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Over the past month, there has been a notable increase in the intensity of the air war in Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Strikes in mid- and late-May and early June have been characterised by significantly larger numbers of drones and missiles deployed by Russia in single attacks, leading to more destruction and more casualties.

At the same time, Russian territorial gains on the ground have slowed significantly, and in some cases have been reversed by successful Ukrainian counter-attacks.

The change in intensity in the air war, however, is what generates headlines, and for good reason. Two consecutive Russian attacks on May 13 and 14 were the largest in the war to date.

Ten days later, a similar strike hit Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. And a week after that, Russia launched yet another large-scale strike.

Just focusing on the Russian strikes, however, masks an important pattern of increasingly effective Ukrainian retaliation.

This series of Russian and Ukrainian airstrikes represents a high-intensity retaliation cycle. Ukraine responds to a Russian strike, which Moscow then uses to justify its next massive strike, and so on.

The first Russian attack in May was followed by Ukrainian strikes on the Moscow region. The second one saw Ukrainian strikes on St Petersburg on June 3, just before Vladimir Putin’s St Petersburg International Economic Forum was due to begin there.

At the same time, Ukraine has also intensified its strikes on Crimea and critical Russian supply lines to the peninsula, which Moscow has illegally occupied since 2014.

This series of Russian and Ukrainian airstrikes represents a high-intensity retaliation cycle. Ukraine responds to a Russian strike, which Moscow then uses to justify its next massive strike, and so on.

What is new is both the scale of the Russian strikes, with larger numbers of drones and missiles compared even with the peak of attacks in late 2025, and the quickening cycle of these tit-for-tat attacks.

Ukrainian attacks deep into Russia are no longer just symbolic but highly effective – prompting Russia to accuse Ukraine of a terror campaign, in an attempt to deflect from its own systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure.

In their levels of destruction and civilian casualties, the Russian strikes also seem more effective than in the past – and Ukraine’s air defences less so. But this is only partially true. Ukraine’s intercept rate of drones remains high. However, the larger number of drones being deployed by Russia means that, in absolute numbers, more drones hit their targets.

Russia has also deployed more missiles in recent strikes, which Ukraine finds harder to intercept – not least because its stockpiles of anti-missile defences have been depleted over time, with the decrease in US support since Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025. The recent diversion of US interceptors to the American war effort in the Middle East has also run down the stocks of these defence systems that are available to Kyiv.

Russia has thus been presented with an opportunity it is ruthlessly exploiting. But how sustainable is the current pattern?

The scale and frequency of the past four weeks is probably beyond Russia’s capacity to sustain indefinitely. While still large in scale, the strikes in late May and early June did not involve the same number of munitions as the first wave.

Russia is clearly able to mass-produce cheap attack drones, but less able to do the same for missiles. So, sustaining larger-scale attacks over time is likely to decrease their frequency, while more frequent attacks will mean a more limited scale.

A mixture of the two is most likely – a sustained campaign of frequent massed drone strikes, with intermittent spikes of large missile barrages.

Sustaining larger-scale attacks over time is likely to decrease their frequency, while more frequent attacks will mean a more limited scale.

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While this may be a sustainable attack pattern for Russia, it does not mean the current level of effectiveness is equally sustainable. Ukrainian air defences will adapt and become more effective, including against Russian missiles.

Kyiv’s defence cooperation with the EU is simultaneously also improving. The lifting of Hungary’s veto on €40 billion (£34.6bn) of EU reimbursements for military support is likely to free additional funds to supply critical air defence systems to Ukraine.

Even with a sustained Russian air campaign, a manageable equilibrium is likely to set in over time. But critically, this will not merely be characterised by better Ukrainian defences against Russian attacks – but also by more effective Ukrainian strikes at Moscow’s critical war infrastructure.

The Russian air campaign, and the war against Ukraine more generally, will thus become more costly for the Kremlin, and not just on the battlefield inside Ukraine.

Whether this simply creates a different stalemate at a more costly level for both sides in their ongoing war of attrition, or prompts them to reassess their exit strategies, remains to be seen.

For Moscow, there is a hard choice to be made: towards escalation, including potential nuclear mobilisation, or towards a peace deal. The middle ground of simply continuing with his campaign as is is quickly eroding, because none of Putin’s strategic goals in the war can be achieved this way, and the ongoing waste of resources cannot be sustained indefinitely.

The middle ground of simply continuing with his campaign as is is quickly eroding, because none of Putin’s strategic goals in the war can be achieved this way.

On the Ukrainian side, the statement by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that Ukraine’s recent strikes on Russia put the country on an equal footing with Moscow in negotiations, hints at Kyiv’s willingness to negotiate an end to the war directly with Moscow. However, it may take several more rounds in the air campaign retaliation cycle before the Kremlin reaches a similar conclusion.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s and Tetyana Malyarenko’s article published in The Conversation on 4 June 2026.

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Stefan and Tetyana argue that Moscow’s middle ground — continuing the ongoing war of attrition — is “quickly eroding.” Zelensky has already signalled negotiating readiness. What would it take for the Kremlin to reach a similar conclusion — and does the currently escalating retaliation cycle make that moment more or less likely?

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Armenia's parliamentary elections on 7 June are often framed as a binary choice between Russia and the West. In reality, the outcome will shape the country's evolving relationship with Russia, the West, and its neighbours in the strategically important South Caucasus — a region at a crucial north-south and east-west crossroads, and one whose geopolitical significance extends far beyond its borders.

At stake first is the future of incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party government, which came to power in 2018 after the Velvet Revolution. That movement ousted the government of long-term leader Serzh Sarkisian, who had tried to prolong his stay in power by moving from the office of president to that of prime minister — triggering nation-wide protests that propelled Pashinyan to the premiership in May 2018 and to electoral victory that December.

Under Pashinyan, who was re-elected in 2021, Armenia has generally gravitated towards the European Union and away from Russia. That drift is mostly the consequence of Russia's failure to support Armenia during the Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. The offensive resulted in Azerbaijan retaking control of the territory — which Armenia had illegally occupied since the first Karabakh war in the early 1990s — and causing the displacement of around 100,000 Armenians from the region. These events unfolded in the presence of Russian "peacekeepers" deployed under the ceasefire agreement that ended the second Karabakh war in 2020.

Pashinyan is now campaigning on a platform to reopen the country's borders, lower dependence on Russia, and diversify its foreign and economic profile by normalising relations with traditional adversaries Azerbaijan and Turkey. If he secures another term, it would give him the mandate to carry out a major shift in Armenia's foreign policy orientation. In that sense, these elections amount to a strategic referendum on Armenia's geopolitical orientation.

Armenia's elections are often framed as a choice between Russia and the West. In reality, the outcome will shape a far more complex set of relationships — including with its neighbours.

Reordering the South Caucasus

A popular endorsement of Pashinyan's agenda would enable the continuation of three important trends in the region: first, the gradual emergence of regional ties between Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; second, further declining Russian influence in a region where Moscow was once the undisputed hegemonic power; and third, a strengthening foothold for the EU and the US in a strategically important land bridge towards Central Asia and China.

The relationship between Moscow and Yerevan has steadily deteriorated over the past decade. Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the weight and significance of Russia in the region has clearly diminished — though this has been a gradual process rather than an abrupt rupture.

While Russia retains significant influence in Georgia, the Georgian Dream government in Tbilisi is also trying to balance its relationship more carefully between Russia and the West — forging closer ties with Azerbaijan and Türkiye in the process. A victory for Pashinyan and his pro-Western agenda is likely to reinforce the trend towards geopolitical re-orientation across the region. But this will remain a careful multi-vector balancing act — a mixture of political, economic, and cultural relationships with different external actors — rather than a one-directional pivot towards the West.

Where Russia once accounted for over 90% of Armenia's weapons purchases, its share has now dropped to somewhere between 5% and 10%, while France and India have become Armenia's primary defence partners.

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Russia's Residual Grip

Although Russian influence may be declining, Moscow's strategic interests in the South Caucasus remain strong. Russia will use whatever tools and leverage it still commands to prevent a further erosion of its role as erstwhile regional hegemon, including through cultural and religious channels of influence. Economically, Russia remains Armenia's most important trade partner and energy supplier. Many opposition forces also remain closely aligned with Moscow, including the Strong Armenia bloc led by billionaire Samvel Karapetyan.

Most Armenians favour diversification of relations rather than an outright rejection of Russia. According to recent polling, 43% see Moscow as the country's most important partner, compared to 42% who think of Washington in that way, and 29% who think of Brussels.

The geopolitical dynamics in and around Armenia are therefore more complex and nuanced than the political rhetoric surrounding them. Yet Russia's capacity to exercise real influence effectively — at the level of its previous dominance — is more constrained than ever. Where Russia once accounted for over 90% of Armenia's weapons purchases, its share has now dropped to somewhere between 5% and 10%, while France and India have become Armenia's primary defence partners.

Multi-Vector, Not a Pivot

Armenia has not, and most likely will not, replace its close alignment with Russia with one that solely relies on the West. However, the change in foreign policy direction under Pashinyan has clearly shifted away from Moscow and towards Brussels and Washington. On the European side, this has been reciprocated with the back-to-back European Political Community summit and first bilateral Armenia-EU summit held in Yerevan in May 2026.

Whoever forms the next government in Yerevan will still have a range of pre-existing problems to resolve in an environment where external support is neither certain nor dependably benign.

The United States under President Donald Trump has also demonstrated a continuing interest in the region. This has been most evident in Trump's engagement with a permanent peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan. While that has yet to be achieved, several pieces of the puzzle have been put in place, including, most recently, a bilateral framework agreement on the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). Given the transactional and erratic nature of much of Trump's foreign policy, this is unlikely to be a pivotal game changer for long-term US commitment to the region, but it is part of the broader picture of Armenia's geopolitical importance — and the opportunities it may create for Pashinyan's agenda.

A careful balance therefore needs to be struck between dismissing Armenia's parliamentary elections as mere continuation of historic Russian dependence and reading them as a clean pivot to the West in a much bigger geopolitical game. The outcome will matter for the country's direction and for the speed of travel.

Whoever forms the next government in Yerevan will still have a range of pre-existing problems to resolve — in an environment where external support is neither certain nor dependably benign.

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This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff's article co-authored with James Stanley, published in The Foreign Policy Centre on 4 June 2026.

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Armenia's shift in defence procurement — from over 90% Russian-sourced to under 10% — represents a structural reorientation that is harder to reverse than a rhetorical pivot. At what point, if any, does a change of this depth become irreversible, and what would it take to pull it back?

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After first announcing late on May 23 that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated”, US president Donald Trump then backtracked less than 24 hours later, stating that he had instructed his negotiators “not to rush into a deal”. So far, so usual for Trump’s approach to diplomacy.

Over the past week, the pathway to a deal between the US and Iran had become both more credible and more narrow at the same time. Brinkmanship has escalated on both sides, with Trump threatening renewed escalation, then pulling back — after an intervention by Gulf allies — but leaving it on the table as a credible option. This was matched by Iran threatening a wider regional response to any renewed US strikes. Over the past year, both sides have demonstrated enough capacity and willingness to underscore that these are not empty threats.

This basic logic has not changed over the weekend. The risk of escalation, therefore, is real, which, in turn, narrows the time available for a deal but also makes it more likely because both sides stand to lose from a return to all-out war. For the regime in Tehran, the potential consequences are existential; for the White House, they may be more reputational — any decisive military victory will entail enormous humanitarian suffering in the region and cause long-term economic pain globally and domestically — but these are still significant costs for an administration heading into crucial mid-term elections.

The risk of escalation, therefore, is real, which, in turn, narrows the time available for a deal but also makes it more likely because both sides stand to lose from a return to all-out war.

The credibility of escalation and its likely cost have created a window of opportunity for a renewed push for a deal, reflected in intensifying Pakistani mediation efforts. The arrival of high-profile officials from Islamabad in Tehran — the army chief and the interior minister — carrying the latest US proposal signals a potentially viable route to a deal.

Even more so, the re-entry of Qatar into the mediation process is an indication that the Arab Gulf states sense that a deal might be possible, which they want to be able to shape as much as possible. Qatar has traditionally had a role as a mediator and retains multiple backchannels to key actors in the conflict, including Iran and the US. This makes its re-entry acceptable to both Tehran and Washington. That Doha is willing to take the diplomatic risk that this move involves is also a sign of both the urgency that countries in the region feel to prevent a renewed escalation of the war and the narrow window of opportunity that they currently see to achieve it.

Further away from the region, on May 22, the Council of the European Union decided to extend its sanctions framework against Iran, specifically targeting individuals and entities deemed to undermine freedom of navigation in the Middle East. No-one was specifically named, which adds pressure on Iranian negotiators but also creates incentives to reach a deal — on re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. This is significant because it positions the EU for a potential role in a post-deal operation in implementing new arrangements to uphold freedom of navigation in the Strait, similar to the role it already plays in the Red Sea with its Operation Aspides. The expanded sanctions framework, which comes on top of the wide range of existing sanctions, further adds to the independent diplomatic leverage of the EU: it can impose and renew sanctions on Iran but crucially also remove them in exchange for a deal, and can do so independently of the US.

All of these developments, however, also expose two long-term structural vulnerabilities. Current efforts are primarily focused on short-term gains: preventing an all-out resumption of the war between the US and Iran and across the region and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. This may be possible but is likely to include some commitment to a process to resolve the more fundamental underlying dispute over Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched Uranium and its future enrichment capabilities, and possibly its ballistic missiles programme and support for regional proxies.

These are issues over which sustainable agreement has eluded negotiators for a long time and the sides’ stated positions will make any compromise extremely difficult and time-consuming to achieve. Whatever deal might be achieved now on the Strait of Hormuz, therefore, will not remove the risk of escalation later. The lack of trust between Tehran and Washington, public posturing by both Trump and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and the potential for even minor incidents in a yet-to-be-agreed new regime for the Strait of Hormuz will create a combustible mix of risk factors that will at best prolong a volatile ceasefire and at worst simply postpone the resumption of hostilities until one side perceives a road to victory.

Whatever deal might be achieved now on the Strait of Hormuz, therefore, will not remove the risk of escalation later.

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There is an important wild card in all of this: Israel. The strategic preferences of Tel Aviv are fundamentally mis-aligned with those of the US, Arab Gulf states, and Europe. Israel requires a comprehensive neutering of Iranian nuclear, ballistic missile, and regional proxy capabilities. The US under Trump seems to have settled for a transactional framework deal that trades re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz for a longer-term commitment to negotiating a new regime curbing Iran’s ability to acquire nuclear weapons (not unlike the JCPOA original nuclear deal of 2015 which Trump abandoned in 2018). The Arab Gulf states and Europe are similarly keen on rapid de-escalation and more strongly committed to long-term stabilisation, especially with an eye to secure energy flows from the region.

The mis-alignment of preferences, and the perception of an existential threat from Iran, creates the incentives for Israel to torpedo any short-term deal that seems currently possible. Israel’s ability to do so hinges on whether Netanyahu can drag Trump back into an all-out war, including by launching unilateral strikes on targets in Iran or whether he is willing to escalate his war against Lebanon in order to trigger Iran to walk away from negotiations now. Both of these options have significant disruptive potential and Israel has a track record of using them – despite the risks they involve. Importantly, they are also not simply options for the short term but threats that Israel can wield in the longer term, heightening the risk to subsequent talks under a US-Iran framework deal.

The mis-alignment of preferences, and the perception of an existential threat from Iran, creates the incentives for Israel to torpedo any short-term deal that seems currently possible.

In a phone call with Trump on May 24, Netanyahu apparently kept insisting that “Israel will maintain freedom of action against threats in all arenas, including Lebanon”.

Constraining Tel Aviv, therefore, is both a short-term priority and a long-term necessity. In the short-term, pressure on Netanyahu might be effective. In the long-term, only a deal with Iran that assuages existential Israeli security concerns will do.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in CNA on 25 May 2026.

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Stefan argues that a deal reopening the Strait of Hormuz would postpone the confrontation rather than resolve it — and that constraining Israel is the precondition for a settlement that lasts. For a government or a business with material exposure to the region, is a near-term deal a genuine de-risking event, or a window that merely resets the clock?

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Hot on the heels of his summit with US president Donald Trump, China’s Xi Jinping hosted his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Beijing on May 19 and 20.

Headlines spoke of multiple trade agreements, warnings against a return to the law of the jungle in international relations, and a joint declaration on building a multipolar world. But underneath that, it was also obvious that this is not a partnership of equals anymore – and hasn’t been for some time.

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Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has become increasingly dependent on China. But the 2022 proclamation of a “no-limits friendship” between Russia and China has not turned into a strategic alliance between two poles of a new world order.

Beijing is now Moscow’s most important export market for its oil and gas and its most important source of imports, especially of so-called dual-use goods that are critical to sustaining Russia’s war effort against Ukraine. Yet, bilateral trade between Russia and China, while consistently above US$200 billion (£149 billion) annually for the past three years, is not growing that fast.

Notably, Russia is one of the few countries with which China has a trade deficit, albeit a small one, driven by Chinese energy imports. In this context, the continuing lack of a final deal between Moscow and Beijing over the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline is remarkable but not surprising. The key disagreements appear to be on price (how much China pays) and volume (how much China buys), and potentially over the length of any such commitments.

China is reluctant to commit fully to a long-term and expensive partnership with Russia. China wants Russian gas, but not at any price.

This sheds an interesting light on Beijing’s strategic commitments to Moscow, indicating that China is reluctant to commit fully to a long-term and expensive partnership with Russia. China wants Russian gas, but not at any price.

Beyond their economic relations, China also provides critical political and diplomatic cover for Russia in various multilateral formats and helps Russia retain its reputation as a champion of concerns of the global south and as a critic of a US-dominated global order. This is unlikely to change, with Xi explicitly committing himself and Putin to “continue to offer each other firm and mutual support on matters relating to our respective core interests and key concerns”.

All roads lead to Beijing

Putin is the 12th leader to visit Xi this year. He has followed in the footsteps of, among others, Canada’s Mark Carney, the UK’s Keir Starmer, and Germany’s Friedrich Merz. And, of course, his visit followed just a week after Xi’s summit with Trump. This makes Beijing clearly an important pole in a multipolar order — and a more important one than Moscow.

For Russia, a multipolar order in which Moscow is one of the poles, is probably the best that the Kremlin can hope for.

There is clearly significant ideological alignment between Russia and China, including in their sometimes more veiled and sometimes more explicit criticism of the US. But their shared criticism of US hegemony and unilateralism disguises a crucial difference over what they envision as the end state of the current transition to a new order.

For Russia, a multipolar order in which Moscow is one of the poles, is probably the best that the Kremlin can hope for. For Beijing, the real issue is whether a multipolar order is simply a transitional phase — and the desired endpoint is instead Chinese hegemony. This would place China at the apex with all the other poles of the multipolar order, including Russia and the US, relegated to second-tier status.

The challenge for China in this context is how to avoid all-out confrontation with the US — the so-called Thucydides Trap, which refers to the near inevitability of war between a rising power (in this case, China) and the existing dominant power (in this case, the US) it seeks to replace.

For now, war between the US and China is not imminently in the cards. Instead, China and Russia can exploit an opportunity grounded in their shared dislike of a US-dominated world and facilitated by Trump’s active destruction of it. But not much of this has so far translated into a coordinated and effective foreign policy agenda, despite Putin’s and Xi’s rhetorical commitments.

Where Russia sees an opening for disruption and chaos, China senses an opportunity to accelerate the transition to Chinese dominance.

Two of the multilateral flagship projects of China and Russia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the BRICS are not coherent formats. India and Pakistan are members of the SCO and yet fought a war in 2025. Iran and the UAE are both part of the newly enlarged BRICS but now find themselves at opposite sides of the US-Iran war.

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Regardless of how effective the challenges to the existing international are — from Trump and from the disparate bloc led by China (and to some extent still Russia) — they are real and create space for China and Russia to pursue their own agendas. And this is another crucial difference: where Russia sees an opening for disruption and chaos, China senses an opportunity to accelerate the transition to Chinese dominance.

The clear signal from the Xi-Trump and Xi-Putin summits is that China is not choosing between Russia and the US. This underscores Xi’s rhetorical commitment to a multipolar order. It also indicates that China keeps instrumentalising Russia and the US. Russia is a useful partner — not an ally, and not a vassal yet. The US, meanwhile, is an essential political and economic partner — an equal for now, but not forever.

This gives reassurance to Russia that, for now, China sees a multilateral order as beneficial, while signalling to the US that China, again just for now, is not seeking to replace the US as the sole superpower.

But neither Moscow nor Washington should be under any illusion that a tripolar order is China’s ultimate goal. This is a transitional strategy to a China-dominated international order through which Beijing hopes to avoid the Thucydides Trap.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 21 May 2026.

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If China’s multipolar rhetoric is a transitional strategy toward primacy rather than a settled end state — as this analysis argues — at what point does Moscow recognise it has become a tool of Beijing’s grand strategy rather than a partner, and what leverage, if any, does Russia retain to resist that trajectory?

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With the AfD now the second-largest party in the Bundestag after its February 2025 result, a PiS-backed candidate having won Poland’s presidency in June 2025, and French presidential elections due in April 2027 and Polish parliamentary elections later that year, Britain is at risk of losing dependable security partners on the continent. A minilateral hedge — the Joint Expeditionary Force, the Coalition of the Willing, the E3, and the Ukraine Defence Contact Group — and the recently published Strategic Defence Review hold some promise for mitigating this risk, but the populist landscape that is reshaping Britain’s continental partners is also reshaping the ground that this hedge sits on.

1. The populist right is not one threat — it is three. AfD-style sovereigntist-nationalism would fracture EU cohesion on Ukraine. PiS-style illiberal conservatism keeps the Atlanticist line but qualifies the Ukraine commitment. RN-style nativist statism is uncertain on NATO at the operational level. Britain cannot plan for a single populist Europe — it has to plan for three distinct disruption modes simultaneously, and the planning starts now, not after the elections.

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The Xi–Trump summit produced the photo-op everyone expected and the substance nobody can quite name. Headlines have oscillated between “thaw” and “theatre” — both wrong, in different ways. In an interview with ItalyPost’s Simone Matteis, Stefan Wolff answers the questions that matter most: what the summit actually changes, what it reveals about Russia’s slow demotion, the quiet US–China alignment on Iran, and the moment Europe finally runs out of excuses for not being a power of its own. Below, we provide an English-language version of the interview, lightly edited for style and readability.

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1. Does the Xi–Trump summit mark a real turning point in US–China relations, or is it just a temporary tactical pause? Who is the real winner?

It is definitely not a turning point, and this was hardly to be expected: neither side has an interest in worsening relations at the moment — i.e., a negative turning point, implying a breakdown of the relationship — or the capacity to fundamentally reset relations towards full-on cooperation — i.e., a positive turning point, marking a greater alignment of strategic interests. I don’t think it’s merely a tactical pause either. It’s the continuation of a pattern in the relationship between Washington and Beijing that acknowledges certain boundaries and redlines (e.g., on Taiwan) and manages their deep economic interdependency by small mutual concessions and by creating new frameworks and processes (e.g., a Board of Trade and a Board of Investment) to kick the can of harder decisions further down the road. In that sense, they are both winners: Xi and Trump can each take some deals back home and look strong to domestic audiences without having given too much away.

2. If Washington and Beijing stabilise their relationship, is Vladimir Putin the real geopolitical loser of this shift?

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The accelerating proliferation of minilateral security formats is reshaping European defence — from Nordic-Baltic cooperation to the Joint Expeditionary Force. At the heart of it, the Weimar Triangle has the potential to provide the strategic coordination Europe urgently needs. The architecture that is emerging is more dynamic than it appears but has never been tested in a real crisis.

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Something significant is happening in European security — and it is not happening inside NATO or the EU. Across the continent, a proliferation of flexible, issue-focused minilateral formats has emerged alongside the traditional institutional architecture. Some formats are old and have been energised; others are brand new. Together, they are reshaping how Europe actually organises its defence.

The pattern has three defining features. First, a multiplying set of more or less permanent minilateral groupings, each serving distinct but overlapping purposes, cutting across the formal structures of NATO and the EU rather than nesting neatly inside them. Second, a thematic focus firmly on security and increasingly and more narrowly on defence, with varying emphasis on military, political, and economic dimensions. Third, a geographic logic centred on the Nordic and Baltic region, and along a north-south axis running from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Adriatic.

The Weimar Triangle has the potential to provide strategic coordination across these different formats — but it has never been tested in a real crisis.

Two simultaneous pressures explain why this is happening now. The first is Russia: the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the sustained hybrid war being waged across Europe’s political and physical infrastructure. The second is the United States: a trajectory that runs from soft retrenchment through hard disengagement toward what some European governments now model as potential strategic exit — compounded by active interference in European political affairs and a broader assault on the international order Washington itself built in the decades after the end of the Second World War. Europe needs to manage both pressures at once, at a moment when domestic polarisation is rising, democratic institutions are under strain, and economies are underperforming.

Minilateral formats, and their proliferation, is the response — and potentially part of the solution.

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The opening headlines from the summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing signalled an openness on the Chinese side towards stabilising relations with the US. In his opening remarks, the Chinese president noted that China and the US “should be partners not rivals”. But he warned Trump that a crisis over Taiwan could lead to “clashes and even conflicts”.

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With Xi also indicating that there will be more opportunities for US companies to do business in China, the stage was set for a relatively successful summit. Both sides can now claim it as a success because it offers some concrete benefits in the form of a trade war avoided and at least the prospect of cooperation on global issues such as the Iran war. It also sets a generally more positive tone for relations between the two countries.

Putin’s aspirations to position Russia as a great power depend on Moscow either being strategically useful to Washington and Beijing, or gaining leverage with them by demonstrating a capacity to be disruptive.

Such an outcome is particularly troubling for Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, who will see his relevance and leverage diminished by more stable and predictable US-China relations. Putin’s aspirations to position Russia as a great power depend on Moscow either being strategically useful to Washington and Beijing, or gaining leverage with them by demonstrating a capacity to be disruptive.

However, on both counts, Putin’s hand was weak before the summit even started — and it has been further weakened as a result. His war against Ukraine is no longer a priority issue for the US, with the two main American interlocutors in peace talks, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, focused on negotiations with Iran.

Putin’s latest phone call with Trump on April 29 will have been disappointing for the Russian leader. His offer to take Iran’s highly enriched uranium to Russia was reportedly rebuffed by Trump, who told him to focus on “ending the war with Ukraine”. And days later the Kremlin was forced to scale back its annual military parade in Moscow, due to concerns that it could be targeted by Ukrainian forces.

On the Chinese side, things are possibly even more troubling. The last face-to-face meeting between Xi and Putin took place in September 2025. They have only held one video conference since then. A Kremlin statement during the Trump-Xi summit that Putin will visit China soon smacks more of desperation than confirmation.

Putin’s leverage

While Putin appears sidelined in the US-China relationship, he is not without cards of his own. Major global issues — including wars in Ukraine and Iran, energy security and the future of the international order — are still connected to Russia. This provides Putin with a degree of leverage in his relations with both Xi and Trump. But exercising this leverage comes with significant risks, especially in areas where Chinese and US interests are more aligned with each other than with Russia.

Take the case of the Iran war as an example. Russia benefits most from this conflict continuing. The disruption it is causing to global energy flows has pushed up oil and gas prices, keeping Moscow’s war economy afloat. It has also reduced the flow of US arms to Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Russia has expanded its support for Iran — from intelligence and cyber support to providing “unjammable” drones.

For China, its relationship with the US is far more important than the one with Iran. This tilts the balance of preferences in Beijing towards an end of the conflict rather than towards its continuation.

While Russian support is unlikely to enable Iran to win the war, it will give the regime in Tehran more time to avoid defeat and thus increase the costs for the US, its regional allies and the global economy. This is not going to play well with Trump, who is under mounting domestic pressure to wind down the war in Iran.

Beijing has offered Iran some support throughout the war, for example by helping it bypass western sanctions on the export of its oil. But there are clear limits to how far China will go. For China, its relationship with the US is far more important than the one with Iran. This tilts the balance of preferences in Beijing towards an end of the conflict rather than towards its continuation.

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The limits of realignment

This does not mean that China and the US will now align against Russia. Relations between Russia and China are longstanding and deep across a range of issues. Their “no-limits partnership” may be increasingly asymmetric, but there is still a great deal of anti-American and anti-western alignment between them.

The US under Trump is also more ambivalent about its stance on Russia than under previous administrations. Trump’s transactional foreign policy — and his urge to make deals rather than pursue a consistent strategy — is something Russia will continue to try to leverage to its own advantage.

The Xi-Trump summit is a party to which Putin was not invited.

Ahead of the Trump-Xi summit, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov released a statement in which he said “the path to the implementation of a whole range of economic projects will be open” if the White House agrees to decouple trade from the war in Ukraine. This indicates that Moscow is fully aware of this opportunity — as well as the challenge to offer the US something China cannot.

The Xi-Trump summit is a party to which Putin was not invited. The fact that the US and China seem to be heading towards a period of better-managed relations indicates that his efforts to make his presence felt have largely failed. This does not bode well for his aspirations to restore Russia to its Soviet-era status as a great power – but it does not imply that he will give up.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 14 May 2026.

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If Putin’s leverage strategy requires being either useful or disruptive to Washington and Beijing, and a stabilising US-China relationship narrows both options, where would you expect Russian disruption to surface next — and what does that imply for institutions and boards with operational exposure in those theatres?

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Russia’s campaign of hybrid warfare against Europe has Soviet roots and will likely outlast Putin. This analysis maps the campaign in precise, systematic terms: what it is, where it is targeted, why Russia is doing it, and — most importantly — how effective it has actually been. The assessment is unsettling not because the campaign is succeeding, but because the European response, while significantly improved, remains strategically deficient where it matters most: credible deterrence not just by denial but also by punishment.

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The title of last year’s annual report of the Valdai Discussion Club offered an inadvertent self-portrait of Russian strategic intent: “Dr. Chaos or: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Disorder.” This is, of course, a telling play on Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — and a worrying one. Russia is not merely observing European disorder. It is manufacturing it.

What Russia Is Doing

Russia is conducting a sustained campaign of hybrid warfare: what the UK Ministry of Defence described in 2019 as “the synchronized use of multiple instruments of power tailored to specific vulnerabilities across the full spectrum of societal functions to achieve synergistic effects.” The European Commission offered a complementary definition in its 2016 Joint Framework on countering hybrid threats: “a mixture of coercive and subversive activity, conventional and unconventional methods — diplomatic, military, economic, technological — which can be used in a coordinated manner by state or non-state actors to achieve specific objectives while remaining below the threshold of formally declared warfare.”

Russia recognises the same concept under different labels — the “Gerasimov doctrine”, non-linear war or new-generation warfare, and the Soviet-era tradition of “active measures”. In practice, it involves a range of tactics: information warfare and disinformation; cyber operations; covert physical sabotage of critical infrastructure; the weaponisation of energy; the weaponisation of migration; and espionage and intelligence-led operations, including assassinations and assassination attempts.

Russia is not merely observing European disorder. It is manufacturing it.

These tactics are no longer just abstract labels. They have real-life manifestations: undersea cable disruptions in the Baltic Sea; incendiary parcel bombs in DHL distribution centres in Birmingham, Leipzig, and Warsaw; sabotage of Poland’s railway network; drone flights disrupting civilian aviation in Denmark, Germany, and Norway; hack-and-leak attacks against the German SPD in 2024 and against a range of UK officials in a campaign starting in 2015; election interference in Romania and Moldova; and actual and attempted assassinations of former Russian spies in the UK, including Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018.

What follows maps what and where Russia’s targets are and examines how Europe's response — while strategically deficient right now — can rise to the permanent challenge that Russia poses.

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The diplomatic signals in the US-Iran war remain confused while both sides cling to their maximalist demands. Professor Stefan Wolff of the University of Birmingham — a specialist in international security and co-founder of Navigating the Vortex — applies I. William Zartman’s concept of the ‘ripe moment’ to map where both parties stand now and what would have to change before either side judges that a deal is worth the political cost of making it.

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“The war is almost ten weeks old and there is no credible end-game in sight.”

The war between the United States and Iran is now almost ten weeks old. Despite ongoing diplomatic noise, the fundamental strategic calculus for both sides has not changed enough to make talks more attractive than continued fighting.

Diplomacy has mostly turned into a farce. On April 25, US President Donald Trump cancelled his negotiators’ trip to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, blaming “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iran’s leadership. “Nobody knows who is in charge, including them,” he wrote. Still, there appears to be some back-channel diplomacy going on.

As Trump pulled his negotiators out of talks, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had discussions with Pakistani and Omani mediators before meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior officials in Saint Petersburg on April 27. There, he told reporters that Iran was considering a request from the US for negotiations.

Meanwhile, US officials said Iran had proposed, via Pakistan, to loosen its grip on the Strait of Hormuz if the US lifted its naval blockade and ended the war. The proposal would also decouple the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme from these negotiations – a likely non-starter for the US.

It is clear both sides still hold the same positions as at the start of the war, and neither expects much progress anytime soon.

Understanding why requires going beyond headlines about ceasefires and back-channel negotiations to examine the structural conditions that make settlements possible. The key concept here is what the late I. William Zartman called the ‘ripe moment’.

A ripe moment has three ingredients. The first is a mutually hurting stalemate: both parties simultaneously judge that the cost of continuing the conflict exceeds the cost of negotiating a way out.

The second ingredient is the perception of a way out (a.k.a. a winning formula): an arrangement that accommodates enough of each side’s demands that makes a settlement feasible and viable. Feasible because the solution allows both sides to save face; viable because it has benefits that will incentivise the sides to commit to the agreed solution in the long term.

The third ingredient is a mutually enticing opportunity: both parties realise that a beneficial settlement is achievable only through joint efforts at the negotiation table.

Among these three ingredients, the mutually hurting stalemate is crucial to initiating meaningful negotiations; a winning formula and a mutually enticing opportunity are critical to keep them there till a settlement has been agreed and to ensure that it is implemented and operated in good faith.

This crucial first condition has not been met: the moment when both sides perceive a mutually hurting stalemate has not yet arrived.

Iran: absorbing pain, but not changing course

Iran’s economy is under severe pressure. Oil exports have been further curtailed, the rial has sharply depreciated, and civilian discontent is palpable. But the Islamic Republic’s decision-making structure insulates the leadership from that discontent in ways that most democratic governments cannot replicate. The Revolutionary Guards retain operational autonomy and military capacity. This means they can keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and effectively supress internal dissent.

Iran cannot win militarily, but it will be reluctant to give up the power it now wields in the Strait of Hormuz, even as the negative consequences of its closure for the global economy grow each day and will take longer and longer to unwind once the war ends.

The Supreme Leader’s office continues to frame the conflict in civilisational terms that make concessions politically costly. Reframing the regime’s approach would have reputational and material costs among regime supporters at home and allies abroad. This locks the current leadership into its maximalist position and at the same time marginalises anyone inside the regime arguing for a change of course.

Mr Araghchi’s visit to St Petersburg also indicates that Iran is not as isolated as could have been expected. China has been less forthcoming with the kind of political support that Russia has just provided, but if Beijing is putting any pressure on Tehran to re-enter into negotiations with Washington, it has been doing so very quietly — and not very effectively so far.

The regime in Tehran is absorbing pain but without the need — or opportunity — to translate it into a political imperative to negotiate. Until the pain impacts the leadership’s own survival calculus, the likelihood of Iran re-engaging in serious talks remains remote.

“Sanctions, a blockade of Iranian ports, targeted strikes against regime and civilian infrastructure have already imposed real costs and will keep doing so if maintained or resumed. But costs and red lines are not the same thing.”

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The United States: rising costs, no course correction

The United States is not suffering military casualties at a scale that would trigger domestic political pressure for withdrawal or raise doubt about the sustainability of military operations — a blockade of Iranian ports for now, the resumption of all-out war possibly in the future.

However, the economic costs of the conflict are accumulating in ways the Trump administration cannot ignore indefinitely: oil prices remain elevated, the mid-term electoral arithmetic is beginning to concentrate minds, and allies in the Gulf are quietly signalling alarm about both indefinite limbo and possible re-escalation.

Trump’s negotiating instincts are well documented. He prefers a deal he can brand as an unprecedented win of historic proportions to a prolonged military campaign he cannot easily conclude. But that preference has not yet overcome the institutional and political barriers to opening even a credible back-channel. The administration’s stated preconditions remain maximalist, and Iran has shown no willingness to accept them.

What’s more, the calculations in Washington are highly personalised and not always completely rational. In particular, Mr Trump’s obsession with getting a better nuclear deal than former President Barack Obama is not helpful. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was far from perfect, but, according to successive reports from the IAEA, most of the highly enriched uranium that justified concerns about Iranian intentions was produced after Mr Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018.

Given the deep mistrust of Mr Trump in Iran, it is unlikely that the regime will agree to his tough conditions on its nuclear programme. But mistrust is mutual, and the White House is right to be suspicious of Iran’s suggestion to decouple nuclear talks from a ceasefire and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. This does not indicate that Iran would be entering talks in good faith either.

What would have to change (and why it likely will not anytime soon)

For a mutually hurting stalemate to materialise, both sides would need to cross their pain threshold. And they would need to recognise this and the fact that the pain will not go away by continuing to fight.

On the Iranian side, that means either an economic collapse, escalating domestic turmoil, or a significant military setback. Any of these, and especially if they occur simultaneously, could trigger an internal political shift that elevates the cost of the war above the cost of making concessions and induces a course correction.

On the American side, it means a domestic political environment in which a deal — even an imperfect one — becomes more attractive than an open-ended commitment.

Importantly, the war, even if it resumes, will not produce a military stalemate in the classic sense, because the United States retains overwhelming military, including air superiority. This will likely create an impression on the American side that the US can still meaningfully escalate and impose a settlement on Iran. But this is an illusion.

The political cost of escalation — such as an overt threat, let alone use, of tactical nuclear strikes against Iran — is almost inconceivable, even for Trump. Anything else would not produce a decisive political outcome, at least not quickly. Sanctions, a blockade of Iranian ports, targeted strikes against regime and civilian infrastructure have already imposed real costs and will keep doing so if maintained or resumed. But costs and red lines are not the same thing. Until both sides reach their red lines, the conditions for a genuine negotiation — rather than tactical manoeuvring and public positioning — do not exist.

The risk of escalation

What is more worrying than the continuation of a low-intensity conflict with no incentives for either side to talk is the alternative — renewed escalation.

The US has continued building up resources in the Middle East over the last two-and-a-half weeks since the initial temporary truce agreed between Washington and Tehran. It has deployed a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East, the USS George HW Bush.

Amassing such unprecedented firepower in the region is likely intended to send a signal of strength and resolve to Tehran: a full-scale resumption of the war remains available as an option to Mr Trump, who has repeatedly threatened such a move.

It would not be the first time that Mr Trump has used the ruse of actual or potential negotiations to lure Tehran into a false sense of security before pouncing again. Further escalation, or even a credible threat thereof, might therefore qualify as what Zartman described as an impending, past, or recently avoided catastrophe and which he considered as contributing to a ripe moment because it focuses the parties’ minds on the possibility of increased pain.

The problem in the Iran context, however, is that for all his bravado, Mr Trump’s shifting ultimatums suggest a reluctance to follow through. This may be a sign that he realises military escalation offers no clear path to victory — an insight that will not have been lost on the regime in Tehran either.

Neither side, thus, has found a winning strategy, but they have found a strategy of not losing. As a consequence of the resulting ambiguity of this continuing state of limbo in which they therefore find themselves the conflict will likely persist even once it has ceased to serve the strategic interests of either side.

“The conditions for a genuine negotiation do not yet exist — and identifying why is the first step to understanding when they might.”

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in Channel News Asia on 29 April 2026.

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At what point does the domestic political cost of continuing the war exceed the political cost of the concessions required to end it — and which side reaches that threshold first?

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The United Arab Emirates announced on Tuesday 28 April 2026 that it is withdrawing from OPEC and the OPEC+ alliance next month, dealing what the Financial Times called “a significant blow to the oil cartel and its de facto leader Saudi Arabia.” UAE Energy Minister Suhail Mohamed al-Mazrouei told Reuters the decision followed “a careful look at current and future policies related to level of production.”

The move follows years of Emirati frustration with OPEC’s quota system. It also comes amid ongoing tensions between the UAE and Saudi Arabia. And it happens against the background of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — where Iran’s military had effectively seized control of shipping lanes in early March after US and Israeli attacks against the country.

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1. OPEC’s institutional collapse is not coming — it is already visible in the organisation’s own documents. In April 2026, the cartel published a 92-page monthly report covering its production without once naming the war that caused its biggest-ever output drop. Five of its members are parties to, or directly affected by, a conflict that reduced the group’s collective production by a record of almost 8 million barrels per day in March, with UAE output falling 45% in that month. This was the largest monthly collapse in the cartel’s history, exceeding even the Covid shock of May 2020.

In its monthly report, the organisation conceded that “geopolitical developments remain an important factor to be closely monitored.” Perhaps it is not surprising that OPEC was unable to use stronger language — after all, Iran, one of the organisation’s founding members, is, for all intents and purposes at war with the other four Gulf OPEC members. But an institution that cannot name the crisis that is destroying its members’ capacity to produce the lifeblood of their economies is not managing that crisis. It has already lost its ability to function. The UAE’s exit is the formal confirmation of the failure that OPEC’s own silence announced first.

2. The numbers reveal a scale of disruption with unprecedented — and not yet fully appreciated — consequences. While BP doubled its profit in the first quarter, calling conditions “exceptional”, UNDP estimates forecast that the economies of the countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) stand to lose between $103 billion and $168 billion. The IMF forecasts a regional recession; only Saudi Arabia is expected to escape it, but not unscathed. The UAE was the first to approach Washington for dollar-swap arrangements; other Gulf states have followed suit.

Oil markets have registered the shock in full: Brent crude rose above $105 a barrel on 28 April before slipping to $104 after the UAE exit was announced — more than 40% above pre-war levels. West Texas Intermediate reached $101. US gasoline hit $4.18 a gallon, its highest since April 2022, up 40% since the war began. Diesel stands at $5.46, up 45%.

3. The UAE’s exit is a direct blow to Saudi Arabia — and that is the more consequential story than the OPEC membership change itself. The Financial Times frames this explicitly: the UAE’s departure is “a significant blow to the oil cartel and its de facto leader Saudi Arabia.”

The two Gulf giants have been on diverging trajectories since at least 2018. The Qatar-linked Arab Center in Washington, D.C., documented the widening fault lines between the UAE and Saudi Arabia before the war. Every one of them has become deeper and more entrenched, making an effective and united response of the Arab Gulf states all but impossible and leading the UAE’s diplomatic adviser Anwar Gargash to describe the Gulf response to Iranian attacks as “the weakest in its history.”

OPEC without Saudi-UAE alignment at its core is a coordination mechanism whose two most important participants are no longer pointing in the same direction — and one has now walked out.

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4. Trump wins the political framing — but the record of the past weeks tells a different story. The UAE exit will be presented in Washington as vindication of Trump’s pressure campaign against Iran and as evidence that OPEC’s grip on energy markets is breaking. Politically, that framing will hold.

The actual record of Trump’s manoeuvring since the beginning of the war, however, is one of repeated but unenforced ultimatums, escalating deadlines, and threats of strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure. Deadlines were extended or quietly abandoned as Iran refused to yield.

The UAE’s exit was never the intended result of that pressure campaign. It is the product of UAE frustration with the political vacuum that the US campaign left behind. What’s more, a fragmented OPEC in a wartime energy environment, combined with Gulf states seeking emergency dollar liquidity from Washington, means the US now has more distressed dependants in the Gulf, not fewer obligations. And these obligations will outlast the war. While all Gulf states have seen a drop in exports as a result of Iran and the US effectively both blockading the Strait of Hormuz, Arab states have had to shut down production because of limited storage and re-routing capacities. Iran, by contrast, has significantly more expansive storage capacities, meaning that production shutdowns are less likely in the near future — potentially also enabling the country to take full advantage of a reopening of the Strait sooner than its Arab Gulf rivals.

5. The UAE exit accelerates the fragmentation of the Gulf energy-security order — and OPEC’s own silence confirms that order is already gone. The Arab Center describes the Iran war as ending the US-Gulf “oil for security” bargain that has endured since 1945. The UAE’s OPEC withdrawal is the first institutional consequence of that rupture. But the more revealing signal came earlier: an organisation where five of its members are at war with each other, whose production has suffered its worst-ever monthly collapse, and whose response is to publish a document that does not name the conflict. Qatar exited OPEC in 2019. The UAE has now followed. If the old deal is genuinely over — Gulf states restrain production to keep prices stable; the US provides security — then every remaining Gulf member faces the same calculation the UAE just made.

The question is not whether OPEC fractures further. It is how quickly. And as the fracturing of OPEC confirms — and accelerates — the collapse of the post-1945 Gulf energy-security order, the next question is what replaces it? And what does the answer mean for the next Gulf state calculating whether OPEC membership still serves its economic and security interests?

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Stefan Wolff has spent three decades studying the fracture lines of European security — from the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia to the Russian aggression against Ukraine. His analyses of Ukraine do not trade in the usual optimism or alarm; they map the institutional terrain that determines whether political gestures translate into durable outcomes.

On the day the EU formally unlocked its €90 billion loan to Kyiv following the removal of Hungary’s veto, Stefan and his long-time collaborator Tetyana Malyarenko apply that lens to a question that many headlines are already answering too quickly: does Orbán’s exit actually change Ukraine’s trajectory toward EU membership? The answer — as readers of Navigating the Vortex will not be surprised to find — is considerably more complicated than it appears.

The veto falls — but the coalition that replaces it is not unified

As widely expected, the EU has unlocked the disbursement of its previously agreed €90 billion loan to Ukraine. Together with the approval of the 20th package of sanctions against Russia, this is good news for Brussels. It became possible after Hungary dropped its opposition following a change of government after recent parliamentary elections. How many more such decisions the union will be able to make, and how fast, remains to be seen.

Former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán may have been the most vocal disrupter of the EU’s Ukraine policy, but he was not the only one. Former close allies of his — Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic and Robert Fico in Slovakia — stay in power. Another election in Bulgaria on April 19 returned the arguably Russia-leaning former president, Rumen Radev, as the likely next prime minister in Sofia.

None of these are as explicitly hardline as Orbán was. But the combined ability of ‘Ukraine-sceptics’ to at least water down EU policy — limiting or conditioning aid for Ukraine and potentially delaying or softening sanctions on Russia — remains real. So, for Ukraine the news is also rather more mixed than the headline of the end of the Hungarian veto would suggest.

“The combined ability of ‘Ukraine-sceptics’ to at least water down EU policy — limiting or conditioning aid for Ukraine and potentially delaying or softening sanctions on Russia — remains real.”

The divergence on membership is the deeper problem

Granted, the disbursement of the €90 billion will help Kyiv plug critical financing gaps over the next several years. However, Orbán’s exit doesn’t deal with other critical challenges in the EU-Ukraine relationship, especially regarding the divergent views on Ukraine’s path to EU membership.

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Apart from Kyiv’s most ardent Baltic supporters, scepticism about Ukraine’s membership abounds. Some EU member states — like France and Germany — have already made it clear where they stand regarding the union’s future relationship with Ukraine. For them, it’s about due process and avoiding shortcuts. At best, they seem to contemplate a somewhat enhanced status for Ukraine within the EU in the interim.

Others hold more Ukraine-sceptical positions, especially regarding certain policy areas that they consider core national interests. For example, with parliamentary elections in Poland scheduled for 2027, it is unlikely that even the current clearly pro-European government of Donald Tusk will endorse the early and full access for Ukrainian agricultural products to the EU market or the application of the bloc’s common agricultural policy.

This scepticism in national capitals potentially also complicates relations between member states and EU institutions in Brussels. After a meeting on the sidelines of the EU leaders’ summit, European Council president António Costa, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky called “for the opening of negotiation clusters without delay”. But the power to decide on this lies with member states’ foreign ministers who are likely to vote on the issue at the end of May. If they approve, this will be the next important move in Ukraine’s accession process. But it’s only the first step in what could be a protracted journey.

Common cause — and where it breaks down

On average, any country’s journey from application to accession has gotten longer and longer since the end of the Cold War. Sixteen countries have joined the EU since 1995. Apart from Ukraine, there are eight more official candidate countries and one applicant — all at different stages of the process and with vastly divergent prospects of successfully completing their accession negotiations.

Ukraine’s prospects might be above average, but Zelensky’s ambition to achieve membership by 2030 seems more unrealistic than ever. With his timeline knocked off course and even the terms of membership unclear, the question arises how Ukrainians will respond to this.

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The EU and Ukraine both see Russia as an existential threat. And both agree that Ukrainians’ defence of their country is crucial for European security. This has made it easy to reach an understanding that Europe will financially and politically support Ukraine’s effort to defeat Russia and open the doors to EU membership. This basic understanding remains intact. But translating it into concrete policies has revealed important divisions about the affordability of financial commitments and the timelines and conditions for Ukraine’s EU accession.

“Zelensky’s ambition to achieve membership by 2030 seems more unrealistic than ever.”

The compromise trap

As always, the EU will hash out a compromise that articulates the lowest common denominator between those that prefer a swift accession for Ukraine, and those that oppose the watering down of accession conditions. It remains to be seen whether this compromise will be palatable to Ukrainians.

Individual Ukrainians would gain access to the benefits of EU citizenship — the ability to live and work in the EU. But Ukraine as a country would not enjoy the benefits of full and equal state membership — including voting rights on EU legislation and the automatic disbursement of EU structural funds.

It’s questionable whether this is economically viable for Ukraine. The country has already suffered a serious loss of human capital — on the frontlines and through emigration. If this were to continue, let alone accelerate if Ukraine’s young people were offered free movement, it would seriously weaken the country’s resilience in the face of Russia’s continuing onslaught.

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This, in turn, could add to narratives inside and outside Ukraine that question the possibility of continued resistance and urge seeking a settlement with Russia. Pro-Russian arguments could well be strengthened by blaming the EU for weakening Ukraine by luring its young and talented workforce into the bloc while denying full membership to Ukraine as a country, casting further doubt about the dependability of the west as a credible partner.

“Declining trust in the EU and a desire for rapprochement with Russia would ultimately reinforce the idea of positioning Ukraine as a bridge between Russia and the west — the approach that already failed in 2014.”

Declining trust in the EU and a desire for rapprochement with Russia would ultimately reinforce the idea of positioning Ukraine as a bridge between Russia and the west. This was the approach tried, under significantly better circumstances, in the first two decades after Ukraine’s independence. As the EU-27 decide how to move forward, they need to remember that this Ukraine-as-a-bridge approach already failed once in 2014 — with the devastating consequences of this failure only becoming fully apparent in 2022. There is nothing to suggest that this approach would fare any better if it were tried again.

This analysis draws on an article published in The Conversation on 24 April 2026.

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Keir Starmer told the Commons that he is not going to yield to pressure from Donald Trump over the Iran war, after the president threatened he could change the terms of the US–UK trade deal. Last night Donald Trump said talks between the United States and Iran could restart in the next two days, following their collapse in Islamabad on Sunday. Yesterday, at Turning Point USA in Georgia, Vice President JD Vance said that the president wants to strike what he called a “grand bargain”. This comes as America enforces its naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz — it has seen some ships getting through, including a Chinese-linked tanker, while others have turned back.

Click to view this as an interactive chart

Q. Iranian officials, when asked about these new talks, say they’ve received no new information. Have you any idea what is actually going on? What’s the latest here?

A. Well, I think what’s going on is that we have quite a number of back-channel talks again, mediated by Pakistan. These have apparently been going on since the breakdown of the talks over the weekend, and it seems that at least some of the gaps between what the Americans demanded and the Iranians were willing to accept seem to have been narrowing on this very crucial issue of Iran’s nuclear programme. So I think there is some progress here. But it’s not entirely clear what Donald Trump now has in mind with this so-called grand bargain that JD Vance floated yesterday. Nor is it really clear what the American exit strategy at the moment is.

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Q. I read this morning a rather interesting point — that the Iranian government, or the different parts of it, had no opportunity to get together in Tehran, because of course we now know that the Americans and the Israelis seem to be able to target everybody’s kitchen in that city, and therefore they couldn’t bring the top people together in Iran. But they got together in Islamabad because they felt safe there. Do we actually know who’s in charge? I mean, we haven’t seen the Supreme Leader, and so on and so forth.

A. Well, I think from what we can sort of gather — both in terms of how the Iranian regime generally works, and what the intelligence analysis is in relation to how they had envisaged the transition of leadership — it definitely seems we do have the new Supreme Leader. But there’s very strong influence now of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which really seems to have evolved into the key power broker in Iran. So from that perspective, it is in a way a continuation of the old regime — in my view, probably more hardline, more hostile, but potentially also more paranoid. And what you just said about the way in which the Iranians were able to prepare for this is absolutely correct. They arrived with a delegation of approximately 40 people in Islamabad, and I think partly that was so that they could actually properly coordinate and sit down before they got into the talks with the American interlocutors.

“Ceasefires tend to collapse as a result of minor incidents that then spiral out of control.”

Q. The Iranians say the blockade will constitute a prelude to a violation of the ceasefire — i.e., at some point they’re going to get fed up with this. Mr Trump says it means the war is over. Can they both be right?

A. Well, in Trump’s world, everything is possible. So from that perspective, one of the key challenges we have is that the ceasefire at the moment is still in place for another roughly two weeks. From that perspective, there is a potential that a deal could be wrapped up by then. There’s also a possibility that the ceasefire might be extended. But I think the key thing to bear in mind is that ceasefires tend to collapse as a result of minor incidents that then spiral out of control. So I think it’s less the question of whether there is a deal by the time the ceasefire comes to an end — if there is enough momentum in the talks, it would be very easy for the sides to extend the ceasefire. But if one of the enforcement operations that the Americans are currently running in terms of the blockade of Iranian ports spirals out of control, I think that could signal the end of the ceasefire and we could see a full resumption of hostilities.

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“In Trump’s world, everything is possible.”

Q. There’s another actor here for whom this matters: China. They’ve condemned the blockade as dangerous and irresponsible. How long are they going to put up with this? If there is a blockade on Iranian oil, roughly 80% of it goes to China — and it constitutes something like 15% of China’s energy imports. How long are they going to put up with it?

A. Well, I think the question is at what point they will actually be able to do anything credible about it. The Chinese are clearly reluctant to be drawn into this — not just militarily, but also in terms of any mediation effort. And I think what this reveals in a broader sense is that China is not the kind of global leader that Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, aspires to be. There simply doesn’t seem to be either the inclination or the capacity on the Chinese side to do anything about either the blockade or the war, or the broader escalation of tensions in the Middle East that we have seen over the past year.

“China is not yet the kind of global leader that Xi Jinping aspires to be.”

Professor Stefan Wolff is co-founder of Navigating the Vortex. This interview was conducted by Trevor Phillips on The Times at One, Times Radio.

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Within less than 24 hours, United States President Donald Trump went from threatening that Iran’s “whole civilisation will die tonight” to announcing a two-week ceasefire, subject to “the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.” Another six hours later, he mused that “this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!”

That golden vision quickly disappeared behind the smoke of a massive Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, exposing a major flaw in Mr Trump’s deal with Iran — no explicit inclusion of Israel — and laid bare just how his administration lacks a coherent strategy for the Middle East as a whole.

Iran called Israeli attacks in Lebanon a “grave violation” of the deal and warned of “strong responses”.

The US and Israel have insisted the ceasefire did not include Lebanon. Mr Trump called it a “separate skirmish”, keeping Lebanon distinct from Iran while urging Israel to scale back its attacks to help with US-Iran peace talks over the weekend, which subsequently collapsed over Iran’s nuclear programme and prompted the US president to impose his own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. In parallel to this escalation, Trump continues to float ideas about a grand bargain with Iran and a resumption of talks with Tehran.

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If Trump’s intention is to buy himself time to secure a halfway intact deal and walk away from an unpopular war, then Israel’s continuing war in Lebanon is a major liability for him. This is hardly surprising for three reasons.

First, Israel’s objectives do not align well with Mr Trump’s war goals that have been shifting since the first US strikes on Feb 28.

The US president now seems more concerned with the economic backlash – domestic pump prices, consumer inflation and the volatile stock market. This could explain why he readily agreed to a truce that leaves him in a much weaker negotiation position. If the Strait of Hormuz reopens, it will make it more difficult for him to restart the war.

Israel, by contrast, views the war as an existential conflict. The minimum victory from an Israeli perspective is a substantially weakened regime in Tehran, deprived of its current military capabilities, of its regional proxies and most importantly, of any meaningful capacity to rebuild them.

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For Tel Aviv, a ceasefire is but a pause to rearm and regroup. The easiest way out of the current pause in the war would be to get Iran to restart the war and bring Mr Trump back into military action.

Second, Israel’s continuing attacks on Hezbollah serve a different function.

To Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this is part of a survival strategy that is predicated on the creation of ever-larger buffer zones around Israel – in Lebanon, where attacks are currently focused, but also in Gaza, the West Bank and Syria.

Israel has vowed to occupy the parts of south Lebanon it currently controls and has been carrying out ground incursions into southwestern Syria. An Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire has officially been in place since the end of November 2024, though this was never fully implemented or respected by either side.

This strategy predates the current war with Iran, with public calls for the annexation of southern Lebanon by one of Mr Netanyahu’s coalition partners going back to March 2023.

And it is likely to outlive the US war with Iran, especially if a deal that Mr Trump negotiates leaves the Iranian regime with enough capacity to continue supporting its regional proxy forces.

Third, the reaction of other countries in the region, especially the Gulf states, is something of a wild card.

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Initially opposed to the war against Iran, Tehran’s direct attacks on their critical energy and water infrastructure have likely hardened their opposition to the Iranian regime.

With Mr Trump now potentially walking away from an essentially unfinished project of regime degradation — let alone regime change — it could leave them more vulnerable and exposed. This is likely to be one reason for now confirmed talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The Gulf states will have little sympathy for either Israel or Hezbollah, but they are heavily dependent on a return to calm and stability in the region. They will likely see Mr Trump as a less dependable ally but will also be less dependable allies for him.

How these tensions play out in the coming weeks and months will be critical for another one of Mr Trump’s “peace projects” — Gaza.

A ceasefire has been in place in the strip since Oct 10, 2025, after a two-year war. And the Gulf states, in particular, are meant to play a major role in the region’s recovery.

But the Iran war has diverted resources and attention away from the implementation of the second phase of the Gaza deal, which is more complex than pausing hostilities and exchanging hostages and prisoners.

Mr Netanyahu might soon find himself in a situation where he is not just fighting a war in Lebanon but where full-on confrontation with Hamas resumes in Gaza. Israel is capable of fighting such a two-front war, but more easily so if he can further weaken Hezbollah now.

For that reason alone, any pause to Israeli strikes in Lebanon is unlikely to lead to a sustainable peace. And if the US does withdraw from the Iran war in these conditions, peace will also be less attainable for the region it leaves behind.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by Channel News Asia on April 11, 2026.

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When Hungarians are heading to the polls on 12 April to elect a new prime minister, the world will be watching. This may sound exaggerated, but these parliamentary elections are about much more than simply whether the incumbent prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will serve another term as his country’s leader.

His main challenger, Péter Magyar, until two years ago was a close ally of the Hungarian prime minister. On some key issues — future oil purchases from Russia, resisting fast-track EU accession for Ukraine — Magyar is a continuity candidate who, at best, signals moderation, rather than radical change. If he fails to win a two-thirds majority, which would allow him to change the constitution and undo many of the deeply undemocratic changes Orbán has made to Hungary’s political system, Magyar’s hands will also be tied domestically and he may not even be able to deliver on his key campaign promise — to clean up the systemic corruption that has thrived under Orbán.

In fact, while important, the outcome of the elections is almost secondary in a bigger picture of an election campaign that has revealed much about the broader, and increasingly fraught, geopolitical dynamics of geopolitical dynamics of European politics.

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Throughout his campaign, Orbán leaned into the close relationship he has built with Trump over many years. This is not surprising. The US president publicly endorsed him twice — first in February and then again in March. Trump also dispatched both his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and vice president, J.D. Vance, to Hungary. Vance, visiting Hungary just days before the elections, praised Orbán’s governance model and leadership style as a model for Europe and attacked the EU for trying to influence the outcome of the vote.

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Such blatant election interference by the US in a Nato and EU member state is as unprecedented as it is worrying. It signals a new level of determination by the White House to shape alliances with other far-right populists predicated on the vague notion of “moral cooperation…and the defence of western civilisation”, as Vance put it during his visit to Budapest on April 7.

While Orbán revelled in Washington’s endorsements, his unconditional embrace of Trump is no longer the dominant approach to Washington among Europe’s right-wing populist parties. The appeal of the MAGA movement is rapidly diminishing in Europe. While fulsome in their support for Donald Trump for more than a decade, many European right-wing populists have begun to realise the fraught nature of their association with Trump. “America first” is exactly what it says on the tin, and Trump’s interpretation of what it means makes it even worse for some of his erstwhile supporters.

For Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki, Trump’s cosy relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin runs counter to the almost universal perception of Russia as the main threat to Polish security. For the Danish People’s Party, which sits with the far-right Patriots for Europe faction in the European parliament, Trump’s designs on Greenland were so unpalatable that one of its members, Anders Vistisen, told the US president to “fuck off”.

For, others, like the French National Rally, Trump’s tariff threats have affected some of their core constituencies among farmers. Even more so, Trump’s illegal war against Iran, hugely unpopular across European electorates, exposes the electoral liabilities of an association with Trump.

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This does not make these right-wing populist movements more liberal. They still share a broad resentment of liberalism and what it stands for: open societies, open borders, and a commitment to global institutions. Many of these parties have staked their political legitimacy on the defence of the sovereignty of their individual nation states. They now need to ask themselves whether this sovereignty is perhaps more threatened by Washington — and Moscow — than by Brussels.

The answer to this question will partly be determined by the outcome of Sunday’s elections in Hungary. A win for Orbán would, at a minimum, indicate a sufficient appeal for an autocratic and illiberal model of governance and a residual appeal for an alignment with Trump. But this may not be a logic that prevails for long.

On the one hand, the defeat of Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni in a constitutional referendum that would have increased political influence over courts signals that a sizeable pro-liberal core electorate can still be mobilised.

On the other hand, Orbán’s close relationship with Putin and his persistent obstruction of the EU’s Ukraine policy is likely to leave him more and more isolated, even among otherwise ideologically close right-wing populists. This vulnerability became apparent as early as 2022 when Orbán’s long-time ally Jaroslaw Kaczynski, then Polish deputy prime minister, publicly bashed his pro-Russian leanings.

Divisions over the EU’s Russia policy have exposed one significant faultline among right-wing populist movements across Europe between those seeking accommodation with the Kremlin and those seeking deterrence and containment. The far-right Sweden Democrats, for example, threatened to leave the European Conservatives and Reformists parliamentary bloc in the European parliament if Orbán’s Fidesz party had been allowed to join — precisely because the Hungarian prime minister was seen as too close to Russia.

For these Russia-sceptical parties, Orbán’s alignment with Putin is clearly anathema, and Trump’s rapprochement with the Russian president is likely to cement their weariness of too close an alignment with the White House. Geographical proximity to Russia and a long history of confrontation with Russia will remain powerful drivers for these parties’ foreign and security policies. Ironically, but consistent with general absence of strategic vision in the White House, Trump’s endorsement of Orbán may thus effectively accelerate Orbán’s isolation among right-wing populists in Europe and undermine Washington’s agenda of building a powerful coalition of like-minded illiberal leaders eroding the EU from within.

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These tensions and contradictions at the heart of a supposedly ideologically well-aligned transatlantic populist right movement predate Hungary’s parliamentary elections and they will outlast them. At a time of almost unprecedented global disorder and uncertainty, the battle for Hungary is as much an election campaign as it is part of an ongoing debate over the meaning of the west as a geopolitical project.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on April 9, 2026.

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Instead of bombing Iran back to the Stone Age — as was loudly threatened — there is now to be a deal between the US and the Mullahs. How should this development be assessed? What does it mean for the Middle East, for the standing of the United States in the world, and what lessons are autocrats worldwide drawing from the past few weeks? Constantin Schreiber discussed this with Professor Stefan Wolff from the University of Birmingham. Stefan Wolff is co-founder of Navigating the Vortex , which publishes analysis and assessments on geopolitics and the global economy, and has built a community of over one million people in more than 140 countries.

Q. The stock markets are jubilant, the economy relieved. The Strait of Hormuz may be navigable again. But how does this ceasefire look geopolitically — is it good or bad?

A. Overall, this is initially a positive development — but one must also consider that Donald Trump’s foreign policy is not characterised by great consistency. A somewhat more pessimistic view would be: deferred is not cancelled. We now have a ceasefire for approximately 14 days, but it is entirely unclear what will ultimately be agreed in an actual deal between Washington and Tehran, how far that would be acceptable to both sides, and whether it will lead to a longer-term resolution of the dispute between Iran and the US, but also between Iran and Israel.

“Deferred is not cancelled.”

Q. The Mullah regime has been described as the control centre for terror networks across the entire region. But it now looks as though this regime will in some form remain, even after the war?

A. Yes, absolutely. And it is not just that the regime itself remains — the regime now has considerably stronger incentives to pursue a harder line within the region. There was the agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, brokered by China — a normalisation of relations, an exchange of ambassadors. At the time, it was seen as very positive. But now it has become essentially irrelevant, given the direct conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. That is an uncertainty the ceasefire announcement does not resolve. At the same time, Israel has confirmed the ceasefire with Iran but insists it does not extend to Lebanon and the conflict with Hezbollah.

Q. You say the Mullah regime now has an incentive to act even more confrontationally in the region. Was the war, then, counterproductive?

A. Absolutely — as is almost every war. And there is also cause to ask whether wars today can be won at all, even by superpowers like the United States. Trump originally insisted on regime change in Tehran, on the destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme, on eliminating Iran’s capacity to develop ballistic missiles. Essentially none of that is now being discussed. What Trump announced overnight on his Truth Social channel is just the vague hope that Iran’s nuclear programme will end — but that is not an immediate improvement compared to the situation before the war, when the universal assessment was that Iran was neither on the verge of building a nuclear bomb, nor that it was even clear Iran was moving in that direction at all.

Q. On the subject of nuclear weapons — there is still around 400 kg of missing highly enriched uranium. How close is Iran actually to developing nuclear weapons?

A. This so called highly-enriched uranium — which at the moment nobody quite knows where it is — is still not at a stage where it could be used immediately to build a nuclear bomb. It could potentially be used for a so-called dirty bomb, but even for that you still need rockets or other means to deliver it. So even the worst scenario one can imagine is not the immediate outbreak of a nuclear confrontation in the Middle East. That does not mean Iran has not thought strategically about maintaining a certain leverage — staying just short of nuclear weapons production capability. But there was no definitive proof that a nuclear strike was imminent, let alone that Iran was on the verge of a nuclear attack against Israel or the United States.

Q. I was on the ground in Israel at the start of the war and witnessed the first waves of Iranian missile attacks. At the time, it was said that within days up to 90% of Iran’s missile launch capabilities would be destroyed. Weeks later Iran is still firing at full capacity. Was there a massive miscalculation?

A. It was impossible to have 100% accurate information about how far Iran’s capacities were developed, or what stocks existed. The clear miscalculation, in my view, was in the access to the enormous underground facilities where Iran stores its missiles and launchers. There was simply no way of knowing how many of those there were, or how many had actually been effectively destroyed. The number of Iranian missiles and drones being sent toward Israel, US bases, and allies in the region has definitely declined — but the overall capacity persists, and one cannot say definitively when Iran will run out of launchers, missiles, or drones, or the capacity to produce more. One of Trump’s stated war goals — reducing Iran’s military capability — has definitely not been achieved.

Q. And yet — given the scale of the underground infrastructure, the tunnel systems, the way Iran has been firing in all directions including at Gulf states — surely removing this regime was the right goal?

A. Absolutely. But the question is whether the currently heightened hostility of the regime was not itself provoked by this war of aggression. That is not to say a longer-term deal could have been made with the regime — even with the old regime under Khamenei senior— I do not think so. But one could possibly have found other and more effective means to remove from the regime both the ability and the incentives to create an entirely new level of misery across the region.

Q. What could that have looked like?

A. One could simply have continued on the diplomatic track. Just before the war began, mediation through Oman had been relatively productive. The Omani foreign minister said literally the night before Trump and Netanyahu launched the attack that they were extremely close to a deal. In my view, what is ultimately achieved in a new agreement between the United States and Iran will be very close to what was already negotiated in 2015 under Barack Obama — but with a ten-year delay, a massive war in the Middle East, and consequences for the global economy that are far from resolved.

“What is ultimately achieved will be very close to what was already negotiated in 2015 under Barack Obama — but with a ten-year delay and a massive war in the Middle East.”

Q. When I speak with Israeli representatives and American security experts, they say the Mullahs are simply a partner you cannot trust — that any deal would be cover for continuing to build toward nuclear weapons. Is that unrealistic?

A. That is by no means unrealistic. Though I would also say the question of trust operates in both directions — how far can Iran trust the United States under Donald Trump to behave constructively, rather than using talks merely as a pause before resuming the war. As for Iran — of course there are massive doubts — but we must keep in mind that for decades there have been fears Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, and yet even today Iran does not have nuclear weapons. The greatest uncertainty exists for Israel, which is far more directly at risk given its geographical proximity. For Israel, what the US is now probably enabling is arguably the worst outcome: a considerably more hostile regime, with sufficient capabilities, remaining in Tehran. That will further increase Israel’s fears — and partly explains why Israel will definitively continue trying to eliminate Hezbollah in Lebanon.

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Q. But it is also tragic for the people of Iran — tens of thousands dead, people who wanted to overthrow this regime, who have been oppressed for decades. A regime so unpopular with its own population.

A. Absolutely. And that underscores the complete loss of confidence in a consistent US foreign policy. The protests in Iran at the start of the year — which by some estimates led to up to 45,000 deaths on the protestors’ side — were partly a direct response to Trump’s promises on social media that help was on the way. That help did not come. In his first statement after the war began on 28 February, regime change in Tehran was clearly stated as a war goal. That is entirely gone now. Trump is in effect negotiating with a regime he has partly destroyed — and that regime’s own capacity to engage constructively in negotiations has been at least decimated.

Q. What does this mean for other authoritarian systems? What have Russia and China learned from the past few weeks?

A. I think different conclusions are being drawn in Moscow and Beijing. For Moscow, the fundamental lesson is that Trump cannot be trusted — that his foreign policy is entirely inconsistent. That also has consequences for the deal Putin and Trump were trying to arrange, which is not something Moscow can rely on long-term. For Beijing, the lessons are different. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has had massive consequences for the global economy, and for China as the world’s second-largest economy there are direct effects. Beijing can also lean back somewhat, since US leadership capacity has been further eroded — we also see this in how transatlantic relations have suffered. On the other hand, the complete collapse of the existing international order is also problematic for China. If there are no rules that global actors feel bound to respect, that is not good for anyone, including an economy the size of China’s. The challenge for China now is to decide how far it actually wants to take on a global leadership role, and how far it has the capacity to do so. Those questions have not yet been definitively answered in Beijing.

Professor Stefan Wolff is co-founder of Navigating the Vortex. This interview was conducted by Constantin Schreiber. The English-language transcript has been slightly edited for clarity. This episode is also available as a podcast.

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including:

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On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military campaign against Iran — striking its leadership, regime infrastructure, and nuclear programme in the opening hours. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed. Within a few days, the Strait of Hormuz was closed. Oil spiked to $120 a barrel.

We have spent the days since working through what this means — not just for the Middle East, but for energy markets, food systems, the global financial order, nuclear non-proliferation, and the wider trajectory of the Russia–Ukraine war. The consequences are cascading in real time, and the full effects will play out over years, not weeks

Below is our full analysis so far, structured across three tiers: the direct and immediate impacts; the secondary geoeconomic and geopolitical shocks; and the longer-term butterfly effects that this war has already set in motion.

Epic Fury & Its Consequences

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Tier One: Primary Impacts — Direct & Immediate

Strait of Hormuz Closure

20% of global oil and 20% of global LNG supply transits the Strait of Hormuz daily. There is no viable rerouting option for tankers caught inside the Gulf, and with Iranian forces actively targeting maritime traffic, marine transit has nearly halted through the world’s single most critical energy chokepoint.

Oil Price Shock & Fuel Prices

Brent crude surged from roughly $70 per barrel pre-war to a peak of $120, settling around $100 — a spike larger than the one that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. At the pump, Americans saw the national average rise from $2.98 to $3.58 per gallon, with California hitting $5.34. That is the highest price per gallon since 2024.

Gulf Production Collapse

Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE collectively cut production by approximately 6.7 million barrels per day by 10 March. Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura terminal — one of the largest oil export facilities on earth — was shut. Qatar declared LNG force majeure, instantly affecting 20% of world supply.

Aviation Chaos

The airspace of the UAE, Iran, Qatar, and Kuwait closed simultaneously. British Airways, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic, Air India, and Cathay Pacific all suspended Middle East services, with knock-on disruption across global transit routes that will take time to resolve.

Decapitation of the Iranian Regime

Ali Khamenei was killed alongside nine or more senior officials — including the army chief and defence minister. This is unprecedented in the modern era. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has stepped into the leadership vacuum and is described by analysts as more hardline and vengeful than his father. The regime has not collapsed. It has radicalised.

Market Shock & Legal Crisis

The Dow Jones fell more than 400 points on 2 March. Central banks globally were placed on emergency watch, with sovereign wealth funds doing urgent scenario analysis. On the legal front: there was no congressional declaration of war, no UN authorisation, and no confirmed imminent threat. The US attacked a sovereign state, raising serious questions about violations of UN Charter Article 2(4) and the 1973 War Powers Act.

Tier Two — Secondary Economic Impacts

Inflation & the Stagflation Spectre

The IMF formula holds that every 10% rise in oil prices produces approximately +0.4% global inflation and −0.15% GDP growth. With oil up nearly 70% from pre-conflict levels, those numbers are not academic. Central bank governors are openly citing the 1970s stagflation episode as the relevant historical parallel — a period from which recovery took a decade.

Food Price Shock

This is the underreported story. 30% of global fertiliser exports transit the Strait of Hormuz. The shipment cutoff translates directly into higher farm production costs, with downstream food price rises expected within six to ten weeks in import-dependent nations. The food shock will outlast the oil shock.

Developing World Crisis

The Philippine peso has dropped to 59.5 PHP/USD, while diesel prices surged +38.6% in the country. Egypt declared a near-emergency. South Korea, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have all introduced price caps and fuel rationing. The countries least responsible for this conflict are bearing some of its highest costs.

Europe on the Brink of Recession

European gas prices nearly doubled. The continent is still rebuilding its energy architecture following the decoupling from Russia, with strategic reserves currently limited. The IEA agreed to a strategic release of 400 million barrels of reserves, the largest in history.

The Fed is Caught

The US Federal Reserve faces the classic stagflation trap: cutting rates risks accelerating inflation; raising them risks deepening an employment downturn. Both actions carry severe risks simultaneously, and there is no clean exit from this position.

Tariff Shock Compounding

The Iran war compounds the pre-existing tariff shock from Trump’s trade policy. American households now face simultaneous energy cost spikes and supply chain disruption — a double-squeeze not seen since the 2008 financial crisis.

Tier Two — Secondary Political Impacts

Russia Wins the Lottery

Washington announced a 30-day waiver for countries to buy sanctioned Russian oil and petroleum products currently stranded at sea. Russia is simultaneously providing targeting intelligence to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard while having its economic constraints eased by the US. The European Council’s assessment is blunt: “So far, only one winner — Russia.”

Ukraine Sacrificed

Abu Dhabi peace talks planned for early March were disrupted. Patriot interceptor stocks — Ukraine’s primary shield against Russian ballistic missiles — are being drained by the Iran war. Trump has resumed blaming Ukraine for failing to accept Putin’s terms.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation at Risk

The IAEA chief warned that the strikes risk collapsing the global non-proliferation regime. Iran was bombed despite having no confirmed nuclear weapon. The lesson this writes for every other state watching — including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and South Korea — is devastatingly simple: only nuclear weapons deter US military action.

Sanctions as a Tool — Broken

If the US lifts Russian oil sanctions to solve a crisis caused by its own military action, the signal to every future adversary is permanent: create a crisis large enough and Western sanctions dissolve. The cornerstone of non-military foreign policy leverage has been weakened, possibly fatally.

US Domestic Blowback

Fuel up 20%. Over 1,800 Iranians killed in the first 14 days, including children at a school. Russia handed a windfall. No congressional authorisation. Every element of Operation Epic Fury creates midterm vulnerability in November 2026, with downstream effects on trade policy, NATO commitments, and global economic governance.

Tier Three — Butterfly Effects and Long-term Consequences

Taiwan Challenge

Two US navy aircraft carrier groups are in the Persian Gulf. Patriot stocks are dangerously down. US political capital is consumed. The Taiwan Strait is less defended than at any recent moment. If the Iran war extends past summer 2026, the window of reduced US Pacific capacity becomes strategically tempting to Beijing. China is treating every engagement against US carrier strike groups as live-fire doctrine refinement for a Taiwan scenario.

Nuclear Proliferation Cascade

The lesson that nuclear weapons are the only insurance policy against a US attack is now written in fire over Tehran. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and South Korea have all previously signalled nuclear hedging interest. If the non-proliferation regime collapses, the world twenty years hence is fundamentally more dangerous.

Russia’s War on Ukraine Gets Longer

Higher oil revenues, eased sanctions, diverted US military attention, depleted Patriot stocks, stalled peace talks, European financial support for Ukraine under strain — every variable moves in Russia’s favour. Russia benefits from Iran bleeding US and allied forces and drain interceptor stocks. The Iran conflict is likely to make Russia’s war on Ukraine both longer and harder to resolve.

Energy Transition Leap

This is the one consequence that cuts differently. The oil price spike makes renewables dramatically more cost-competitive. European and Asian governments will likely accelerate domestic clean energy investment regardless of climate politics. Long-term losers: petro-states. Long-term winners: clean energy industries and the fastest-moving economies.

Key Variables — Determining the Severity of Outcomes

• Whether the Strait of Hormuz remains closed

• Whether Iran’s regime collapses, escalates, or seeks negotiation

• Whether IEA release of strategic reserves at historic scale calms or spooks markets

• Whether the US can feasibly escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz

• Whether conflict spreads via Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, or Yemen proxy escalation

• Whether Russian sanctions relief becomes permanent

• Whether Ukraine talks can resume

• Whether China interprets US overextension as a strategic window in Taiwan

• Whether ceasefire terms preserve or further degrade the IAEA non-proliferation framework

• Whether the US recommits to non-proliferation diplomacy or accelerates NPT regime collapse

We will continue to track this as it develops. The situation remains highly fluid — the Strait of Hormuz closure, the Iranian political transition (if any), the status of Ukrainian air defences, and the position of the Gulf states are all moving simultaneously. The range of possible outcomes from here is exceptionally wide.

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As the war in the Middle East spreads and intensifies, the one in Ukraine continues. While geographically some 2,500 km (1,600 miles) apart, the impact of US president Donald Trump’s latest military adventure on the Russian war against Ukraine will be acutely felt across several areas. In the short term, the Kremlin will probably feel emboldened to double down on its aggression, but this is unlikely to shift the dial significantly towards Russian victory in the long term.

The targeted killing of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by a precision US strike will likely have reminded the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, of his reportedly “apoplectic” reaction to the killing of the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011. Comments on social media from the likes of far-right nationalist Alexander Dugin, who posted, that “one by one, our allies are being systematically destroyed”, and former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who alleged that the “talks with Iran were just a cover”, are unlikely to have steadied Putin’s nerves.

The Russian leader’s fears about being next after a string of US successes targeting foreign leaders may have been played up somewhat by the western media, but they are not completely unfounded. Putin continues to walk a fine line between paranoia and his outrage over the killing of Khamenei, which he condemned in a condolence letter to the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, as a “cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law”. But he did not mention Trump or the US as the culprits.

Concerns about his own longevity, however, will not be the only things weighing on Putin’s mind and compelling him to double down on his war against Ukraine. The escalation of violence in the Middle East also offers Russia several opportunities in its war of aggression against Ukraine — at least in the short term.

The sharp rise in oil prices throws Moscow a new lifeline for financing its ongoing war. Not only did prices spike — with Brent crude oil hitting $85 per barrel for the first time in almost two years — but the sudden, and likely lasting, inability of Iran to export oil will also have a major impact on China, which bought over 80% of all Iranian maritime oil exports, equivalent to some 13% of Chinese maritime oil imports.

China has large stockpiles of oil which will allow it to ride out current inflation. But Beijing is now likely to double down on its energy relationship with Russia. This will serve both countries well: Russia will deepen its economic ties with China and rebalance the relationship, while China will tap into a reliable supply line that will not be as vulnerable to being choked off as maritime supply routes in a future confrontation with the US.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian strikes against oil and gas facilities across the Gulf countries have destabilised global energy markets. With some 30% of global seaborne oil trade and 20% of all trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade affected, this represents a market opportunity for Russia and its shadow fleet of tankers, at least in the short term, given that Moscow retains sufficient refining and port capacity — despite a long Ukrainian air campaign against the country’s oil infrastructure.

Another likely benefit the Kremlin will reap are problems with weapons supplies to Ukraine. While insisting that the US had “virtually unlimited supply” of weapons and munitions, Trump also conceded that there were areas “at the highest end, (where) we have a good supply, but are not where we want to be”. This is a view echoed within the Pentagon where officials are keen to discuss an acceleration of weapons production with key arms manufacturers.

With large parts of western military support for Ukraine consisting of US weapons paid for by Kyiv’s European allies via NATO’s Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative, shortages on the US side will immediately impact the flow of vital equipment to Ukraine. Even deliveries already agreed could be derailed. In June 2025, during the so-called 12-day war with Iran, the US diverted some 20,000 missiles from Ukraine to the Middle East.

Russia is unlikely to face any similar constraints. On the contrary: a Russian-Iranian deal in late 2022 enabled Moscow to acquire technology from Tehran that allowed the Kremlin to kick-start domestic drone production based on the Iranian Shahed design. Not only has Russia improved the drones, it now also produces them faster and cheaper than Iran ever did.

If western military supplies to Ukraine now dry up even temporarily as a result of an increased focus of the US on the Middle East, Russia’s air superiority and the devastating impact its relentless campaign of missile and drone strikes has had on Ukraine is likely to continue unabated for now.

At the same time, however, this drives home the point that dependence on the US puts Ukraine and its European allies in an unacceptably precarious position. Ukraine’s own defence industry already meets half of the country’s needs, and the fallout from Iran war will likely further accelerate homegrown military production and innovation across Europe as the traditional US-European alliance frays.

In the short term, however, this ongoing transatlantic decoupling will serve Moscow’s interests more than Kyiv’s. European countries, including the UK, France, and Spain, have been critical of US and Israeli attacks on Iran, earning them the expected rebukes from Trump.

The White House might be too busy to follow through on threats “to cut off all trade” with Spain, but it will equally not put much effort into already fraught mediation efforts between Russia and Ukraine. Given the dismal performance of Trump’s own efforts and those of his negotiation team, as well as the pressure that the US had put on Ukraine rather than Russia to cut a deal, this may not be much of a loss.

But US diplomatic disengagement from the Russian war against Ukraine still poses a problem as Washington is the only player with the leverage to bring both sides together and — if Trump were to decide so — achieve a just and sustainable peace agreement between them.

Ukraine and its European partners may be able to prevent a Russian victory, but it will take some time for them to develop the military and political muscle to force Russia to make meaningful concessions that could pave the way towards a durable and acceptable settlement.

If nothing else, Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East is another factor in prolonging the war against Ukraine. Regardless of its short-term effects, it will not make a Russian victory more likely. But it has thrown the world into additional turmoil for no good reason whatsoever, and it will delay the much-needed restoration of peace in Europe.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on March 5, 2026.

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As Ukraine heads into a fifth year of defending itself against the unprovoked Russian full-scale invasion, the prospects of a just and sustainable peace agreement remain distant. On the ground, the land war continues to be in a stalemate, with the pace of Russian territorial gains now slower than some of the most protracted battles of trench warfare during the First World War.

In the air war, Moscow has demonstrated a ruthless and brutal efficiency in destroying much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The repeated destruction of power generation and distribution facilities has taken a serious toll on the Ukrainian population and economy. Yet beyond inflicting hardship, these strikes have not had the kind of strategic effect Russia needs to achieve in order to turn the military tables decisively on Ukraine.

All in all, the Kremlin narrative of inevitable victory looks more like Soviet-style propaganda than a reflection of battlefield reality. President Vladimir Putin, however, is not the only world leader guilty of wishful thinking. His American counterpart, President Donald Trump, at times, also appears to make policy untethered from the real world.

First, there was his claim on the campaign trail that he could end the fighting in Ukraine within 24 hours. Upon returning to the White House, Trump issued multiple ceasefire demands and associated deadlines that Putin simply ignored without incurring any cost. The latest plan from Washington is for a peace deal to be concluded between Moscow and Kyiv, approved by a Ukrainian referendum, and followed by national elections — all before June.

The timeline for the American plan aside, a US-mediated deal between Russia and Ukraine remains possible. However, it is unlikely that it will take the form of the just and sustainable settlement that Kyiv and its European allies demand. If it comes to pass as a result of the ongoing trilateral negotiations currently underway, it is highly probable that Ukraine will have to make significant concessions on territory in exchange for US-backed security guarantees and a mostly European-financed package of post-war reconstruction measures.

An additional bitter pill to swallow for Ukraine and Europe would be an unashamed US-Russia rapprochement with a simultaneous end to American sanctions on Russia, a flurry of economic deals between the two countries, and pressure on Ukraine’s other allies to follow suit, at least on sanctions relief and possibly on the release and return of Russian frozen assets.

The other — and more likely — possibility is that not even a bad deal will be forthcoming. The Russian side has given no indication that it is willing to make any significant concessions. Moscow’s position is that Kyiv should relinquish control over the entirety of the Donbas, including territory in Ukraine’s fortress belt that Moscow has so far been unable to take by military force. In return, or under the terms of what Russia refers to as the ‘Anchorage formula’ allegedly agreed between Putin and Trump at their Alaska summit in August 2025, the Kremlin is apparently willing to freeze the current frontlines elsewhere along the more than 1,000 km long line of contact.

Even at the very remote possibility that this was acceptable, or that Ukraine would be pressured into agreeing to such a deal, this would hardly seal a settlement, given that Russia continues to oppose the security guarantees currently on the table between Kyiv and its Western partners. Without them, territorial concessions make no sense for Ukraine, especially as there is no imminent danger of a collapse of Ukrainian defences.

The Hungarian blockage of the EU’s €90 billion loan to Ukraine — likely instigated by the country’s Prime Minister, Victor Orbán, at the behest of both Trump, whose Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had visited the country just before the announcement, and Putin, with whom Orban has had close ties for a long time — is not going to change Kyiv’s calculations significantly. Not only is the EU surely going to find a work-around to deal with this blockage but Orbán’s days as Ukraine’s principal foe inside the EU might be numbered given that he is trailing in opinion polls ahead of April’s parliamentary elections. As any embrace of and by Trump and Putin is unlikely to improve Orbán’s prospects for another term, the Hungarian blockage might ultimately prove temporary regardless of the outcome of April’s elections.

If, as is therefore likely, Trump’s latest deadline passes without a deal being reached, the question arises what next? Trump could simply walk away from the war. He threatened to do so in the past but a likely mix of ego and the prospect of economic deals in the event of peace prevented him from doing so. Nothing suggests at the moment that this time will be different. There might be some angry exchanges and finger pointing, but after that, the current, deeply flawed negotiation process is likely to resume in some form because the alternatives are worse for all sides, Trump included.

The US President could walk away and finally realise that Putin is simply not interested in peace, no matter what is on offer. But this will not lead Trump to ramp up pressure on Russia in a significant way. He has had reason and opportunity to do so on multiple occasions since returning to the White House in January 2025. He has not done so then, and there is no reason to believe that he would do so now.

Trump could then instead pursue a bilateral deal with Russia. But without European participation, such a deal will be of limited benefit to both sides. The bulk of Russian foreign assets remain frozen in Europe and would very likely stay so in the absence of coordinated transatlantic action. Russia has little of value to export to the US and lacks the market conditions to make it an attractive destination for US foreign direct investment. Some US companies might return or expand their still existing operations in the country, but these will hardly be the trillion-dollar deals that Trump, and possibly Putin, envisage.

Even if any such separate US-Russia deal would be of limited economic value, it would still be politically damaging, especially to transatlantic relations. That, however, also makes it less likely to happen. By June, primaries in the United States ahead of the November midterm elections will largely have concluded and Republican candidates will be less susceptible to pressure from the White House. As was already obvious in the context of Trump’s threats to take over Greenland, if necessary by force, there remains a segment of foreign policy realists among congressional Republicans who, unshackled from the leverage Trump may have held over them in the primaries, are likely to push back more against his most disruptive foreign policy stances, including when it comes to any dealing with Russia reached at the expense of the transatlantic alliance.

All of these scenarios, and a likely myriad of more or less minor variations of them, contain the ingredients of a British and European strategy for what is probably another year of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The first is the utmost importance of unity behind Ukraine’s defence efforts. Across the multiple overlapping multi- and mini-lateral formats of EU, NATO, coalition of the willing, etc., there needs to be a clear message to Russia, the US, and Ukraine alike: Russia’s aggression is also Europe’s problem and will be treated as such for as long as the threat from Moscow — not just against Ukraine but against the fundamental tenets of the European security order as such — remains credible.

This means, second, that Ukraine needs to be supported materially with military and economic aid and politically when it comes to pushing back against both American and Russian designs for a deal to serve the interests of the current incumbents of the White House and the Kremlin first. For a more effective political pushback, Europe needs to cultivate relations with those in the US foreign policy establishment who continue to see value in established alliance structures, especially if they reflect more balanced burden-sharing.

Third, the UK and its European allies also need to think beyond Ukraine — because this is what Russia is doing as well, despite the demands of its war of aggression. Though it need not be limited to the EU-Russia borderlands, this is where the focus needs to remain for the foreseeable future.

Moldova, for example, remains particularly vulnerable to Russian interference, notwithstanding the success of pro-European forces in the country in presidential and parliamentary elections in 2024 and 2025. Moscow still retains multiple channels of influence, including through the unresolved conflict in the Transnistrian region, which, if left to fester, could significantly impede Moldova’s EU accession process and provide opportunities for renewed destabilisation.

Similarly, parliamentary elections in Armenia in June will create an opportunity for the Kremlin to destabilise another of its neighbours that has increasingly turned away from Moscow and towards Brussels. Given the role of the US, and of Trump personally, in the peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan, this also offers an opportunity for the UK and Europe to cooperate with Washington in working towards constraining Russian influence in the South Caucasus region as a whole.

A fourth and final ingredient in an evolving British and European strategy is a focus on becoming a credible player in the emerging new international order. This requires a certain amount of realism and modesty in aspirations and messaging. The UK is not pursuing a fast track to rejoining the EU, but closer alignment and cooperation across the English Channel is essential.

Equally important is that declarations of intent, be they about a UK-EU reset or an expanding coalition of the willing, are followed with concrete action — especially on investment in defence and a more credible European deterrence posture. This means both a more capable defence industrial base and doctrine for the kind of war being fought in Ukraine and improved defence readiness and resilience at the level of society.

A reconstituted European alliance, with a coalition at its heart that is not just willing but also capable of deterring Russia, is not beyond the reach of the UK and Europe. It may not be, nor ever become, a traditional great power, but by continuing to back Ukraine today and integrating it tomorrow, it will feel, and be, less vulnerable to the whims of the current or any future mercurial leader in the White House or the Kremlin. Crucially, it preserves the opportunity to rebuild the transatlantic alliance in the future, and to do so on stronger European foundations.

An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Foreign Policy Centre on February 24, 2026.

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On 13 February 2026, we spoke with John Nagle and Tamirace Fakhoury to mark the publication of the latest edition of Ethnopolitics — a special issue on Contesting Power-sharing: Contentious Politics in Divided Societies, co-edited by John and Simon Mabon, to which Tamirace contributed the article “How Do Semi-Authoritarian Regimes Defeat Uprisings? Lebanon’s 2019 Uprising and the Dramaturgical Performances that the Post-Civil War Regime Plays”.

John is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast, as well as a Fellow of the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies. More information about him is available here.

Tamirace joined us from Massachusetts in the United States where she works as Associate Professor of International Politics and Conflict at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. You can find out more about her by following this link.

The articles we discuss in this episode can be accessed for free on our website:

• John Nagle and Simon Mabon, “Contesting Power-sharing: Contentious Politics in Divided Societies”

• John Nagle and Cera Murtagh, “Contesting Power-Sharing? LGBTQ+ Activism and the Sexual Citizenship of Consociationalism”

• Tamirace Fakhoury, “How Do Semi-Authoritarian Regimes Defeat Uprisings? Lebanon’s 2019 Uprising and the Dramaturgical Performances that the Post-Civil War Regime Plays”

The whole special issue, Contesting Power-sharing: Contentious Politics in Divided Societies (Ethnopolitics 25(2), 2026), can be accessed here.

John’s 2009 article, “Potemkin Village: Neo-liberalism and Peace-building in Northern Ireland?” (Ethnopolitics 8(2), 2009, 173-190), is available here.

You can listen to episode two of Navigating the Vortex | Ethnopolitics Edition, which contains the whole interview with Tamirace and John, here for free.

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex | Ethnopolitics Edition with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Amazon/Audible

• PocketCasts

• Overcast

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