influence” over decisions in Tehran, Washington, or Jerusalem.

“Russia’s loss is Ukraine’s gain in the Middle East,” Hanna Notte, Financial Times, 04.28.26.

  • Notte argues that two months into the Iran war, Russia has enjoyed “extra billions in oil revenues,” “stepped up its ballistic missile attacks on Ukraine,” and can “watch gleefully as Operation Epic Fury turns into the US’s own ‘special military operation’ gone awry.” Yet the same conflict has “put Ukraine on the Middle Eastern map” and “marks the latest setback for Russia,” whose fortunes in the region “have in recent years” declined. Gulf states, “woefully unequipped to deal with Iranian drone and missile attacks,” are turning to Ukraine for drones, training, software and co‑production, even as they must “navigate Ukraine’s promising courtship under the Kremlin’s watchful eye” because of “extensive economic ties with Russia, including in OPEC+,” and Moscow’s veto at the UN Security Council — recently used against a Gulf‑backed resolution on the Strait of Hormuz.
  • She contends Russia is now “playing a weakened hand in the Middle East,” having abandoned Bashar al‑Assad in 2024, watched the US and Israel attack Iran, and been “upstaged by Pakistan” as mediator. “Regional states must avoid antagonizing Moscow, but Moscow must also avoid antagonizing them,” she writes, while “the Kremlin won’t be pleased about the Middle East’s newfound interest in Ukraine.” In the long run, she concludes, the Iran war may be a “short‑term boon” for Moscow, but “it is Ukraine that could score the bigger long‑term gains.”

“The Iran conflict is the new Cold War,” Marc Caputo and Barak Ravid, Axios, 04.28.26.

  • Caputo and Ravid report that the Iran conflict “has entered a Cold War-like phase of financial sanctions, gunboat interdictions and talks about having talks,” with U.S. officials fearing a “frozen conflict of no war and no deal.” In this scenario, “the Strait of Hormuz would stay closed, the U.S. blockade would remain,” and both sides would wait “for the other to blink or fire first,” a prospect one source close to Trump calls “the worst thing for Trump politically and economically” six months before the midterms. Trump is described as “vacillating between launching new military strikes or waiting to see whether his ‘maximum pressure’ financial sanctions” force Iran to negotiate its nuclear program, telling one adviser “all [Iran’s leaders] understand is bombs,” while that adviser characterizes him as “frustrated but realistic… He doesn’t want to use force. But he’s not backing down.”
  • Inside the administration, some senior advisers want to maintain the blockade and “impose more economic sanctions” before resuming bombing; Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio says “the level of sanctions on Iran are extraordinary… and I think more can be brought to bear,” urging the world to join “crippling sanctions.” Outside hawks such as Marc Thiessen, Jack Keane and Lindsey Graham press for military action, with Graham urging Trump to “stick to your guns” and reject Iran’s latest proposal: a side deal to reopen Hormuz in exchange for lifting the U.S. blockade on shipping. Trump discussed the offer with his team but, according to one source, “didn’t seem to be inclined to accept” because it would delay talks on Iran’s nuclear program. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has escalated sanctions on banks, shippers and even Chinese “teapot” refiners; a senior official calls it “maximum pressure everywhere and from all angles… That could mean military action, too. It might not. It’s up to the president.”

“Negotiation Won’t End Iran’s Nuclear Threat,” John Bolton, Wall Street Journal, 04.28.26.

  • Bolton argues that “to protect the interests of the U.S. and its allies, the administration must eliminate Iran’s nuclear menace and destroy its terrorist capabilities and capacity for economic extortion,” something that “can’t be accomplished with negotiations — it requires regime change.” He criticizes Trump’s “narrow focus” on extracting Iran’s highly enriched uranium, “which he insists on calling ‘nuclear dust’,” as “hardly enough,” and says both Obama and Trump have overemphasized uranium enrichment while “all but ignoring the plutonium path Iran has pursued since firing up its Bushehr reactor in 2010.” 
  • “Based on current Russian estimates of spent-fuel levels at Bushehr and International Atomic Energy Agency estimates about the reactor's energy production, nuclear-proliferation expert Henry Sokolski estimates that Iran has enough plutonium to make more than 200 nuclear weapons,” Bolton writes.
  • He warns that Tehran could “outsource some — or even all — of its nuclear‑weapons activity to North Korea,” recalling their joint history with A.Q. Khan designs, SCUD‑based missiles, and the Yongbyon‑clone reactor in Syria “almost certainly intended for Iran’s nuclear‑weapons program.” The JCPOA, he argues, “didn’t eliminate Iran’s intellectual capacity” to rebuild a weapons effort, just as Saddam’s “nuclear mujahideen” remained a threat after the first Gulf War. “That’s why in Iran today, as in Iraq earlier, regime change is the only long‑term solution,” Bolton concludes, warning that “making a deal with Tehran’s current leadership won’t turn out differently than in the Obama years. In Iran, the new boss is always the same as the old boss.” He does not discuss Russia or Ukraine in this piece.

“The Iran-Israel War Presents a Problem for Russia’s Military Supply Chains,” Emily Ferris, RUSI, 04.30.26.

  • The piece argues that the Iran–Israel war has exposed a key vulnerability in Russia’s logistics: long, fragile supply chains through the Caspian Sea and the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC). An Israeli Air Force strike in late March hit a well‑known Russia–Iran route where cargo moves between Iran’s Bandar Anzali/Amirabad and Russia’s Astrakhan, Olya and Makhachkala, a node that has become “increasingly important” since 2022 for exchanging weapons and oil and for moving Shahed drones before Russia localized production. Moscow publicly denied any such strike, with Dmitry Peskov claiming the Kremlin had “no information” on arms shipments but warning it would view any expansion of the war into the Caspian “extremely negatively,” underlining both the route’s sensitivity and its exposure.
  • The INSTC, a 7,200 km land‑sea corridor linking Russia, Iran, Central Asia, India and Europe while bypassing both the EU and China, is described as a “strategic priority” for Moscow—critical to sustaining the war in Ukraine and extending influence abroad. Yet its success depends on regional stability Russia cannot ensure. The killing of Iran’s National Security Council secretary Ali Larijani, a key interlocutor on the corridor, plus damaged infrastructure and political uncertainty in Iran, all threaten to derail the project. Senior figures such as Nikolai Patrushev and Transport Minister Andrei Nikitin still talk up future construction and investments in Astrakhan and Gulf partnerships, but the author suggests that by personally ordering new meetings on the INSTC, Putin has both raised its profile and “raised the stakes if it fails.”

“The Middle East Crisis: What Lies Behind Moscow’s Neutrality?”, Alexander Maryasov, Valdai Club, 04.20.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine-translated (This organization is affiliated with the Russian authorities.)

Humanitarian impact of the Ukraine conflict:

  • No significant developments.

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

“Zaluzhnyi: For Russia and Ukraine, It’s a Question of How to Sell Outcome as Victory,” Serhiy Nyzhny Kyiv School of Government, April 2026.

  • Zaluzhnyi tells students that the post–Cold War “world order” is already broken: “we can no longer speak of a functioning world order,” he says, from Georgia 2008 to Ukraine and now Venezuela and the Middle East. He argues that “AI is now the main game‑changer capable of transforming the world order,” and that the next order “will depend on how states and societies pass through this leap of technological revolution.” On whether today’s conflicts are World War III, he calls it “a very rhetorical question,” noting “55 against 17 or 18” states in theory, but no “formed wartime coalitions in the classical sense.”
  • He draws a sharp parallel between Ukraine and the U.S.–Iran war: in both cases, a great power escalated expecting the other side to play by its rules and instead “suffered catastrophes.” In the Middle East, “they left the phase of escalation because they realized nobody wanted to play by their escalation rules,” so turned to force and now “stopping it is very, very hard.”
  • On the battlefield, he describes the situation as “stably bad.” The line looks static “on my electronic map,” but “inside the ‘stable’ line little enemy dots appear” as Russian raiding groups penetrate the rear. “The real catastrophe,” he says, is that “a human being has no business being there now”: drones, sometimes AI‑guided, “fly in and kill people,” eroding willingness to be mobilized. Russia is “moving faster technologically,” hitting logistics and making “recapturing something large‑scale… practically impossible—unless with machines.”
  • On victory, he is starkly realist: “our options are limited… continue fighting while improving conditions; get someone to pressure Russia; or some negotiated settlement.” For both sides, “victory… is increasingly a question of how to sell the outcome as victory.” Without a clear goal and strategy, “losing people and the economy won’t lead anywhere,” and he warns that if the war does not end in a genuine Russian defeat and Ukrainians again “let ourselves be fooled… then everything will repeat.”

“Chat with David Ignatius about the war in Ukraine and foreign affairs,” David Ignatius, Washington Post, 05.04.26.

  • Asked whether Ukraine might extend its “zone of death” to cut Russian supply lines to Crimea, David Ignatius answered that Ukrainians “have been very creative with their deep-strike tactics into Russia,” hitting targets “with devastating effect,” but that “on the ground inside Ukraine they have seemed to focus on maintaining their own lines rather than… attempting a breakthrough like cutting the land bridge to Crimea.” He added, “I probably won’t get any answers about this from Ukrainian contacts, but I’ll ask,” the columnist wrote. On Russia’s strikes on Ukraine’s grid, he said there is “intense focus on new, cheap anti-drone interceptors and other technologies” so “next winter won’t be as painful as the last one was,” describing plans for “a nationwide grid of largely autonomous interceptors,” but warned that “the damage to Ukraine’s power and distribution system is immense” and argued that “Ukraine needs defenses against ballistic missiles” and that he “wish[es] European nations would mount a ‘Manhattan Project’ crash program” on missile defense.
  • Asked whether Trump’s pressure on NATO might ultimately strengthen Europe, he agreed that “Ukraine is getting stronger, and so are its European friends. They need each other,” saying that “of all Putin’s miscalculations, this may be the most important,” because “his belligerence has reanimated Europe’s willingness to defend itself,” even as he called “Trump’s assault on the alliance…a stunning strategic mistake.”
  • Responding to a request for “good” news, Ignatius said that “Ukraine’s defenses have generally held firm against brutal Russian assault,” even though the war remains “a terrible killing ground.” On Trump, he said “the best thing is that he has not done anything to cut the flow of U.S. intelligence to Ukraine — and I’m told that the administration has given Kyiv repeated assurances that it won’t,” according to the author.
  • When asked “What would be the impact of a Russian coup?” David Ignatius said, “First, I think there's more restlessness in Russia, but I don't see any precursors of a coup. “That said, a post-Putin government will emerge eventually--and it will govern a nation that has been battered badly in Ukraine and is weaker, poorer and more disoriented than in decades,” he predicted. “That's a recipe for a very chaotic situation in Russia--with possibilities for democratic change but also big risks of fragmentation and warlordism,” he added.

“Ukraine took Russia’s best punch. It wants to teach Europe what it learned,” David Ignatius, Washington Post, 04.28.26.

  • Ignatius writes upon attending at the Kyiv Security Forum, “Strange as it sounds, it’s uplifting to visit Ukraine these days. This is a place where the good guys are winning — or at least holding their own.”
  • Ignatius writes, “The deep concerns I’ve heard in past wartime visits here have eased. Ukrainian troops held firm against Russia’s ferocious assault on the front lines last fall, and its cities survived a terrible, frigid winter despite a Russian blitz on energy infrastructure. Now spring has arrived: It’s warm again, and the power is still on. Ukraine has taken Russia’s heavy punch without buckling.”
  • “We are definitely not losing,” affirmed Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the former head of military intelligence who is now the top aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky, in remarks to the forum. 
  • European defense chiefs gathered at the Kyiv Security Forum seemed to share the assessment that, as one put it, “the Ukrainians have outpaced Russia in spite of being outgunned,” according to Ignatius. 
  •  “Ukraine has become a fortress, a lesson Europe would do well to learn,” Gen. Sean Clancy, the chair of the E.U. Military Committee, told the conference. 
  • Ignatius writes, “Ukraine has one thing that Europe (and most other countries) desperately need, which is expertise in drone warfare — both offense and defense.”
    •  “Warfare is a race of innovation, and time is a domain of war,” responded Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, chief of the NATO Military Committee. “We need more cooperation with Ukraine to adapt at the speed of conflict.”
    •  “Ukraine currently neutralizes 70 percent of Russia’s drone attacks and hopes to boost that kill rate to more than 90 percent by the end of this year, Oleksandr Yarmak, who created an air-defense brigade known as “Darknode,” said at the forum. “My message to our European partners is that you should build air defense capability quickly. An attack of 500 drones in one day can lead to your capitulation.” 
    • Ignatius writes, “all know the old saw about how necessity is the mother of invention. What has happened in Ukraine over the past four years of war profoundly demonstrates that truth.”

“Drones are blowing up old assumptions about US foreign policy,” Stephen Kinzer, Boston Globe, 05.03.26.

  • Kinzer argues that America’s misadventure in Iran and Russia’s failure in Ukraine show that “superior force is no longer enough to guarantee victory” and that “war is becoming democratized.” Cheap drones have become “the poor man’s weapon of choice”: they cost “anywhere from $300 to $50,000,” while U.S. interceptors run to “$3 million for each Patriot missile” and “at least $10 million” for a THAAD, and a drone factory can churn out “hundreds in a week” versus “a minimum of two years” to field a Patriot battery. Iran, he writes, isn’t trying to win outright; it has realized it can “win simply by surviving,” using swarms of drones that Washington struggles to counter within a “lumbering and overfed defense industry” still fixated on complex, profitable systems.
  • In Ukraine, Kinzer notes, early infantry charges and armor assaults have largely vanished because “any operation on open ground can be quickly spotted and attacked by drones,” forcing both sides to adapt “drone for drone.” The United States has been slower to pivot, even turning to Ukrainian partners for advice — “a remarkable case of a student surpassing the teacher.” He concludes that raw military power “no longer brings either victory or stability,” and that if Iran and Ukraine are any guide, the countries that adapt “more quickly and imaginatively” to cheap, disruptive technologies will hold the advantage, while superpowers that rely on coercive force will find it harder to “win arguments with military might alone.”

“Transcript: Ukraine’s ‘existential’ battle with Russia,” Gideon Rachman with former Ukrainian foreign minister and Belfer Center senior fellow Dmytro Kuleba, Financial Times, 04.30.26.

  • Kuleba calls the Russian-Ukraine conflict “an existential war” in which “we as a nation are in the survival mode.” His own outlook, he says, brightened mainly because “we as a society survived the winter” — “the worst winter Ukraine went through since our independence,” with flats at “plus 5 [degrees Celsius], plus 7” inside, “minus 15 outside,” and society “on the brink of collapse.” That experience, he argues, proved “our resilience is even stronger than we expected.” 
  • On the war’s endgame and talks with Moscow, Kuleba is stark: “The truth of this war for both Russia and Ukraine is that in the end, only one of us will survive. This is a war, not for an asset, not for a piece of territory, but for the viability of the national project.”
  • Russian losses of “30,000 people killed and wounded a month” have not broken Moscow’s will, and Ukraine compensates for its smaller population by “technological solutions”: “A drone cannot replace an infantryman, but it can help to save an infantryman’s life. Secondly, it can kill more Russian infantrymen.” Deep Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, he jokes, are “the most efficient sanction imposed on Russia since the beginning of the invasion,” especially once “the United States lift[ed] sanctions on the seaborne Russian oil,” and he criticizes Western hesitation over escalation: “Wars happen much faster than some decisions to win those wars are being made because they deliberated for too long.”
  • The Iran war, he argues, “empower[s] President Putin to benefit from the surging oil prices,” buying “more time and he will spend that time destroying and killing us.” He expects “a peak of Russian ballistic attacks somewhere in the middle of the summer,” noting that in four days of the Iran war the U.S. fired “more Patriot interceptors than the number they have provided to Ukraine since 2022.” 

“‘I’m fighting two wars. One against the Russians. And one inside myself,’” Christopher Miller, Financial Times, 05.01.26.

  • Miller profiles 25‑year‑old Yana Zalevska, call sign “Multik,” a drone operator and commander of an all‑women FPV unit in Ukraine’s 141st Mechanized Brigade. From a bunker near Huliaipole, she flies fiber‑optic first‑person‑view drones carrying armor‑piercing warheads, stalking targets with “cold clarity” over a stable but lethal front where, she says, “a human being has no business being.” In one strike she guides a suicide drone into two Russian motorbikes, killing four soldiers; there is no celebration, only the terse confirmation “Minus.” Ukrainian officials say 70–80% of battlefield kills are now caused by FPV drones; Zelensky has claimed up to 90%.
  • Zalevska, from Kherson, was politicized when Russia annexed Crimea and then occupied her city in 2022. After organizing protests and escaping through Russian checkpoints, she joined the army as a press officer, then retrained as a combat medic and finally as a drone pilot, saying, “I know what a wounded man sounds like when he dies in your arms… I could get my revenge.” Her call sign “Multik” (“cartoon”) contrasts with the carefully feminine “Yana” who appears in Kyiv restaurants; she says war has split her personality: “There is Multik, who is definitely around more now… And there is Yana… Yana wouldn’t do what Multik does.”
  • Now building an all‑women FPV platoon, the “Amazon Banshees,” she trains former clerks and staff officers to fly, supported by comrades like “Feya,” who manages a crowded drone “airspace” from rear command posts. Zalevska bears heavy physical and psychological scars: in August 2024 a Russian FPV detonated above her, leaving shrapnel in her eye, face and body, eight surgeries and 11 laser treatments; she returned to the front as soon as she could see. She rarely speaks of her 7‑year‑old daughter, who asks, “Mom, how many people have you killed?” and, “Will you teach me to fly like you?” — prompting her to answer: “Of course I will.” For now, she refuses rest: “You could say I am fighting two wars. One against the ... Russians, and one inside myself.”

“Hezbollah Has Learned How to Pilot Deadly Drones Into Israeli Troops,” Anat Peled, Wall Street Journal, 04.30.26.

  • Peled wrote, “Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, has increasingly used first-person-view, or FPV, drones to attack Israeli troops, posing a major threat to the Israeli military that it hasn’t encountered in earlier rounds of fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, according to military officials and soldiers. The devices are a type of small, cheap drone that has wreaked havoc in Russia and Ukraine and was used more recently by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq to attack U.S. troops. They are difficult to detect, highly accurate and cost hundreds of dollars apiece.”
  • “Their deployment by Hezbollah has become widespread in recent weeks. On Thursday, the Israeli military said another soldier had been killed by an explosive drone in southern Lebanon, and on Tuesday, an Israeli man was killed after an FPV drone struck him and his son as they were operating excavators for the military there,” according to Peled.
  • “Unfortunately, our warnings were not taken into account,” Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister from 2021 to 2023, said in an interview. “Since Oct. 7, 2023, and continuing to this day, Israel has been facing the aggressive application of Russian-derived combat experience through Iranian proxies.”
  • The FPV drones have “become one of the most common types used in Ukraine, accounting for most battlefield casualties. FPVs have an average range of 15 kilometers or longer if a signal repeater or optic fiber wires are used, allowing operators to sit far from the front lines.”
  • “We shouldn’t be surprised after four plus years of Ukraine that this technology would be spreading,” said Samuel Bendett, an adviser with the Russia Studies Program at CNA, a Washington-based think tank. “We know that Iran has been monitoring the use of drones in the Ukraine war. We know that Iran has military to military cooperation with Russia.”
  • “Hezbollah began experimenting with FPVs as early as June 2024, releasing footage showing FPVs hitting Israeli military hardware.”
  • “Optic fiber is the worst. There is actually no efficient way to countermeasure this threat,” said Iaroslav Kalinin, a former army officer in the Ukrainian military and chief executive of Infozahyst, one of Ukraine’s biggest electronic warfare contractors. Ukraine now relies on acoustic sensors and nets to counter optic fiber drones, while more sophisticated solutions are still in testing, he said. Optic fiber isn’t available off the shelf and likely had to be brought in from abroad, analysts and security officials said.

“Slyer Drones Give Hezbollah an Edge Over Israel,” Isabel Kershner, Natan Odenheimer, Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon, New York Times, 05.03.26.

  • The authors show how battlefield innovations from the Ukraine‑Russia war are now shaping Hezbollah’s campaign against Israel. Hezbollah is attacking Israeli forces in southern Lebanon and northern Israel with exploding drones “controlled not by radio signals but by thin, almost invisible fiber‑optic cables,” a technology the authors note “has long been in use in the war in Ukraine.” Because these drones are “largely immune to the kind of jamming of communications and global positioning systems that Israel employs against regular drones” and can “fly low and fast,” they’re much harder to detect and destroy.
  • An image circulated on Hezbollah‑linked media boasted of “the thread that shifts the equation,” adding, “One thin fiber can threaten the most advanced technology.” A senior Hezbollah official says the technology is “low cost compared with Israeli weaponry” but has made Israeli troops “easy targets.” The piece links this directly to Iran’s and Russia’s learning from Ukraine: Iran “has relied on drones heavily” in its own war and has exported them to Russia, while Russia has fielded similar fiber‑optic FPVs since late 2024. Israeli officials admit they were “inadequately prepared,” now improvising with nets and rapidly developing new counter‑drone systems — echoing the defensive improvisation Ukrainians pioneered under relentless Russian FPV and Shahed attacks.

Igor Strelkov on mobilization and Russia’s lost window for victory, I. Strelkov’s Telegram channel, 05.01.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine-translated.

Military aid to Ukraine:

“Why is the Pentagon holding up Ukraine funds?”, Mitch McConnell, Washington Post, 04.28.26. Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress that the Pentagon has finally released $400 million in Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative funds after weeks of pressure from lawmakers, according to Kyiv Post.

  • McConnell recalls that “Republican majorities on both armed services committees authorized $400 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative for each of the next two years,” and that appropriators “fully funded that authorization for fiscal 2026 with overwhelming support,” yet “the Ukraine aid we passed months ago is now collecting dust at the Pentagon.” He says Senate appropriators have been “stonewalled” by Undersecretary Elbridge Colby’s policy shop, and claims Colby previously suspended arms shipments to Kyiv and deemed aid to Ukraine and NATO’s Baltic allies “wasteful.” “We did so not out of charity but because aiding Ukraine is an investment in America’s security,” McConnell argues, noting that support for Kyiv has “drove billions of dollars in investments in the U.S. defense industrial base.”
  • He criticizes the Pentagon for “withholding or slow‑rolling support to Ukraine,” calling it “in effect the same strategy President Joe Biden deployed,” which “weakens its capacity to defend against aggression and hampers the prospects of diplomacy.” Although Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has called Ukraine “the ‘Silicon Valley of warfare’” that has “done an amazing job innovating,” McConnell says most senior officials still avoid the front and that Washington is “sandbag[ging] a relationship with the world’s foremost drone experts” even as Russia and Iran adapt: “America’s adversaries aren’t so willfully ignorant about the modern battlefield. They are learning and adapting.”

Igor Strelkov on the EU’s €90 billion loan to Ukraine and Russia’s trajectory, I. Strelkov’s Telegram channel, 05.01.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine-translated.

  • On the EU’s approval of a €90 billion package for Ukraine, Strelkov says “what had to happen, happened” and mocks Russian diplomacy’s attempts to delay the inevitable. Whether Kyiv gets all, half or a third “no longer matters,” he argues; the key is that it will get substantial support. He underscores the paradox that “we will continue supplying Europe with gas, and Europe will continue supplying Ukraine with shells and drones that explode on our territory,” with Europe buying Russian gas cheaper than American LNG and using the margin to produce “many more” munitions. Hopes that friendly governments like Hungary or Slovakia will meaningfully help Russia are delusional, he says, because “no one respects us and no one fears us anymore—not Estonia, not France, not the Czech Republic.” He concludes that the “special military operation has clearly reached a dead end,” is consuming “huge numbers of lives without any result,” and that “unfortunately, we are heading toward military defeat. That is a fact,” while the leadership still “does nothing serious” to avert it.

“To Leave or Not to Leave: How Russian Technocrats Undermined Western Efforts to Isolate Russia,” Kirill Shamiev, Kennan Institute, 05.01.26.

  • Shamiev argues that Western efforts to force a corporate exit from Russia have largely failed in practice. Before the full‑scale invasion, at least 4,277 publicly traded foreign companies operated in Russia; only about 12% (547) have made a clean break. More than 11,000 foreign firms still generate profits in Russia, often via rebranding, management buyouts, or third‑country intermediaries.
  • At the center of this is a wartime approval regime. A government subcommission on foreign investment became the gatekeeper for exits, imposing punitive terms: by late 2024, typical deals involved roughly a 60% discount on asset value plus a 35% “contribution” to the federal budget, leaving sellers with only 20–40 cents on the dollar. These exit levies generated about $1.5 billion in 2023 and roughly $4 billion in both 2024 and the first half of 2025—close to $10 billion in total.
  • Meanwhile, firms that openly stayed have done well. Shamiev cites estimates that those which “officially publicly stayed” (excluding those working via intermediaries) increased their profits by about 10%, or roughly $5 billion a year. Individual examples underscore the pattern: Weatherford International’s Russian subsidiary saw revenues rise nearly 30% and gross profit 61% between 2022 and 2024, while its workforce grew 9% to 2,382 employees; Knauf’s flagship Russian entity reportedly increased revenue by 20% and its insulation arm by 60% over the same period.
  • The redistribution of corporate assets has also fueled a billionaire boom. Since 2021, Russia’s number of dollar billionaires has not declined; instead, 2024 produced 19 new billionaires and 2025 another 14, bringing the total to a record 155. Many, like Arnest Group’s Alexei Sagal—whose revenues jumped from about $450 million pre‑war to $1.7 billion after acquiring Heineken, Ball and Unilever’s Russian assets—have profited directly from Western exits financed by sanctioned state banks.

“Escrow and Russian Oil Super-Profits: Revisiting an Old Sanctions Tool,” Tom Keatinge, RUSI, 04.28.26.

  • Keatinge writes that the Iran war and closure of Hormuz have “turned the tables,” with oil at “around $100 per barrel” so that “super-profits are pouring into the coffers in Moscow.” For Ukraine’s allies, he says, this is “particularly galling,” as Trump’s venture in Iran has produced an “energy shock” that “opened up opportunities for Russia to cash in,” while “the West’s sanctions strategy has lost its way.” Russia, he argues, has “quickly circumvented and neutered” the oil price cap (OPC) and built “a parallel market for its oil sales that no longer relies on Western infrastructure,” an adaptation that “was entirely expected.”
  • Looking back to sanctions on Iran, Keatinge recalls that earlier efforts “focused on controlling the associated payment flows,” with oil buyers paying into “escrow… to which Iran’s access was restricted,” so that “although Iran’s revenue existed on paper, its access to that liquidity… was blocked.” He argues this “decoupled the flow of oil… from the use of sale proceeds” and shows that “sanctions need not eliminate trade to constrain state behavior; they can instead reshape the terms on which revenue is realized.”
  • Keatinge suggests that “whilst many… have called for the OPC to be thrown aside, it may actually have finally found its calling.” With the cap at $44.10 while prices are “at least double,” countries are “paying a super-profit to Russia”; instead, sanctions could be used to “pressure the use of an Iran-style escrow system” so Russia is “unable to access the windfall above the price cap.” Escrowed funds “might one day be included in a reparations settlement to rebuild” Ukraine, he notes, while “most importantly, Russia does not profit from the oil price spike.”

“Is the Shadow Fleet Rallying ‘Round the Russian Flag?” Gonzalo Saiz Erausquin, RUSI, 04.28.26.

  • Erausquin notes that Russia’s shadow fleet now moves “nearly 70% of Russian seaborne crude” and generates “an estimated $85 billion annually for the Kremlin,” but pressure on weak flag registries and aggressive boardings have pushed parts of this fleet to register directly under the Russian flag since late 2025. This shift, he argues, shows that “current efforts are working… somewhat”: cooperative registries such as Panama have “de-registered hundreds of designated vessels,” false‑flagging has “opened the door to ship detentions, boardings and other actions,” and cases like the Bella 1/Marinera boarding “shed light on Russia’s willingness to provide its flag and deploy military assets to protect a shadow fleet vessel.”
  • At the same time, he warns that a more insulated “Russian‑flagged parallel fleet” undermines Western leverage: such ships are “unlikely to seek G7 marine insurance, P&I cover, trade financing or certification,” so “Western authorities and private operators are therefore gradually losing the last remaining touch points” for enforcement. Acting against openly Russian‑flagged tankers “poses far greater risks” of confrontation, while Moscow, which lobbied hard to stay on the IMO Council, is reluctant to become “the flag state of a decrepit fleet built around sanctions evasion.” Erausquin urges keeping pressure on permissive third‑country registries (e.g., Cameroon) via FATF and an EU/UK list of “high‑risk flag registries,” arguing that continued tightening will “force harder choices on the Kremlin and make the fleet more difficult to keep both profitable and deniable.

“Ukraine’s falling confidence in US mediation,” Steven Pifer, Brookings, 04.29.26.

  • Pifer contrasts Biden’s principle of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” with a Trump approach that “does not appear to share that principle.” He notes that chief negotiator Steve Witkoff has traveled to Moscow “eight times since March 2025 but has yet to visit Kyiv,” while Russian officials increasingly invoke an “Anchorage understanding” from the August 2025 Trump‑Putin summit. After that meeting, Putin spoke of an “understanding we have reached,” and Trump told Sean Hannity “it’s really up to President Zelenskyy to get it done,” later reportedly telling European leaders he supported Kyiv ceding all of Donetsk to Russia. A subsequent 28‑point plan even proposed that “Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognized as de facto Russian, including by the United States.”
  • Although a later 20‑point U.S. plan dropped that demand, Zelenskyy has publicly said U.S. officials linked a bilateral security guarantee to giving up Donetsk; Rubio “angrily denied” it, but Russian aide Yuri Ushakov has described Washington “pressing and influencing Kyiv” as “what is needed now.” Polls cited by Pifer show “70% of Ukrainians do not expect the U.S.-brokered talks to succeed” and only “28% consider the United States a reliable partner.” One Ukrainian journalist told him Kyiv now hopes for little more than U.S. intelligence, Patriots purchased by NATO, and that Washington will not force an “unacceptable deal,” while a former diplomat warned Ukraine “is losing” the United States as a strategic partner. If Trump truly wants to mediate, Pifer concludes, he must “pressure Moscow to negotiate seriously” and “give Kyiv confidence that he and his negotiators are pursuing a competent and balanced mediation.”

“Ukrainians: More Confident in Course of War, less so in U.S. Policy,” Steven Pifer, Stanford CISAC, 04.28.26.

  • Based on April 21–24 conversations in Kyiv, Pifer reports Ukrainians are “more confident than a year ago about the course of the war”: the front “appears stable,” Ukraine has “largely stopped the first Russian spring offensives,” and officials claim “more than 35,000 Russian casualties in March, a record since the February 2022 invasion.” Drones are expanding the “kill zone” deep into Russia; small interceptors now down “as many as 90 percent” of Shaheds, and over the past two months Ukraine has launched “more drones at targets in Russia than Russia has launched against Ukraine,” hitting refineries and export terminals. Europeans, led by the Commission and Germany, are seen as giving “strong support,” capped by the EU’s €90 billion loan.
  • By contrast, confidence in Washington is slipping. One interlocutor said the U.S. sends “mixed signals”: is it “a neutral or non‑neutral (i.e., pro‑Russian) mediator?” Another expects the United States will do little beyond intelligence, allowing NATO to buy Patriots for transfer, and “hopefully refrain from pressing Kyiv to agree to unacceptable peace terms.” A former senior diplomat warned Ukraine “is losing” the United States as a strategic partner. Even so, Pifer stresses that Ukrainians, hardened by “a miserable winter,” are “not prepared to embrace settlement terms that would amount to surrender,” and face the coming fighting season with “notable confidence in their ability to resist.”

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

“I Played Putin in a War Game. The Most Dangerous Period May Be Coming,” Alexander Gabuev, New York Times, 04.29.26.

  • Gabuev recounts playing “President Vladimir Putin” in a Die Welt–Bundeswehr war game where Russia, after a cease-fire in Ukraine, moves 15,000 elite troops into Belarus and Kaliningrad and seizes the Suwałki Gap as a “humanitarian corridor” to supply Kaliningrad. His team uses drones to “gain control of the area,” remotely mines the Polish‑Lithuanian border, then brings in doctors and journalists “to increase the number of civilian casualties if NATO hit back,” before telling Washington: “Give us what we want, or prepare for another war that could go nuclear.” With U.S. midterms a week away, “the White House chose to engage in talks,” wanting to present “preventing World War III” as Trump’s achievement; once the U.S. president “stood down, NATO was effectively deactivated,” and Russia extracted concessions “to refashion Europe’s security architecture in Russia’s favor.”
  • He argues this is plausible because Putin now insists “the real war is not against Ukraine but against all of NATO,” and Russia “has a bigger land force and produces more tanks, shells and missiles than before the invasion,” plus superior drone‑warfare experience. Europe, by contrast, is only beginning a “costly and politically controversial rearmament process,” creating a window when Russia, “though fundamentally weaker than NATO, may have an upper hand militarily.” Combined with a U.S. president who has “put the credibility of NATO more in doubt” than any predecessor, Gabuev concludes that unless Europe quickly hardens its eastern flank with “drone walls,” minefields and visible resolve, “the most dangerous period… may soon be upon us.”

“To fight Russia, Europe needs Ukraine”, The Economist, 04.28.26.

  • The Economist staff note that Poland’s PM Donald Tusk now fears Russia could attack Europe’s eastern flank within “months,” yet many EU leaders still stall on Ukraine’s accession. Ukraine’s critics call it a “corrupt, fragile democracy” that may emerge with “ambiguous borders and Russia as its neighbor-from-hell,” and fret that if it joins, “the Common Agricultural Policy could not survive.” But supporters argue “any credible defense of Europe must involve Ukraine’s 800,000 men at arms” and its “home‑grown, AI‑guided drone and counter‑drone technologies.” Finnish President Alexander Stubb says, “We Europeans have to understand we need Ukraine more than Ukraine needs us.” With NATO membership “dead” for now, EU entry and even extending the EU’s mutual‑defense clause (Article 42.7) are framed as the only way to anchor Ukraine firmly in the West and deter future Russian aggression.

“The Transatlantic MAGA Fantasy: How Trump Misread Europe,” Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage, Foreign Affairs, 04.29.26.

  • Fix and Kimmage argue that Trump’s second-term effort to “refashion” ties with Europe—through “extreme pressure,” tariffs that “disadvantage Europe,” and even threats to “annex Greenland… by force”—has backfired. They say the administration openly backed Europe’s far right, with JD Vance warning in Munich that in Europe “free speech… is in retreat” and “mass migration” is the main problem, but note that “after more than a year of trying, the Trump administration has not come close to assembling a coalition of far-right parties.” The Iran war has “illuminated” that these parties “have not been Trump’s wartime allies” and that U.S. meddling has “damaged Washington’s relationship” with mainstream leaders, so that “distrust of Washington now prevails across Europe.”
  • They stress that even far-right actors often remain anti-American: the AfD “has traditionally seen the U.S. role in Europe as… an alien power” and “regards Russia, on the other hand, as a proper European power.” Trump’s backing has become a “liability” after Viktor Orban’s defeat, and leaders like Marine Le Pen insist “sovereignty of states is never negotiable.” The authors urge Washington to accept that “an illiberal transatlantic order is not in the cards,” step back from Europe’s domestic politics, and rebuild a thinner partnership based on shared interests such as security and reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

“Reagan's Military Lessons for the New Cold War,” John Lehman and Anand Toprani, Wall Street Journal, 04.29.26.

  • Lehman and Toprani say today’s push toward 5% of GDP for defense echoes the Reagan buildup, which “played a significant role in ending the Cold War,” but warn that “it takes more than an open checkbook to secure strategic advantages.” They stress that Reagan’s buildup was “modest,” built on Carter‑era innovations such as stealth and precision weapons, and paired with “a wider military and grand strategy” that used new doctrines (like Assault Breaker) and allied power, including “considerable U.S. military assistance” to Japan and even China, to convince Moscow it “couldn’t keep up” militarily.
  • Looking to the current competition with China and a resurgent Russia, they argue the U.S. is “likely closer to the beginning than the end” of a long contest and must emulate Reagan‑era acquisition reforms—ending sole‑source deals, fostering competition, using fixed‑price contracts—to field a force it can “sustain over the long term.” Today, they note, “the size and sophistication of its primary rival are greater, and the battlefield is more dangerous due to the proliferation of cheap weaponry that can defeat even expensive systems,” so “spending alone won’t be sufficient”: civilian and military leaders must “develop, fund and execute a strategy that can end this new cold war without bloodshed.”

“The U.S. Military Was Losing Its Edge. After Iran, Everyone Knows It,” Editorial Board, New York Times, 04.30.26.

  • The board argues that the Iran war has exposed “the vulnerabilities in the American way of war”: despite spending “around $1 trillion a year” and destroying much of Iran’s military early on, the U.S. has allowed Tehran to seize the Strait of Hormuz and gain the “stronger negotiating position.” Three months after warning that America risked being “overmatched in the wars of the future,” they say that fear is now borne out by a force optimized to fight other big platforms but “ineffective against cheaper, mass‑produced weapons,” an anemic industrial base (a “single factory” for Tomahawks, “constant shortage of Patriot interceptors”), and a sclerotic procurement system dominated by five primes. They call for four priorities: serious investment in counter‑drone defenses “like those that Ukraine has developed in its war against Russia,” more cheap expendable drones and unmanned vessels, expanded and diversified manufacturing, and much closer cooperation with other industrial democracies.
  • These reforms, they argue, are needed not only to win but to deter wars, because the Iran campaign has become a “road map for any country that wants to resist the United States in the future, including Russia and North Korea,” while for China it “validates its focus on new forms of warfare such as drones and cyber and space power.” The editorial credits some Trump‑era steps to break contractor monopolies and cancel failing programs, but says a chaotic “Trump class” battleship project and a misdirected $1.5 trillion budget show the larger failure to adapt. With adversaries now watching closely, they conclude, “Washington can no longer just talk about reforming the military. It has to do it, or risk making the disappointments in the Iran war become a preview of far worse.”

“It’s Only 5,000 Troops, but America Will Come to Regret Its Rash Withdrawal From Germany,” Linas Kojala, New York Times, 05.02.26.

  • Kojala argues that while Trump is “right to demand that Europe spend more on its own defense,” pulling 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany “risks weakening one of America’s best strategic investments.” NATO, he recalls, was meant “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down,” and though today “Europe needs [Germany’s] money, industry and political will,” old anxieties are returning as Berlin’s defense budget, already “the fourth largest in the world,” is set to “approach the combined military spending of Britain and France.” Defense minister Boris Pistorius now wants “the German armed forces… to become ‘the strongest conventional army in Europe’,” while the far‑right AfD is “already the second-largest faction in Parliament.”
  • In this context, Kojala warns, U.S. forces in Germany are “a military presence that deters Russia and keeps Europe’s old rivalries from becoming America’s problem again.” He notes that U.S. troops “reassure allies, secure America’s military role on the continent and help sustain U.S. operations in the Middle East,” and that an American SACEUR prevents Europe’s “most sensitive military post” becoming a contest among Berlin, Paris, Warsaw and London. If America becomes “ambivalent in its security commitments,” he writes, “the nuclear question will become more urgent,” and a Europe that “competes within itself” will be “far easier for Russia to divide and intimidate.”

“Trump Is the One Without the Cards at the Poker Table,” Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 05.01.26.

  • Friedman argues that the Iran war shows Trump “does not understand how much asymmetric warfare has reshaped geopolitics,” comparing Iran’s leverage over Hormuz to Ukraine’s use of cheap drones against Russia. He notes that Ukraine “smuggled 117 cheap drones into Russia… and destroyed or damaged about 20 of Russia’s strategic aircraft,” and that Iran has used $35,000 Shahed‑136s to hit Amazon Web Services data centers in the Gulf, forcing multi‑million‑dollar defensive responses. In an “interdependent world,” he quotes defense scholar John Arquilla, “the many and the small now have the ability to create ‘mass disruption’” rather than mass destruction, turning weak actors like Iran, Ukraine, Hamas or Hezbollah into major strategic players.
  • Friedman’s main warning is about a shift from “information‑age” to “intelligence‑age” tools: large‑language‑model A.I. agents that can autonomously execute multistage cyberattacks, replacing skilled operators with “vastly more intelligent, autonomous and skilled A.I. agents with more destructive reach at little cost.” He cites Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT‑5.4‑Cyber, whose vulnerability‑hunting prowess already leaked to unauthorized users, as a preview of how cheap A.I. could super‑empower states like Iran and non‑state actors. He urges the two A.I. superpowers, the U.S. and China, to cooperate on limiting these “intelligence‑age” asymmetric threats “not unlike the United States and the U.S.S.R. did” on nuclear arms, or “neither of them will be safe. Nor will anyone else be.”

“The Most Potent Weapon in Russia’s Disinformation War,” Stephanie Baker, Priyanjana Bengani, graphics by Rachael Dottle, Bloomberg, 04.27.26.

  • A two-minute video, shared March 6 on the social media platform X, appeared to offer evidence linking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. One post alone racked up 2.9 million views. But the email is fake. 
  • The video was… one of more than 190 fabricated stories since August 2023 that Bloomberg News has identified as being part of a Russian influence operation known to Western intelligence agencies and researchers as Storm-1516. Together they have hundreds of millions of views on social media.
  • While [Storm-1516’s] stories are shared on multiple platforms… X has proven especially fertile ground. Since Musk bought the platform in 2022, it has discontinued many of its trust and safety measures, including policies aimed at combating misinformation. 
  • The broader aim of Russia’s disinformation campaign is to undermine support for Ukraine and divide the West by eroding trust in democratic institutions and elections. With the U.S. midterms looming, that strategy is likely to intensify.
  • “In a lot of these elections, you don’t need big numbers—you need targeting and that’s what the Russians do,” says Anne Nelson, a research fellow at… Columbia University. Nelson points out that the makeup of the 2024 House of Representatives was determined by 7,309 votes in three districts. “The dismantling of government agencies tracking disinformation,” she says, “is the equivalent of saying, ‘Come on in.’.”

“The EU, Like ‘NATO 3.0,’ Will Remain Our Adversaries,” Dmitry Trenin, Russian International Affairs Council, 05.04.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine-translated. (This organization is affiliated with the Russian authorities.)

  • Dmitry Trenin writes that “for the first time since 1945, the most urgent military threat to Russia comes from the European direction,” with its source being “the European states themselves.” According to the author, “Germany is consistently moving along the path of militarization in anticipation of a new war with Russia,” while “France…conducts military exercises, practicing nuclear strikes on Russian territory,” and Britain “actively participates in Ukraine’s sabotage attacks, including against Russia’s strategic arsenal.” Trenin believes the EU’s “ultimate goal” is “to split the Russian Federation into components managed from outside and turn them into semi‑colonies of the EU.”
  • The author insists it is necessary “to counter this threat primarily by strengthening our rear,” arguing that “the war is going on not ‘somewhere out there,’ but everywhere: in the rear no less than at the front.” He warns that if Europe continues its “strategy of a ‘thousand cuts’” and Russia rules out surrender, then “we will have only one option left—powerful (ultimately nuclear) strikes on the enemy’s logistic, military‑industrial and military‑political targets.”
  • Trenin contends that “the three‑century period during which Europe was for our country a model, mentor and main export‑import market is over,” and that “the ‘European choice’ has ceased to be relevant for Russia.” He concludes that “the EU, like ‘NATO 3.0,’ will remain our adversaries,” and argues that Russia’s task is to “strengthen the resilience of our own rear, achieve the goals of the special military operation, and not allow European provocateurs to unleash a major war.”

“A Multipolar World: From Ideology to Design,” Dmitri Trenin, Russian International Affairs Council, 04.30.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine-translated. (This organization is affiliated with the Russian authorities.)

China-Russia: Allied or aligned?

“Is a Deal Cheaper Than Money?,” Fyodor Lukyanov, Russia in Global Affairs, 05.02.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine-translated. (This organization is affiliated with the Russian authorities.)

  • Lukyanov writes that hopes the coming Russia–China–U.S. summitry will yield a grand bargain are “vain,” because the “process of rearranging the world has been launched ‘seriously and for a long time’.” He argues that Washington has shifted from the long‑term, system‑building logic of the liberal order to a strategy that “puts tactical benefits above strategic ones,” aiming in the transition period to “create a head start for the future” and “as long as possible maintain superiority over the rest.” Trump is just “the face” of an approach “laid down before him,” he says, one that seeks sharp, immediate gains even if “the long‑term effect may turn into losses.”
  • For others, Lukyanov contends, this means the “principled impossibility of a ‘big deal’ with America.” For Trump, a “deal” is purely commercial—“about very big money” and easily discarded “as soon as there is a chance for another, perhaps larger” one. Until the U.S. has accumulated the margin it deems sufficient, “there can be no agreements on world order.” This “American non‑deal‑making” is, in his view, a rational choice about how to survive a period of “maximum international uncertainty” while preserving the premises of future dominance.
  • As a result, leading players increasingly conclude that they “cannot agree with Washington,” which, he says, elevates military potential as a way to resist pressure and boosts interest in building “infrastructure of relationships independent of the United States and protected from its encroachments.” Allies may be the “first line at whose expense Americans strengthen their potential.” China long hoped for “an acceptable compromise” to preserve mutual benefit, but “this no longer seems likely.” The upcoming visits of Trump and Putin to Beijing will show, he argues, what “small deals” are still possible between a mistrustful U.S. and China, and how ready Beijing is, alongside Moscow, to construct mechanisms “not connected with the United States.”

“Assessing the Impact of China-Russia Security Coordination in Latin America and the Caribbean,” Henry Ziemer and Ryan C. Berg, CSIS, 04.30.26.

  • Ziemer and Berg argue that as Washington “cannot readily project power abroad without security and stability at home,” the Trump administration has made a “pivot to the Americas,” launching the Shield of the Americas Summit and an “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition,” even as it fights Iran. But they warn that Russia still sees provocation in the Western Hemisphere as retaliation for U.S. moves in its “near abroad,” and China “has more space infrastructure in LAC than anywhere else in the world outside of mainland China,” alongside arms exports, training, and “defense‑adjacent” security assistance. Such ties are “stickier… not easily undone” and could create a hostile operating environment for the United States in a crisis.
  • Their tabletop exercise on a Colombia–Venezuela border clash finds that “the United States remains the security partner of choice” and that even when allowed to coordinate, China and Russia “struggle to achieve tight coordination.” Still, Russia consistently chose escalation, and a looser “no‑limits” partnership could embolden anti‑U.S. regimes and force Washington into riskier moves to defend allies. The authors urge the United States to “curtail the alliance options of China and Russia” by limiting anti‑U.S. authoritarian regimes, “leverage the Shield of the Americas for security cooperation,” and “increase support for defense modernization” so that LAC partners do not drift toward Russian or Chinese systems.

“The U.S. Wants to Break China’s Drone Dominance. Here’s Where It Will Struggle,” Josh Chin, Merrill Sherman, Jason French and Ievgeniia Sivorka, Wall Street Journal, 05.02.26.

  • The article draws heavily on lessons from the Ukraine war to show how deeply global drone supply chains run through China. A teardown of a Russian FPV quadcopter by Ukraine’s Bulava unit found “batteries, motors and an unmarked central ‘brain’ chip” all traceable to Chinese suppliers; Bulava’s own similar drones “couldn’t have been built without China’s supply chain,” its chief specialist says. With Ukraine burning through “roughly 10,000 unmanned aircraft every month” and Iran having launched “more than 4,000 suicide drone attacks in the first month” of its war with the U.S. and Israel, scale is everything—and “U.S.-made quadcopters… can cost upward of $15,000, at least three times” Chinese equivalents.
  • Ukraine’s experience also illustrates Beijing’s leverage: DJI holds “80% of the commercial drone market in the U.S.,” and when China blacklisted U.S. maker Skydio over sales to Taiwan, cutting it off from batteries, its CEO accused Beijing of trying to “eliminate the leading American drone company.” The Pentagon’s $1.1 billion “Drone Dominance” program plans to buy 340,000 FPVs and drive unit costs down to $2,300, but experts warn that “reinvent[ing] an industry that already exists that is high quality and low cost” will be “slow and painful,” and that bans on foreign components could also hurt competitiveness by cutting off non‑Chinese suppliers in places like Ukraine and Taiwan.

Missile defense:

  • No significant developments.

Nuclear arms:

“Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and U.S.-Russia Relations after the Cold War,” Rose Gottemoeller, Stanford University Press, April 2026.

  • In her new book Rose Gottemoeller notes that “Russian officials and experts often voice the view that the United States was hell-bent on undermining, even destroying Russia during the turbulent period of the Soviet breakup,” claiming that America’s “primary…goal…was to expand NATO to Russia’s borders to isolate and threaten the Russian state.” The author explicitly “refutes this notion.”
  • According to Gottemoeller, “successive American presidents were convinced that deep cooperation with Russia is essential to international security and stability.” She argues that this conviction “was born during the George H. W. Bush administration and took definitive shape during the administration of Bill Clinton,” when Clinton and Boris Yeltsin “agreed to develop technological cooperation that would be useful to both countries,” and that George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin “carried the conviction further.”

“Can Europe Build Its Own Nuclear Umbrella?,” Pavel Podvig position, StarkTalk, 04.27.26.

  • Podvig argues that a European nuclear umbrella based on French or British forces is largely a mirage. Extending de Gaulle’s famous question—would the United States trade Boston for Paris?—he asks whether “France [would] trade Paris for Tallinn.” France’s arsenal can certainly “inflict serious damage on Russia,” but any threat to strike Russian targets would be matched by a Russian capability to hit France in kind: “if France deters Russia, then Russia deters France.” That symmetry, he contends, makes a French (or British) guarantee for Baltic or Eastern European allies fundamentally non‑credible.
  • By contrast, U.S. extended deterrence has at least a “somewhat plausible” rationale: Washington can lean on the full weight of its strategic arsenal and a theory of damage‑limiting counterforce, maintaining an advantage in follow‑on strikes. This logic, however imperfect, does not scale to much smaller French or British forces, which lack any realistic first‑strike or damage‑limitation capability against Russia. In Podvig’s view, relying on a European nuclear umbrella only adds dangerous uncertainty; “certainty would serve Europe far better,” ideally by constraining Russia’s ability to use nuclear weapons at all.

“Can Europe Build Its Own Nuclear Umbrella?—William Alberque: The Umbrellas of Luxembourg: Can Europe Deter Russia?,” StarkTalk, 04.27.26.

  • Alberque disputes Pavel Podvig’s view that Europe cannot credibly deter Russia without the U.S., arguing that deepened UK–French nuclear cooperation can provide “a stronger European leg of the nuclear deterrent,” both alongside and, in extremis, instead of the American guarantee. He points to the 2025 Northwood Declaration and the earlier Lancaster House Treaties as the basis for closer joint work on warhead design, stockpile stewardship and deep‑strike capabilities, and to UK decisions to restore a nuclear mission to the RAF (at least 12 F‑35As for NATO’s dual‑capable aircraft role) and expand the UK SSN fleet from 7 to 12 under AUKUS.
  • Under Northwood, he argues, London and Paris can co‑develop new SLBM and air‑launched cruise missile warheads (e.g., France’s AS4NG), jointly produce missiles, and reduce UK dependence on U.S. technology and components (for example via access to French tritium). A UK–French nuclear consultation “Steering Group” will coordinate policy, capabilities, and operations. Unlike France, which is doctrinally restrictive and resists joint planning or sharing, the UK has no such inhibitions: it could, Alberque suggests, eventually offer UK‑French ALCMs to NATO’s DCA fleet and expand its SSBN force and warhead numbers with allied co‑funding.
  • He concludes that if allied warhead numbers and delivery platforms grow and UK nuclear sharing is reintroduced, France and the UK together could present Russia with both strategic and theater‑level deterrence options robust enough to dissuade attacks on NATO’s eastern flank. Contrary to Podvig’s “Paris for Tallinn” skepticism, Alberque argues that Paris would see any loss of NATO territory as a direct threat to its own security and the survival of the Alliance, and would thus be prepared to extend credible nuclear protection forward.

“Statement by the Head of the Delegation of the Russian Federation, Ambassador‑at‑Large Andrey Belousov at the 11th Review Conference of the NPT,” Russian Foreign Ministry, 04.29.26. Clues from Russian Views.

  • Conveying Vladimir Putin’s address, Belousov says Russia “strictly adheres to the letter and spirit of the Treaty” and calls the NPT “a cornerstone of international peace and security,” whose three pillars—non‑proliferation, disarmament and peaceful use—are “equally important and mutually reinforcing.” Putin’s message stresses that all compliant states have “the inalienable right to enjoy the benefits of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy without any restrictions,” and that Russia, “as a leader in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, is ready to continue to develop constructive cooperation.”
  • Belousov notes that the NPT is “under severe strain” and condemns “the unprovoked, unjustified and unlawful aggression by Israel and the United States against Iran,” calling Tehran “a good‑faith Party to the Treaty” and accusing a “State blatantly disregarding the Treaty and a depositary State acting in its interests” of attacking safeguarded facilities. He argues that “provocative and destructive actions of Western nuclear‑weapon States”—U.S. hints at building up beyond New START, Britain’s expanded “nuclear sharing,” and France’s plans to “increase its nuclear capabilities” and draw in European allies—“significantly undermine” arms‑control prospects.
  • Russia, he asserts, will act “in the most responsible and well‑considered manner” and rejects calls for “immediate and unconditional renunciation of nuclear weapons,” saying this “disregard[s] the legitimate interests of our country” and must await “effective alternative security mechanisms.” Moscow “reaffirms” support for IAEA safeguards and nuclear‑weapon‑free zones, but questions whether states involved in “nuclear sharing” should receive negative security assurances. On peaceful uses, he says Article IV rights must be upheld, denouncing restrictions on nuclear‑energy sectors “outside the framework of the UN Council” and “excessively intrusive inspections.” The conference, he concludes, should seek “consensus‑based solutions” to “strengthen the Treaty and its fundamental pillars.”

“How Russia Can Win the New World War,” Sergei Karaganov, Profile, 04.30.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine-translated. (This individual is affiliated with the Russian authorities.)

  • Karaganov frames current conflicts as a “full‑scale world war” and argues Russia has erred by “underusing the most important weapon in our arsenal… nuclear deterrence.” He says Moscow accepted a Western‑imposed “war of attrition” in Ukraine, despite the enemy’s greater economic and demographic potential, and insists that Russia “cannot win the world war” by trench fighting and drones alone without sacrificing “hundreds of thousands of our best men.”
  • He calls for “qualitative strengthening of reliance on nuclear deterrence,” urging Russia to “stop talking about ‘arms control’,” drop any idea of a new START, and rapidly expand medium‑ and strategic‑range delivery systems so “opponents must know that superiority and impunity are unattainable.” Nuclear weapons at an “optimal” level and doctrine, he writes, should make conventional superiority “impossible” and save resources. He proposes revising doctrine so that in any conflict with a materially stronger coalition, the high command is not just allowed but “obliged to use nuclear weapons,” starting with tests, then conventional strikes on logistics and command centers, and, if necessary, “series of group nuclear strikes.”
  • Karaganov explicitly ties this to Ukraine, calling the current campaign a “modernized trench war” that “cannot win a world war.” He says Russia must be ready, even after any peace or capitulation, to retaliate with “even nuclear” blows if missiles or drones again fly from Ukrainian or neighboring territory, so that those “standing behind the drone operators” will “hunt down potential provocateurs themselves.” To deter escalation and Western “revenge,” he urges naming European “places of elite concentration” as priority targets and making clear that Germany, in particular, “has no right” to the strongest army or weapons of mass destruction—and that if it reaches for them, “its homeland will be destroyed, so that no threat to peace ever again comes from German soil.”2

Counterterrorism:

“Jihadists Are on the Brink of an African Caliphate,” Benoit Faucon, Wall Street Journal, 04.30.26.

  • Faucon reports that al‑Qaeda‑aligned militants of JNIM, “bent on building an African caliphate,” have routed Kremlin‑controlled Africa Corps units in northern Mali, seized Russian armor and a helicopter, and now “announced a siege on the capital” Bamako. Over the weekend they attacked the airport and Kati, killing Defense Minister Gen. Sadio Camara—the architect of Russia’s 2022 intervention—in a car‑bomb attack on his home. The 6,000‑strong jihadist umbrella already controls territory “the size of Montana” across the Sahel; Western officials now fear it could “seize control of the entire country,” home to 25 million people. Justyna Gudzowska of The Sentry says “the regime is highly vulnerable, and the Russians have shown they cannot protect it,” warning that “the junta [could become] nominally in charge of a capital while losing effective control of most of the country.”
  • The article casts the collapse as a major blow to Moscow’s wider African strategy: Mali had hired Wagner (now Africa Corps) as part of a Kremlin push to trade security for mining access and global leverage, but Russia is already “squeezed out of Libya” and “sidelined in Syria,” and the retreat from Kidal “could spell the end of the adventurism in Africa that Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin envisaged.” JNIM’s rise is financed by ransom, intercepted fuel sales and escorting “Colombian cocaine transiting through the Sahel,” including a reported $20+ million ransom from the U.A.E. for a kidnapped prince. The Tuareg Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), which helped expel the Russians from Kidal, says it has received online drone training from Ukrainian volunteers as well as Russians, and aims at a more “moderate” Islamic rule—but JNIM explicitly seeks to emulate the Taliban, winning a war of attrition while the regime “collapses from within.”
  • See this link for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

Conflict in Syria:

  • No significant developments.

Cyber security/AI:

“Mythos in Moscow: Why Russia Will be the Relative Winner of AI Cyber Proliferation,” Naveen Krishnan, Russia Matters, 04.30.26. 

  • On April 7, 2026, Anthropic introduced Claude Mythos Preview, a model that converts vulnerabilities into working exploits with a 72.4% success rate in the Firefox JS shell testbed. In plain English: Mythos can reliably turn many software bugs into real, ready‑to‑run hacks with minimal human expertise or manual effort. This model is a massive step change in offensive cyber capacity. 
  • The capability gap between nation-state offensive cyber and non-state actors has collapsed. In the age of AI hacking, Russia will pull ahead by scaling and weaponizing its existing ecosystem of deniable criminal proxies and state-linked operators. Russia is the asymmetric beneficiary of this new period of cyberwarfare because its offensive ecosystem architecture is already designed, institutionally and in terms of doctrine, to take maximum advantage of the jump in capabilities Mythos enables. 
  • Krishnan argues that “Three features define that relative shift: 1. Russia operates a privateer model that outsources offense to criminal proxies under intelligence-service tolerance and, often, direct tasking. 2. It integrates cyber with disinformation and sabotage in a single coercive package. 3. Its AI stack (the full end-to-end pipeline of training data, models, compute and deployment tools that encompasses “AI”) faces a far weaker version of the regulatory, commercial or journalistic constraints that limit Western frontier labs.”
  • According to Krishnan, the vital U.S. interest at stake is straightforward. The current Washington cybersecurity toolkit (sanctions, indictments, Geneva-style diplomatic agreements on cyber rules of the road) was built for slower, more identifiable state actors and not for a distributed ecosystem of AI-accelerated privateers. Unless that toolkit is updated quickly, Russian adoption of these weapons will arrive before the U.S. has a response to it.

“We Used to Compile Our Own Wartime Kill Lists. Now We Let A.I. Do It,” Fred Kaplan, The New York Times, 04.28.26.

  • Reviewing Katrina Manson’s Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, Kaplan says she argues the “era of ‘killer robots’ is here,” raising “the biggest moral and practical question there is: who—or what—gets to decide to take a human life?” He notes the Pentagon only demands “appropriate levels of human judgment,” without defining “appropriate,” and that for many systems “A.I. controls every stage from the launch up to the actual kill,” with humans pulling the trigger “at the algorithm’s urging.”
  • Kaplan highlights Maven’s role against Russia: its data stream let Ukrainian forces “see and identify tens of thousands of targets… and destroy hundreds of them a day, some inside Russian territory,” so that “to the extent Ukrainians beat back the much mightier Russian Army… Maven played a major role.” But in Gaza and Iran, Manson shows the “double‑edged sword:” A.I. generates “more targets, faster,” making it “hard to imagine this will lead to fewer strikes,” while even its architect Drew Cukor wonders, “Are we the best custodians of it?”

Energy exports from CIS:

 “Ukraine Hits Russia’s Oil Machine, but Struggles to Dent Its Economy”, Ian Lovett, Wall Street Journal, 04.28.26.

  • Lovett reports that Ukraine’s latest long‑range drone strike hit the Tuapse refinery, already shut since April 16 after a previous attack, in a campaign that has also targeted the Baltic ports of Ust‑Luga and Primorsk, which “collectively handle roughly 40% of the country’s seaborne crude‑oil exports.” Tuapse, more than “300 miles” from the nearest Ukrainian‑held territory, saw “enormous plumes of toxic smoke,” “black, oil‑like drops” falling on the city, slicks over “several square miles” of the Black Sea and more than “100 emergency personnel” deployed, as residents were told to stay indoors.
  • Ukraine’s general staff says it is striking infrastructure “involved in supplying the Russian occupying army,” and its Defense Ministry has declared the goal is to “deal a decisive blow to the Russian economy,” but Sergey Vakulenko, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and an economist who formerly worked in the oil-and-gas industry, said Russian oil production dropped as a result of the strikes in late March and early April. But it has since rebounded, he said.
    • “If they manage to keep the flow of drones at the same intensity as they had on Ust-Luga and expand it at Primorsk and Novorossiysk,” a key Black Sea port, “then they could create a pretty substantial dent,” Vakulenko said. “But it’s a matter of how many drones they have at their disposal,” he said, adding they probably need four or five strikes for a fully successful attack, and most drones in each barrage are shot down.

“Russia Oil Exports Keep Flowing Despite Ukrainian Attacks,” Alexander Osipovich, Wall Street Journal, 05.02.26.

  • Osipovich reports that Ukrainian drones have “battered Russian oil-export terminals” from Tuapse to Perm, with “apocalyptic scenes of a burning liquid” and complaints of “black rain,” yet the campaign has had only a “modest impact” on the “gusher of oil money” funding Moscow’s war. Since late March, strikes have hit Primorsk, Ust‑Luga and Novorossiysk, which “together had handled nearly 60% of Russia’s seaborne crude exports,” and consultant Nick Coleman says, “They’re not pinpricks anymore.” But Russia has rerouted flows: Kpler data show total seaborne crude exports “held steady at about 3.5 million barrels a day in April… 2% higher than the same month last year,” as Moscow shipped more via Pacific and Arctic ports.
  • The attacks have imposed an “opportunity cost,” says analyst Ronald Smith: volumes “didn’t go up” as they might have, and exports of refined products have fallen—fuel oil down 34%, diesel 12% in April. Yet soaring prices from the U.S.–Israeli war with Iran, which pushed Brent “near $110 a barrel,” have nearly doubled Russia’s oil revenues to $19 billion in March, by IEA estimates. GDP still shrank 0.3% in Q1 2026 as the “sugar rush” from war spending faded, and Janis Kluge cautions that only a prolonged closure of Hormuz would be a real “game‑changer,” but the authors underscores how resilient Russia’s oil lifeline remains despite Ukraine’s escalating long‑range “sanctions by drone.”

“The Global Energy Order Is Breaking Down,” David Uberti, Wall Street Journal, 04.29.26.

  • Uberti argues that the Iran war and Hormuz blockade are “scrambling the longstanding foundations of the oil market,” replacing free-flowing trade with “resource nationalism.” The immediate shock is the U.A.E.’s decision to quit OPEC, which he calls “a major blow” that removes “one of the few shock absorbers [the market] had left,” in Rystad’s phrase. With OPEC+ (including Russia) still holding “an immense market footprint,” he notes that if others now “prioritiz[e] market share over quota discipline, OPEC’s ability to manage orderly markets… may increasingly be called into question.” Benchmark futures have already “topped $111 a barrel,” and some expect further spikes toward post‑2022 highs.
  • He highlights a structural shift in U.S. behavior: “the relationship is flipped,” analyst Gregory Brew says; Washington now thinks of itself not only as a major consumer but “a producer—a force to shape the oil market.” Even as Iran’s closure of Hormuz and the U.S. blockade send pump prices to multi‑year highs, Trump signals the U.S. could “benefit from high prices,” urging others to buy U.S. oil and gas while drawing down the SPR by a projected “172‑million‑barrel” release. Canada’s energy minister Tim Hodgson concludes that the old system of “free flow of energy has been ruptured,” calling this “a very clear signal… that we are at a time of heightened volatility.”
  • “Some countries may have thought after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that that was a one-off,” said Tim Hodgson, Canada’s minister of energy and natural resources, said in a March interview. “This is a very clear signal for everybody that we are at a time of heightened volatility.”
  • See this link for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

Climate change:

  • No significant developments.

U.S.-Russian economic ties:

  • No significant developments.

U.S.-Russian relations in general:

II. Russia’s domestic policies 

Domestic politics, economy and energy:

“The Foundations are Crumbling: Polls show that the Russian authorities are suffering a fatal setback in their efforts to promote traditional values among Russians,” Ivan Kurilla, Re:Russia, 04.30.26. Clues from Russian Views.

  • Kurilla argues that “military Putinism” leans heavily on ideology—a “besieged fortress” narrative plus “traditional values”—but surveys show this conservative project is largely failing with Russians themselves, especially the young. A massive pro‑natalist push has raised “demographic anxiety”: between 2023 and 2026, the share saying Russia’s birth rate is low rose from 37% to 51%, and those saying it is falling from 19% to 36%.
  • Yet preferred family behavior has moved in the opposite direction. In 2014, about 70% thought women should have a first child before 25; by 2018 that was 58%, by 2023 54%, and by 2026 only 47%. Support for early childbirth has dropped 11 points overall since 2018 and 18 points among the young, with even older generations and the North Caucasus shifting toward later births.
  • Trust in the Orthodox Church and enthusiasm for the army are also eroding. FOM data show trust in the Church down from roughly 65% (2014–19) to 59% in 2026, while those saying it has a positive influence on public life fell from about 55% to 40%. The share wanting children or grandchildren to become professional officers dropped from 53% (2018) to 30% (2026), and Gallup finds only 32% of Russians willing to take up arms to defend the country.
  • Kurilla concludes that while war‑time propaganda has hardened anti‑Western and anti‑Ukrainian views, the Kremlin’s conservative‑militarist value system remains “largely alien” to most citizens, whose preferences continue along a “modernizing trajectory.” With TV weakened and internet controls unpopular, he argues, state campaigns are more likely to produce neo‑Soviet “doublethink” and youth rejection than genuine internalization of “traditional values.”

“Neither Standing Nor Sitting: Russia’s Regime and a Change in Mood,” Alexander Baunov, Carnegie Politika, 04.30.26. Clues from Russian Views. Machine-translated.

  • Baunov says that in Russia “as if the composition of the air has changed,” with “fear” now “too noticeable a motive in the actions of the authorities.” He notes that the Victory Day parade is being reduced to a “walking version with a small number of personnel, without equipment… in 1:42 scale,” because “heavy equipment has turned from formidable weapons into clumsy targets not only on parade, but also in battle.” The state’s whole machine “still tries to solve one and the same problem—to hide Putin’s mistake made in 2022, but it turns out worse and worse.”
  • Putin, Baunov argues, is losing his “magic of power”: instead of the topless horseman, people see “a fussy old man on thin legs with melted muscles under a sagging suit,” whose once sharp phrases now “sag—become rounded and confused, endless and sometimes meaningless.” The post‑2022 bargain—“you can live outside the war, but you cannot be against the war”—has been broken by the regime itself. With MAX and internet blocks, the state “crudely crossed personal boundaries,” so people feel “cheated, fooled,” and literally say: “Let there be drones, but let the internet work.”
  • Baunov calls Ukrainian strikes on oil depots from “Ust‑Luga to Tuapse” and the “revolution of the military‑industrial complex” the true culprits in changing moods: they turned the front into a “kill zone” where mobilization “only means that drones will kill more people.” The arena where Russia meant to show “military superiority and economic unsinkability,” he writes, has become a showcase of its “vulnerabilities.” The regime now “fusses, accumulates mistakes, shifts then forward, then back, like a car skidding in the mud,” and researchers can already sense the “hard‑to‑describe smell of fading” when power “has not yet left, but has ceased to be perceived as natural.”

“Vladimir Putin hunkers down for fear of assassination,” Anastasia Stognei, Max Seddon and Leila Abboud, Financial Times, 05.04.26.

  • The FT reports that Russia has “stepped up security protocols for President Vladimir Putin amid fears of assassination as he grows more isolated and absorbed by his war in Ukraine.” Citing people who know him and a source close to European intelligence, they write that since March the Kremlin’s concern over “a coup d’état or an assassination attempt, specifically involving drones, has intensified sharply,” with the shock of Ukraine’s long‑range “Operation Spiderweb” and the U.S. seizure of Nicolás Maduro feeding paranoia. Putin now spends more time in underground bunkers, including in Krasnodar, while state media use “pre‑recorded footage to project normality,” and he and his family no longer visit their usual residences.
  • The Federal Protective Service has “sharply tightened security”: visits are further restricted; FSO agents conduct large‑scale checks with dog units and guard the Moscow riverbanks “ready to react in case of drone attacks;” staff in Putin’s inner circle are banned from public transport and internet‑enabled devices, and surveillance systems have been installed in their homes. Recent internet shutdowns in Moscow are “at least partly related to the president’s security and anti‑drone protection,” people who know him say. After a December meeting where security chiefs “blamed one another” for failures like the killing of Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov, Putin tasked the FSO with protecting ten senior generals in addition to Valery Gerasimov.
  • Politically, the authors say, Putin has dropped most domestic policy to focus on the war: one insider estimates he spends “70% of his time running the war and the other 30%” on everything else, and Andrei Kolesnikov observes that “he listens only to the security services, which now run all spheres of life.” Polls show trust in Putin “at its lowest since 2022,” while social media clips like influencer Viktoria Bonya’s 18‑minute address complaining that “people are afraid of him” have gone viral. Analyst Tatiana Stanovaya warns that the gap between “what Putin is willing to deal with and what is expected of him is widening,” and that public “bursts of discontent will only become more frequent.” 

“Internet Restrictions Spur Russians to Openly Question Putin’s Moves,” Nataliya Vasilyeva and Valerie Hopkins, New York Times, 04.28.26.

  • Vasilyeva and Hopkins write that after years in which Putin “kept a lid on public dissent” over war, mobilization and tax hikes, it was his move “to throttle popular apps and intermittently cut off the internet” that “suddenly” made “many Russians” find their voice. “The internet restrictions have turned a large number of people against the ruling class, if not against Vladimir Putin personally,” political scientist Mikhail Komin argues, noting that Putin’s approval has fallen seven weeks in a row to “65.6%,” back to “where it was just before the war.”
  • Instagram influencer Victoria Bonya tells followers the curbs “make Russia impossible to live in,” adding, “I don’t think people should be scared of their own president,” a clip that drew “more than 30 million views” and forced a response from Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov praises Bonya and warns that internet limits, economic stagnation and war “could threaten the current government” as in 1917. Former Kremlin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov says, “The attack on the internet is viewed as an attack on private life.”
  • Even loyalists are uneasy: Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov says restricting Telegram could “endanger the lives of residents,” while Communist lawmaker Alexander Yushchenko reports complaints “from dismay to outright radicalism.” The Kremlin’s push to drive over 100 million Telegram users onto its unencrypted MAX app, combined with secrecy about outages, has let the puppet “New People” party turn internet freedom into its signature issue and overtake other systemic opposition groups—prompting Nezavisimaya Gazeta to note that “the internet is essentially the only issue where every party could boost their approval rating right now,” even as Komin cautions the new stirrings “pose no threat to the stability of the political regime.”

“Russia’s War Boom Masks an Economic Implosion,” Alexey Kovalev, Foreign Policy, 04.28.26.

  • Kovalev argues that Putin’s vaunted war “boom” rests on “millions of missing workers.” He notes that the Alabuga drone plant’s ads aimed at teenagers “were a simultaneous admission” of how “severe Russia’s worker shortage has become,” with competition from the army so intense that “recruiting children into weapons manufacturing is now done openly.” Official unemployment of 2.1%, he claims, hides a manufacturing shortfall of “nearly 2 million workers in 2025,” with the total deficit “projected to reach more than 10 million by the end of the decade.” The defense sector, “running three shifts and still understaffed,” offers wages “three to four times the regional average” and draft deferments, leaving “a civilian economy quietly contracting in the sectors that feed, move, and maintain the country.”
  • He stresses that war has compounded an older demographic collapse: at least 1 million excess COVID deaths, hundreds of thousands of men “killed or permanently disabled,” and up to “a million more” who fled and never returned. Migration from Central Asia has “collapsed,” forcing Moscow to recruit in India, Nepal, Kenya, and elsewhere—yet the military’s habit of shunting foreigners straight to the front is “poisoning labor recruitment.” The missing workers, he concludes, include “the children never born during the 1990s collapse,” so “the demographic hole and the damage done to Russia itself by its war of choice are… the same crisis, arriving simultaneously.”

“Book Review: ‘The Successor,’ by Mikhail Fishman,” David Kortava, New York Times, 05.02.26.

  • Kortava says Fishman’s 778‑page biography revolves around one question: “What kind of world would exist today if the cosmopolitan liberal democrat Boris Nemtsov, and not Vladimir Putin, had succeeded Boris Yeltsin?” Fishman asks, “When was the moment that Russia lost its freedom? Was the abhorrent war that Putin began unavoidable?” For him, Nemtsov—“a tall, sexy, curly‑haired, handsome playboy” who became reformist governor of Nizhny Novgorod and then Yeltsin’s heir apparent, handed a photo inscribed “Top Secret: I pass the baton”—embodied “the promise of the free, democratic Russia” that might have avoided “fighting in Ukraine” and “the specter of World War III.”
  • Fishman ultimately argues that “Nemtsov probably would not have become president of Russia,” admitting he was “already too free and too idealistic for the times,” and Kortava agrees that “the currents of history favored a despot.” Still, the book’s sweeping treatment is justified because it offers “a glimpse of the open, pluralist Russia that almost was—and may yet be.” Fishman’s earlier coda—“Heroes do not die, and neither do values”—has been tempered, but he insists “I still believe” another future is possible, and Kortava closes by echoing him: “ideas can’t be shot, poisoned or forced into exile. The seeds Nemtsov and Navalny planted may yet mature, in their own time.”

“Putin goes after books—even the classics—and their publishers,” Editorial Board, Washington Post, 05.02.26.

  • The board writes that “Soviet-style repression is not a sign of confidence,” arguing that with “a strained economy and stalemate in Ukraine,” Vladimir Putin “continues ratcheting up internal repression against his own people.” They note that Russia’s biggest publishing house was raided, “thousands of books” seized and its CEO arrested for disseminating so‑called “homosexual propaganda,” as Putin “is keen to maintain support among social conservatives as the country grows increasingly weary of war.”
  • A new antidrug law requiring warning labels on any book that mentions narcotics has led terrified publishers to put “cigarette-style warnings on classic Russian works,” including novels by “Nikolai Gogol, poetry by Alexander Pushkin and plays by Mikhail Bulgakov.” At the same time, “the internet is severely restricted, journalists have been sent to modern-day gulags, and street musicians have been jailed for performing songs believed to have an anti-war message.”
  • The editors link this to battlefield setbacks: “various spring and summer offensives have failed to meaningfully move the battle lines,” estimated casualties are “over a million… killed or wounded,” and Ukrainian drones just “knocked out a Russian oil refinery” in Tuapse. Putin claims to defend Russia from “Western decadence,” they conclude, yet is “setting fire to Russia’s cultural inheritance.”

“What Putin is trying to erase in Russia,” Vladimir Kara-Murza, Washington Post, 05.01.26.

  • Putin is trying to erase the memory of the Soviet state’s crimes and the idea that those crimes require justice. Kara‑Murza writes that the Kremlin is waging “a campaign to erase the memory of crimes the Soviet state had committed against its people—and to glorify their perpetrators and masterminds.” He notes that today’s rulers “consider themselves—proudly so—as the direct successors of Soviet security services, and any reminder of their heroes’ heinous crimes is naturally unwelcome.”
  • He also argues that Putin is trying to erase the very notion of accountability for state violence. After early‑1990s proposals for opening archives, lustration and a trial of the Communist regime were rejected as a “witch-hunt,” Vladimir Bukovsky warned, “Then the witches will return and start hunting us”—which “of course, turned out to be right,” Kara‑Murza says. That is why he insists that in a future democratic Russia “everyone, from Putin on down, responsible for committing crimes against our own people and the peoples of other countries must be held fully accountable,” so that “these witches must never, ever be allowed to return again.”

“Kremlin Tests Out Its ‘Nuclear Option’ for the Internet in Russia,” Dmitri Zair Bek, Russia.Post, 04.28.26.

  • Zair‑Bek recounts how in early March mobile internet in central Moscow suddenly vanished; “life built around digital infrastructure ground to a halt,” with couriers stopping and payment terminals “turn[ing] into useless pieces of plastic,” and Kommersant estimating RUB 3–5 billion in losses over five days. Unlike previous regional outages, this time the Kremlin “deployed whitelists of approved sites and services on a large scale,” so while most apps and sites failed, “the websites of major state corporations, the Gosuslugi public services portal, Russian Railways sites and VK services continued to function.” He argues the regime is “preparing the country for a new censorship model,” a Plan B that “once the decision is made, will quickly become Plan A.”
  • The “nuclear option” he describes is a full inversion of Russia’s current blocking paradigm. Today, the internet works on “everything is permitted unless explicitly prohibited,” with Roskomnadzor’s DPI “boxes” trying (and often failing) to spot VPNs and “subversive” traffic; blocking all encrypted traffic would “kill half of the modern economy.” Having “realized it is losing the technological battle,” the state is testing a shift to “everything is prohibited unless explicitly permitted,” enforced by TSPU and whitelists. In such a system, “no matter how skillfully your traffic is disguised,” it will not pass if the destination isn’t on the government’s list. Zair‑Bek warns that this instrument of “absolute control” is constrained by economic costs, pointing to Iran’s similar experiments that cost “hundreds of millions of dollars” and threatened “millions of jobs.”

“The Disposable Oligarchs: Why Wealthy Elites Come to Regret Their Bargains With Authoritarians”—Christopher Hartwell and Tricia D. Olsen, Foreign Affairs, 04.28.26.

Defense and aerospace:

“Russia’s War Boom Masks an Economic Implosion,” Alexey Kovalev, Foreign Policy, 04.28.26.

  • Kovalev notes that Putin touts “record-low unemployment—the official rate is currently 2.1%,” but cites Russian labor and trade ministry data that manufacturing alone was short “nearly 2 million workers in 2025,” with the total worker deficit “projected to reach more than 10 million by the end of the decade.” Russia’s agriculture sector is “losing an estimated 150,000 employees each year due to old age,” while in Volga and Urals arms hubs “wage inflation has run at 30% to 60% since 2022,” producing a defense sector “running three shifts and still understaffed” alongside a civilian economy that is “quietly contracting.”
  • The war and pandemic have devastated demography: the botched COVID response “alone cost Russia an estimated 1 million excess deaths,” Rosstat stopped publishing monthly birth data in 2025, and the conflict has left “hundreds of thousands of working-age men killed or permanently disabled,” plus “between 500,000 and a million more” who fled and haven’t returned. Kovalev adds that more than “27,000 foreign nationals” were fighting for Russia in March (up from 18,000 in November), Indian work permits rose from “some 5,000 in 2021 to more than 10 times that number in 2025,” and the average age of a lathe operator is now “above 45,” as the “children never born during the 1990s collapse” leave a structural hole that war makes impossible to fix.
  • See this link for more commentary/analysis on this subject:
  • 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:

“Why Are Africans Fighting for Russia in Ukraine?,” Matthew Mpoke Bigg, New York Times, 05.04.26.

  • Matthew Mpoke Bigg reports that “thousands of young African men have signed up to fight in Moscow’s war against Ukraine,” and that while “some have posted cheerful videos with Russian soldiers,” “many others say they were deceptively lured to Russia and then coerced into signing military contracts.” “Many have been killed on the battlefield,” he writes. Although “Africa is thousands of miles from the front line and most African nations have adopted a neutral stance,” Bigg says “some see a clear explanation: Russia needs more troops, and young African men need jobs,” with Moscow seeking to “offset its own casualty rate” of about “1.2 million” killed, wounded or missing.
  • The author writes that Africa’s “demographic boom” and the inability of economies “to generate enough jobs” push young people abroad, including “to Russia, even though the job offers presented are often vague.” Africans who serve “can expect to earn wages many times what they are likely to earn” at home, but survivors say they were “forced to sign contracts in Russian” and that “in practice, the financial rewards have evaporated.” Bigg notes that governments in Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria have “responded to calls demanding that officials do more” and, in Kenya’s case, begun stopping some young men from traveling “to destinations that could lead to Russia.”

“How Russia lost its way in the Sahara,” Jacob Judah and Polina Ivanova, Financial Times, 04.30.26.

  • Judah and Ivanova report that the rebel capture of Kidal “has exposed Russia’s failure to stabilize Mali” and raised doubts about “the future of its African military adventurism.” Tuareg and jihadist forces forced a few dozen Russian paramilitaries to “surrender or die,” prompting a retreat that analyst Wassim Nasr calls “a humiliation,” adding: “They have not achieved anything beyond helping the regime hold on to power.” Sadio Camara, the Russian‑speaking defense minister who “was the architect of Moscow’s presence in Mali,” was killed when rebels stormed Kati, while intelligence chief Modibo Koné was “critically wounded.” A former Malian official, Moussa Kondo, says Russians “left behind Malian soldiers to be captured like rats,” asking, “How can you say that you have not been humiliated? How can you say that you are a powerful country?”
  • Africa Corps, which took over from Wagner and fields roughly “2,000 Russians” across a country “twice the size of Ukraine,” is now seen as “inefficient and unreliable,” with ex‑officer Sergey Eledinov saying the episode “suggests the Russians are not invincible after all.” Analysts note Russia “overestimated the capability of Mali as a partner” and lacks French‑ or U.S.‑style intelligence and logistics; indiscriminate violence has “driven recruits towards JNIM and the FLA,” Nasr argues, so “they did not solve the problem. They made it worse.” Moscow is expected to “give up the idea that they could control the whole country” and fall back on regime protection in Bamako, as FLA and JNIM vow to march on Timbuktu, Gao and even besiege the capital.
  • See these links for more commentary/analysis on this subject:

Ukraine:

“Bringing Ukraine into the EU fold,” Ben Hall, Financial Times/Europe Express, 05.01.26.

  • Hall notes that with Viktor Orbán gone, Hungary’s new government is expected to unblock the formal start of EU accession talks for Ukraine this summer, but “there is little dispute about the strategic value” of Ukraine’s integration even as “the EU is none the wiser about how to achieve it.” Conventional accession would take “10–15 years,” officials say, yet there is no agreed fast‑track. A U.S.-floated peace plan mentioning EU entry in 2027 panicked Brussels and produced an improvised idea of “reverse enlargement”—early, probationary membership with limited rights that would expand as reforms are met—but capitals rejected it as discriminatory and politically toxic, especially in enlargement‑sceptic France where ratification might require a risky referendum.
  • France and Germany now push different “associate membership” schemes: seats for Ukraine at the EU’s council and parliament but no voting rights; possibly an “associate commissioner”; immediate inclusion in EU foreign policy; gradual single‑market integration but no early access to farm or cohesion funds. Advocates say this gives a “credible prospect of accession” while “prepar[ing] public opinion,” but Hall warns Kyiv could see it as “a permanent waiting room for second class Europeans.” The Commission is cool on legally novel half‑membership but relieved that capitals are finally engaging, and may flesh out the Franco‑German model rather than revive “reverse enlargement.” A stronger EU security offer—applying the mutual defense clause, long‑term defense funding, a European security council—could anchor Ukraine, while progress for other candidates like Montenegro or Iceland would signal that the EU “really is back in the enlargement business.” For now, officials hope talks, a clearer roadmap and the €90bn loan will ease Zelenskyy’s growing “anti‑EU bitterness,” but Hall concludes Brussels still has “plenty of work to do.”

“War Is Killing Ukraine’s Oligarchy,” Paul Hockenos, Foreign Policy, 04.29.26.

  • Hockenos writes that full‑scale war has done “what neither homegrown regulators nor international prodding could: clip the most powerful oligarchs at the knees,” leaving Ukraine “more oligarch‑free than at any time since its independence in 1991.” Anti‑corruption activist Tetiana Shevchuk says “the key structural assets of all oligarchs were partially either destroyed or are currently under attack,” noting that Rinat Akhmetov “lost vast assets in Donbas and Mariupol—as many as 70 companies,” halving his fortune “from nearly $14 billion to now $7 billion.” With wartime media under tight state control and martial law in force, “all the decision‑making is happening in Zelenskyy’s cabinet,” Shevchuk argues; defense economist Dmytro Kisilenko adds, “Ukraine is no longer an oligarch state.”
  • Rather than eliminate every tycoon, Zelenskyy has “recast oligarchs as conditional allies rather than independent power centers,” demanding money and loyalty for the war effort. Hockenos notes that Akhmetov and his firms have provided “around $368 million” and a “Steel Front” of fortifications, armor, and shelters, while Victor Pinchuk funds “19 innovative rehabilitation centers” for wounded soldiers and a network of mental‑health clinics. Those who “didn’t play ball,” such as Ihor Kolomoisky, “suffered the consequences.” Shevchuk warns, however, that unless Kyiv now enforces the anti‑oligarch law, strengthens anti‑corruption institutions, reforms the judiciary, and “break[s] up media monopolies,” new oligarchs—especially from the defense sector—will re‑emerge after the war.

Balázs Jarábik on “Essential Ukraine #22,” Twitter thread, 05.01.26.

  • Jarábik believes the “most positive” development for Ukraine is at the front: “Ukraine has stabilized it over the winter, helped by weather conditions, disruptions to Russian use of Starlink, advantage in drone warfare.” Russia, however, “sustain[s] its attritional model,” and is “increasing” pressure by “expanding along the frontline and into new sectors to exploit Ukraine’s manpower shortages.” He warns that “Ukraine’s ability to convert available manpower into effective combat units is deteriorating, social resistance is becoming structural.” The “infrastructure war becomes systemic,” with Russia combining “continuous drone pressure with targeted missile strikes,” while Ukraine “expand[s] deep strikes into Russia’s energy network,” making “energy systems on both sides… central to the war’s trajectory.”
  • The “most significant shift,” he argues, is internal: Ukraine’s “degraded energy system has emerged as key strategic vulnerability—and a timeline. The next winter is a critical horizon shaping the negotiation track.” Governance strains are “growing,” with “parliamentary fragmentation and anti‑corruption conflicts… intensifying,” and state capacity declining even as the system adapts to “a prolonged war.” He notes “economic, fiscal, and energy pressures are accumulating,” internal security is “deteriorating” amid weapons proliferation and attacks on recruiters, and while the €90 billion EU package brings “short‑term stability,” it deepens an “asymmetry: Ukraine is more externally stabilized while internally more strained.” From Washington, he sees the U.S. “busy (Iran), but also in a waiting mode,” with the settlement track “not abandoned, just paused until conditions align. Until then, the war grinds on.”

Russia's other post-Soviet neighbors:

“The Much‑Touted Middle Corridor Transport Route Could Prove a Dead End,” Friedrich Conradi, Carnegie Politika, 04.29.26.

  • Conradi notes that the Trans‑Caspian “Middle Corridor”—a 4,000‑km network linking western China to Europe via Central Asia and the South Caucasus—saw cargo jump from 500,000 tons pre‑invasion to “4.1 million tons” in 2024, and is touted as a way to bypass Russia and Iran and ship Central Asia’s “uranium, copper, tungsten, and titanium” to the EU. Yet, he warns, “impressive growth rates obscure a sobering reality”: the route “remains far from competitive,” handling only “about 6%” of the Northern Corridor’s 100‑million‑ton capacity, and faces “hard bottlenecks and likely a limited shelf life.” Anaklia, the deep‑sea port identified as a “central corridor priority,” is stalled as Tbilisi slashes funding and China shows “limited interest,” while attempts to reroute via Armenia (TRIPP) trade Georgian paralysis for “Iranian volatility.”
  • A second constraint is environmental: the Caspian Sea is “drying up,” with levels dropping “up to 30 centimeters” annually since 2020, already cutting rail‑ferry capacity on the Baku–Kuryk route by 22%. A projected 6.5‑meter fall could leave Kazakh ports “landlocked by 2045.” For Central Asian states, Conradi concludes, the corridor offers a “window of opportunity” rather than a permanent outlet: they must use current Western demand for critical minerals to bargain for “domestic processing” and “industrialization,” or risk being trapped selling “raw ore at depressed prices with no domestic value addition,” a trap that becomes “inescapable if the corridor closes.”

“Why Is Belarus’s Approach to Online Censorship So Different From Russia’s?,” Artyom Shraibman, Carnegie Politika, 04.29.26.

  • Shraibman writes that while Belarusians are “a season ahead” of Russians on repression, Moscow’s drive for “total control over the internet” has made Belarus suddenly look like “an oasis of online freedom.” Under Alexander Lukashenko, the state “fastidiously blocks opposition content” but “does not restrict access to entire platforms or messaging apps.” Instead, it targets consumers: a list of banned “extremist material” has “about 10,000 entries,” and “any interaction with such content”—even a like or subscription—can mean detention, fines, or job loss, so people learn that when they see criticism “they close the webpage, unsubscribe, and delete all traces from their phones.” In return, “the regime does not deprive Belarusians of entire online services,” and shutdowns are brief and episodic.
  • Russia, he argues, has chosen the opposite path, trying “to make all Russians change their online habits,” blocking platforms like YouTube and testing whitelists, because the Kremlin sees itself as a “civilization” that “should be self-sufficient in everything.” Lukashenko, by contrast, still wants Belarus to “reconnect to the global economy, act as a bridge between West and East,” so even harsh controls are “strictly functional: designed to guarantee the survival of the regime, not build a ‘Belarusian firewall’.” For Minsk, abandoning Western services for Russian ones would mean “tying himself even closer to Moscow,” a vulnerability in any future crisis.

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

 

Endnotes

  1. This highlight is a modified version of a highlight on the same subject that appeared in the May 1, 2026, issue of the Russia in Review news digest.
  2. Also skim: “Sergey Karaganov: Our semi-policy on Ukraine only harms Russia—this is not the way to win,” Sergey Karaganov, Eurasia Daily, 04.30.26; “Sergey Karaganov: We need to severely besiege Europe, if necessary, punish,” Sergei Karaganov, Sputnik, 04.30.26.

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: FILE - A Ukrainian made FPV fibre optic drone flies at a military market place at an undisclosed location in the Kyiv region, Ukraine, Jan. 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

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