On October 9, US president Donald Trump announced that he had struck a deal with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to allow Russia to “immediately supply” more than 300,000 tons, followed by 500,000 tons in November and several million more thereafter. Within hours, the US Treasury issued General License No. 135, authorising the sale, delivery and importation of Russian-origin diesel, “including importation into the United States”, until April 7, 2027.

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The deal itself is a major departure from US policy towards Russia and runs counter to Ukrainian and European interests. Adding insult to injury, Trump’s announcement happened as a senior Ukrainian and European delegation sat down with his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, in Miami for talks to discuss apparently new US proposals, including on a pre-winter deescalation. Once in the room, the US envoys reportedly signalled that sanctions relief was coming, but this still left Ukrainian and European officials blindsided by the announcement. Unsurprisingly, the talks ended the same day without any agreement and a day earlier than planned.

If the diesel deal between the US and Russia was just about fuel, it would be modest at best. The first two tranches in Trump’s announcement amount to just under six million barrels, roughly a day and a half of US diesel demand based on data from the US Energy Information Administration. This will hardly have any significant impact on global diesel supplies, even if Russia can provide the volumes in Trump’s announcement. This, however, is already in doubt given that the lack of Russian diesel exports is primarily due to an export ban imposed by the Kremlin, extended in July but partly lifted for refineries from September, and the rise of diesel prices began with, and is primarily a result of, Trump’s war against Iran.

As part of a domestic price campaign ahead of crucial mid-term elections in the US in early November, Trump’s deal with Putin is unlikely to have a major impact. Its effect on the war, however, is likely to be considerably larger and more damaging.

Ever since Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, there has been a question about how impartial a mediator between Kyiv and Moscow Washington can and wants to be. With an obvious stake in the output of Russian refineries, this question has now been answered and not in the way any official in Kyiv or its partner capitals had hoped.

In the past, Trump’s approach to ending the Russian war against Ukraine was to try and bully especially Kyiv into concessions to bridge the gap between the stated war aims of both sides.

These attempts largely failed: Ukraine and its European allies rejected the idea of territorial concessions to Russia. Trump’s diesel deal is another attempt to bully by now pressuring Ukraine to give up one of its recently most effective tools: a long-range drone and missile campaign against Russian refineries, which has reportedly caused Russian refining capacity to fall by up to 60% over recent months, while Ukraine’s general staff claims to have put more than 45% of Russia’s refining capacity out of operation.

The diesel deal now caps efforts by Washington to stop targeting Russian refineries since at least September when Trump blamed Ukraine for high diesel prices and urged Zelensky to halt the strikes on Russian refineries. Later in the month, Trump also told reporters that he had asked Zelensky to “take it easy on the refineries”.

Kyiv’s position in this regard has been consistent. As Zelensky said again after Trump announced his diesel deal, “Ukraine will not set Russian oil refineries on fire if Russia does not destroy our energy infrastructure”.

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By contrast, Moscow’s terms were different. When Trump announced an energy truce between Russia and Ukraine in mid-September, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that a halt to refinery strikes would not on its own bring down prices; that would also require the lifting of sanctions on Russian energy export. On September 25, he added that for international markets to be saturated, Russian diesel would have to reach them “without any sanctions, without any restrictions”.

When Trump provided this sanctions relief in his diesel deal on October 9, Putin got the economic half of an energy truce that he really wanted without having to commit to its military half.

On the contrary, while there is nothing in the deal that obliges Russia to stop striking Ukraine’s grid, Ukraine’s campaign against Russian refineries now runs directly counter to a declared American interest. Trump is already doubling down on his pressure to get Ukraine to stop striking Russian refineries. On October 10, he told Ukraine to “get a new leader”, and Ukrainian and European officials have said that Washington has threatened to cut intelligence sharing and weapons sales if the strikes continue, a claim denied by the US.

On October 11, Trump then declared an “energy ceasefire” that “both parties have agreed”. Zelensky responded that this “was news for me”. Moscow has not confirmed it either and instead struck Ukrainian power plants after Trump’s post.

Much like the failure of Washington’s push for an energy truce in September, this latest attempt is likely to get nowhere.

It won’t even get near the limited ceasefire covering energy infrastructure and possibly grain shipments that was on the agenda of the Miami talks. Russia has repeatedly dismissed temporary or limited ceasefires in favour of a so-called “comprehensive” settlement, a position reiterated again by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, in his speech to the UN Security Council on September 23.

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With neither Moscow nor Kyiv making any significant gains in the ground war, offering any concessions that would signal a breakthrough in future negotiations, nor achieving any decisive advantage in their respective air campaigns, the economic front of the war has become more important again, including in terms of adding strain to already fragile transatlantic relations. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, condemned the diesel deal saying that “suspending sanctions on Russian diesel provides Moscow with more revenues to wage war” and that this was “not the time to ease pressure on Russia, and Europe won’t.”

But Europe now depends more on US diesel than it did in the past, and Washington had already threatened export bans to the continent before ruling them out after European concessions. This obvious vulnerability will likely limit how hard Europe will push back. Together with the Treasury licence granted for Russian diesel, Europe’s dependence on energy imports from the US also puts a question mark over how effective and sustainable the EU’s next sanctions package will really be.

Meanwhile, the war continues in the air and on the ground and a pathway to a comprehensive settlement remains just as absent as it did before the diesel deal on October 9. Even a partial deal on energy may now be harder to reach which will add yet more pain and suffering for Ukraine.

Most worrying in the long term, all the signs are that under Trump the US is closer to Moscow’s position than at any point since the full-scale invasion.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 12 October 2026.

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If Washington’s licence for Russian diesel now runs to April 2027, what leverage does Europe still have to keep Russia’s energy revenues under pressure — and will it use that leverage while it depends on US diesel to get through the winter?

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In early August, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was granted a few minutes with the country’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. According to media reports, the meeting took place in the back seat of a car with tinted windows. Pezeshkian heard a voice but never saw a face and, on his return, reportedly wondered whether he had met Khamenei at all. Days later, he said publicly that contact with the supreme leader was “very difficult”.

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Pezeshkian spent the week of 21 September in New York, making Iran’s case to the UN General Assembly while his foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, held Qatari-mediated talks with US president Donald Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. From the same podium on 22 September, Trump mused about whether to strike a deal or “annihilate the Islamic Republic”. He also said he was open to meeting Pezeshkian, something an Iranian foreign ministry official all but ruled out.

Whether anyone in Tehran can agree to a deal that ends the US war against Iran, and then make it stick, is far from clear. This year’s record alone gives little reason for any optimism in this regard.

In April, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, led his country’s delegation at the Islamabad talks, alongside Araghchi. Pezeshkian signed the memorandum that resulted from these talks and then saw it lapse in August. Araghchi is now the point of contact for Witkoff and Kushner, and it was Araghchi, not Pezeshkian, who set out Iran’s seven-day roadmap to end the war.

Above all of them, in theory, sits a supreme leader who has not appeared in public since his appointment in March. Nor is it clear to what extent Khamenei directs and coordinates any diplomatic efforts and how much access Iran’s civilian and military leaders and diplomats have to him.

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Below them, parts of the security apparatus appear able to act on their own. According to the New York Times, the July attacks on merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz that wrecked the June memorandum were ordered by a hardline faction around Hossein Taeb, the cleric now in charge of the Basij militia. Neither the Revolutionary Guards commander, Ahmad Vahidi, nor the Supreme National Security Council knew in advance. Pezeshkian reportedly found out after the fact and phoned Vahidi in anger.

The same pattern surfaced within hours of Trump rejecting the roadmap on 26 September. According to Iran International’s live blog, Araghchi said Tehran was waiting for the mediators to pass on the American position formally, and the Supreme National Security Council insisted that talks were continuing. The armed forces spokesman, Abolfazl Shekarchi, warned instead that the Americans would be “slapped” if they interfered in the strait.

President Pezeshkian does not call the shots, but neither, it seems, does anyone else.

Part of the explanation lies in how the Iranian system works, part in how the war has been fought. Coercive diplomacy needs someone on the other side who can weigh the cost of holding out against the cost of settling, and who can then impose a concession on the sceptics in their own system. For 37 years, that person in Iran was the previous supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who could overrule the Revolutionary Guards and absorb the domestic price of compromise, as he did when he allowed the 2015 nuclear deal to go ahead.

The strike that killed him on 28 February removed that capacity. His son inherited the title but, as far as anyone on the outside can tell, not the authority. Few in the system will want to be remembered as the person who gave up the nuclear programme or control of Hormuz to the adversary that killed the old supreme leader.

From Washington’s perspective, the war has made Iran easier to hurt and harder to negotiate, let alone settle, with.

Trump’s threat to “drive them into hell” registered with his audience at the UN General Assembly in New York but is unlikely to have the intended effect in Tehran. For the faction around Taeb, every such threat confirms that negotiating is pointless and that Washington still wants regime change. For Pezeshkian and Ghalibaf, it makes talks harder to defend at home.

The two sides are also working to opposite clocks. Pezeshkian told NBC News that he wants Washington back in the memorandum before November: “We don’t want it to get to the midterm elections.” Trump has said a deal will come “right after the election“.

On 26 September, the US president dismissed Iran’s offer as one that was made “because they are losing so badly” and claimed the US already had “total control of the Hormuz Strait”. According to the Wall Street Journal, he has also told aides that renewed bombing is likely after the midterms. A president who believes he already controls the strait has little reason to pay for its reopening. The weeks until the 3 November election, meanwhile, give anyone in Tehran bent on wrecking a deal time to show that none will hold.

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Washington has a credibility problem of its own. Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal in 2018 and declared his own memorandum with Iran “over” less than three weeks after signing it. The same day as Trump’s rejection of the roadmap, Pezeshkian told Al Jazeera that Iran had “no trust in the American side”.

The critical structural difference between the two capitals is that Tehran has many points of failure, Washington only one.

In the White House, a single decision-maker can drop a deal as fast as he made it. For the faction around Taeb, talk of renewed bombing after the midterms confirms that American commitments last only as long as one man’s patience or attention span. For Pezeshkian, it is an argument for settling before November.

If there is a way forward, it probably lies in small steps that can be checked and, if necessary, reversed, each one testing whether anyone in Tehran can deliver. Iran’s roadmap points in that direction, with Hormuz reopening on day six. But it front-loads American concessions and leaves open who in Tehran would guarantee that the sides ever get to day six. Safe passage through the strait remains the obvious first test. It is easy to observe and hard to fake, and it matters to the Gulf states and China, both of which have leverage in Tehran that Washington lacks. When he hosted his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at the White House on 24 September, Trump asked for China’s help in isolating Iran and reopening the strait. Xi did not oblige and instead backed a return by both sides to the Islamabad memorandum, which is precisely what Tehran has been asking for.

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Pakistan, Qatar and Oman, the mediators, could verify each step. A commitment kept would show who in Iran actually commands, while one broken would expose the spoilers without bringing down the whole framework, unlike what happened in July.

The coming weeks will show whether the mediators can carry anything back from Washington beyond Trump’s rejection, and whether anyone in Tehran can keep ships moving through Hormuz without Vahidi’s Revolutionary Guards or Taeb’s Basij militia men deciding otherwise. On current evidence, neither is likely before November.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s commentary published in Channel NewsAsia on 30 September 2026.

If safe passage through Hormuz is the first test, who on Iran’s side could credibly guarantee it, and what should Washington be prepared to offer in return before the 3 November midterms?

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By Martin Wählisch & Stefan Wolff

António Guterres used his final address to the General Assembly to recast the world’s crises as a single problem. War, inequality, the climate emergency and artificial intelligence, he argued, are not separate crises but chapters of the same story. That story, as he told it, is the story of power: who has it, who is denied it, how it is used and how it is changing.

The outgoing secretary-general identified three shifts. Among states, new centres of economic, political and technological influence have emerged. Power is also moving away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals. And humans are increasingly handing power to machines, with AI agents going rogue and lethal autonomous weapons becoming a military reality. These shifts put the use of power to the test: power over war and peace, the power that concentrates wealth and drives inequality, the power fuelling climate chaos, and the power unleashed by artificial intelligence.

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The debate’s own theme is an unusually self-inspecting one for the UN: “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all“. The institutional anxiety behind it was explicit in Guterres’s diagnosis that global governance still reflects the power realities and interests of a largely bygone era.

The strain on the rules-based order became plain about an hour after Guterres spoke when Donald Trump offered his view of power and how he intends to use it, confirming Guterres’s bleak view on the same stage.

The gap on AI, which Guterres had placed alongside inequality, climate change and war as a test of power, was particularly stark. Trump said he would try to rebrand AI as “super intelligence”, dismissed warnings that it could prove catastrophic, and insisted he would not stifle its growth.

Not every western leader followed that line. The British prime minister, Andy Burnham, told the General Assembly that the UK would lead international efforts to develop global AI standards. While the UN’s new Scientific Panel and Global Dialogue cannot impose such standards, they can, however, bring governments and experts into the same conversation and help establish what those standards should address.

Guterres cast his second test, inequality, not as a problem of economics but as one of power over opportunity, resources and voice. Developing countries crushed by debt and shut out of affordable finance are trapped in a financial system created in the 1940s whose reform will have to be about representation and fairness, rather than technicalities. Trump did not address global inequality at all — except by boasting of cutting the UN budget by 15% and eliminating more than 4,000 posts.

On his third test, climate, Guterres struck a slightly more optimistic note when he described renewables as a redistribution of power because “the sun belongs to no one“ and “the wind cannot be embargoed.” Trump did mention climate but only to include it in the list of his opponents’ supposed hoaxes alongside “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax” and open borders, all of which he considers inventions of the same people now warning about AI.

On war and peace, the contrast was just as pronounced. Gaza featured in both speeches: Guterres emphasised destruction and the need for humanitarian access, Trump presented his peace plan as an achievement. On Iran, the American president offered the usual mix of bombast and contradiction: a deal to let Iran rebuild, versus the annihilation of the Islamic Republic, versus Iran seeking a settlement only after the midterm elections in the US in November.

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Yet the diplomacy carried on regardless. Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, held three hours of talks, largely through Qatari mediators, with Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, which Trump described as “a very good meeting”. Tehran, through its foreign ministry spokesman, acknowledged the talks, but downplayed them as nothing new. Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, meanwhile sent a note of defiance in his speech at the General Assembly. He admitted that Iran had been hit but “did not bend the knee“.

In contrast to Pezeshkian, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, secured a personal meeting with Trump, their first since July. According to reports, the ground covered was much the same and no concrete deals have transpired: not on the energy truce that Trump had announced on Truth Social on 14 September and of which Kyiv said it had not been informed, not on additional winter support for Ukraine, not on licences for Ukraine to produce Patriot missiles, and not on a possible trilateral meeting with Vladimir Putin.

Moscow’s answer came within hours in the form of a rare daytime drone attack on Kyiv which killed two people. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the conditions for peace talks did not yet exist and repeated that any meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents would have to happen in Moscow. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, met Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, on Wednesday and afterwards claimed that both sides were interested in a limited ceasefire covering grain and energy. The same day, Lavrov used his speech at the Security Council to reject any pause in the fighting.

None of this means the UN has become irrelevant.

Deals have always been struck in the margins of high-level week and elsewhere. In the past, some of those deals were subsequently endorsed by the Security Council. That happened after the US and Russia agreed a framework for eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons in 2013, and again after the Iran nuclear deal was concluded in Vienna in 2015. Last year, 13 Council members endorsed Trump’s Gaza peace plan, with China and Russia abstaining. The Council condemned Tehran’s attacks on its Gulf neighbours in March this year. There is no comparable path in sight for a settlement with Iran or for Ukraine.

Much like the UN institutions in whose shadows it once thrived, bilateralism appears to have reached a dead end: it still produces meetings and declarations but without resolving any of their underlying issues. That is a serious limit on what the Council can accomplish, but it is not the only measure of the UN’s relevance.

Guterres’s answer to a changing balance of power was what he called “networked multipolarity”: cooperation among different centres of influence, held together by shared rules and a more representative UN. Regional forums and smaller groups of states will do much of the negotiating. The question is how their efforts can serve a wider international community.

The UN has not lost its purpose. More than eight decades after its founding, it can still bring rivals to New York and give them a platform they want to use.

Iran’s president came to make his case in the United States; Trump returned to an institution he regularly disparages. Speeches and meetings cannot compel compromise, but they keep channels open and put competing positions in the public eye. As more diplomacy now happens through regional forums and smaller groups of states, the UN’s challenge, and purpose, is to give those efforts a wider hearing and a basis in shared rules, even when its Security Council is stuck.

Guterres closed by appealing to the assembled world leaders that the power of law must prevail over the law of power. With the first days of his last General Assembly suggesting a fast-paced and perhaps unstoppable move in the opposite direction, his successor, still being chosen through Security Council straw polls, will inherit that difficult work.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s and Martin Wählisch’s article published in The Conversation on 24 September 2026.

If bilateral deal-making has stalled on both Iran and Ukraine, which regional forum or coalition is best placed to carry a settlement back to the Security Council, and what would Washington and Moscow need to accept for it to get there?

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On September 11, Houthi forces seized the Yemeni port of Mokha and Mayyun Island overlooking the Bab el-Mandeb strait. This gives Iran’s most powerful remaining proxy force in the Middle East near-complete control of Yemen’s entire Red Sea coast. Directly or indirectly, Tehran now has a chokehold on around 12% of global trade that passes through that waterway while maintaining its pressure on the Strait of Hormuz which has already led to a cut of flows there from about 9 million barrels of oil a day to between 3.7 and 6.4 million.

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The next day, BRICS adopted its New Delhi declaration: 140 paragraphs agreed by a bloc of eleven states representing, by its own count, 49.5% of the global population, 40% of global GDP, and 26% of global trade. Iran is one of the eleven member states and of the remaining ten five are directly and negatively affected by the actions of Iran and the Houthis while only one benefits.

Saudi Arabia is the most exposed. Its east-west pipeline across the kingdom, built to bypass Hormuz, terminates on the Red Sea coast the Houthis now overlook. It had been running at full capacity, before being shut down after strikes from Iranian proxies in Iraq and the Houthis’ seizure of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline.

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Egypt, in turn, depends on revenue from the Suez canal. The shipping traffic that underpins this income significantly decreased in early 2024 as the result of an earlier Houthi campaign against shipping lanes in the Red Sea and has struggled to recover ever since. The latest Houthi advances are not going to improve any of these numbers in maritime traffic that insurers have already treated as high-risk for months.

The UAE has suspended all trade and financial transactions with Iran in late August. This move came after Iran allegedly attacked a ship owned by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company in the Strait of Hormuz and launched two ballistic missiles into UAE territorial waters there. All this came on top of UAE claims in May that Iran had fired some 3,000 missiles and drones at it in the first two months of the US war against Iran alone.

China and India, the world’s largest oil importers, need the Strait of Hormuz open to keep global oil and gas prices low. Both also depend on it as a trade route that the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic is unlikely to replace soon.

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By contrast, Russia, whose own exports travel by other routes, is the one BRICS member whose economic outlook improves as these Iranian-controlled chokepoints tighten. And this is not by accident. In testimony to US lawmakers this month, Russia and China were both singled out as supporters of the Houthis alongside Iran. Russian personnel in Sanaa, it was alleged, have supplied technical and targeting support for attacks on Red Sea shipping. Most weapons smuggling to the Houthis is now apparently routed through Chinese companies, and a satellite firm tied to China’s military has been accused of providing intelligence used against commercial vessels. For China, supporting the Houthis may be a way to get assurances for the safety of its own ships transiting the Red Sea. For Russia, it’s mostly a pathway to increasing its profits from oil sales to India and China, the two countries that now account for 80% of all Russian oil exports.

Given these clearly conflicting interests, it’s no surprise that the New Delhi declaration of the BRICS does not mention the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb, Yemen or the Houthis. It contains no reference to shipping, to maritime security, or to freedom of navigation.

The silence in New Delhi is not an isolated lapse.

At the Rio summit in July 2025, BRICS members at least managed to condemn “the military strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran since 13 June 2025, which constitute a violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.” Ten months later, on 15 May 2026, its foreign ministers could not produce a joint statement at all, leaving India to simply offer a chair’s summary, which flagged “the importance of ensuring the exercise of navigational rights and freedoms of vessels of all states in the Red Sea and Bab Al-Mandab Strait” and then noted that one among them “had reservations on some aspects” of the paragraph that included this formulation.

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Four months on, when BRICS members approved the New Delhi declaration, they managed the remarkable feat of agreeing on 140 paragraphs without even naming the single most difficult issue they collectively face.

The New Delhi declaration is by no means a timid document. In paragraphs 21 and 22, it voices “serious concerns” about unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures that “distort trade” and condemns “the imposition of unilateral coercive measures that are contrary to international law” and demands “the elimination of such unlawful measures, which undermine international law and the principles and purposes of the UN Charter”. In paragraph 33, it also condemns “the use of starvation as a method of warfare”.

Brics members find the right words only as long as their target sits outside the organisation in the US, Europe or Israel. It is absent from paragraph 28, however, because the war fought against outsiders in 2025 has become one fought inside Brics in 2026.

This lack of clear and decisive language is eroding the credibility of the claim the BRICS bloc makes for itself: that it speaks for the global south against an order that has ignored it and is unwilling to reform. That claim does not survive the inability to name the waterways through which much of the global south’s energy and trade move.

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Ironically, what drives the erosion of credibility is the expansion of its membership that BRICS has been celebrating: eleven members, ten partner states, an unrivalled share of the world’s population, GDP, and trade. But what expansion did was import unresolved conflicts faster than the group built the means of handling them. Iran is effectively in a state of war with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been at odds for years over Yemen, Sudan, and Somalia. India and China, meanwhile, are at on-again, off-again conflict over border disputes along the line of control in Kashmir which intersects with their broader geopolitical competition for influence in Asia and beyond. China is also engaged in long-running disputes with Vietnam and Indonesia in the South China Sea.

Each enlargement has lowered the ceiling on what the bloc can say together. And saying nothing at all beyond expressing “deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions in Middle East/West Asia”, recalling respective national positions, and calling for “exercising maximum restraint, as well as avoiding actions that could further aggravate the situation”, as paragraph 28 of the New Delhi declaration skilfully does, may be the only survival mode for the BRICS.

But a grouping whose sole remaining source of unanimity is opposition to the US and its allies and that cannot describe a crisis in which its own members stand on opposite sides is hardly likely to become a pole of a multipolar order.

Whether two of the world’s major trade and energy arteries reopen will be settled in Tehran, in Washington, and in the marine insurance market in London. It will not be settled by the eleven governments that spent last weekend calling for maximum restraint.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on September 15, 2026.

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For a government or business with exposure to Gulf and Red Sea shipping lanes: does BRICS’s silence on its own chokepoint crisis mean the bloc has nothing to offer as a mediator here — or does it mean no one should have expected a grouping this divided to referee a crisis in which its own members stand on opposite sides?

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On 1 September, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation marked its 25th anniversary in Bishkek with all the trappings a diplomatic milestone demands: 21 heads of state and government, a ceremonial family photo, and a two-page Bishkek Declaration plus 28 other agreements on everything from synthetic-drugs coordination to biodiversity conservation. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi were all present, alongside Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. On the face of it, and looking at the communiqué in particular, the SCO looks like a confident bloc speaking with one voice for roughly a quarter of humanity and a quarter of global GDP.

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The real picture, however, is rather different and far less flattering. A quarter of a century in, and the SCO remains primarily a forum for multiple parallel bilateral engagements and dealmaking between leaders. So far, so functional. What the SCO has never been in this quarter-century is a body able to adjudicate the disputes its members bring to the room, still less the ones they keep outside.

At its best, the SCO has been something narrower: a shell for bilateralism, a stage that lets its most powerful members, in particular, strike deals and settle scores one-on-one.

As they often do this in very public ways, the messages they send more often than not are for domestic consumption: to present themselves as staunch defenders of strategic national interests.

Take Narendra Modi’s plenary address. With Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif at the same table at the same time, Modi declared that “there can be no place for double standards” in dealing with terrorism and that “terrorism can never be a strategic asset for anyone” while calling for dismantling “the entire ecosystem of terrorist financing, recruitment, radicalisation and safe havens.” He did not need to name Pakistan to make it clear who the addressee was: everyone in the room and at home will have recognised this as the language India uses to criticise Pakistan for its alleged support of transnational terrorist networks. The added benefit of the SCO summit for Modi is that he delivers it directly into Sharif’s face.

Modi then made a second point, noting that it is essential to “respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries”. Without saying it directly, it works as a rebuke for Russia’s war against Ukraine, for China’s Belt-and-Road corridor through Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and for Pakistan’s claims to territory that India considers its own. A statement like that not only makes Modi look good at home. It also offers something for India’s partners in the west – who can read it as a criticism of Russia – and helps shore up India’s traditional role as a champion of the global south, including against Chinese or Russian aspirations in this regard.

Modi also had a more direct message for Putin which he delivered in person and on the record. “Every day spent in war pushes humanity backwards,” he told the Russian president after their customary hug, before emphasising the need to move “from an endless war towards an end to the war.” While there is clearly a more constructive and less antagonistic bilateral relationship between India and Russia, compared to India and Pakistan, it was nonetheless a notably pointed line to deliver, in public, to a fellow leader of a bloc built partly around the idea that its members offer each other unconditional solidarity against the West. This is not the first time that Modi publicly called on Putin to end the war. He also condemned the deaths of Ukrainian children in a Russian missile strike just as the two leaders had a bilateral summit in Moscow in 2024.

Modi’s interaction with Xi tells yet a different story. It was equally carefully choreographed but much shorter: just a handshake and a short walk together. It was cordial, on the record, but not a formal bilateral meeting. It signalled the continuation of rapprochement without any breakthrough to report, reflecting the outcome of the latest round of boundary negotiations between the two countries in Beijing on 25 August: an agreement to keep talking and nothing else.

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These three interactions capture something broader about the nature of SCO summits: the organisation’s members, and especially the ‘big three’ of China, India and Russia, are using the SCO stage to project their own foreign policies, not to subordinate them to any kind of collective agenda.

Putin came to Bishkek with the busiest bilateral schedule of any leader — nine meetings across two days, including with Xi, Modi, and Pezeshkian, and the presidents of Tajikistan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and of attending non-SCO members Türkiye and Armenia.

Impressive as Putin’s SCO agenda may seem, it is hardly a sign of strength and smacks more of necessity and desperation.

Because of the ICC arrest warrant against him, Putin’s personal diplomacy is now confined to venues like the SCO and sometimes the BRICS. This is hardly a good look for the leader of a would-be great power who has also suffered recent setbacks in its influence and leverage elsewhere, from Syria to Venezuela to Mali.

Xi, by contrast, was strikingly selective, with his only confirmed bilateral meeting being with Putin. This can be seen as a possible signal that Beijing increasingly views the SCO as a lower-value venue than its own direct channels with individual capitals or forums like the BRICS. In this context, it was also striking that Xi then headed straight to Cairo for his first state visit there in a decade, and thus to a country that has been a member of the enlarged BRICS since 2024, ahead of that organisation’s upcoming summit in New Delhi on September 12 and 13.

Each of the organisation’s ‘big three’ is extracting something different and specific from the summit, none of which depends on the SCO functioning as a collective actor.

This is particularly evident again in the Bishkek Declaration. Although framed as a celebration of the organisation’s 25^th anniversary, the declaration and its accompanying set of 28 agreements simply entrenches the kind of relatively low-level, smallest-common-denominator cooperation SCO members have signed onto for years and rarely, if ever, operationalised in any meaningful way: protocols on cross-border crime, a synthetic-drugs coordination initiative, a drug-addiction cooperation programme, an information-security programme to 2028, biodiversity commitments, a green technology corridor. On the contentious issues – terrorism, boundaries, the war in Ukraine – the declaration is mostly silent. Its mention of the “great potential to further improve cooperation in the fight against terrorism, separatism and extremism” is hardly a display of members’ genuine enthusiasm in this regard.

This is SCO business as usual and hardly the worst of its kind. In September 2022 exactly at the time of the SCO summit in Samarkand, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – founding members of the SCO in 2001 and its predecessor, the Shanghai Five, in 1996 – were shelling each other along their border in one of the deadliest clashes of a dispute that had already killed dozens the previous year. Despite a death toll close to 100, and well over 100,000 people displaced, the 19-page Samarkand Declaration said nothing about it.

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The way that this dispute was resolved points to a larger issue for the SCO as well. In 2022, the fighting was stopped after Putin phoned his Kyrgyz and Tajik counterparts separately, and these two leaders eventually settled their dispute in 2025 through direct negotiations. Thus, much like the China-India boundary negotiations, not only was the process of resolving the dispute between SCO members bilateral in nature, but it also happened completely outside the organisation. And this is a pattern throughout the organisation’s history.

None of this means the SCO is meaningless. Its summits generate bilateral engagements, agreements, and opportunities for its members to project non-Western solidarity to their own domestic and international audiences. But Bishkek’s real anniversary message was not the declaration its leaders signed but the affirmation of the ordinary, practised way in which the organisation’s three dominant leaders – Xi, Modi and Putin – used the same forum to pursue three entirely separate agendas and left having resolved none of the issues that divide them. The Bishkek summit points to yet more bilateralism happening outside – not inside – the SCO’s shell.

This analysis is an extended version of Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 4 September 2026.

If the SCO can’t even mediate a violent dispute between its own founding members, is “strategic autonomy” really what member states get from it — or just cover for pursuing bilateral interests they would pursue with or without the forum?

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Ukraine is celebrating this year’s independence day on August 24 in the presence of key allies from the coalition of the willing — and the unfolding of another major corruption scandal.

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It all started when Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s defence minister until his dismissal as part of a government reshuffle last month, posted a nine-minute video on August 19 that was widely seen as a direct challenge to the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. One part of the challenge was what amounted to a call for elections in wartime — something that both Zelensky and a majority of Ukrainians have repeatedly rejected.

The other part of Fedorov’s challenge was his diagnosis of a “systemic crisis of governance”.

Corruption in Ukraine isn’t simply anymore about this scandal or that minister. It is a pattern of elite behaviour that has outlasted every Ukrainian government since independence, survived revolutions in 2004 and 2013/4 fought explicitly in the name of ending it, and is now, according to the account of a one-time member of Zelensky’s inner circle undermining a war for national survival.

Ukraine’s problem is that accountability is no longer working as a deterrent against corruption. And the depth of this problem has become more obvious over the past year.

In July 2025, Zelensky signed a law stripping the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the special anti-corruption prosecutor’s office (SAPO) of their independence, prompting the largest street protests in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022. It forced Zelensky to reverse course within days.

In November, a bribery scheme worth an estimated $100 million in the energy sector reached into Zelensky’s own inner circle, forcing out his justice and energy ministers. As part of the fall-out from that scandal, Zelensky’s long-time chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, resigned in November 2025.

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In July 2026, Fedorov’s own removal from his post as defence minister came after a rift with the armed forces’ commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi. The rift was partly about strategy and partly about procurement reforms –allegedly threatening entrenched interests – that Fedorov had been keen to push through. Like a year earlier, large-scale public protests ensued. Unlike then, however, the protests – focused on individuals rather than programmatic reform – had only a limited effect. Zelensky replaced Syrskyi but remained unyielding on the issue of reinstating Fedorov.

On August 5, Olha Stefanishyna, the former deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, former justice minister, and former Ukrainian ambassador to the US, was formally charged by NABU and SAPO. For now, she stands accused of illicit enrichment, while a separate investigation into her time overseeing Ukraine’s asset recovery and management agency — where contracts allegedly went to companies linked to her ex-husband — remains open but hasn’t led to formal charges yet. The charges came two days after Zelensky officially dismissed her as ambassador to the US.

And as if Fedorov’s point about systemic corruption needed any further proof, Iryna Mudra, the deputy head of Zelensky’s presidential office, who oversaw judicial reform and the special tribunal on Russian aggression, was dismissed by the president on August 19 after NABU and SAPO launched a new investigation into corruption, code-named Operation Forest Gump, a continuation of Operation Midas that was at the heart of the scandal in November 2025.

These are not just five unrelated crises happening over the course of a little more than a year.

They are symptomatic of exactly the accusation that Fedorov made: corruption has led to a systemic crisis of governance. What Fedorov didn’t specifically mention was that none of this is new, or particular to wartime. Ukraine emerged from the Soviet collapse with an economy substantially captured by a small circle of oligarchs who controlled industry, media and, at various points, the presidency itself.

After the Orange Revolution of 2004, the Euromaidan revolution a decade later was also fought explicitly against that system. NABU and SAPO were created the following year, in large part because the reforms Ukraine’s post-Maidan governments had promised were not being delivered on their own. Zelensky himself was elected in 2019 on a platform built largely on fighting corruption.

What the war has changed is not the underlying motivation of corruption – pure and simple human greed – but where the opportunities are to realise it. The privatisation auctions of the 1990s and the gas-trading schemes of the 2000s have become the procurement contracts and reconstruction funds of the 2020s. Arguably, though the damage they do, is compounded by wartime: a 2023 sham contract for undelivered mortar munitions worth some $40 million leaves a critical gap in an already stretched defence budget and strains frontline capabilities, while a $100 million scheme in 2025 which syphoned off funds intended to protect Ukraine’s energy grid damaged both the economy and made ordinary Ukrainians’ lives more miserable during the winter.

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This shift towards defence and reconstruction as the most profitable sectors for corruption has been enabled by the justifiable imposition of martial law and emergency procurement rules. After all, Ukraine is a country at war. The resultant limitations on parliamentary oversight and press scrutiny have been partly compensated by the increased leverage that Ukraine’s western partners now have: following widespread public protests, it was pressure from the European Commission and allied governments that forced the NABU and SAPO reversal within little more than a week in 2025.

This ensures the continued work of NABU and SAPO in exposing corruption. At the same time, however, it also demonstrates the limitations of a judicial approach to corruption. The European Commission’s 2025 assessment of Ukraine’s accession process found that Kyiv had made some progress across all 33 negotiating chapters, but singled out corruption as a major impediment to further progress: recent developments, the Commission wrote, “cast doubts on Ukraine’s commitment to its anti-corruption agenda.” This was a judgment squarely aimed at the attempted curtailing of NABU’s and SAPO’s independence.

Yet, in the latest round of scandals, the reaction has been muted. Fedorov’s dismissal was mostly met with surprise rather than criticism. The subsequent corruption revelations caused hardly any reaction – and so far none that speak to the underlying “systemic crisis of governance” identified by Fedorov. This is all the more surprising given that this crisis now reaches deep into the Ukrainian parliament as well: on the day that Mudra was charged by NABU and SAPO and dismissed by Zelensky from her post as deputy head of his office, the Verkhovna Rada’s law enforcement committee blocked five bills intended to strengthen the country’s fight against corruption. These bills are a non-negotiable EU requirement for releasing over €2 billion of aid to Ukraine before the end of the year and a key item on Kyiv’s to-do list for the accession negotiations.

Fedorov’s video is both the statement of a deeply felt personal grievance and a diagnosis of a system that may be beyond the point of reform and repair.

Fedorov alleged that his own reforms of defence-ministry procurement, worth billions of dollars a year, were what cost him his post. “The old system,” he said, without naming Zelensky directly, “lives by its own rules too often. It protects itself. It is scared of change.” The asymmetry he is describing is stark: reformers get sacked, while insiders with the kind of connections implicated in the November 2025 scandal are able to leave the country.

Zelensky was elected in 2019 to end exactly this kind of corrosive corruption. At that time, ending it looked mostly like a matter of political will. Even if Zelensky himself ever had this will, many of those around him clearly did not. Add to this more than four-and-a-half years of full-scale war, and corruption in Ukrainian public life is now embedded in sectors – arms procurement, air-defence contracts, energy-grid protection – where failure costs soldiers’ lives and adds yet more misery to the plight of ordinary Ukrainians.

Ukraine’s survival as an independent state has always depended on not losing the war against Russia. It plainly depends just as much on winning the older, quieter war against a system that, in the words of one of the president’s own former ministers, is still “scared of change.” Based on past evidence, Fedorov’s solution – elections – is unlikely to be a solution on its own and western pressure has clear limitations.

Without a solution, the problem will continue to fester and lead to more alienation between state and society in Ukraine.

Finding and implementing a workable solution will be impossible without a change of culture among Ukraine’s elite – and that will determine how good a wartime leader Zelensky ultimately proves to be and how sincere his partners are in supporting not just him but the survival of a democratic Ukraine.

This analysis is an extended version of Tetyana Malyarenko’s and Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 24 August 2026.

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In the early hours of 16 August 2026, Ukraine launched roughly 600 drones at Moscow — one of the largest single strikes on the Russian capital since the beginning of war nearly four-and-a-half years ago. Moscow’s mayor said 201 of the drones were destroyed over the city and region; Russian officials reported at least six people killed across the Moscow and Rostov regions, while Russian strikes on Kryvyi Rih killed one person and wounded six.

Hours earlier, a Spanish F-18 flying a NATO air-policing mission over Romania shot down a Russian drone that had crossed into its airspace — the fourth such incident this year. The exchange lands amid an escalating air war in which Russia fired more than 450 missiles at Ukraine in a single month, nearly 200 of them ballistic, while Ukraine has struck Russian oil refineries 194 times in the first half of 2026.

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1. Neither side can currently force a breakthrough on the ground. The Institute for the Study of War’s battlefield assessment of 11 August records no confirmed advances around Pokrovsk, Kupyansk or northern Kharkiv Oblast, even as both militaries keep attacking there. Strikes on refineries, air-defence networks, industrial sites and major cities, including now Moscow itself, are highlighting that both sides are doubling down on attritional escalation, hoping that putting pressure on infrastructure and civilians will eventually help them achieve the territorial breakthroughs – either on the front line or at the negotiating table – that have eluded them so far.

2. Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign is a genuine doctrinal shift, not a one-off spectacular: 194 hits on Russian refineries in the first six months of the year, and Saturday’s roughly 600-strong drone raid on Moscow, compensate for the manpower and artillery deficit Ukraine cannot close on the ground by moving the war’s cost into Russia’s own economy and psychology. But it operates alongside a static front, not as a substitute for one — nothing in the refinery attacks or Moscow strikes changes who holds Pokrovsk.

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3. Lack of air defences is Ukraine’s most critical vulnerability now and going forward. Zelensky told CNN this month that Ukraine is receiving roughly 1% of the interceptors it needs and holds two-and-a-half times fewer than in 2025, while Russia has roughly doubled its monthly ballistic-missile output — the gap showed in a single early-August strike, when Ukrainian air defences failed to down a single one of 28 ballistic missiles fired at Kyiv. Russia’s resumed use of North Korean KN-23 missiles, which allows Moscow to keep up pressure on Kyiv while protecting and increasing the stockpile of its own cruise and ballistic missiles ahead of its annual winter campaign against Ukrainian critical civilian and especially energy infrastructure.

4. The timing of the current escalation on both sides is not accidental. Ukraine’s campaign of intensifying deep strikes happens as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner allegedly prepare to travel to both Kyiv and Moscow this month, and Zelensky has said explicitly that squeezing Russian oil revenue and military production is meant to move Putin toward an air ceasefire. Yet, there is little hope that Witkoff and Kushner will be able, or indeed willing, to change the Kremlin’s calculus. It took them and the White House nearly a year to accept that Kyiv’s refusal to cede the rest of Donbas is not a negotiating position but a red line. With Russia’s equally uncompromising stance, any negotiations appear deadlocked even before they have started.

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5. Both sides, therefore, currently have more incentive to keep striking than to enter negotiations. They do not see themselves in a position of sufficient strength that would allow them to extract concessions at the negotiation table that they cannot achieve on the battlefield. This makes near-term de-escalation unlikely and dooms any efforts by Witkoff and Kushner. The turning point, if one comes, is more likely to arrive through attrition than through a single event. If Western air defence pledges materialise before Ukrainian cities face the next winter, Ukraine’s resilience might outlast Russia’s ability to cope with mounting refinery losses that constrain its war economy. If, on the other hand, Russia’s missile production (and North Korea’s support) outpaces Ukraine’s capacity to deploy effective interceptors in sufficient numbers, the prospects of a just and lasting peace will diminish rapidly.

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What do Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Volodymyr Zelensky and Mojtaba Khamenei have in common? The military power that they can all command is far easier to use than to convert into political success.

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All five leaders have vastly different resources at their disposal and pursue different goals. Trump and Putin lead nuclear powers (it’s generally accepted that Netanyahu does too, but Israel has never acknowledged this). Trump, Putin and Netanyahu all started wars.

Zelensky inherited a frozen conflict that escalated into full-scale invasion. Khamenei inherited both a war and Iran’s highest office at once, becoming supreme leader in March 2026 after his father was killed in the US-Israeli strikes that opened the conflict on February 28.

Trump can order devastating strikes but not answer how Iran fits into a future regional security order. Netanyahu can destroy infrastructure across Gaza, Lebanon and Iran but not guarantee security for Israel. Putin can sustain an invasion for years yet still can’t force Ukraine into territorial compromise. Zelensky can deny Russia victory, but his forces struggle to recover occupied territory. And Khamenei can make defeating Iran costly, but he can’t stop the US or Israel from trying.

Such stalemates are not new. That they have become seemingly unbreakable, however, is. The old logic of asymmetric warfare was relatively simple: the weak can prevent the strong from winning by using unconventional tactics and weapons to offset superior firepower. Russia discovered this in Afghanistan, the US rediscovered it there almost half a century after Vietnam. Neither was defeated in battle, yet both withdrew once superior firepower failed to produce a sustainable outcome.

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To some extent, this logic still plays out in Ukraine and Iran. Ukraine doesn’t need to invade Russia to frustrate Putin – it needs to remain sovereign and prevent Moscow from dictating its future. Iran doesn’t need to defeat the US military or destroy Israel – it needs to preserve the regime and persuade adversaries that further escalation carries unacceptable costs.

A weaker country’s victory doesn’t require conquering territory or destroying an enemy’s forces – it may simply mean survival. This creates an imbalance: an aggressor must achieve something; a defender only has to prevent it. Putin loses if he cannot impose a settlement on his terms and Zelensky succeeds by denying it to him. Trump and Netanyahu may degrade Iranian capabilities, but if the regime survives, Khamenei can claim he has not been defeated.

The stronger side loses by not winning. The weaker side wins by not losing.

In this logic of asymmetry, time has always been a weapon of its own. Powerful states want speed – shock, collapse, a quick exit that doesn’t look like a forever war. Weaker actors play for time.

Ukraine’s survival in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion transformed the war, giving Kyiv time to mobilise society and secure western support, before then exploiting its ability to innovate, which has gone some way towards levelling the battlefield.

Iran’s cheap drones, missile attacks, sea mines and threats to energy infrastructure don’t need to defeat a superior coalition outright – only to prolong uncertainty and erode its adversaries’ will to continue.

In both wars, the battlefield has become wider than the front line – to such an extent that the two wars are increasingly connected. Ukraine’s air campaign is degrading the oil pipelines and refineries funding the Kremlin’s war effort and its drone strikes in the Caspian Sea disrupt Russian drone supplies to Iran.

Iran and its proxies have turned military confrontation into a broader economic and political crisis – a “forever war” – well beyond the Middle East by threatening infrastructure and shipping routes of its neighbours in the Gulf and the Red Sea.

The military forces that the weak and strong alike are able to muster can destroy infrastructure and kill commanders. But without an overarching strategy this remains just destruction.

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This does not mean military superiority has ceased to matter. Stronger powers still have an enormous capacity to destroy infrastructure, degrade military capabilities, seize territory and improve their bargaining position.

In Ukraine, Putin may ultimately come away with territory he can present as a gain. But that is very different from his original ambition of bringing Ukraine back under effective Russian control.

The same applies to Iran: the US and Israel can destroy significant military capabilities of the regime and set back its nuclear programmes, but military superiority alone cannot guarantee that Iran will not rebuild and revive them, much less produce a political order in Tehran to the liking of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Strong powers retain an extraordinary ability to destroy and impose costs. What has diminished is their ability to turn that advantage into durable political control or decisive political outcomes. Trump wants leverage without another forever war. Netanyahu wants security that battlefield dominance alone can’t deliver. Putin wants territorial and political control that firepower hasn’t secured.

But weaker powers struggle, too. Zelensky must turn resistance into a sustainable future. Khamenei needs to preserve deterrence despite a war that began by killing his father and predecessor. Neither of them lacks instruments of power. But they do lack a clear path from those instruments to a stable and acceptable end state.

This is where the old logic of asymmetry is beginning to break down: neither conventional military superiority nor unconventional tactics of warfare seem to be able to break stalemates anymore. Winning wars may simply no longer be possible at all.

This analysis draws on Martin Wählisch’s and Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 14 August 2026.

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If neither conventional military dominance nor asymmetric tactics can now force a decisive outcome in Ukraine or Iran, what should replace “winning” as the objective governments and institutions actually plan for?

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When the Iran war erupted at the end of February 2026, Vladimir Putin appeared to be its biggest winner. Soaring oil prices, diverted Western attention and US military assets — they all seemed to strengthen the Russian president’s hand in his war against Ukraine.

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That price shock did not come from a single chokepoint. Brent crude spiked twice in five months — once when the Strait of Hormuz closed, and again in July when a ceasefire collapsed and Houthi attacks widened the disruption to the Bab el-Mandeb strait.

But the longer the US-Israel war against Iran has dragged on, the more Ukraine has found ways to make itself strategically useful beyond its own battlefield, diminishing the benefits that Russia reaps.

While the world’s attention was on the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, Ukraine struck Iranian cargo ships and their Russian navy escort in the Caspian Sea, which borders both Russia and Iran, on 25 July 2026.

Since then, Russia and Iran signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty on 17 January 2025; it entered into force on 2 October 2025 after ratification. The treaty establishes a 20-year framework covering defence, energy and finance, though it is still short of a NATO-style mutual-defence clause.

The relationship between Russia and Iran has also become operationally deeper than the long-established weapons trade. According to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, Russia has been providing Iran with real-time intelligence support, including satellite surveillance of US positions in the Gulf that has reportedly aided Iranian targeting. Russia has denied the allegation, but if Zelensky’s account of it is accurate, providing this kind of operational battlefield support would pit Moscow more directly against Washington and its regional allies in the Iran war.

This is also the case with drones. These remain a critical link between Russia and Iran, but the direction of the relationship has changed. Moscow initially relied on Iranian Shahed-136 drones after its invasion of Ukraine stalled in 2022. In a striking reversal, Russia is now reportedly supplying Iran with drone components and upgraded Geran designs based on the original Shahed technology, after Iran lost a large share of its own arsenal in the 2026 war.

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But the deepening Russia-Iran partnership also has vulnerabilities. First, it has lost its human anchor. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — for a quarter of a century Putin’s stable interlocutor in Tehran — was killed alongside much of Iran’s senior leadership in the joint US-Israeli strikes that opened the 2026 Iran war on 28 February.

Then, Moscow’s failure to intervene militarily when its partner got in trouble echoes the collapse of its protection of Bashar al-Assad in Syria — a reminder that Russian “protection” for its clients is rhetorical rather than real.

At the same time, Ukraine has found ways to exploit the Russia-Iran relationship and strengthen its own standing with the US as a result.

Based on years of experience dealing with Russian-Iranian drones, Kyiv sent military experts to the Gulf to help the US, Israel and their Gulf allies counter such attacks.

Both countries’ wider maritime logistics — above all, the parallel “shadow fleet” tanker networks, roughly 591 Russian-linked vessels and 170 Iranian, that the two countries use to evade US and EU oil sanctions, sharing insurers, flag registries and falsified documentation providers – have also come under increasing pressure. However, this advantage may prove less durable than it looks. On 28 July, the US Senate voted 86-12 to advance a bipartisan sanctions package targeting both Russia and Iran — the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 — authorising tariffs of up to 200% on major buyers of Russian oil and gas and extending Iran sanctions through 2031.

Western sanctions enforcement is now complemented by an increasingly effective Ukrainian sea drone campaign against Russian shadow fleet tankers — Kyiv says it hit 159 vessels linked to the shadow fleet during a 12-day drone campaign in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov in July 2026. This further reduces Moscow’s opportunities to make money on international oil markets and adds to the strain on the Russian war economy. Over time, this is likely to limit Russia’s ability to support Iran.

Sustained Ukrainian operations against targets in the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Black Sea could simultaneously disrupt a supply chain that sustains Iran’s ability to attack US targets in the Gulf while weakening Russia’s own war effort. Ukraine has thus turned a front in the Russia-Ukraine war into a simultaneous front in the US-Iran war. And it has demonstrated its capacity to operate successfully on both.

But this is not the only reason why supporting Ukraine is now beginning to make more strategic sense for the US, even from an America-first perspective.

One indication of that came when the two leaders met on 28 July in Washington. Mr Trump reiterated his commitment to licensing Ukraine to co-produce components for Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missiles and to accelerate the cheaper PAC-3 ACE variant — easing pressure on the US-only supply chain that currently struggles to supply two simultaneous wars. While the US president seemed to have second thoughts about the licensing deal two days later, it is clearly not off the table. And US pressure on Kyiv to make concessions to Moscow has remarkably receded — another sign that the Iran war has increased Kyiv’s room to manoeuvre.

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All of this indicates shifts in dynamics of both wars. For now, they are subtle rather than seismic and unlikely to fundamentally change the battlefield trajectory of either war in the immediate future.

None of the warring parties’ stated aims have changed: Kyiv and Moscow appear unwilling to make any territorial concessions; the US and Iran remain far apart on agreeing the future of either the Iranian nuclear programme or a regime for the Strait of Hormuz. All sides retain sufficient resources to continue fighting at current levels for some time, and they lack the incentives to stop.

But the strategic separation between the wars is eroding. The longer the two wars continue, the more they will collide in Washington’s, Moscow’s and Tehran’s calculations — and the more difficult it will become to treat them as separate problems. If the momentum behind this beginning fusion of two wars into one is sustained, it will likely change the calculations of their main protagonists. Whether that will make any of them more amenable to compromise or push them to double down, however, remains to be seen.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s commentary published in Channel NewsAsia on 5 August 2026.

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If your institution still treats the Iran war and the Ukraine war as separate risk lines, where does that assumption break first — energy pricing, defence-supply allocation, or sanctions enforcement?

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When we were asked by the OSCE to investigate Russia’s indoctrination and militarisation of children living in the Ukrainian territories occupied by Moscow since 2014, we had a general idea of the Kremlin’s occupation policies. Two of us grew up in what was then Soviet-occupied Latvia and East Germany. As such, we were already familiar with the Soviet approach to “upbringing”.

Nevertheless when we went to Ukraine, what we found shocked us. There was plenty of evidence of the systematic and coercive nature of the Russian federation’s policies attempting to erase the identity of the Ukrainian children under its control.

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Our investigation was the sixth mission established by Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) since 2022 to investigate human rights violations in relation to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It’s the second to focus specifically on children.

The first of these two missions was concerned with their forcible transfer to the Russian Federation. Our task was to build on this first mission and assess whether Russia’s conduct during the war against Ukraine violates applicable international law, such as the Geneva Conventions and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

During the three weeks of our mission, we collected and analysed a vast amount of data. This included written reports, comments and statements produced by international organisations such as the United Nations, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the European Union.

We also collected testimonies, both online and in person, from young adults who had experienced indoctrination and militarisation as children in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. And we also heard from teachers who had spent some time under occupation before escaping to territory controlled by the Ukrainian government.

During a visit to Kyiv, we also conducted a series of interviews with representatives of Ukrainian government institutions and civil society organisations.

Our report, presented to the OSCE Permanent Council on July 9, offers sometimes distressing detail and harrowing witness accounts.

The coercion of Ukrainians in the occupied territories to take Russian passports is also significant when it comes to what we refer to in our report as the “conscription pipeline”.

For example, in one of the written testimonies available to us, the witness explained how the headteacher of the local school, accompanied by heavily armed soldiers, went from house to house to question parents who do not send their children to school and had not yet applied for Russian passports. He threatened them with the removal of their parental rights. He also said their children would be placed in institutions if they didn’t yield to the pressure to do so. In the face of such a display of government power, the parents eventually gave in.

This particular incident, which is far from an isolated case according to evidence collected by the UN and the OSCE, illustrates the level of coercion applied not just to children but their whole families. It also shows the extent to which different agencies across the Russian government agencies collaborate in this.

The coercion of Ukrainians in the occupied territories to take Russian passports is also significant when it comes to what we refer to in our report as the “conscription pipeline”. Children are being systematically prepared for future armed service. By being forced into Russian citizenship, boys also become eligible for conscription as soon as they turn 18.

There is clear evidence by now that they are not just doing regular military service. Many of them are sent to the front lines where several have died.

So, what does the system of indoctrination and militarisation look like and how does it work? The use of the Ukrainian language is prohibited in schools and significantly obstructed in public and private life. Ukrainian children are subject to education under the Russian state curriculum. This now involves high levels of historical falsification and ideological indoctrination.

Ukrainian children are exposed to the full toolkit of Russian militarisation techniques.

To give just one striking example, the history textbook for Grade 11 devotes 29 pages to the so-called “special military operation”. It frames the invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to western aggression. Versions of this textbook for lower grades, starting in grade five, have been used across schools in the occupied territories since the beginning of academic year 2025-26.

Amnesty International has assessed this textbook as “a blatant attempt to unlawfully indoctrinate school children in Russia and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories”.

Ukrainian children are exposed to the full toolkit of Russian militarisation techniques. For example, since the beginning of the 2023–24 academic year, the course entitled “Fundamentals of Security and Defence of the Motherland” has been compulsory in all schools in the occupied territories.

Russian media reports say this means the “return [of] initial military training as part of life safety lessons”. The UN has established that this includes “170 hours of military training including on the main types of grenades, small arms, hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers, and sniper rifles”.

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It doesn’t stop there. The patriotic youth organisation Movement of the First, created in December 2022 by Vladimir Putin, has revived a Soviet-era military war game, which has been rolled out into the occupied territories since the beginning of the 2024 school year.

As part of the game’s simulated military activities children are divided into armies. They are trained in assembling weapons, operating drones, acting as “storm troopers” and completing “military-tactical” obstacle courses. They also practice cyber warfare and information operations.

The Institute for the Study of War describes this game as part of “a wider Russian ecosystem operating throughout occupied Ukraine with the explicit purpose of militarising Ukrainian children, indoctrinating them against their Ukrainian identities, and training them to fight for the Russian military”.

Russia does not deny this is being done. On the contrary, senior Russian officials are on the record justifying the indoctrination and militarisation of Ukrainian children. For example, Yana Lantratova, formerly deputy chair of the State Duma’s committee on education, now Russia’s human rights commissioner, noted – with specific reference to children in Russian-occupied Ukraine – that the Russian Federation “must first of all take care of the main thing – our children. To develop and enlighten them, to instil in them a sense of the Motherland”.

“Any deal to end the war cannot just be about kilometres.”

Except that these are not Russian children, they are Ukrainian. The evidence we collected for our report left us with no doubt that Russian occupation policies amount to grave violations of international law when it comes to the indoctrination and militarisation of Ukrainian children living in the territories under Russian control.

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For example, the unlawful transformation of the education system in the occupied territories is a clear breach of Article 43 of the Hague Regulations and of Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

This led us to call on all parties to immediately and meaningfully recognise the plight of Ukrainian children for their safety, identity and family life in the ongoing war and in all negotiations. In the words of one of the interviewees we spoke to in Kyiv: “Any deal to end the war cannot just be about kilometres.”

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s, Elīna Šteinerte’s and Hervé Ascensio’s article published in The Conversation on 31 July 2026.

Read the full mission report submitted to the OSCE Permanent Council on 9 July 2026, including the Government of Ukraine’s formal response.

If any peace settlement is measured only in kilometres of territory, what happens to the generation of children Russia has already spent years reshaping inside occupied schools?

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Summit meetings on the fringes of funerals, diplomacy after death as the British political scientist Geoff Berridge put it, have a long and useful tradition. Not only can such working funerals force a meeting at a time that would not otherwise have happened, but they can remind those assembled of the transience of life, physical as well as political, and the urgency of now.

And so it was with the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham at Washington National Cathedral. The marking of his death provided the background to carefully choreographed visits to the White House for Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Each visitor, ostensibly in Washington for Graham’s memorial service, was granted 90 minutes in sequential closed-door meetings with Trump and his advisers. All sides later conveyed that the meetings were, in the words of White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, “positive and productive”.

First up was Zelensky. For the Ukrainian president, this is not the first instance of funeral diplomacy with his US counterpart. The two presidents’ meeting at the Vatican in April 2025 for the funeral of Pope Francis provided the opportunity to put their relationship on to a more constructive footing just two months after their infamous clash at the White House.

Far from not having “the cards”, as Trump exclaimed in February 2025, Zelensky arrived at the White House this week in a much stronger position. Ukraine has demonstrated its capacity to strike deep into the Russian heartland causing substantial economic and military damage to the Kremlin’s war machine.

Ukraine is also increasingly a high value tech partner in drone technology to the US and its allies in the Gulf and Europe.

Zelensky also stressed Ukraine’s usefulness as an intelligence partner to Washington. He reported he had supplied evidence to suggest that Russia has provided Iran with targeting information on US bases in the Middle East. While Trump himself tends to dismiss such allegations, posting recently on his TruthSocial platform that he doesn’t believe either Russia or China are assisting Iran, they almost certainly helped Zelensky in his subsequent meetings on Capitol Hill.

In a rare demonstration of bipartisan consensus, the Senate – in an 86-12 procedural vote – moved forward a sanctions package against countries who continue to trade with Russia and Iran. This was billed as a tribute to Graham, who – together with his Democrat senate colleague Richard Blumenthal – had conducted long and protracted negotiations to obtain approval from the White House.

Trump’s support for the sanctions package is another indication that his calculations on the Russian war against Ukraine are beginning to shift. The US president also repeated his commitment to advocating for the resurrection of the stalled peace talks between the US and Russia. In typical Trump fashion, he also reiterated that he would allow the licensing of Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missile production to Ukraine — an idea that he first mentioned during a meeting with Zelensky at the NATO summit in Ankara in early July — and a day later seemed to have second thoughts about his very issue.

While Zelensky’s star is, for now at least, clearly on the rise in Washington, Netanyahu arrived for his meeting with Trump in a more precarious position. With Israel heading into crucial parliamentary elections in October, Netanyahu has most to gain domestically from being seen close to Trump.

Their meeting covered several issues where the two leaders’ views differ – from how to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon to US sales of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey. No details emerged of any tangible agreements. Netanyahu was nonetheless full of praise, characterising the meeting as: “It was one of the best conversations I’ve had with our friend, US President Trump.”

While mainly aimed at his electorate back home, these hyperbolic statements from the Israeli prime minister were also designed to signal to Iran that Netanyahu still has influence in the White House and that the Iranian nuclear issue has not been abandoned in the new focus on the Strait of Hormuz.

How much influence, however, is debatable. Trump seems undecided, and above all unsure, on how to move forward on Iran – oscillating between escalation and diplomacy.

As the two wars in Iran and Ukraine are becoming more and more connected, the capacity of the White House to manage them is limited at best.

Critical weapons shortages due to US commitments in the war against Iran are putting Ukraine’s air defences at risk. Russia is emerging as an enabler of Iranian strikes against US bases in the Middle East. Ukrainian strikes on an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea target a vital supply chain between Moscow and Tehran.

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And these are just some of the links between two conflict theatres that are individually growing in complexity. Yet, Trump still uses the same over-extended and under-qualified duo of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to lead US mediation efforts in both.

The best that the US president, therefore, could have hoped for as a result of his back-to-back meetings with Zelensky and Netanyahu was reminding them and everyone else how pivotal the role of his administration in both wars continues to be. What Trump achieved instead was to highlight that the White House remains unable to bring either, let alone both, wars to a satisfactory conclusion on terms acceptable to Washington and its allies.

Under Trump, it seems, that funeral diplomacy is less about diplomacy after death than the death of diplomacy.

This analysis draws on David Hastings Dunn and Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on July 30, 2026.

If Washington’s mediation capacity is now split across two wars that are actively feeding each other, at what point does “the pivotal role” Trump claims become a description of overstretch rather than leverage — and what would a genuine reallocation of US diplomatic bandwidth actually look like?

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When a firm meets a scandal by appointing an independent chair, the most revealing thing is what it has decided not to change.

KPMG Australia has just lost its chair and two senior audit partners, after its chief executive and audit chief before them. The trigger was the misuse of clients’ confidential board papers — Lendlease’s, Optus’s, and Dexus’s — to help the firm win audit work from their rivals. ASIC is now investigating — though its own jurisdiction reaches individual registered auditors, not the partnerships that employ them, a structural gap this piece returns to below. The response, announced alongside the resignations, is a governance overhaul: an independent chair, independent board members, fresh oversight of audit quality and ethics, a new look at how whistleblower complaints are handled. It is the textbook answer. It is also an answer to the wrong question.

The chair the firm settled on makes the point better than I could. KPMG named Michael Ebeid AM as its first Independent Chairman on 2 July — framed as the centrepiece of the overhaul, and an appointment that immediately drew fire in Parliament for being nothing of the kind. Senator Barbara Pocock called it “KPMG’s version of a ‘cleanup’”: Ebeid was already sitting on the board, not an outside appointment, and correspondence released the same day raised further questions about his regard for the whistleblower process the overhaul was meant to fix. A new chief executive, John Sams, followed on 21 July. Both appointments are real governance moves. Neither touches the partner-compensation structure this piece is about.

This is not, at root, a confidentiality breach. A breach is something that happens to a system from the outside. What happened at KPMG happened because of the system. The Big Four are partnerships, and in a partnership the people who profit from winning the next engagement are the same people entrusted with the client’s most sensitive information. The partner who reads Lendlease’s board papers is a partner whose income depends on winning the next big audit. We have built a structure that asks one person to be both the custodian of a client’s secrets and a beneficiary of using them — and then we are surprised, every few years, when the two roles collide.

That is why the scandals rhyme. PwC Australia’s tax-leak affair in 2023 ran on a different mechanism — confidential government tax plans, monetised by the very firm hired to help write them — but it had the same architecture: privileged information on one side of the partner’s desk, a commercial incentive on the other, and nothing structural between them but the partner’s own restraint. The firms answer each episode in the same vocabulary — independence, oversight, culture, an external review — and each time the vocabulary is applied to the symptom and not the structure.

We have been here before, at scale. After Enron and the collapse of Arthur Andersen, the reforms of 2002 — Sarbanes-Oxley, mandatory audit-committee independence, partner rotation, limits on selling consulting to audit clients — were built to wall the auditor off from the incentives that corrupt the audit. Australia ran its own version the year after, following the HIH collapse — CLERP 9, partner rotation under the Corporations Act, an ASX rule mandating audit committees for its largest listed companies. Different statute books, same three levers. They did real work. But they left the deepest incentive untouched: the partnership itself, in which the audit is a product the firm sells and the partners share in the proceeds of selling it. The reforms regulated the conflict. They did not remove it — because removing it would mean asking whether a partnership that profits from the audits it wins can ever be independent of them, and that is a question the profession and its regulators have been content to leave unasked.

Those reforms were built for a narrower firm than the one being asked to hold them now. KPMG in 2002 was close to a pure audit and accounting practice; the Big Four today are sprawling multi-line consultancies — audit, tax, advisory, technology, deals — selling all of it into the same client relationships they are supposed to audit without fear or favour. An independent chair is a good and necessary fix for a governance failure. It is not a fix for a firm that has simply grown too complex, with too many live conflicts, for the partnership structure it still runs on. The question is not only whether the 2002-era guardrails still hold. It is whether the partnership model itself is still fit for purpose for a firm this size and this shape.

I have sat on the committees that receive these assurances, and the tell is always the same: the remedy is aimed at perception. An independent chair changes who sits at the head of the table; it does not change what the people around it are paid to do. New whistleblower guidelines change the process for reporting misconduct; they do not change the incentive that produces it. None of this is worthless — process matters, and a firm that handles a complaint honestly is better than one that buries it, as KPMG’s own inquiries did until Parliament forced the issue. But a board that accepts the overhaul as the answer has confused tidying the room with fixing the house.

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The harder options are the structural ones the overhaul avoids. Separate audit from advisory entirely, as reformers have urged for two decades. Cap or rotate the commercial relationships that give the conflict its force. Or concede openly that “independence” inside a profit-sharing partnership is a regulated fiction we have chosen to live with, and supervise it as such. Each is uncomfortable. Each is a real answer. An independent chair is none of them.

KPMG’s people did a serious thing, and the resignations are warranted. But we should be precise about what their departure settles and what it does not. It removes the individuals. It does not touch the incentive that will, in time, produce their successors’ version of the same scandal. The lesson of the Big Four is not that they keep hiring the wrong people. It is that the structure keeps asking the right people to serve two masters — and then dresses the predictable result in the language of reform. Until a regulator is willing to ask whether the partnership model is compatible with the independence the audit function requires, the independent chair will keep being the answer. It will just keep being the answer to the wrong question.

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If a regulator forced audit firms to choose — separate audit from advisory entirely, or accept full liability for the conflicts the partnership model creates — which would the profession actually pick?

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For the second time in a year, there have been public protests in Ukraine in response to a decision by the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

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In July 2025, protests erupted when Zelensky tried to curb the powers of two independent corruption agencies, forcing him to backtrack within days. The trigger for the latest protests was the dismissal of Ukraine’s popular defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov.

This is not the first time Zelensky has reshuffled his defence team. Oleksii Reznikov, who had been defence minister since 2021, was dismissed in 2023 following a string of high-profile corruption scandals.

He was replaced by Rustem Umerov who, after two years in office, was moved to the role of secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, as part of a full-scale cabinet reshuffle in the summer of 2025.

Umerov’s replacement, former prime minister Denys Shmyhal, lasted almost exactly six months before another reshuffle linked to the long fallout from the corruption scandals of summer 2025. Shmyhal was moved to the energy ministry and replaced by Fedorov who has now also been ousted after just half a year in office.

What distinguishes Fedorov’s ousting is that this is the first time a reshuffle has been carried out for reasons of internal disagreement within Zelensky’s core team.

In a press conference on July 16, Fedorov accused the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi (who controversially replaced the popular Valeryi Zaluzhny in February 2024), of blocking his reform initiatives and dividing the country. Their rift had become increasingly public. Fedorov and Syrskyi had apparently each demanded that the other be dismissed, rather than finding the compromise Zelensky wanted.

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That the president sided with the commander-in-chief rather than his defence minister seemingly defies all logic. Already during his earlier tenure as minister for digital transformation, a role he assumed at the beginning of Zelensky’s tenure as president in 2019, Fedorov had been an advocate of the kind of drone warfare that now has seemingly given Ukraine a slight edge, at least in the air war.

Since Fedorov was appointed minister of defence in January, Ukraine has made significant progress in stalling Russia’s momentum in the war. Key to this has been an intensified campaign of strikes against Russian oil infrastructure – one of the backbones of the country’s war economy.

Fedorov also tried to reform procurement policies in the defence ministry. In June, he stated that his team’s efforts to enforce competitive tendering for defence contracts had saved more than US$100 million (£74 million) by cutting the costs of 155mm artillery shells.

This is one probable source of Fedorov’s conflict with Syrskyi: who decides which weapons systems and military equipment should be procured and how they should be used. More than an issue of corruption, the rift is about control – and a clash of cultures between the moderniser, Fedorov, and the more traditional military leadership around Syrskyi.

After his dismissal, Fedorov apparently refused to continue in an advisory role for Zelensky. Two key advisors in the defence ministry, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov and Serhii Sternenko, as well as the deputy commander of the air force, Pavlo Yelizarov, have all now resigned.

These developments further underline the internal strategic disagreements over the direction of Ukraine’s war effort.

Zelensky’s initial choice for his next defence minister was Ihor Klymenko, who apparently declined the role and is set to take up the post of secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council instead.

As a former national police chief who had been Ukraine’s interior minister since 2023, Klymenko was seen as someone who could resolve Ukraine’s continued recruitment crisis. This is arguably the area in which Fedorov failed to make sufficient progress.

In light of sustained rumours about a new mobilisation of Russian troops for the war in the autumn, it is clear that Ukraine’s manpower problem is becoming more acute and needs an urgent resolution.

According to Fedorov’s diagnosis of the scale of the problem, 2 million Ukrainians are currently wanted for draft evasion, and 200,000 soldiers are absent without official leave.

Less clear, however, is why Klymenko was touted for the role. As interior minister, he was at least part of the problem caused by so-called “busification” – the forcible seizure of military-age Ukrainian men by recruitment officials. Klymenko has consistently maintained that these officials have acted within the boundaries of martial law.

Klymenko’s refusal to accept the position may also have been an implicit acknowledgement of how difficult a job any reform of recruitment would be. This is particularly the case given Zelensky’s highly public commitment to eradicating busification, during his press conference with the outgoing British prime minister, Keir Starmer, in Kyiv on July 16.

Yevhenii Khmara, a major general and acting head of the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU, has now been appointed as acting defence minister. Given Khmara’s previous role in supporting Ukraine’s intensifying air campaign against Russia, his appointment somewhat placates critics of Fedorov’s dismissal. These include members of Zelensky’s own party, who saw Klymenko as insufficiently aligned with Fedorov’s strategy in the war.

But a realignment with Fedorov’s vision of how to win the war will do little to address either the recruitment issue or the underlying conflict with Syrskyi. That this will likely fester — as the continuation of public protests clearly indicates —could be particularly destabilising, because the timeline towards Khmara’s parliamentary confirmation is unclear.

Under Ukrainian law, Khmara first has to resign from active military service before he can take on the civilian role of defence minister. He then has to be formally nominated by the president, after which the Ukrainian parliament must approve his appointment.

Like the summer 2025 corruption crisis, Zelensky will probably weather this storm. But the price he is likely to pay is a further erosion of his authority – and a shrinking of his inner circle of trusted advisors.

This is an unnecessary and unwelcome distraction from a defence effort that had finally seemed to put Ukraine on the front foot, for the first time since the end of 2022.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 17 July 2026.

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If Zelensky’s decision to back his commander-in-chief over his reform-minded defence minister signals where real power sits inside Ukraine’s wartime government, what does that mean for the other reformers still inside it — and for the allies who have been backing them?

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VIENNA, 9 July 2026 — Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham and co-founder of Navigating the Vortex, was one of three independent experts appointed under the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism — a process allowing OSCE participating States to launch independent human-rights investigations — to investigate the militarization and indoctrination of Ukrainian children by the Russian Federation. Today, alongside Prof. Hervé Ascensio (France) and Dr. Elīna Šteinerte (Latvia), he presented the mission’s findings to the OSCE Permanent Council: a systematic, accelerating Russian Federation policy to militarize and indoctrinate Ukrainian children in occupied territories and in Russia itself.

The mission was invoked on 14 May 2026 by 41 OSCE participating States. It was the sixth such expert mission on Ukraine since 2022 and was carried out by Prof. Wolff, Prof. Ascensio, and Dr. Šteinerte. Ukraine agreed to host the mission and cooperated fully, including facilitating an in-country visit from 6 to 11 June 2026 during which the experts met Ukrainian state institutions and civil society. The Russian Federation did not respond to the mission’s request for cooperation.

Key Findings at a Glance

• 20,610 children recorded by Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice as deported or forcibly transferred as of June 2026 — only 2,264 had been returned as of the same month.

• Membership of the Russian state-sponsored military-patriotic “Movement of the First” among children in the occupied territories has grown from around 60,000 in 2022 to more than 340,000 today — a nearly six-fold increase.

• Approximately 50,000 children a year are directed toward indoctrination and militarization “recreation camps,” including during school holidays.

• Russia’s militarization and indoctrination programmes now systematically target Ukrainian children from kindergarten age; a naval academy trains children as young as eight in drone operation.

• The mission found violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Hague Regulations, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; concludes that Russia’s occupation practices may amount to crimes against humanity; and identifies probable war crimes, including torture, inhuman treatment, and unlawful deportation of children.

A System That Has Learned, Sped Up, and Expanded

The experts found that what began as an improvised, friction-laden occupation policy in Crimea after its 2014 annexation has become, within little more than a decade, a fast, well-resourced, and expanding system. Measures that took years to implement in Crimea — replacing the school curriculum, phasing out Ukrainian-language education, rolling out youth paramilitary structures — were imposed within weeks or months in territory occupied after the 2022 full-scale invasion.

The mission also documented the system’s current scale beyond the formal education system. Programmes such as “Eaglets of Russia” now reach children as young as kindergarten and elementary-school age. Government institutions from the Kremlin to the local level, the Russian Orthodox Church, and state-owned companies are directly involved in directing and funding indoctrination and militarization programmes aimed at Ukrainian children. Ukrainian children have also been documented at camps not only in Russia but also in Belarus and in North Korea.

Deportations and Unreturned Children

Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice recorded 20,610 children as deported or forcibly transferred as of June 2026; Ukrainian authorities report that only 2,264 had been returned as of the same month. The mission concluded that the low rate of return reflects a deliberate Russian policy of preventing family reunification, forming part of a broader effort to alter the identity of Ukrainian children in Russian hands.

Legal Findings

The mission concluded that Russia’s conduct violates international humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention (on the protection of civilians) and the Hague Regulations (on occupation), and international human rights law, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It further found that the practices of systemic indoctrination and militarization may amount to a crime against humanity in the form of persecution, and endorsed prior findings that the forcible transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children may amount to the crime against humanity of deportation and forcible transfer of population, while also identifying probable war crimes including torture, inhuman treatment, and unlawful deportation of children.

Recommendations

The mission’s principal recommendation is that all stakeholders immediately, effectively, and meaningfully recognize the centrality of Ukrainian children’s safety, identity, and family life in the ongoing war and in any cease-fire or peace negotiations. It calls on the Russian Federation to halt all indoctrination and militarization practices, end coercion against children, parents, and teachers, facilitate the return of all deported children, and establish a mechanism for restoring their identity. It calls on Ukraine to continue strengthening documentation, return, reintegration, and rehabilitation systems, and calls on OSCE participating States and the wider international community to support accountability mechanisms and international cooperation to end impunity for crimes against Ukrainian children.

Ukraine’s Response

In formal comments transmitted together with the report, Ukraine welcomed the mission’s recommendations as a valuable and important basis for further action. Building on them, Ukraine set out further priority actions, including harmonizing the inter-agency methodology for recording deportation cases, expanding secure distance-learning opportunities for children in the occupied territories, introducing a unified long-term reintegration standard covering the child, the family, the school, and psychological and social services, extending sanctions to those directing and financing the transfer and “re-education” of children, continuing to submit evidence to the International Criminal Court and the Register of Damage for Ukraine, and seeking international access to the locations where Ukrainian children are held through the United Nations, UNICEF, the ICRC, and UNESCO.

“Russia isn’t running a static system. It’s an operation that has been learning, speeding up, and expanding for over a decade — and there is no sign that it is done or even slowing down,” said Prof. Stefan Wolff. “If anything, our findings show it is accelerating.”

About the Moscow Mechanism

The Moscow Mechanism, established in 1991 under the Document of the Moscow Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (now OSCE), allows participating States to establish independent expert missions to investigate serious human rights concerns on the territory of a participating State. This is the sixth expert mission invoked in relation to Ukraine since 2022. The mission’s full report was submitted on 22 June 2026, formally transmitted to OSCE participating States by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) together with Ukraine’s comments (ODIHR.GAL/34/26, 6 July 2026), and presented to the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna on 9 July 2026.

About Professor Stefan Wolff

Stefan Wolff is Professor of International Security in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, and co-founder of Navigating the Vortex. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre and a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the UK’s Political Studies Association. He specialises in the management of contemporary security challenges, especially in the prevention and settlement of ethnic conflicts, in post-conflict state-building in deeply divided and war-torn societies, and in contemporary geopolitics and great-power rivalry. Wolff has extensive expertise in the post-Soviet space and has also worked on a wide range of other conflicts elsewhere, including in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. With almost three decades of experience in UK higher education, Wolff has a publication record that includes over 100 journal articles and book chapters, as well as 24 books. He is the founding editor of Ethnopolitics and a regular international affairs contributor to The Conversation. He was one of three independent experts appointed to the Moscow Mechanism mission on the militarization and indoctrination of Ukrainian children, alongside Prof. Hervé Ascensio (University of Paris I) and Dr. Elīna Šteinerte (UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture).

Media Contact

Lucy Marcus

Co-founder, Navigating the Vortex

lucy.marcus@navigatingthevortex.com

Notes to Editors

• This release is issued by Navigating the Vortex. It is not an OSCE or ODIHR release; comment on behalf of the OSCE, ODIHR, or the mission’s other two experts should be sought directly from them.

• The mission’s full report runs to 143 pages, including annexes and the Government of Ukraine’s formal response, is available for download via the link at the bottom of this page.

• Prof. Wolff is available for interview. To arrange, please contact Lucy Marcus at lucy.marcus@navigatingthevortex.com.

• For broadcast bookings — TV chyron and Introduction and Radio introduction: “Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham, and co-founder of Navigating the Vortex.”

About Navigating the Vortex

Navigating the Vortex is a strategic analysis publication co-founded by Lucy Marcus and Stefan Wolff, covering Geopolitics & International Affairs, Corporate Governance & Stewardship, Markets & Economics, Leadership, Strategy & Power, Technology & AI, and ESG & Sustainability. Grounded in experience, written with rigour, and delivered with an ethical compass, the analysis draws on direct personal experience — boardroom, diplomatic, and academic — not produced at arm’s length from the world it covers. www.navigatingthevortex.com

OSCE Moscow Mechanism Report: Militarization and Indoctrination of Ukrainian Children by the Russian Federation

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The full 132-page mission report submitted to the OSCE Permanent Council on 9 July 2026 by Prof. Hervé Ascensio, Dr. Elīna Šteinerte, and Prof. Stefan Wolff, including the Government of Ukraine's formal response.

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It is becoming increasingly hard to take the prospects of a long-term deal to end their war seriously now that the United States and Iran are back to exchanging strikes in the Strait of Hormuz.

They concluded a round of meetings through Qatari and Pakistani mediators on Jul 1, just days after agreeing to stop tit-for-tat strikes that had continued despite a ceasefire being in place.

After US President Donald Trump dispatched his son-in-law Jared Kushner and long-time real estate business partner Steve Witkoff to the Qatari capital of Doha in expectation of high-level talks, Iran said it would not meet them.

This does not mean that the already fragile ceasefire is doomed to collapse imminently. But it raises serious questions about whether the 60-day window that the US and Iran agreed to hammer out a permanent settlement is still realistic – if it ever was.

“The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding was structurally flawed from the moment of its signing on Jun 17.”

With just over 40 days left, Iran’s refusal to engage directly with the top US negotiators certainly does not bode well. The next round of talks, to come after the late Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral, will also be indirect.

The impasse is hardly surprising. The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was structurally flawed from the moment of its signing on Jun 17.

The MOU declared “the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts” and committed the parties not to use or threaten force. But it failed to establish a robust enforcement mechanism.

A High-Level Committee tasked with political oversight was established and involves senior leaders such as US Vice President JD Vance and Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Yet, the mechanism did not function as intended when renewed hostilities broke out because of disagreements over the Strait of Hormuz.

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The MOU also fails to resolve any of the foundational disputes between Iran and the US, including over who governs the Strait of Hormuz, which is as much a question of the post-war regional order as it is one of global economic and energy security.

But it is also a question that is tied up with domestic politics. For Iran, control over the strait has long been seen as a question of sovereignty, but it had been content with using it as implied leverage – until the war let it turn the issue into a test of Iran’s claimed right to charge transit fees.

“… a bad deal that prevents escalation might be better than no deal at all. But now, it is not clear whether even a bad deal is possible.”

The MOU explicitly notes that Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, “with no charge for 60 days only” and that the future administration of the strait will be defined with Oman.

Iran and Oman have reportedly worked out a proposed arrangement to administer the strait, which includes the joint collection of administrative fees. They seem to have some way to go to hammer out the details: Iran is apparently insisting on fee levies while Oman favours voluntary contributions towards regional projects aimed at supporting the safety of waterways and protection of the maritime environment.

Either idea, however, runs counter to the views of Mr Trump, who had repeatedly insisted that there will be no fees to transit the strait.

All the hardest questions – from the conditions and timeline for sanctions relief for Iran and the release of frozen assets to the future of its nuclear programme – are also to be tackled in a final deal. Similar to the issue of transit fees, the gaps between the parties are wide and the process designed to close them far from clear.

Still, a bad deal that prevents escalation might be better than no deal at all. But now, it is not clear whether even a bad deal is possible.

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The saving grace is likely to be a provision in the MOU that allows the 60-day timeline for completing negotiations to be extended by mutual agreement.

And this may well be the enduring legacy of the MOU – not that it created a pathway to peace and stability in the region but that it allowed the US and Iran to settle into a holding pattern, preventing a further slide towards the abyss.

The MOU provides minimal guardrails that serve the interests of both Tehran and Washington while negotiations are ongoing, such as asset release and a status quo on sanctions for Iran and a toll-free gradual re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz for the US.

As both sides come to realise the complexity of resolving their substantive issues and the compromises likely required to do so, they might find living within the parameters of the MOU acceptable, even if far from ideal.

Right now, neither the US nor Iran will want to abandon the process. They could thrash out a deal in the remaining weeks or simply agree to give themselves more time to do so.

“If, or rather when, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah escalates anew, it could turn out to be the real spoiler of any American and Iranian plans.”

This might look like a viable strategy to stabilise the current volatile situation, but that is not the same as stability. There are still significant risks, the most important among them being Lebanon.

The MOU explicitly includes Lebanon as part of the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts” and states that the US and Iran also commit themselves to “ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon”.

Yet neither of the parties to that conflict – Israel and Hezbollah – is a signatory of the MOU. The extent to which Washington and Tehran exercise control over them is debatable.

This is not a sideshow to the main war, but a major arena in which a key part of the conflict over the future regional order of the Middle East will play out.

Israel and Lebanon reached a framework agreement for achieving “lasting peace and security” on Jun 26. But the ceasefire it calls for puts no real, and certainly no enforceable, obligations on Hezbollah but makes the group’s disarmament a condition for Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah immediately rejected the agreement to which it was not a party.

Ceasefire arrangements between Israel and Hezbollah have been running on an entirely separate track. Their most recent truce was agreed on Jun 19, mediated by Iran and Qatar, but leaving Lebanon out of the deal and preserving Iranian leverage.

Four thousand people killed and one million displaced in 2026 alone suggest that attempts to control the fighting in Lebanon are still far from effective. Agreements based on a logic of Hezbollah disarming and the Lebanese army assuming full control of southern Lebanon will continue to fail when there is nothing to suggest that Lebanon’s institutional capacity or Hezbollah’s attitude have changed enough to succeed.

If, or rather when, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah escalates anew, it could turn out to be the real spoiler of any American and Iranian plans. But Tehran and Washington may not even need that trigger to return to all-out war.

This analysis draws on and updates Stefan Wolff’s commentary published in Channel NewsAsia on 7 July 2026.

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For governments and businesses with material exposure to the Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean — is the Islamabad MOU’s extendable 60-day clock a genuine pathway to settlement, or a mechanism that lets Washington and Tehran defer the hardest questions indefinitely? And what happens to that calculus the day the Israel-Hezbollah track breaks again?

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The New York Times mistakes a rebrand for a transformation. The relationship between Trump and Infantino is not one of influence but rather a meeting of the minds. I diagnosed FIFA’s corruption as structural in 2014 and warned a new president would not alter it. No one fixed the structure with any permanence — and the people who could have were put on the payroll. For anyone who sits on a board or vets a partner, the mechanism of capture is the same — and the governance diagnostic is the same too.

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The New York Times published a careful, well-reported account of how Gianni Infantino spent years courting Donald Trump — but it has made the wrong call on the chicken and egg of it. The paper calls it the Trumpification of FIFA: a self-invented peace prize pressed into the president’s hands, a flirtation with a FIFA cryptocurrency, hotel-licensing deals stamped with the FIFA name, a gleaming new hub in Miami. Since publication, the relationship has produced its most concrete demonstration yet: a mid-tournament phone call that got a red card against a U.S. player reversed within a day. The reporting is sound, but the framing is wrong.

This is not the story of an upstanding institution being distorted. It is the story of an institution finding its level. FIFA did not contract Trumpism like a virus. FIFA is a body that was already transactional, already self-dealing, already a black box that wrote its own rules. It looked at this White House and recognised an institution resonating on its frequency. This is not a transformation. It is a homecoming.

The diagnosis, a decade early

I can be certain about this, because I wrote FIFA’s diagnosis down more than a decade ago — and not in a place the people who ran football could claim to have never seen it. It ran in translation, too — in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish, and a piece on the working conditions in Qatar was also translated into Italian.

In 2014, in my column for Project Syndicate, I urged FIFA to fire Sepp Blatter and rebuild its governance from the ground up, calling the organisation a black box that believed itself “immune from scrutiny” and free to “play by their own rules.” In Fortune, I wrote that the charges had not “come out of nowhere” — that FIFA “has been getting progressively worse for years,” in plain sight, while its sponsors wilfully looked away. And in a BBC column that also appeared in the World Economic Forum’s own publication — set, in other words, in front of the very executives, ministers and heads of institutions who could have forced change — I spelt out exactly what fixing it would take: an independent investigation by people the incumbents did not choose; the chair and chief-executive roles split apart; hard term limits; genuinely independent directors in the room.

I also wrote the sentence I want on the record now. Electing a new president, I warned, “won’t be enough.” Nothing short of root-and-branch structural change would do. I said it then. It came to pass — to the letter.

How much there was to fix

It is worth remembering how much there was to fix. In May 2015, Swiss police walked into the five-star Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich and led FIFA officials out through the lobby. The United States Department of Justice unsealed a sweeping racketeering case: more than 150 million dollars in bribes and kickbacks across nearly a quarter-century, dozens of officials and executives charged, the statute written for the Mafia turned on the governing body of the world’s game. Blatter — president since 1998 — was re-elected days later, then pushed toward the exit; within months he and his heir apparent, Michel Platini, were banned from football for eight years. The bidding that sent the World Cup to Russia and to Qatar left a stain that has never washed out. This was not a handful of bad actors. It was the operating system.

Reform on paper, kabuki in practice

Into that wreckage stepped a new president promising to clean house. Infantino arrived in 2016. The promise was reform. What FIFA delivered was a kabuki performance of reform.

Let the record show that FIFA did pass reforms in 2016: a twelve-year limit on the presidency, a formal split between the Council that sets strategy and the General Secretariat that runs the business, independent members on its committees, new disclosure rules. On paper, my checklist was answered. In practice, almost none of it changed the organisation. The Council is composed of elected football insiders; power is pooled, as ever, around the man at the top. And when the one hard rule met that man, the man won: in 2022, FIFA’s own Council ruled that Infantino’s first thirty-nine months “did not count” toward the term limit, clearing him to rule for fifteen years under a twelve-year cap. The structure was repainted, not rebuilt.

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Not accidents — a methodology

And the rot did not stop in 2015 — nor did it start there. The decade since reads less like a series of accidents than a methodology, and the method is old: FIFA handed the 1934 World Cup to Mussolini’s Italy and the 1978 tournament to Argentina’s junta, and the 2018 tournament to Putin’s Russia. Sportswashing is bedrock, not a recent habit.

Qatar was sold as the first “carbon-neutral” World Cup, a claim a Swiss regulator ruled false — and the 2034 World Cup was handed to Saudi Arabia without even a contest, on human-rights pledges that Amnesty International warned offered no “credible guarantees of reform.”. The real ledger was human: thousands of migrant-worker deaths in the years of construction, and a FIFA that promised remedy and then delivered a $50 million “Legacy Fund” routed to UN agencies and the World Trade Organization, with nothing for the workers a report it had itself commissioned was understood to recommend it compensate.

Even the doping scandal is, for FIFA, a scandal of looking away. When the McLaren report named Russian football inside a state doping scheme, FIFA investigated its own World Cup hosts and closed the cases against its World Cup players for “insufficient evidence,” then kicked off the tournament in Moscow. FIFA did not dope anyone. It was the body that chose not to look.

And beneath the money sits something worse. Luis Rubiales seized and kissed a player at the 2023 Women’s World Cup final and was later convicted of sexual assault. Federation presidents in both Afghanistan and Haiti were banned for life by FIFA for the sexual abuse of female players. The Afghan ban was upheld on appeal; the Haitian one — where the victims included minors at the national training centre — was quietly overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport for “insufficient evidence,” leaving the man free.

Haiti’s team is at this World Cup; its fans are barred at the United States border; the man who abused its girls is not. If you want to know what an organisation truly values, watch what it lets slide.

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The electorate on the payroll

So how does a body with this record keep going, decade after decade, scandal after scandal? The answer is almost banal.

Everyone who could discipline FIFA is paid not to — in money or in joy. Sponsors, broadcasters and host governments look away; even we, the fans, get caught up in the beautiful game and find it hard to look squarely at it. Looking would cost more than not looking.

But the machine has a specific engine, and a whistleblower’s account of how Infantino keeps his grip names it precisely. FIFA hands up to $8 million a cycle to each of its 211 member federations through its development programme — and the president controls the flow. The federations elect him; he funds them; they elect him again. He says it unabashedly from the stage: “seventy per cent of you,” he told the 2024 Congress, “would have no football without the resources coming directly from FIFA.” The electorate that is meant to hold the president to account is on his payroll. Reform that never touches the money was never going to bite.

I had named that failure too, back in 2015. Membership organisations governed only by their members, I argued in my BBC column, risk becoming an echo chamber — “a place where the self-interest of individual members overrides actions that are best for the organisation as a whole.” FIFA did not merely prove the point. It industrialised it.

Don’t mistake the man for the machine

Not everyone takes the bait, which is how you can see the machine working. When FIFA came to Chicago, the Mayor at the time, Rahm Emanuel, read the terms and walked. He would not, he said, “allow taxpayers of the city of Chicago to be dumb money,” and told FIFA to “take a hike.” The point is that walking away is the exception. The model is extraction, and it works because almost no one says no. FIFA even courted the Biden administration, which kept its distance, wary of “a scandal-tainted organisation”.

The pattern keeps confirming itself. During the tournament itself, Trump called Infantino directly to ask for a review of a red card against United States forward Folarin Balogun — and FIFA, within a day, lifted the suspension, drawing a furious response from Belgium's football federation, which called the reversal "unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable." Infantino did not deny the call took place; he said discussing World Cup matters with the U.S. president is something he does "regularly." A financial disclosure the same week showed Trump had accepted fifteen thousand dollars in FIFA tickets from Infantino, days before Infantino confirmed Trump would present the World Cup trophy himself on 19 July. Jürgen Klopp, incoming manager of Germany, put it more bluntly than any official involved: "Let's just say: this is our game, not theirs. These two people, who both have no idea about football, should have nothing to do with that." None of this required a conspiracy. It required only what the captured electorate has always required: a man at the top who understands that proximity to power is worth more than the rules on paper.

The Times is not arguing that FIFA was previously clean; its specific claim is that the Trump relationship represents something new in its particular transactional character. That is true. What the frame gets wrong is the causal direction and the significance.

So when the New York Times reads off Infantino’s flatteries — the peace prize, the FIFA coin, the mooted FIFA hotels — as evidence of a new, Trump-shaped FIFA, it mistakes the surface of a river for the riverbed. Every item is the same organisation doing the same thing it has always done: monetising proximity to power, which is its native art.

This is why the frame is not a quibble. If you believe FIFA is being Trumpified, the cure looks like removing Infantino — a clean new president, a fresh start, the reset. That is the exact error football made in 2015, the error I warned against, and the error that produced the very man the New York Times is now writing about. The disease was never the figure at the top. It is the structure beneath him — and the electorate that structure pays.

For anyone who sits on a board, prices a counterparty, vets a partner, signs off on a sponsorship, the lesson travels far beyond football. Learn to tell reform from rebranding. Reform changes the architecture: independent oversight, separated powers, term limits that bind the people who wrote them, money that cannot be turned into votes. Rebranding changes the letterhead and the friends in the photographs. When an organisation tells you it has turned a corner, do not count the new faces or admire the new mission statement. Ask whether a single line of the governance has changed and proof of genuine follow through — and whether the rules still bind the person at the top. Often enough they do not, and the company an institution keeps will tell you long before its accounts do.

The New York Times is right that FIFA is being remade in a powerful man’s image. It simply has the wrong man. FIFA was ever thus — in Zurich, in Moscow, in Doha, and now at Mar-a-Lago. It promised reform, it even legislated reform, and it counted on the world moving on. The world’s tolerance for naked self-dealing moved instead, and FIFA walked through without lowering its voice. Until someone rebuilds the architecture — and frees the electorate from the purse — the patron will keep changing and the organisation will not.

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In your own governance experience — on a board, as an investor, or inside an institution — have you seen the funding relationship and the oversight function collapse into the same hands? What made it hard to separate them once it had happened?

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Two massive Russian attacks on Kyiv in less than a week, renewed Iranian threats in the Strait of Hormuz, and a security crackdown in Turkey are just three of the immediate issues shaping the context of the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7–8.

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While Ukraine and Iran will be on the agenda of the NATO summit, the authoritarian drift of its host, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will be politely overlooked. But as ever, the summit outcome will be determined by the position of the United States.

At last year’s Hague summit, the NATO-sceptical US president, Donald Trump, was placated by the allies’ commitment to spend 5% of their GDP annually on defence by 2035. The challenge this year will be to demonstrate sufficient progress towards that goal, while also addressing Trump’s vision of “NATO 3.0” – involving, according to his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, “a balanced alliance with Europe in the lead for its own defence”.

Progress towards defence spending appears reasonably on track. In 2025 alone, the Atlantic Council notes, “European allies and Canada increased defence spending by 20% from the previous calendar year.” Six NATO allies (the three Baltic states plus Denmark, Poland and Norway) spent more on defence as a share of GDP than the US. Germany, not among that group in 2025, nonetheless has big ambitions. In absolute terms, it is now NATO’s second biggest defence spender. Germany has costed defence procurement plans that run to 2041. These will deliver, according to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Europe’s largest conventional armed forces. Merz has claimed Germany will be spending 3.5% of GDP on defence as soon as 2029.

Trump seems unable to accept that the NATO allies have made genuine progress in defence.

The allies have also made strenuous efforts to wean themselves off American-sourced defence systems. The UK’s Project Brakestop involves the development of long-range strike missiles without any US components, so creating a completely autonomous British capability. Germany is seeking to buy its own cruise missiles from Israel and Ukraine as a substitute for the deployment US-owned Tomahawks. And in a highly symbolic move (likely to be announced at the summit) the Nato procurement agency will purchase a fleet of Swedish-built SAAB GlobalEye surveillance aircraft to replace its ageing American-made Boeing E-3A AWACS.

But bumps in the road remain. Whereas in 2025, all the NATO allies (bar Iceland, which has no armed forces) met NATO’s 2024 standard of spending 2% of GDP on defence, this will not be repeated in 2026. The Czech government and Hungary are likely to dip below the target. And many spending commitments still need to translate into concrete capabilities.

Europe’s defence industries are working flat out but are at the limits of how fast they can absorb new investment. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte has spoken of an “absorption problem”: the inability of Europe’s defence manufacturers to keep up with the levels of projected spending.

The success of the summit may just be down to luck and the volatile mood of the US president.

Cross-national coordination also remains a problem. Disagreement between Frances’s Dassault Aviation and Airbus (incorporating a German and Spanish stake) led in June to the abandonment of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), the €100 billion (£86 billion) joint fighter jet project launched in 2017 as the flagship expression of Franco-German defence ambition.

The success of the summit may just be down to luck and the volatile mood of the US president. Trump seems unable to accept that the NATO allies have made genuine progress in defence. He claimed just days before departing for Ankara it was “ridiculous” that the US continues to support a “one-sided” NATO. That grievance appears to be one reason the meeting may withdraw its endorsement of Albania – a low-spending NATO member – as the 2027 summit venue.

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Things could also prove tricky on another of Trump’s pet complaints – the lack of NATO support for the US-Israeli war with Iran. The NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte (who chairs the summit), seems determined to avoid getting too deeply into discussion of the situation.

But if it does intrude, safety will likely be found in the formulation recently agreed by the G7 – welcoming the US-Iran deal, condemning Iran’s nuclear ambitions and supporting a Franco-British led maritime operation in the Strait of Hormuz. Don’t expect a NATO coordinating role in any operation, however. On that, there is no allied consensus.

There will be greater scope at the summit for dealing with Russia’s war against Ukraine and the broader threat to European security that emanates from the Kremlin. The Trump administration has grown increasingly distrusting of Putin and, in parallel, more impressed with the Ukrainian war effort.

This has translated into some positives for Ukraine: the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, will be at the summit, attending the Nato-Ukraine Council and the Ukraine Defence Contact (Ramstein) Group meetings, which coordinate western support for Ukraine.

He will be hoping for more concrete commitments similar to British and German defence packages for Ukraine both announced as part of $60 billion pledge of support for Ukraine at the April meeting of the Ramstein Group in Berlin or the additional air defence provisions to which allies committed at the subsequent meeting in Brussels in June. NATO’s Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative, launched last summer, has also already been a big success in keeping arms and other military aid flowing to Ukraine.

… a pathway to NATO accession for Ukraine will not be spelled out at the summit.

That initiative will be reaffirmed at Ankara, signalling a clear commitment to support for Ukraine from Europe and the deepening of Ukraine-Europe defence links – and at least tolerance by the White House for these efforts, which cannot always be taken for granted, as is evident in Trump’s frequent flip-flopping on sanctions against Russia. What it does not signal is that Ukrainian Nato membership will be on the agenda anytime soon. The US is adamantly against it. So, a pathway to NATO accession for Ukraine will not be spelled out at the summit.

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Other items missing from the agenda at Ankara will also reflect the Trump administration’s priorities. It’s no surprise that climate change and Women Peace and Security – a UN-led initiative which recognises and fosters women’s contribution to peacekeeping – have fallen out of favour. Both issues figured in NATO communiques during the Biden period – both disappeared from last year’s Hague summit declaration. Don’t expect a mention at Ankara, despite the fact that some allies continue to press. The British see themselves as champions of WPS initiatives in the alliance, but American diffidence has killed progress. Nato’s agreed WPS Action Plan timed out in 2025; a new one is not in sight. In 2021, Nato adopted a Climate Change and Security Action Plan. One of its few deliverables was an annual Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment. That document has not appeared since 2024.

These omissions are readily explicable. More curious, though, is the lowered priority given to China. NATO’s 2019 London declaration contained NATO’s first ever summit-level statement on China, recognising that the nation’s growing influence brought challenges as well as opportunities – a move engineered by the first Trump administration. Then, Nato’s relevance to the United States was judged by how it was positioned in the emerging era of “strategic competition.” Under Biden a similar logic applied, reinforced by the 2024 Washington summit’s description of China as the “decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine.2 And yet China disappeared from the 2025 Hague declaration. It was not discussed at Nato’s recent foreign and defence ministerials. Neither is it expected to figure at Ankara.

Why not? The Trump administration’s recent efforts at accommodation with China are part of the answer. Other allies too are happy to see China sidelined from NATO’s business. France, easily perturbed by a globalist NATO, had always been a sceptic when it comes to including China in NATO’s agenda. Many east European allies, meanwhile, see a China focus as distracting NATO from Russia. And big exporters like Germany need to keep Beijing sweet, given the shrinkage of their Russian market.

There will be anxiety and histrionics at Ankara. Trump is not the only big political personality who will be in town. The summit host, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will also want to promote a particular vision of Nato and contemporary security challenges. The summit declaration, like that of 2025, will be short to avoid controversy. But like an iceberg, much lies below the surface. The detailed work of moving to “Nato 3.0” was already agreed at the Nato defence ministerial in mid June. Most of the gaps in the Nato Force Model occasioned by recent US force announcements have already been plugged.

The summit will give rise to much noise, but NATO’s ongoing adaptation to the new reality engendered by shifting US priorities suggests a high degree of underlying resilience.

This analysis draws on Mark Webber’s and Stefan Wolff’s article, published in The Conversation on 6 July 2026.

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If record European defence spending still can’t be converted into fielded capability fast enough to matter, is the 5%-by-2035 pledge solving the right problem — or the easiest one to measure?

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The G7 summit at Evian from June 15 to 17 is most revealing not for what was agreed, but for what was exposed about the state of play among Europeans, and their relationship with the US. For all the choreography and displays of unity, the summit was, in large part, theatre. It was an attempt to paper over what is becoming increasingly obvious: many of the most critical international issues are now decided without the EU. Brussels is now, at best, an informed bystander.

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This was obvious when the US president, Donald Trump, signed a physical copy of his deal with Iran at a post-G7 dinner at the Palace of Versailles hosted by Emmanuel Macron. It was a diplomatic coup for France, rather than a plan hatched by the EU.

The G7 produced nine joint declarations and seemingly reaffirmed more than just the bare minimum of western unity that has been possible of late. The leaders’ statement on geopolitical issues included strong language on Ukraine. The G7 promised “to increase the delivery of air defence capacities, additional systems and interceptors, and long-range capabilities” and “to increase the pressure on the Russian war economy”.

Yet, the statement fell short on concrete provisions and timelines. And it notably lacked the commitment to the “robust and legally binding security guarantees” and “the deployment of the Multinational Force – Ukraine” that France, Germany and the UK (the “E3”) had emphasised in their joint declaration with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky on June 7.

The E3 and Ukraine mini-summit showed European diplomatic coordination at its most effective. Évian, by contrast, showed how little of that coordination carries into the decisions that ultimately matter.

The spectacle of European leaders publicly repudiating their own council president will have given Moscow the satisfaction of knowing that Europe still cannot speak with a single voice.

Europe’s struggle for relevance is particularly obvious in relation to Ukraine. The last meaningful – if hardly constructive – negotiations occurred in the so-called “Geneva track” in February, mediated by Trump’s Witkoff-Kushner team (which was simultaneously involved in talks with Iran). But while Witkoff reported “meaningful progress”, Zelensky commented that “on the political track there was dialogue [but not] the same level of progress … as on the military side.” Zelensky also called for Europeans to be involved in the next round of talks, which had originally been scheduled to take place in Abu Dhabi but were cancelled in the wake of war with Iran.

Meanwhile, Europe’s own efforts also failed. Putin immediately rejected the call from E3 and Ukraine for direct talks. This rejection was further reinforced in a June 19 essay penned by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, accusing Europe of complicity in the 2014 political crisis in Ukraine which ousted the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and, in Lavrov’s view, precipitated the conflict. He added that the Europeans had subsequently sabotaged any attempts at peace.

By the time Lavrov’s essay appeared, the EU was already at loggerheads with itself. Earlier that day, EU leaders gathering for a summit in Brussels discovered that António Costa, the European Council president, had instructed his office to reach out to the Kremlin — without consulting member states — to lay the groundwork for potential peace negotiations with Russia over Ukraine. Their reaction ranged from surprise to outrage. Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and Macron both publicly pushed back against Costa. Macron stated that “he [Costa] cannot represent [EU states] when security guarantees are at stake”.

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The episode was damaging for reasons that go well beyond procedural embarrassment. The spectacle of European leaders publicly repudiating their own council president will have given Moscow the satisfaction of knowing that Europe still cannot speak with a single voice.

The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, tried to bring the messaging under control. At her press conference after the EU leaders’ summit, she noted that “sooner or later Russia will need to come to the negotiating table, and when that comes we need a united European message to President Putin”. That ambition, however, contrasts sharply with the reality of the earlier Costa episode.

Diplomatic embarrassment is not the only issue when it comes to how quickly Europe will be able to close the persistent gap between ambition and reality.

On June 8, the German government formalised its withdrawal from the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), the €100 billion (£86 billion) joint fighter jet project launched in 2017 as the flagship expression of Franco-German defence ambition. FCAS also included engines, sensors and a digital intelligence network known as “combat cloud”.

One point of contention was reportedly the role played by French aerospace giant Dassault. Germany wanted more leadership of a project in which the main partners are had divergent visions of the end product.

This Germany aspiration to “lead or substantially shape” future European air combat systems may seem rational given the country’s financial muscle and engineering prowess. With more than €750 billion committed to rebuilding its armed forces by 2030, Germany’s instinct that this investment should produce proportionate industrial and strategic leadership is understandable. But when applied to European defence cooperation, it is counterproductive.

While European states, including Germany, have repeatedly stressed the need for collective action on defence, there is a repeated fallback on national initiatives. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Europe continues to struggle to effectively coordinate efforts.

Europe’s ambition … for strategic autonomy or “going it alone”… is not matched with an ability to act coherently.

In a development that neatly illustrates this point, on June 20 the UK unveiled three prototype long-range strike missiles built without any US-manufactured components. The product of an 18-month programme known as Project Brakestop, the explicit purpose of developing this capability is to remove Washington’s ability to veto their deployment in Ukraine.

On the positive side, the UK’s ability to pull this off is commendable. It encapsulates the transformation in European thinking about the transatlantic relationship under Trump – and the capability to follow through on this. But as an act of strengthening European strategic sovereignty, it falls short. It is British rather than European.

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Europe’s ambition to rise to the simultaneous challenges of Trump’s transactionalism and Putin’s adventurism has been stated loudly and clearly on more than one occasion over the past 18 months or so. This ambition is most commonly expressed in the quest for strategic autonomy or “going it alone”. But it is not matched with an ability to act coherently.

This analysis draws on the article by Richard Whitman and Stefan Wolff published in The Conversation on 25 June 2026.

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Germany has committed over €750 billion to national rearmament by 2030, while simultaneously withdrawing from FCAS — the continent’s largest joint defence project. If Europe’s biggest economy is choosing national industrial leadership over cooperative architecture, what does that mean for the strategic autonomy project? Is European strategic sovereignty achievable through national rearmament alone, or does it require a fundamentally different approach to joint procurement and command structures?

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The AI Frame War — Part 4 of 4

This is Part 4 of The AI Frame War, a four-part PDQ series. Part 1 mapped where major governments stand after June 2026’s pivotal moves — and identified Colorado’s AI Act as the most rights-protective operative framework in the US. Part 2 examined the two models competing for the world’s uncommitted governments, and described Colorado as holding the rights line inside a country whose federal government was moving in the opposite direction. Part 3 used Canada as the clearest case study in how a democracy makes that choice under pressure — and chose growth over rights. This fourth piece covers the American exception that no longer exists. Each piece stands on its own; read together they map the AI frame war — and how the terrain shifted in one defining month.

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On 14 May 2026, Governor Jared Polis signed SB 26-189, which repeals Colorado’s original AI Act and replaces it with a disclosure-based framework that contains none of the rights-protective mechanisms the original law was built around. The rights-frame exception inside US federal AI policy — the thread this series identified as the most consequential internal contradiction in American AI governance — is gone. What follows is not an account of how Colorado was defeated in court. It is an account of how Colorado made a political choice, what drove that choice, and what it tells every board about the structural resilience of rights-based AI governance when it faces organised pressure.

1. Colorado didn’t wait to be defeated — it chose its exit.

The sequence matters. On 9 April 2026, xAI filed a federal lawsuit challenging SB 205 on constitutional grounds. On 24 April, the Department of Justice intervened to support xAI’s position, arguing SB 205’s disclosure requirements constituted compelled speech and its algorithmic discrimination provisions imposed impermissible race- and sex-conscious obligations. On 27 April, a federal magistrate blocked enforcement of SB 205. Colorado’s legislature introduced a replacement bill on 1 May. Polis signed it thirteen days later. The court never ruled on the substantive constitutional questions. Colorado moved before it had to.

Governor Polis had flagged concerns about SB 205 before the lawsuit existed. When the lawsuit, DOJ backing, and a court order arrived simultaneously, the political cost of defending the law crystallised — and turned out higher than the political cost of replacing it. The federal apparatus did not need to win in court. It needed to make the political calculation clear, and Colorado did the rest.

For boards and governance teams: the lesson is not that rights frameworks cannot survive litigation. It is that a rights framework survives only if the political cost of abandoning it is higher than the political cost of defending it. That threshold is set by how deeply entrenched the framework is — and Colorado’s SB 205, a statute eighteen months old, contested from both industry and civil society, never yet enforced, did not clear it.

2. Formal preemption was never needed — the mechanism is the message.

The Trump administration’s strategy was explicit from its December 2025 executive order: challenge conflicting state AI laws through litigation, develop a preemptive national framework, treat strong state governance as regulatory friction. That strategy did not require Congress to pass preemption legislation. It required one lawsuit from a well-resourced company, DOJ backing, and a court order. Colorado supplied the rest.

The White House’s March 2026 National Policy Framework for AI recommended that Congress broadly preempt state AI laws deemed to impose “undue burdens.” Congress has not acted. It didn’t need to. The informal preemption — executive order, lawsuit, DOJ intervention, court block, replacement legislation — produced the same result without a single vote on Capitol Hill.

What this means for any jurisdiction watching: a rights framework that has not passed into deep institutional structures — enforcement infrastructure, board-level compliance obligations, political constituencies whose interests are now bound to the framework — is vulnerable to exactly this sequence. The EU AI Act has survived because unwinding it is more expensive than complying with it. That pressure from economic competitiveness agendas is real — but the EU AI Act has passed the point where economic argument alone can reverse it: enforcement infrastructure, compliance investment, and political constituencies are already embedded. A state statute facing its first lawsuit, with an unenthusiastic governor and an organised federal opposition, does not enjoy that protection.

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3. Canada and Colorado reached the same destination by different routes.

Part 3 of this series documented how Canada abandoned AIDA — a rights-based AI bill cleared for committee passage — under three structural forces: economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and legislative convenience. No democratic vote against rights governance. No constitutional defeat. A political mechanism — prorogation — resolved it without requiring either side to win the argument.

Colorado’s route was different: executive order, lawsuit, DOJ intervention, court block, replacement statute. But the destination is identical. Both jurisdictions had rights-based AI frameworks. Both chose lighter alternatives before those frameworks took full legal effect. Neither required a democratic mandate against the rights approach — both were resolved through political mechanisms that bypassed the contest the rights frame needed in order to win.

Read Canada not as a country that changed its mind, and Colorado not as a state that lost a legal fight. Read both as case studies in the structural conditions under which rights-based AI governance fails to entrench before pressure arrives. Those conditions — economic exposure, US-alignment pressure, frameworks that have not hardened into institutional infrastructure — are present in more than a dozen other democracies. The pattern is not coincidental. It is the operating logic of the industrial frame.

4. The US has defaulted to the industrial frame — what that means for your organisation.

SB 26-189, which Polis signed on 14 May, takes effect 1 January 2027. It contains disclosure requirements and consumer notification rights for automated decision-making technology. It does not contain risk tiers, mandatory impact assessments, algorithmic discrimination duties, or enforcement provisions comparable to the original Act. As of today, there is no operative state AI rights framework in the United States. The Federal Executive Order of 2 June 2026 — “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security,” EO 14409 — establishes voluntary benchmarking frameworks for frontier AI models and prioritises cybersecurity measures. Voluntary. No mandatory impact assessments. No consumer rights of appeal. No board-level accountability obligations.

For organisations that have been building AI governance to Colorado’s standard for US market coverage: that standard no longer exists in the form you were building to. The floor you were planning around has been replaced by a disclosure obligation that takes effect in six months.

The practical implication is clear: if you are building AI governance to protect your organisation’s position across markets, the relevant rights-framework standards are the EU AI Act, South Korea’s AI Basic Act (in force January 2026), and — for certain sectors like financial services and healthcare — UK and Australian frameworks. If you have built to those standards, you are ahead. The “build to the strictest applicable standard” default that Part 2 of this series identified as the pragmatic corporate position now has an unambiguous answer in the US context: the strictest US standard is the EU AI Act, applicable to any system making consequential decisions about people in EU markets.

5. The contest is not over — but which rights frameworks are robust enough to plan around has become a more specific question.

Neither Canada nor Colorado represent the end of the rights frame’s prospects. South Korea’s AI Basic Act took effect January 2026 and covers a genuinely competitive AI economy — proof that the rights model can take root and hold outside Europe. Brazil’s AI legislation remains in progress. The EU AI Act is generating enforcement activity and compliance infrastructure across markets. The democratic rights coalition is smaller than it was in June — but it has not disappeared.

What has changed is the answer to a precise question: which rights frameworks are structurally robust enough so that you can plan your governance around them for the next five years? The evidence from the last six weeks suggests the answer requires two conditions. First, deep institutional entrenchment: not just statutory text, but enforcement infrastructure, board-level compliance structures, and political constituencies whose interests are now bound to the framework’s survival. Second, insulation from the three structural forces Part 3 named — economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and legislative convenience — which together make the political cost of abandonment lower than the political cost of defence.

On those two tests, the EU AI Act and South Korea pass. Canada’s AIDA and Colorado’s SB 205 did not. For boards making AI governance investment decisions now: that is the distinction to apply to every jurisdiction in your operating footprint. Not “is there a rights-based law in progress?” but “has it hardened into the kind of institutional structure that survives a well-funded legal challenge and an unsympathetic federal government?” If the answer is no — plan for the floor to move, and build above it regardless. A governance framework built only to the statutory minimum, without institutional depth, does not hold — as Colorado just demonstrated.

Four articles. Four moves. One month that redrew AI governance.

Part 1 mapped the split: two AI governance frames both operative in June 2026, the world’s governments dividing between them, no global standard yet settled. Part 2 showed what the two models mean for every organisation — the fiduciary bet every board is already making, whether it knows it or not. Part 3 showed how Canada, under economic pressure and US-alignment pull, chose the industrial frame over a rights bill that had cleared committee — and named the three structural forces that made abandonment the rational political choice. This fourth piece shows how Colorado made the same choice by a different mechanism: not prorogation and legislative lapse, but a well-funded corporate lawsuit, a DOJ intervention, a court order, and thirteen days of legislative action.

The pattern across all four is the same: rights frameworks that are not deeply institutionally entrenched do not survive sustained pressure. Canada’s bill died in committee; Colorado’s act lasted months before organised federal and corporate opposition replaced it. What survived — the EU AI Act, South Korea’s AI Basic Act — did so because those frameworks have reached the stage where abandonment is no longer cheap. They have generated compliance infrastructure, enforcement expectations, board-level accountability, and political constituencies whose interests are now bound to the framework’s survival. The cost of unwinding them is higher than the cost of complying with them. That is what entrenchment means in practice.

The rights frame did not lose the AI governance contest in June 2026. It lost two of its most visible champions, in two different countries, in four weeks, through two different mechanisms. That is not the same thing as losing the contest. The contest remains open. But the field is smaller — and the lesson of what just happened is precise: in the AI frame war, the question is never just which framework your jurisdiction has adopted. It is whether that framework is built to survive the pressure that arrives when the stakes get high enough. On current evidence, there are two answers to that question. Build to the EU AI Act and South Korea standards. Everything else is provisional.

Which of the two survival conditions — deep institutional entrenchment, or insulation from the three structural forces this series named (economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and legislative convenience) — is harder to achieve in the jurisdictions your organisation operates in? And does your board’s AI governance strategy account for the possibility that the floor moves before it takes full effect?

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That is The AI Frame War — the map, the models, the pivot, the choice. Four pieces that together trace how the structure of the AI governance contest shifted more in one month than in the two years before it. We hope you will read it, share it with colleagues, and that it helps guide your thinking when addressing these issues.

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The AI Frame War — Part 3 of 4

This is Part 3 of The AI Frame War, a four-part Navigating the Vortex PDQ series. Part 1 mapped where governments stand after June 2026’s pivotal moves. Part 2 examined the two models now in direct contest for the world’s uncommitted governments. This piece shows how one democracy made that choice in real time — and what the sequence reveals about how every democracy will have to make that choice. Part 4 (tomorrow) covers the American exception: Colorado’s AI Act vs. the federal Executive Order. Each piece stands on its own; read together they map the AI frame war.

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On 4 June 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney launched ‘AI for All’, Canada’s new national artificial intelligence strategy. The $2.3 billion industrial plan targets a lift in AI adoption from just over 12% of businesses — below the OECD average — to 60% by 2034. What AI for All does not contain is binding AI legislation. The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act — AIDA — which had cleared committee in Parliament, will not be revived. The rights frame was not defeated. It was abandoned. And the three forces that drove that abandonment — economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and legislative convenience — are present in more than a dozen other democracies right now.

Parts 1 and 2 of this series mapped the global AI-regulation landscape and the contest between the EU’s rights model and the US industrial model. This piece uses Canada as the clearest available case study in how that choice is made in practice: what collapsed, what replaced it, and what the sequence tells every board operating outside the EU.

1. AIDA’s death was procedural, not principled — and that’s the point.

AIDA was Part III of Bill C-27, the Digital Charter Implementation Act, introduced in June 2022 alongside the Consumer Privacy Protection Act. It passed a second reading and was referred to committee in April 2023, where it remained — contested by civil society and industry alike — as Parliament worked through proposed amendments. When Prime Minister Trudeau prorogued Parliament on 6 January 2025, all pending legislation died on the order paper, including both AIDA and the accompanying privacy reform. The prorogation was triggered by a political crisis. But what it created was an opportunity — and the Carney government, elected in April 2025, chose not to restore it.

The position was confirmed after AI for All’s launch: the strategy “does not introduce comprehensive AI legislation in Canada, and confirms that such legislation is, for now, not contemplated. The previously tabled AIDA is unlikely to be revived.” The rights frame did not lose an argument. It lost a political moment, and then a political choice followed. Those are different things — and regulators in every jurisdiction that has rights-based AI legislation in its pipeline should read the distinction carefully.

2. This is a story about executive power over regulatory design.

A rights agenda that had passed out of committee was overridden by an executive reorientation. This matters beyond Canada because the mechanism is structural, not idiosyncratic: any rights commitment in AI governance is only as durable as its political entrenchment. Passed legislation is more durable than strategy; legislation hardened into institutional structures is more durable still. The EU AI Act, which is now in force and generating compliance obligations across markets, represents deep entrenchment. A bill at committee stage does not.

The Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) review sharpens this point. Canada is currently renegotiating its trade relationship with the United States. In March 2026, the US Trade Representative’s annual trade estimate report named Canada’s digital sovereignty measures as trade barriers for the first time — a signal that Washington intends to treat strong AI governance as a friction to be negotiated away. Canada entered those talks without binding AI legislation. The executive that might have defended a rights framework instead launched an industrial strategy. For boards whose operating jurisdictions have AI rights legislation in progress but not yet entrenched, the Canadian sequence is a risk template: the window between ‘cleared committee’ and ‘hardened into law’ is when executive reversal costs the least.

3. Three forces drove the pivot, and none is unique to Canada.

The first is economic lag. Statistics Canada recorded that 12.2% of businesses were using AI in the second quarter of 2025 — below the OECD average, and behind the UK (20.5%) and Germany (19.75%) among its fastest-accelerating G7 peers. Canada’s own SME AI Adoption Blueprint, prepared for the G7, documented that gap and made closing it the central case for urgency. A government looking at those numbers and at a rights-based legislative framework that had attracted sustained criticism from both industry and civil society made a rational political calculation.

The second is US-alignment pressure. Canada’s trade exposure to the United States is structural — roughly 75% of Canadian exports go south. The CUSMA 2026 review was live when AI for All launched. The US Trade Representative had named Canada’s digital sovereignty measures as trade barriers three months earlier. An AI rights framework that Washington would treat as a trade friction was a harder political sell in that environment than an industrial strategy aligned with the direction the US had already set at federal level.

The third is legislative convenience. AIDA was not a standalone bill. It was packaged inside C-27 alongside the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, which had its own critics and its own contested history. Letting the whole bill die cleared a thorny legislative agenda without requiring the government to defeat either part on its merits. The political cost of abandonment was low. The political cost of revival, during a CUSMA negotiation, was considerably higher.

The combination of these three forces — economic urgency, trade-relationship alignment, and legislative convenience — is not specific to Canada’s geography, government, or political history. They are structural features of any other democracy with deep US trade exposure, a growth gap to close, and AI rights legislation that has not yet passed into law.

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4. Every democracy is watching — but not from the same position.

The governments most exposed to the same three forces are not a uniform bloc, and their varying responses matter for understanding which way the contest goes next. South Korea chose the opposite direction. Its AI Basic Act — the Asia-Pacific’s first comprehensive AI law — was promulgated in January 2025 and took effect on 22 January 2026. It establishes national governance structures, trustworthiness requirements, and binding obligations for high-impact AI systems in healthcare, energy, and public services. South Korea has large, globally competitive domestic AI-capable firms that might have argued for the industrial model. It chose rights-focused governance anyway. That shows the EU rights model is genuinely competitive in Asia, not only in Europe — it is not losing by default.

Australia is heading Canada’s way. In September 2024, the Australian government proposed ten mandatory guardrails for high-risk AI uses — a clear trajectory toward binding legislation. By December 2025, it had abandoned them, confirming that existing laws and sector regulators would carry the load, supported by voluntary guidance and an AI Safety Institute with advisory functions and no enforcement powers. In early 2026, Australia signed an AI safety cooperation agreement with Canada. Even if the pivot was quieter, the direction of travel is the same.

Singapore has taken a third path: voluntary, pragmatic, and deliberately non-binding. Its Model AI Governance Framework has been progressively extended; in January 2026 it published the world’s first governance framework specifically for agentic AI. There is no binding legislation. The posture is “show don’t mandate” — a framework that establishes Singapore as a reference jurisdiction without the compliance costs that would follow a binding AI Act, keeping its options open as the contest develops.

Brazil holds a rights-leaning position — it appeared as part of the rights coalition in Part 2 of this series — but its exposure to US trade pressure and a domestic growth gap that mirrors Canada’s create the same structural pressures. Its AI legislation is in progress, not yet entrenched. The three forces that drove Canada’s pivot are present. The timing is the only difference.

What the variation across these four governments shows is that the contest is genuinely open. The EU rights model can take root outside Europe — South Korea’s binding legislation proves it. But the Canadian template is already replicating in Australia. The question is which template spreads faster.

5. ‘Trust’ inside an industrial strategy is not a rights framework.

Canada’s AI for All positions trust as the strategy’s “north star.” Its first pillar — Protecting Canadians and Safeguarding Democracy — commits the government to legislation on deepfakes, AI-generated content labelling, and children’s safety online. A $50 million commitment funds the Canadian AI Safety Institute. The language of protection, responsibility, and accountability runs through the document.

None of it is equivalent to AIDA. AIDA would have imposed binding obligations on developers and deployers of high-impact AI systems: mandatory impact assessments, risk-management frameworks, documented human oversight requirements, and serious adverse incident reporting. Contravention carried penalties of up to 3% of global revenue. AI for All contains none of those mechanisms.

The distinction matters. Trust that enables adoption means trust that AI systems are reliable, accurate, and available — a design principle, enforced through reputational pressure and market incentives. Trust that constrains harm means a legal right to challenge a consequential AI decision — a compliance obligation with enforcement teeth. Only one gives a citizen a legal claim. Only one gives an organisation a defined liability exposure that its board must govern.

Industrial strategies consistently adopt the vocabulary of rights frameworks, because doing so reduces the political cost of departing from them. The word ‘trust’ in AI for All is not incidental. It is precisely the term that makes an industrial strategy sound like a continuation of a rights agenda when it is not. Every democracy that pivots will call its first pillar something like ‘trust’ or ‘responsible AI’ or ‘safe and beneficial deployment.’ Reading those phrases as equivalent to a rights framework is the category error the frame war is engineered to produce.

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Read Canada not as a country changing its mind, but as the conditions under which any democracy could or would.

The three forces — economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and the political cost of defending rights legislation through a trade negotiation — are structural. They apply wherever growth lags, US trade exposure is real, and AI rights legislation has not yet hardened into institutional structures that survive executive reorientation. Canada did not invent a new political logic. It followed an old one.

The question for boards operating outside the EU is not whether your jurisdiction will face this choice. It will. The question is whether your organisation’s governance framework is built to the standard that survives the pivot — or only to the standard your jurisdiction currently requires. Those two standards are not the same when the political weather changes. In Canada, the weather just changed.

The three forces that drove Canada’s choice — economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and the political cost of defending rights legislation through elections — are present in some degree in every OECD jurisdiction. Which of these is most visible in your sector or region right now, and does that change how your board thinks about AI governance?

Tomorrow — Part 4: America is the only democracy fighting its own government over AI. Colorado just made it official.

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