By Vasif Huseynov

The sixth Azerbaijan International Defence Exhibition (ADEX 2026), which opened at the Baku Expo Center on September 30 and lasts until October 2, was the largest in the event’s history. According to the Office of the President of Azerbaijan, 277 companies from 30 countries took part in ADEX 2026 and its sister event Securex Caspian. As many as 59 foreign delegations from 39 countries registered, and 14 countries set up national pavilions. Record demand for the event forced organizers to open an additional pavilion, and for the first time an entire hall was reserved for Azerbaijan’s own national exposition.

President Ilham Aliyev toured the exhibition on opening and was briefed by Defense Minister Zakir Hasanov and Minister of Defense Industry Vugar Mustafayev. In his address to the participants, Aliyev stated that the country’s defense industry “has now entered a qualitatively new stage” and that its products stand out for their competitiveness in international markets. The exhibition floor offered evidence for both claims, but it also carried a more pointed message about the future direction of Azerbaijani air power.

Defense Industry Consolidation and Expansion

The clearest change since earlier expositions was the weight given to Azerbaijan’s growing defense industrial capabilities. At the center of the national exposition stood Azersilah, the defense industry holding created under the Ministry of Defense Industry by presidential order in 2023. The presidential press service describes its mandate as organizing the production, sale, and export of weapons, expanding production capacity, and building international partnerships. Its consolidation of scattered state plants into one entity able to form joint ventures reflects a deliberate industrial policy rather than exhibition showmanship.

The second shift is the role of private capital. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Defense Industry Minister Vugar Mustafayev noted that more than 20 local private companies are presenting products at ADEX and that most of these firms already supply the Armed Forces, while several have begun exporting weaponry. He tied this directly to the lessons of the 2020 Karabakh War, arguing that a strong national defense industry cannot rest on state-owned enterprises alone and needs the flexibility and investment capacity of the private sector.

The product line on display follows those battlefield lessons. Azerbaijani media pointed to the locally built Tufan mine-resistant vehicle, the ITX-15 and ITX-20 armored personnel carriers, including Fireforce, described as the country’s first domestically produced air defense laser system. According to official information, Azerbaijan now produces more than 1,000 types of military products and exports them to over 30 countries. Several new systems made their public debut. Azersilah presented the MGK MK-82 “SkyDiver”, a 250-kilogram laser-guided bomb produced in Azerbaijan in 2026, as well as armed unmanned ground vehicles carrying remote weapon stations with heavy machine guns or grenade launchers, the “kamikaze robots” the Ministry of Defense Industry had announced ahead of the show. Domestic producers also unveiled the QIRAT and ARROW series of reconnaissance and kamikaze drones, while Bayraktar Teknoloji Azerbaijan, the local subsidiary of Baykar that began production in the Sumgayit Industrial Park in 2025, debuted the KASIRGA, a vertical take-off drone that can either strike as a loitering munition or return from a reconnaissance mission.

Baku’s Growing List of Foreign Defense Partners

The guest list at ADEX 2026 is itself a statement of Azerbaijan’s multi-vector defense diplomacy. Türkiye is the most widely represented country, with Baykar, Aselsan, Roketsan, and the shipbuilder Dearsan among the stands the President visited, according to the official account of the visit. The same account lists Israel’s IAI, Rafael, and Elbit Systems, Italy’s Leonardo, Germany’s Rheinmetall, the UAE’s EDGE Group, the Czechoslovak Group, Slovakia’s national pavilion, and the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, which co-produces the JF-17 with China.

Two Western newcomers particularly stand out. Several prestigious American companies participated in ADEX for the first time, and the United Kingdom arrived with a Ministry of Defence stand that includes BAE Systems and a 14-company delegation from the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce. When President Aliyev received UK Minister of State for Defence Lord Vernon Coaker, he described defense industry cooperation as a new chapter in the bilateral partnership and raised the prospect of joint ventures in Azerbaijan, not just purchases.

The ADEX exhibition also produced several concrete agreements. Azerbaijan’s Defense Minister Hasanov and Haluk Görgün, head of Türkiye’s Defense Industry Agency, oversaw the signing of contracts with Turkish companies worth more than $500 million. The package includes 14 Hürkuş-II trainer aircraft from Turkish Aerospace, which Görgün said will begin arriving later this year, a purchase that matters for pilot training as the Air Force transitions to new combat jets. It also covers Baykar’s Mızrak smart loitering munitions and Antidot systems, Roketsan’s Barbaros coastal defense system, and a framework agreement on Aselsan’s ALP-100 radars.

Several deals went beyond mere procurement. Aselsan and the Azerbaijani company NOVASIS signed a term sheet to set up a production facility in Nakhchivan for laser guidance kits, TOLUN precision-guided munitions, and KORKUT air defense systems, while MKE, Otokar, Kayı Defense, and Boğaziçi Defense concluded cooperation agreements with Azerbaijani firms Miras and NOVASIS. Azerbaijan’s Ministries of Defense Industry and of Science and Education also signed a memorandum with Türkiye’s Defense Industry Agency and Council of Higher Education on joint training of engineers and research, alongside a separate memorandum on personnel training and technology for the defense industry.

The largest localization project announced at the show came from Central Europe. The Czechoslovak Group said it will form a second joint venture in Azerbaijan in December 2026 for the gradual local production of self-propelled howitzers, with manufacturing to start in 2027 and business worth €1.8 billion ($2.03 billion) over seven years. It follows VEXA DS, a venture set up earlier this year to repair and modernize armored vehicles.

Uzbekistan signed a Bilateral Military Cooperation Plan for 2027 with Azerbaijan the same day, with Defense Minister Shukhrat Khalmukhamedov signing on behalf of Tashkent. ADEX 2026 took place in parallel with the “Power of Unity 2026” joint exercise of Azerbaijan, Türkiye, and Uzbekistan, which opened on September 22 in the Karabakh region. According to the Ministry of Defense, its large-scale phase on October 1 involved 3,579 military personnel, 135 unmanned aerial vehicles, 27 aircraft, and 25 naval assets, and was monitored by observers from nine different countries, including Pakistan, Georgia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The ministry described it as the first exercise of its kind and scale held on Azerbaijani territories liberated from Armenian occupation.

Baku’s New Jet Fighter: China’s J-10CE in Azerbaijani Colors

One of the most widely discussed objects at ADEX 2026 was the display of a full-scale model of the Chinese-made J-10CE fighter, the export variant of the Chengdu J-10C, which was displayed by China’s AVIC in Azerbaijani Air Force insignia. The presidential press service of Azerbaijan confirms that China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation, AVIC’s export arm, is among the exhibitors.

The display did not come out of nowhere. In November 2024, Air Force Commander Lieutenant General Namig Islamzade inspected the J-10CE at the Zhuhai Airshow and met his Chinese counterpart; the Ministry of Defense reported that they discussed the state and prospects of military-technical cooperation between the two air forces. Since then, Baku has acquired the Chinese-Pakistani JF-17 Block III, and its neighbor Uzbekistan has publicly unveiled its own J-10CE into its air fleet. In late August 2026, Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Defense released footage of the jets, which it described as modern fighters guarding the country’s air borders, making it the aircraft’s second foreign operator after Pakistan.

The J-10CE would be a major qualitative improvement and sit above the JF-17 in Azerbaijan’s fleet, not replace it. Baku is already the largest export customer of the JF-17: the Government of Pakistan announced in June 2025 that Azerbaijan expanded its order from 16 to 40 aircraft in a deal valued at $4.6 billion. Moreover, in a sign of their military significance, the Chinese-made fighter jets flew over Baku in the November 2025 Victory Day parade.

A two-tier fleet of JF-17 Block IIIs and J-10CEs would give Azerbaijan its most capable air force since obtaining independence in 1991. The JF-17s would carry the bulk of routine air policing and strike missions at an affordable cost per flight hour, while a smaller J-10CE force would cover the JF-17’s weaknesses in speed, payload, and air combat. Operating two aircraft from the same Chinese-Pakistani industrial and weapons ecosystem, including the PL-15E and PL-10E missiles, would also simplify training, logistics, and munitions stocks.

The geography of that capability matters. With the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process advancing, Baku’s air power planning is no longer framed solely by the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan’s energy platforms, pipelines, and the Middle Corridor ports on the Caspian Sea form some of the most valuable infrastructure in the wider region. Protecting that airspace requires fighter aircraft with the range and speed to reach threats quickly outside Azerbaijan’s national airspace. Moreover, the addition of the J-10CE fighters would be a meaningful step forward for Azerbaijan in obtaining regional air superiority over its sector of the Caspian.

Outlook

In conclusion, ADEX 2026 suggests that Azerbaijan’s defense industry is moving beyond its traditional role as a buyer of foreign equipment toward becoming a producer, exporter, and increasingly sophisticated partner in international defense cooperation. The financial commitment is quite robust: the draft 2027 state budget, for example, allocates 8.8 billion manats (about $5.2 billion) to defense and security, a 1.1 percent increase over 2026, and the Prime Minister has said these items will remain among the largest expenditures next year.

Should this trajectory continue, Azerbaijan’s defense industry will become an increasingly important component of its broader foreign policy and regional security posture, linking domestic production, military modernization, exports, and partnerships across the South Caucasus, Central Asia, Türkiye, Europe, and the wider Caspian region.

Author’s Bio:

Dr. Vasif Huseynov is the head of the Western Studies department at the Center for Analysis of International Relations and Multiculturalism (AIR Center) in Baku, Azerbaijan.

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By Vasif Huseynov

👉The Azerbaijan-Türkiye energy partnership is entering a new phase, moving from oil and gas toward electricity and renewable power. Three projects under development could extend their energy network to Europe, while a Nakhchivan connection could provide the Azerbaijan-Armenia peace corridor with a new economic and strategic dimension.

By Vasif Huseynov

Baku hosted the fifth Azerbaijan-Türkiye Energy Forum on September 11, bringing together Azerbaijan’s Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov and Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar for a review of hydrocarbons, energy efficiency, the electricity market, renewables and mining under the two countries’ Joint Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation, a format that was launched in 2021. It was on the margins of that forum that Bayraktar confirmed what regional energy officials have been signaling for months: after three decades of building oil and gas infrastructure together, Azerbaijan and Türkiye are now planning to move electricity across the same network of relationships. Bayraktar noted that the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) has carried a cumulative 100 billion cubic meters of gas since entering service, calling it a major contributor to Europe’s energy security.

He then set out, for the first time in detail, three electricity projects the two countries are pursuing in parallel.

The hydrocarbon foundation beneath that announcement remains substantial in its own right. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline is currently carrying about 600,000 barrels a day against a capacity closer to a million, headroom Bayraktar said Ankara wants filled with Central Asian volumes moving through the same corridor. On the gas side, Türkiye’s state pipeline operator BOTAŞ signed a 15-year agreement with SOCAR, TotalEnergies and ADNOC in June for 33 billion cubic meters of gas tied to the second phase of Azerbaijan’s Absheron field, with production due to begin in 2029, according to the Turkish Energy Ministry’s statement on the signing.

Electricity is the addition to that picture. “We are working specifically on three projects,” Bayraktar told the reporters. The first is a transmission line bringing electricity from Azerbaijan to Türkiye via Nakhchivan; the second is a four-country “green energy corridor” linking Türkiye, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Bulgaria; and the third is a high-voltage line running under the Black Sea to Europe. He described the Türkiye-Georgia-Azerbaijan-Bulgaria project in particular as “the TANAP of electricity,” and said the two governments hope to move it to the next stage soon, potentially through an intergovernmental agreement signed by the two presidents at the COP31 climate conference in Antalya.

The most geopolitically sensitive of the three is the Nakhchivan line, because Azerbaijan’s exclave has no land connection to the rest of the country, except through Armenian and Iranian territory.

Any electricity link that reaches both Nakhchivan and Türkiye points toward the same corridor now being rebuilt for rail traffic under the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), the transit framework that the United States, Azerbaijan and Armenia agreed to in their August 8, 2025 Joint Declaration at the White House. President Ilham Aliyev gave a detailed public account yet of that corridor’s physical progress while in Tashkent on August 23, informing the third meeting of the Azerbaijani-Uzbek Supreme Interstate Council that the Horadiz-Aghband railroad on Azerbaijan’s mainland side is already largely complete and is set for completion next year, that construction inside Nakhchivan itself is already underway, and that on the Armenian side, work is expected to begin by early next year. He also said Baku is assembling an international consortium to help finance the Nakhchivan section.

None of that construction is designed to carry electricity. But it establishes, quite literally, the corridor along which the Nakhchivan-Türkiye transmission line would run. It also means that the project would be one of the first pieces of TRIPP-adjacent infrastructure whose purpose is neither symbolic nor purely commercial, but operational: to interconnect the two national power grids. A corridor negotiated in Washington specifically to end a conflict would in all likelihood become the route that keeps electricity flowing between Azerbaijan and one of its own regions. That is a different, and arguably stronger, form of American stake in the peace process than a declaration alone provides.

The other two projects carry less political weight but have more direct relevance on Europe.

The Türkiye-Georgia-Azerbaijan-Bulgaria corridor is explicitly designed to carry renewable generation rather than fossil-fuel electricity, positioning Baku as a producer of green power rather than only oil and gas. The Black Sea subsea cable is the most technically ambitious of the three, delivering Caspian-basin electricity directly into the European market, the electricity equivalent of what TANAP and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline already do for gas, and a hedge against the same overland chokepoints that have periodically complicated Middle Corridor freight traffic.

According to Azerbaijan’s Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov, the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Türkiye-Bulgaria corridor is also significant for linking into Europe’s energy system, and that work on a technical-economic feasibility study and a joint venture for the project is already under way. He has also said that Türkiye’s participation in a separate Caspian-Black Sea-Europe Green Energy Corridor, planned to be phased into operation starting in 2032, would be a natural extension of the two countries’ energy partnership.

Electricity also serves Baku and Ankara differently than oil or gas ever could. Hydrocarbon pipelines lock in a commodity that Europe’s own climate targets are designed to phase down; transmission lines let Azerbaijan monetize the wind, solar and hydro capacity it has been courting foreign investment to build, without depending on European gas demand staying high indefinitely. For Türkiye, it extends the hub ambitions already visible in Middle Corridor freight and TANAP transit into the power sector. Shahbazov also noted that Turkish companies' participation in Azerbaijan’s green energy projects has been growing, and said that artificial intelligence and digitalization in the energy transition should become one of the new priority areas of Azerbaijan-Türkiye energy cooperation.

Whether that ambition attracts financing is an important question in bilateral discussions. President Aliyev told German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government during his July 21 visit to Berlin that with TANAP and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline already running at full capacity, any further gas deliveries to Germany depend on new interconnectors, and that financing for them from the European Investment Bank has largely dried up under the institution’s own green-transition mandates. A renewable-carrying electricity corridor, unlike a hydrocarbon pipeline, sits more comfortably inside the mandate European lenders have used to justify walking away from oil and gas projects.

Outlook

The emerging electricity architecture therefore suggests that the Middle Corridor is becoming more than a route for moving goods between Asia and Europe. Azerbaijan and Türkiye are gradually adding an energy layer to the corridor, moving from oil and gas to electricity and from conventional hydrocarbons to renewable power. For Brussels, this emerging architecture could provide additional momentum for diversifying Europe’s energy supplies and strengthening its energy security through the Caspian region. If the three projects now under discussion are brought to completion, the result would be a network in which Caspian energy resources reach Türkiye and Europe through multiple channels, while the Nakhchivan connection could give the Azerbaijan-Armenia peace framework a tangible economic and infrastructural dimension.

Author’s Bio:

Dr. Vasif Huseynov is the head of the Western Studies department at the Center for Analysis of International Relations and Multiculturalism (AIR Center) in Baku, Azerbaijan.

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By Sergey Sukhankin

The establishment of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) in Shanghai on July 16, 2026, provides Russia and China with a new institutional framework for technological cooperation. The organization brings together 29 founding members—mostly non-democratic regimes from the Global South—to provide Beijing with another institutional platform for shaping an alternative to Western AI cooperation and governance.

The more consequential question for Moscow, however, is not participation in another multilateral technology forum, but whether AI can become a new pillar of bilateral economic interdependence with an economically and technologically stronger, and demographically larger, neighbor. Russian commentary points toward a prospective ‘division of labor’ intended to compensate for Moscow’s disadvantages vis-à-vis China. Namely, MTS Web Services CEO Pavel Voronin argued that in the scope of this “AI Alliance” Russia could provide Russian-language and sector-specific training data and expertise in industry, energy, finance, science, education, and public administration, while China can offer model architectures, computing resources, equipment, and training technologies.

Leverage Through Infrastructure

This proposition reflects Russia’s technological limitations vis-à-vis China: for instance, InfoWatch President Natalya Kasperskaya has argued that Russia is unlikely to catch the United States or China in large foundational models and should concentrate its scarce resources on applied AI instead. In other words, Moscow has an incentive to seek leverage in the physical infrastructure underlying AI, and this asymmetry helps explain the growing Russian focus on Siberia and the Far East, where Moscow’s potential contribution to an “AI alliance” could take the form of physical inputs on which large-scale computing increasingly depends: electricity, land, cooling, fiber connectivity, and geographically distributed data-center capacity. Indeed, Siberia and the Far East offer substantial hydroelectric resources and a cold climate that can reduce cooling costs. Russia is effectively seeking to convert these factors into a higher-value export (computational capacity) and bind part of Chinese demand to Russian territory and power systems, creating a new form of infrastructure interdependence.

Additionally, for Moscow, locating compute capacity east of the Urals supports a broader effort to redirect infrastructure and investment toward its Asian-facing regions that have historically suffered from geographic distance, thin markets, and population outflow. Clearly, data centers alone will not reverse those structural problems, but they can anchor power, telecommunications, engineering, and cloud-service investment around existing industrial centers. This makes AI infrastructure attractive as an instrument of territorial development as well as foreign economic policy. For Moscow, AI infrastructure could therefore serve three objectives simultaneously: developing Russia’s eastern regions, strengthening their economic integration with Asian markets, and fostering interdependence with China.

This operational model has clear precedents: the first steps in this direction occurred well before the current AI boom. For example, in 2015, Russia’s En+ Group discussed Siberian data-center cooperation with Huawei, targeting approximately $5 billion in Chinese investment over five years. By September 2015, En+, Huawei, LANIT, Centrin Data Systems, and Irkutsk regional authorities signed a framework agreement in Beijing for a major Irkutsk Oblast data center. In May 2017, En+ launched the first module of its “Clouds of Siberia” (Oblaka Sibiri) network at the Novo-Irkutsk CHP plant. En+ said the facility would serve Russian and Chinese customers and highlighted two advantages: company-supplied electricity and year-round natural cooling. It estimated that electricity accounts for 50–70 percent of cloud-processing costs and noted it was considering additional projects with Russian and Chinese partners.

The significance of these earlier projects lies less in their scale than in the model they anticipated: converting Siberia’s inexpensive electricity and climatic advantages into data-processing capacity partly oriented toward meeting Chinese demand. What is new in 2026 is the convergence of this older infrastructure logic with rapidly expanding AI-related compute demand. MTS and China Mobile International signed a memorandum to establish a new cross-border internet route – as of now the route is planned rather than already completed – at Pogranichny–Suifenhe using DWDM equipment capable of 48 channels at 200 Gbit/s each. If completed, the project would strengthen the digital backbone required for cross-border cloud and compute services.

Seeking AI Capacity in the East

Russia is simultaneously building domestic AI capacity in the east, which (as of now) should not be treated as direct evidence of Chinese participation. Rather, it should be interpreted as a sign that Moscow was preparing the necessary infrastructure for the purpose of attracting Chinese interest. The specific steps include:

· On August 19, Sakha (Yakutia) disclosed plans for a Far Eastern AI cluster based on a new data center.

· On August 31, it was reported that En+ affiliate Cloud X is constructing a 154-megawatt AI/cloud data center near the Ust-Ilimsk hydroelectric plant, targeted for launch in May 2029 and envisioned as the first of three facilities totaling roughly 462 MW.

Importantly, a recent study by the Stolypin Institute argues that Eastern Siberia could support 150–200 MW-class facilities and potentially develop data infrastructure into an export industry. Taken together, these developments suggest that Russia is expanding the supply side of a prospective AI-compute relationship before corresponding Chinese demand has been publicly demonstrated. Political signaling is also intensifying. At a recent Russia–China session in Beijing (August 12), officials and companies discussed cooperation in AI, e-commerce, and the green economy; the following day, a Chinese delegation visited the Russky Innovation Science and Technology Center in Vladivostok to discuss links with Chinese technology clusters.

Outlook

For the time being no publicly confirmed Chinese company has committed capital or long-term compute demand to the new Russian-backed Siberian AI projects. However, the absence of commitments points to a deeper structural problem for Moscow. From a purely economic and technological perspective, China does not need Russian territory to expand its domestic AI-compute capacity. Beijing’s nationwide “East Data, West Computing” (东数西算) program, formally launched in February 2022, already shifts suitable workloads toward western and northern regions with abundant land, massive renewable energy, favorable climate, and extensive domestic fiber. Regions such as Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Ningxia, Sichuan, Guizhou already offer many of the same advantages while remaining inside Chinese jurisdiction and purview. Consequently, China already possesses domestic substitutes for most of the physical advantages Russia is offering. It also maintains a detailed regulatory regime for cross-border transfers of personal and important data, adding compliance friction to any model that relies on moving sensitive datasets into Russia which could become a matter of vulnerability for China should relations between Moscow and Beijing change their current vector.

This creates a tactical contradiction for Moscow. If Chinese companies eventually commit substantial AI workloads to Siberia, their participation would validate Russian efforts to convert energy and geography into digital leverage. Paradoxically, it could also deepen Russia’s technological dependence on China. Russian companies could provide electricity, land, cooling, and physical infrastructure while Chinese partners supply advanced computing hardware, networking equipment, model architectures, cloud technologies, and potentially the anchor demand determining the facilities’ commercial viability. Russia could therefore capture part of the infrastructure rent while remaining dependent on China for higher-value technological inputs and customers. This also raises the question as to why Beijing would place substantial compute capacity in Russia when comparable domestic locations are already available. Any eventual Chinese investment would therefore merit scrutiny for actual Chinese motivations—such as expanding its data and technological footprint in Russia—extending well beyond basic economic considerations

In sum, the energy constraint ultimately limits Moscow’s leverage. Siberian electricity consumption rose 4.7 percent in 2024, with data centers, mining, and industry contributing to demand growth. If no additional electricity production powers enter into the picture, AI facilities would start competing with (and potentially cannibalizing) aluminum production, cryptocurrency mining, electrification, and other industrial loads for low-cost power. The strategic question is therefore not whether Siberia can host AI data centers – it almost certainly can – but who would control the hardware, demand, data, and economic rents generated by them. The emerging pattern is best understood as a Russian attempt to convert Siberia’s traditional resource geography into digital leverage. Ultimately, the decisive indicator will be a prominent Chinese firm committing capital, equipment, or contracted compute capacity to Russian facilities. Until then, Moscow continues to build the infrastructure for strategic interdependence faster than Beijing can demonstrate it requires it.

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By Andrew McGregor

A growing dispute in the eastern Mediterranean over control of significant and recently discovered offshore energy reserves is aggravating already-tense relations between Türkiye and Israel and creating divisions within NATO while simultaneously assisting the unification of Libya’s rival governments. At the center of these developments is the pending implementation of the 2019 Turkish-Libyan Eastern Mediterranean maritime boundary memorandum.

After the fall of Mu’ammar Qaddafi in 2011, Libya became divided between the internationally recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) of Prime Minister ‘Abd al-Hamid Dbeibah in the west (supported by the GNU’s Libyan Army) and the administration of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar (a long-time CIA asset), his so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) and the Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HoR) in the east and south. The greatest obstacle to unification is the 82-year-old Haftar’s desire to establish a ruling family dynasty with his son Saddam next-in-line to rule Libya. In the meantime, Türkiye and the US continue to encourage a pathway to full Libyan military and economic integration. A unified Libya would easily become an attractive and embargo-free market for Türkiye’s rapidly expanding arms industry, estimated to be worth nearly $11 billion.

Ankara’s principal aim in shifting its sole support from the Tripoli-based GNU to a broader embrace of both the GNU and its LNA/HoR rivals in Benghazi and Tobruk is to encourage HoR ratification of the 2019 Türkiye -Libya Maritime Agreement. Despite having the largest oil reserves in Africa, Libya’s divided rule has inhibited attempts to increase foreign investment and raise daily production of oil from 1.4 million barrels per day to 2 million barrels per day within the next four years. Most of the oil fields and export terminals in Libya remain under the control of the Haftar family, which has received support from the UAE, Egypt and Russia.

The maritime agreement would see most of the offshore energy resources in the eastern Mediterranean split between Libya and Türkiye, to the immense discomfort of Greece, Cyprus and Israel, all of whom have their own economic interests in the region.

Israel and Türkiye

Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Güler informed Türkiye’s parliament on August 10 that the military was preparing for “possible crisis, tension and war” with regard to the growing military alignment of Israel and traditional rival Greece in a Mediterranean region Ankara increasingly views as its own.

Allegedly acting on intelligence that suggested Türkiye’s army was preparing to station troops and weapons at Syria’s Abu al-Duhur airbase (70 km from the Turkish border), Israeli jets bombed the dormant base on August 18.

After the strike, Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu told an army podcast: “”We will not tolerate a Turkish military entrenchment moving southward, because it threatens us,” adding that an earlier warning against a Turkish military presence at the mostly empty base was ignored: “Apparently they didn’t hear it, so we made sure they understood it more clearly.” Israel opposes any move that could restrict the ability of Israeli warplanes to operate freely in Syrian airspace. According to Syrian foreign minister Asaad al-Shaibani, the base had been visited by a delegation of Turkish military officers several days before the strike, but this was only in the context of “training and an exchange of expertise.” Other officials claimed that only a Turkish technical team was present at the base, charged with repairs to a runway and the control tower.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suggested the strikes were linked to upcoming elections in Israel but would not deter Ankara’s cooperation with Damascus: “We will not stop supporting our neighbours in getting back on their feet merely because it unsettles murderous networks with the blood of innocent people on their hands.” Netanyahu in turn has accused President Erdoğan of accommodating “Iran’s terror regime and its proxies” as well as “massacring his own Kurdish citizens.” The Israeli attack, carried out without prior US notification, was the latest in a series of Israeli strikes on Syria since the overthrow of former Syrian president Bashar al-Asad.

Turkish Involvement in Libya

Türkiye’s connection to Libya stretches back to 1551, when Libya was added to the Ottoman Empire. It remained so (with an interlude of independent rule by the Karamanli Turks, 1711-1835) until the 1911-1912 Italo-Ottoman war led to the territory coming under Italian control. Over a century would pass before Turks would once more make their presence felt in their former African colony.

Khalifa Haftar’s Egyptian-backed 2019 LNA offensive on Tripoli came to a shuddering halt when Türkiye intervened on Tripoli’s side. Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones inflicted terrible damage on LNA formations while LNA Russian air-defense systems were jammed by Turkish electronic counter-measures. Ankara’s commitment increased with the deployment of troops and trainers, eventually leading to a Turkish naval presence at Misrata and an airbase at al-Watiya. Türkiye’s military support of Tripoli has also been followed by hundreds of projects in the energy, construction and infrastructure sectors.

Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan visited Khalifa and Saddam Haftar (deputy commander of the LNA) in Benghazi on August 12, the latest in a series of moves establishing closer ties between Türkiye and the Benghazi-based Haftar regime that began in the spring of 2025. Fidan noted Türkiye’s “One Libya policy,” which “makes no distinction between Libya’s west, east and south.”

To avoid accusations of favoring one side over the other, Fidan first visited GNU prime minister ‘Abd al-Hamid Dbeibah in Tripoli before visiting the Libya Mission Group Command of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK). Saddam had earlier been Fidan’s guest in Ankara on July 24, his third visit in a year. The latest discussions appear to have been aimed in part at addressing eastern Libya’s concerns about its prior exclusion from revenue streams and other financial benefits of enhanced oil exploration in the eastern Mediterranean.

*Image above: Hakan Fidan visiting the mausoleum of ‘Umar al-Mukhtar.

On August 12, Fidan visited the mausoleum of Libyan independence hero ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, who at one point in his long career fought in Libya alongside Ottoman volunteers including the Ottoman officer Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk, founder of modern-day Türkiye), after the official Ottoman surrender in the Italo-Ottoman war of 1911-1912 (al-Mukhtar was captured and executed by Italian forces in 1931).

In a sign of the growing military cooperation between Türkiye and Libya, Turkish chief of staff General Selçuk Bayraktaroğlu hosted his Libyan counterpart, Lieutenant General Salah al-Namroush, in Ankara on August 30. The meeting focused on air force and special forces operations as well as means of improving Libyan military performance. Ibrahim Kalin, head of the Turkish Millî İstihbarat Teşkilati (MIT - National Intelligence Organization), also met Saddam Haftar in Benghazi in late August.

Ankara pursues a “One Army, One Libya” approach to Libya’s divided military. To this end, Türkiye facilitated the April-May Efes-2026 military exercise involving the cooperative participation of troops from both sides of the Libyan divide. Türkiye has also begun training of troops from both the GNU’s Libyan Army and the LNA inside Türkiye.

Ankara’s shift to more equitable dealing with both Libyan factions is a sensitive undertaking; the Haftar clan is only onside so long as they see unification leading to their domination of a restructured Libya, while Dbeibah and the GNU watch closely for signs of Turkish backsliding.

The Mediterranean Energy Scheme

Türkiye’s assertive approach to the eastern Mediterranean has its roots in the Mavi Vatan (Blue Homeland) maritime doctrine, which was developed in 2006 by senior commanders of the Turkish navy. The doctrine enables claims to roughly 178,000 square miles of maritime territory and its hydrocarbon resources, including large parts of the Black Sea, the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean, all without regard to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), never ratified by Türkiye, the United States or Israel.

At the core of the regional dispute is Türkiye’s establishment of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), defined under UNCLOS as maritime regions extending as far as 188 nautical miles beyond the traditional 12-mile national territorial limit. An EEZ does not grant full sovereignty, but allows for sovereign rights over economic resources below the surface. This includes the exploitation of oil and gas resources. The eastern Mediterranean is believed to host significant offshore reserves of natural gas.

The 2019 Turkish-Libyan maritime agreement ignores certain Greek and Greek Cypriot claims in the Mediterranean. Cyprus has been divided since 1974 following a coup by Greek Cypriot nationalists and a subsequent Turkish military intervention in the northern half of the island.^[1] Greece, Cyprus, Egypt and Israel all reject the Turkish-Libyan maritime agreement as a violation of their own maritime claims in the region. Also in play is the proposed, but now stalled, East Med Pipeline that would ship natural gas from Israel’s offshore fields through Cyprus to Greece and Italy.

Greek opposition to the maritime agreement is focused on its failure to recognize the EEZ boundaries of Crete and the Greek Island of Kastellorizo, which lies one mile off the southern coast of Türkiye. Questions have been raised in the Turkish parliament regarding the alleged militarization of Greek islands in the eastern Aegean close to Türkiye, including the deployment of Israeli anti-aircraft systems, including Patriot missile batteries. Türkiye maintains that under the 1923 Lausanne Agreement (Article 4 and Article 13), these islands should be demilitarized due to their proximity to the Turkish mainland to prevent them from being used for potential military action against Türkiye. On the other hand, Athens claims the right to self-defense in the militarization of the islands, particularly in regard to “Turkish threats.”

In July, Greece approved the purchase of a €3.5 billion ($4 billion) AI-based radar and missile air defense system from Israel to form the core component of the so-called “Achilles Shield” system. The Israeli technology is already proven through use in Israel’s “Iron Dome” aerial defense system. The deal, which breaks from a larger European reticence to interact with Israel following its devastation of Gaza, was signed in Tel Aviv on August 31. As part of a broader military modernization (with one eye on Turkish military improvements), Greece is also preparing to buy as many as 40 American-built F-35 fighter jets as well as frigates from Italy and France. Popular opposition to Israeli operations in Gaza and the West Bank is strong in Greece , making Israel an unlikely ally in Greece’s long-standing rivalry with Türkiye, its NATO ally; former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis described the deal as part of “the transformation of Greece into an Israeli satellite.”

Containing Israel

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has encouraged President Trump to prevent Türkiye’s return to the Lockheed Martin F-35 development program on the grounds that Türkiye is “a regime infected by the Muslim Brotherhood, an extreme movement that hates America and chants ‘Death to America.’” Left unsaid is that a fleet of Turkish F-35s could challenge Israel’s aerial dominance in the region, a necessary component of Israeli defense and expansion efforts.

Having so far failed in its ongoing effort to crush the Iranian threat or even to eliminate the menace of Hezbollah along its northern border, Israel is particularly sensitive to the danger posed by a Syrian-Turkish alliance against Israel. The promise of the Abraham Accords, once so favorable to Israel’s long-term security, has been shattered by regional opposition to Israeli methods in Gaza. Further challenges to Israel’s economic prosperity posed by the Turkish-Libyan maritime agreement have created alarm in the Israeli media, which has accused Ankara of seeking “to delegitimize the Israel Defense Forces, isolate Israeli officials, and erode Israel’s sovereign right to self-defense” while serving as “a political, logistical, and financial sanctuary for senior Hamas leadership.”

A report by Israel’s Dor Moria think tank described Türkiye’s moves in the region (including its activities in Libya) as a “strategic encirclement” of Israel, confining its operational space and its development of an independent energy sector. In the interim, Türkiye claims its chief motivation in Syria is to assist in rebuilding the country—a goal supported by the United States and the wider international community—and ultimately to bring an end to the Syrian civil war that has devastated the region for more than a decade.

Conclusion

Türkiye is a challenge to Israel’s plan to become the dominant regional power in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. In the last three decades, Türkiye’s post-WWI embrace of the secular, Western-oriented ideology of Mustafa Kemal has been steadily challenged by neo-Ottomanism and a revival of Türkiye’s Islamic identity under President Erdoğan leadership. These trends, endorsed by Türkiye’s ruling party, recall that Palestine, Libya, Egypt and Syria were all once part of the Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire. While a return to imperial status is out of the question for a host of reasons, Ankara sees these nations as potential partners for a post-Iran War regional realignment independent of superpower dominance. The Mecca Joint Deterrence Agreement, signed on August 7 by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, is a major step in this strategic realignment.

Working in Ankara’s favor is Washington’s growing interest in Libyan unification and stability; Chevron and Exxon Mobil have obtained contracts this year to extract oil in both offshore blocks and in the Sirte Basin. Washington is nonetheless finding itself trapped in an uneasy situation as Israel’s principal ally and a NATO ally of both Greece and Türkiye, the latter still fielding the second-largest military in the alliance. The Erdoğan government may see opportunities in the US administration’s increasing disinterest in the NATO partnership that would allow Ankara to abandon its long and fruitless attempts at European integration in favor of a return to regional leadership in a community of Islamic nations rather than its ongoing role as the West’s perennially spurned suitor.

^[1] The island has been divided since 1974 following a military coup in Cyprus backed by a military junta in Greece, which sparked a Turkish military intervention in northern Cyprus to protect the rights of its Turkish minority under Article IV because it is a guarantor power under the Treaty of Guarantee signed in 1960 with Greece, and the United Kingdom.

About the Author:

Dr. Andrew McGregor is director of Aberfoyle International Security, a Toronto-based consultancy specializing in the security issues of Africa and the Islamic world.

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Hi Everyone!

We are delighted to announce the release of a new special report by Senior Fellow Roger N. McDermott: “The Last Mile of Adaptation: How the Russian Military Is Turning Combat Experience into Reproducible Capability,“ which examines how the Russian military is attempting to institutionalize lessons learned from the war in Ukraine to bridge the “last mile of adaptation.”

Ten takeaways from the report include:

• Reproducibility is a separate strategic variable. Innovation, diffusion, and codification are intermediate states; the decisive test is whether new people and formations can regenerate the military effect without the original innovators.

• Russia is building four overlapping mechanisms of force reproduction. Procedural, human, organizational, and material pathways connect battlefield experience to guidance, education, permanent structures, industry, maintenance, and force generation.

• The Russian lessons system is a network, not a single pipeline. Redundant links among command bodies, scientific committees, research institutes, universities, training organs, and industry can make learning uneven but resilient and difficult to suppress at one node.

• Human transmission remains the critical bottleneck. Combat-experienced instructors, mentors, specialists, and commanders carry tacit knowledge that documents cannot fully preserve, while casualties, rotation, and rapid technological change continually erode it.

• The “Last Mile of Adaptation:” Combat experience alone does not equal durable power. The central strategic challenge for Moscow is whether it can detach wartime knowledge from individual commanders and reproduce those military effects across new personnel, doctrine, and force generation.

• Reproducibility as a Strategic Variable: A military achieves true institutional capability only when it can regenerate battlefield innovations following heavy casualties, rotation, and organizational turnover. Without this, even sophisticated tactical advances remain institutionally fragile.

• Institutional Architecture for Learning: Russian General Staff leadership—led by Colonel General Vasiliy Trushin—is using military-scientific committees as “transmission belts” to systematically collect, study, and convert frontline experience into force-wide guidance and updated military science.

• Massive Scale of Adaptation Efforts: Since February 2022, Moscow has issued over 450 methodological recommendations and amendments to combat regulations, conducted more than 400 military-technical experiments under combat conditions, and analyzed roughly 500 weapon types to modernize over 190 systems.

• Force Generation & Education as the Critical Test: Following directives from Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, Russia is mandating combat experience across all officer training programs, doubling faculty battlefield placements, and introducing new military specialties to shorten the gap between frontline lessons and institutional training.

• NATO should develop force-generation intelligence. The most useful warning indicators increasingly lie in schools, training centers, curricula, instructor pipelines, qualifications, organizational standards, and the performance of newly generated formations: the institutions that determine what Russia can reproduce after the war.

You can download the full report here 👉 here.

Enjoy!

Glen E. Howard

President, Saratoga Foundation

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By Paul Goble

The Crimean Tatar underground organization, Atesh – “spark” in that national language -- is playing an increasingly important role in providing intelligence to Kyiv about Russian aggression and carrying out sabotage against Russian targets not only in Crimea but inside the Russian Federation as well. Because of the nature of its work, most of the actions Atesh has claimed or been blamed for cannot be independently corroborated and thus are often dismissed either as self-promotion in the first case or disinformation in the second.

As it enters the fifth year of its existence, Atesh and its role are becoming clearer, especially in the wake of Ukrainian attacks on targets within the Russian Federation. These developments justify the conclusion that this Crimean Tatar underground organization is a serious ally of Kyiv, and suggest that no discussion of Ukraine’s order of battle or its ability to inflict harm on Russian targets should take place without reference to Atesh and its actions.

After Putin seized Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, more than 50,000 Crimean Tatars fled their homeland but others formed a series of small underground groups inside Russian occupied Crimea to harass Russian forces there. They had some success in the following years but did not come together to form a unified command until after Putin launched his expanded war against Ukraine in February 2022. Then, in the fall of that year, many in these groups united and formed Atesh both to continue their campaign inside the Crimean homeland and to assist Ukrainian forces elsewhere, something they viewed as central to the achievement of their own goals.

The group’s actions in 2022 through 2023 attracted relatively little attention because they were concentrated in Crimea and seldom could be independently confirmed; but by the start of 2024, its attacks had increased to the point that they attracted more attention, a trend that intensified as the group provided intelligence to Kyiv that allowed Ukrainian forces to sink Russian ships on the Black Sea and attack Russian positions in Ukraine itself. (For more information on the organization in that period, see CEPA. Feb 8, 2024 and the files for those years of Atesh’s own telegram channel, ATESH UA, one that now has almost 50,000 subscribers.)

Operations Inside Crimea

Over the last year and especially this summer as Kyiv has pounded Russian targets with drone attacks, however, far more information about Atesh has come out about its role acting in support of what the Ukrainian military is doing inside Crimea and also inside Russia, such as in Kursk both by its own attacks and by providing intelligence that a fuller picture of Atesh has emerged.

Among the most important features of this picture, some but not all of which have been picked up by Western outlets media outlets, are the following:

· First, Atesh operates on the basis of its leaders’ understanding that in the current war, there is no chance that Ukraine will disappear but there is a very real risk that Russia could succeed in destroying the Crimean Tatars in their homeland, a possibility that compels the Crimean Tatars to form their own organization of self-defense.

· Second, the group has succeeded in attracting what its leaders claim are 1800 to 2,000 members, although it acknowledges that only a fraction of these is actively engaged in sabotage or intelligence operations. Most, its leaders say, actively support the goals of Atesh but aren’t taking actions that could bring Russian retribution.

· Third, Atesh has always identified itself as a Crimean Tatar operation; but it includes within its membership and supporters may ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians opposed to Putin’s aggressive war in Ukraine. That multi-national composition gives it advantages it would not have had if it had remained purely Crimean Tatar.

· Fourth, as the war has evolved, Atesh has assumed an ever-larger role as a source of intelligence about Russian positions that Kyiv can use for targeting and about Russian plans in Crimea and the Black Sea where Crimean Tatars have the ability to gather information.

· And fifth, as Moscow has stepped up repression in Crimea and forced other groups which have spoken out for the Crimean Tatars to disband, Atesh is thus likely to assume an ever more important role as far as the future of the Crimean Tatars are concerned.

Outlook

Like other Crimean Tatar organizations, Atesh seeks international recognition that the 1944 Soviet deportation of Crimean Tatars was an act of genocide—a step over the last decade that seven countries have done. Furthermore, Atesh shares the commitment of other Crimean Tatar leaders and groups and is committed to the expulsion of Russian forces from Ukraine and ensuring Crimea remains within the restored borders of the Ukrainian republic.

Atesh’s contribution to the Ukrainian cause now almost certainly in the future will give the Crimean Tatars a greater voice in what the role of Crimean Tatars within Ukraine will be, something that along with its current military contribution makes it a group to watch rather than to dismiss out of hand as something marginal.

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By Vasif Huseynov

Trade volumes along the Middle Corridor — the rail and sea route linking China to Europe via Central Asia and the South Caucasus — have roughly quadrupled since 2022. Transit times have been reduced from 53 days to between 18 and 23 days, as shippers are being forced to reroute their products around a sanctioned Russia and a volatile Red Sea, where up to 90 percent of shipping has been diverted since 2024. Beijing and Brussels are now competing openly for a stake in that realignment. China committed some $23 billion to Kazakhstan’s side of the route in 2025 alone, while the EU has answered with €12 billion ($13.94 billion) in the form of the Global Gateway package and a dedicated coordination platform meant to keep European financing in the race.

Azerbaijan is currently routing nearly all of that corridor traffic through Georgia. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, which entered full-scale operation in June following years of upgrades, remains the corridor’s only functioning rail link to Türkiye and the Black Sea coast, bypassing Armenia entirely while a parallel line through Armenian territory has remained dormant since 1993.

A second route is taking shape further south, functioning as an alternative rather than a substitute to the Georgian passage: the Zangezur corridor. Framed under TRIPP—the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, a U.S.-brokered initiative designed to restore transport links between mainland Azerbaijan to Türkiye via Armenia and the Nakhchivan exclave. Ongoing railway reconstruction in Nakhchivan will effectively extend TRIPP onto Azerbaijani soil as corridor construction transitions from a declaration to project physical implementation.

Narrowing the Rail Gap in Zangezur

The clearest recent progress report on that project came from President Ilham Aliyev himself. Speaking in Tashkent on August 23, at the third meeting of the Azerbaijani-Uzbek Supreme Interstate Council, he gave a clear public accounting of where the Zangezur Corridor stands: on the Azerbaijani mainland side, the 110-kilometer Horadiz-Aghband railroad is already roughly three-quarters complete and due for full completion next year. Across Armenia, under that same TRIPP framework, only 42 kilometers of track are required, with construction expected to begin by early next year. Meanwhile, inside Azerbaijan’s own Nakhchivan exclave, reconstruction covers 194 kilometers of main line — 264 kilometers counting sidings, where the sections nearest the border are already under construction.

While in Tashkent, Aliyev noted that Baku is now assembling an international consortium of companies and states willing to invest in the Nakhchivan section in exchange for guaranteed transport volumes and returns. He also noted that work on the Armenian side is proceeding as well, as American partners are keeping Baku regularly informed about progress on the project. Once joined, the three sections are projected to carry 5.5 million passengers and 15 million tons of cargo a year, threading together east-west and north-south transport routes in a way that has not been physically possible since the railways of the South Caucasus suspended operating in the early 1990s.

The Zangezur corridor sits inside a much larger contest for the Middle Corridor’s future capacity, and disruption elsewhere has done as much as construction crews to raise its standing. For example, the near-collapse of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz this past March turned a route once seen as a niche alternative into what one recent assessment described as “a vital insurance policy for the European economy.” Against that backdrop, the EU’s recent outreach to Baku appears less like Brussels conferring a favor and more like a deliberate move to secure a footprint in a corridor defined by Azerbaijan and its partners.

Earlier this year the EU and the EBRD agreed to fund a feasibility study for the Nakhchivan railway, a step that followed a January visit to Baku by the European Commission’s Gert Jan Koopman and reflects the Commission’s own stated goal of reducing transit times between Europe and Central Asia to roughly 15 days — a target that depends on exactly the link Baku is building. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, applied that same logic during her July 1-2 visit to Baku and Yerevan, unveiling a €200 million ($232 million) Global Gateway package to establish greater South Caucasus connectivity. While modest relative to the total capital the corridor demands, the commitment signals Brussels’ determination to claim a seat at a table it did not build.

German engagement follows the same pattern, and came just weeks after the EU visits. President Aliyev traveled to Berlin on July 20-21, producing the most institutionalized bilateral step in the relationship to date which included a Joint Declaration on a Strategic Partnership Agenda and the creation of a new German-Azerbaijani Economic Council. Moreover, Chancellor Friedrich Merz described the South Caucasus as an increasingly vital connective hub between Europe and Asia, framing emerging transport and trade corridors as a shared source of economic potential. This wording positioned Berlin less as a patron granting Baku access to European markets and more as an equal partner seeking to integrate German capital, engineering, and manufacturing expertise into a corridor strategy Azerbaijan has already set in motion. It also comes at a crucial time for Germany, whose export-dependent economy—accounting for roughly 41 percent of GDP—requires precisely the type of supply-chain diversification promised by the Middle Corridor.

The same capital gap runs through Azerbaijan’s energy relationship with the EU, where the need for investment has grown considerably more urgent. Under a 2022 memorandum with the European Commission, Azerbaijan committed to doubling gas exports to the bloc to 20 billion cubic meters a year by 2027. Azerbaijan’s total exports reached 25.2 billion cubic meters in 2025, with more than half flowing into the EU and gas now reaching sixteen countries, up from twelve the year before. Meeting the 2027 target, however, depends on projects still working their way through construction and financing — the second stage of the BP-operated Shah Deniz field, full-scale development of Absheron, the Umid Phase 2 and Babek gas projects targeted for the end of the decade, and an expansion of Trans-Adriatic Pipeline capacity beyond its current 11.2 bcm/year.

Aliyev Calls for Europe to Back Words with Action

President Aliyev has grown increasingly blunt about where the constraint lies. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, he told business representatives that Europe is showing little investment interest in either of Azerbaijan’s energy sectors, noting that the country’s main partners in fossil fuels and renewables alike are American, British, Gulf and Chinese firms rather than European ones. In Berlin six months later, he was even more specific: with TANAP and TAP already running at full capacity, any increase in gas deliveries to Germany and the rest of Europe depends on new interconnectors — and financing for them that European banks, chief among them the European Investment Bank, have largely withdrawn from oil and gas projects under their green-transition mandates.

Azerbaijan brings real assets to that conversation. It is the only post-Soviet nation in the South Caucasus with no Russian military presence on its soil. Moscow completed the withdrawal of its peacekeeping contingent from the Karabakh region in June 2024, some seventeen months ahead of the original November 2025 mandate. Azerbaijani gas began flowing directly into Germany and Austria via the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline for the first time this past January, and its transit relevance has only grown as both the Red Sea and the northern route through Russia have become less reliable. It is also spreading its bets well beyond Europe by extending its activities to Central Asia. SOCAR recently signed an exploration agreement with Uzbekistan’s state energy company and an offshore cooperation deal with Israel’s NewMed Energy near the Leviathan field in March 2025.

Outlook

Taken together, these developments suggest that Azerbaijan is increasingly positioning itself not simply as a transit country or energy supplier, but as a strategic platform linking Europe with the wider Eurasian space. If the EU wants the Middle Corridor and Azerbaijani energy to deliver their full potential, Baku’s message is clear: political recognition must now be matched by more tangible European investment, financing and long-term commercial engagement in the region.

Dr. Vasif Huseynov is the head of the Western Studies department at the Center for Analysis of International Relations and Multiculturalism (AIR Center) in Baku, Azerbaijan.

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By Alexander Melikishvili

Following Ukraine’s pledge not to target the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) infrastructure, which is vital for Kazakhstan’s oil exports (see: Kazakhstan’s Novorossiysk Crisis), or non-Russian oil tankers in the Black Sea, the Ukrainian military has demonstrated precise target differentiation in its recent attacks. On August 17, the Greek-owned, Liberian-flagged Suezmax-class tanker Skiros (capable of carrying up to one million tons of oil) came under attack after loading Russian crude at the CPC terminal in Novorossiysk. Although the CPC terminal primarily handles Kazakh oil, Russian crude still accounts for 5–10% of its total export volume.

The attack caused no oil leakage, and the tanker continued on its journey, but the selective targeting of the vessel indicated that the Ukrainian military possessed key intelligence that allowed it to identify vessels carrying specifically Russian oil. This is likely attributed to the creation of new communication channels set up by Ukrainian authorities to interact with commercial shippers and selectively ensure safe passage. It should be noted that the attack on the Skiros took place only a day after the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Andrii Sybiha, held a phone call with his Greek counterpart. The official readout suggests that most of the call was devoted to discussing Black Sea security.

*Image above: The Sheskharis Oil Terminal near Novorossiysk

On the same day, another Greek-owned vessel, the dry bulk carrier ANNA S (sailing under the Liberian flag), was hit five times by UAVs that almost destroyed it, forcing the evacuation of the crew, including a Romanian captain and 20 Filipino sailors. The vessel was attacked when it was 20 nautical miles off the coast of Novorossiysk, where it was supposed to load barley. It is noteworthy that the crew of ANNA S was rescued by another Greek-owned ship, Elina B (sailing under the Maltese flag), which itself came under attack but continued its journey toward the Bosporus with 56,000 tons of wheat it had received while at the port of Novorossiysk.

On August 18, three additional dry bulk carriers were attacked while carrying or en route to load Russian grain: the Russian-flagged Victoria V, struck while docked at Novorossiysk before loading; the Marshall Islands-flagged Fehu, hit while departing Novorossiysk with wheat but able to continue sailing; and the San Marino-flagged Necibe, attacked at the port of Tuapse after loading 20,000 tons of wheat.

Image above: The Strategic Sheskharis Tunnel (Source Transneft)

Sheskharis in the Crosshairs

On August 12, Ukraine launched its largest combined attack against Novorossiysk since the war began. According to President Zelensky, the strike involved Palianytsia jet-powered attack UAVs, Neptune missiles, and seaborne USVs. As a result, Russia’s Transneft-owned Sheskharis terminal in Novorossiysk temporarily suspended operations on August 14. It remains unclear what specific damage Sheskharis sustained, but the attack damaged the highly strategic tunnel (see above) connecting the terminal to the Grushovaya oil depot, which is located inland, 6 kilometers from the port. Sheskharis is a strategically important facility, as it accounts for roughly 15-20% of Russia’s total oil exports. It is also important for Kazakhstan, as about 6 million tons of Kazakh oil (KEBCO blend) pass through the terminal for export annually. However, Sheskharis is far less significant for Kazakhstan than CPC, which transported 63 million tons of Kazakh oil (CPC blend) in 2025.

Although Sheskharis resumed operations on August 16, the relentless pace of Ukrainian attacks targeting tankers carrying Russian crude has forced Türkiye to reduce its imports of Russian oil via the Black Sea, which was previously the primary conduit for Russian oil exports. Türkiye remains heavily dependent on Russian oil — in 2025, for example, Russia accounted for almost half (15 million tons) of Türkiye’s total oil imports (32 million tons). With the northern part of the Black Sea under a de facto Ukrainian blockade, Türkiye can only hope to receive Kazakh oil from both CPC and Sheskharis, since tankers carrying it will not be targeted, but the volumes will be insignificant, as most of the Kazakh oil is already committed to European markets (Italy in particular).

*Image above: World Bank Map of Novorossiysk

This leaves Türkiye in a difficult position, which explains why, on 8 August, the Turkish Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, proposed to Russia and Ukraine that they introduce a moratorium on attacks against commercial navigation in the Black Sea. On August 14, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, rejected the Turkish proposal, stating that there were “no grounds” for a mutual truce. Ukraine, on the other hand, itself offered Russia a similar proposal, and its ambassador in Turkiye, Nariman Dzhelyal, voiced support for the Turkish initiative on August 24.

Outlook

The tit-for-tat attacks in the Black Sea are hurting both Russia and Ukraine economically, but to different degrees, given the disparity between the two respective economies. For Ukraine, agricultural exports make up 60% of its export revenues, 90% of which are usually transported via the Black Sea. Ukraine’s central bank projects that disruption of seaborne export routes could cost the Ukrainian economy $2.5 billion in losses in 2026.

For Russia, the situation is much different, as the share of agricultural products in Russia’s total exports reached 12% in 2025. Russia is also heavily dependent on Black Sea ports to export its farm products, especially grain. As of August 17, because of the Ukrainian attacks, 90% of Russia’s grain export capacity in the Black Sea was taken offline.

The double blockade of the Black Sea threatens this year’s harvest in both countries, as silos are either filled or nearing capacity, while alternative routes to transport grain simply cannot accommodate such large additional volumes. Against this backdrop, the Russian agriculture minister, Oksana Lut, even suggested using excess grain as animal feed to mitigate the crisis.

Concerning oil exports, the Black Sea’s importance for Russia is somewhat limited. According to Bloomberg, as of early June, Russia’s daily oil exports averaged 3.46 million barrels per day (bpd), which is a record level since the war started in 2022. In June, Reuters reported that Russian oil exports from Novorossiysk, including KEBCO blend but excluding CPC, were on the order of 800,000 bpd, or roughly 23% of Russia’s total oil exports. As for Ukraine, since 2022, it has imported oil by land and not by sea.

Under these circumstances, Russia and Ukraine can potentially continue their standoff in the Black Sea despite mounting economic costs. Ukraine will probably offset them by tapping into the €90 billion ($105 billion) support loan from the EU. The Ukrainian Ministry of Agrarian Policy estimates the initial package of compensation to farmers suffering from the Russian naval blockade to be €220 million ($256 million), as this was the estimated figure with which it approached the EU for a grant, which was denied because it is already included in the aforementioned support loan.

Russia, too, can absorb the costs, as it is considering a slew of measures to mitigate the crisis, including state purchases of excess grain, preferential loans, and subsidies. Despite significantly drawing down its gold reserves in January-July to their lowest level since 2020, the Russian government’s financial position remains robust, with the central bank reporting that, as of August 14, Russia’s aggregate sovereign reserves stood at $755.6 billion. This allows Russia to continue its brinkmanship in the Black Sea, even as doing so will exacerbate food insecurity for poor countries that rely on grain imports. The World Food Programme has warned that at least 45 countries will be in particularly dire straits this year due to the harmful impact of the cyclical El Niño climatic anomaly.

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About the Author:

Alex Melikishvili is a senior country risk analyst with more than a decade of experience working in the private sector (S&P Global, IHS Markit) with a focus on Eurasian security. Alex holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

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*Image above: Khalid Qaraf and his son Nurdin shortly before his conscription into the Russian army

By Paul Goble

Moscow has launched a major conscription effort in the North Caucasus to recruit more soldiers there in the hopes of refilling the rapidly depleting ranks of its invasion force in Ukraine to avoid declaring a general mobilization or involving more ethnic Russians in the fighting. This represents a major change in Kremlin policy, not only because it focuses on the North Caucasus, a region that has largely escaped Putin’s disproportionate use of non-Russians since he launched his expanded war against Ukraine, but also because Moscow is using the military itself to carry out this impressment campaign rather than rely upon local officials to enforce this drive. That combination is now at risk because of the death of Nurdin Qaraf, a Circassian repatriant who died after being forced to serve in the Russian army—a development whose impact has been exacerbated by the threatening behavior of Russian security services against his family.

As a result, Moscow may be forced to double down or quit—either sending more Russian troops to the North Caucasus at the expense of pulling some units out of Ukraine, or scaling back this campaign entirely. Otherwise, what might have appeared in the Kremlin to be a natural extension of existing policies could spark a violent explosion in the North Caucasus and lead to the undermining of Russian influence across the Middle East, where millions of Circassians live and are extremely well-organized, particularly in Türkiye.

Since Putin launched his expanded war against Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin leader has disproportionately used troops drawn from poorer ethnic Russian regions and non-Russian republics. That has been widely reported, but what is much less well-known, although it has definitely been documented, is that this policy has adversely affected the North Caucasus, which in fact has sent far fewer troops to Ukraine and suffered far fewer deaths there than most have assumed.

Moscow’s Manpower Dilemma in the North Caucasus

Multiple factors explain this trend. First, Russian commanders long have been opposed to using North Caucasians as troops, worried that providing them with military training could give the North Caucasians the skills needed to one-day challenge Moscow. Indeed, from the end of Soviet times to 2014, the Russian government refused to draft North Caucasians; and it has continued to have fewer of them in the military than their share in the prime military-service age cohorts would suggest. Second, more than in any other non-Russian section of the Russian Federation, the North Caucasus has been the site of anti-war demonstrations since the beginning of the expanded conflict four years ago, an indication that people there harbor opposition to Putin’s war and reject serving in it. And third, there are today growing indications that even the most Kremlin-loyal leaders in the region, including Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov, do not want to see their young men fighting in what they increasingly view as “Russia’s war.”

*Image: Kadyrov units serving in the Russian Army

But now, as Putin’s war in Ukraine grinds into its fifth year and Russian forces are suffering ever greater losses, the Kremlin appears to have concluded that it has little choice but to find new ways to raise more men for its army. Going after North Caucasians who had escaped such service more frequently per capita than other non-Russians in the past is an obvious choice, and the one the Kremlin has made. But clearly aware of the problems such a recruitment campaign would face, Moscow decided to use its own military forces rather than rely upon the normal military recruitment system, which often lies in the hands of local people, to ensure that its campaign would be more effective.

To that end, earlier this year, Moscow began sending more predominantly ethnic Russian troops into the North Caucasus from which it had pulled units earlier to fight in Ukraine. In addition, Russian authorities appear to have focused their efforts on groups like the Circassians, a nation Moscow has worked to divide and which it would like to keep from uniting, given that there are currently 700,000 ethnic Circassians across the North Caucasus and more than seven million abroad, many of whom are interested in returning. Those two choices, using the Russian military and focusing particularly on the Circassians, have combined to generate severe difficulties that may jeopardize the entire Russian effort.

This assessment arises from a single incident—one largely overlooked in Moscow and the West, yet is drawing significant attention from Circassians both in their North Caucasus homeland and abroad. Earlier this year, Nurdin Qaraf, a Circassian who had returned to the North Caucasus from Syria, was compelled to join the Russian military. His family did not know of his fate and thought he was living with friends or relatives in Moscow. But when his father attempted to find his son after not hearing from him for more than six months and even appealed to Russian officials for assistance, the family was finally told that Nurdin had been killed. The officials provided no details or access to the body and at the same time warned his father Khalid that if he did not stop his efforts to learn about his deceased son, he would suffer the same fate. In addition, Russian propagandists launched a campaign to claim that Nurdin had fought proudly for his recovered country just as have many other Circassian repatriants.

Not surprisingly, neither Nurdin’s family nor Circassians more generally accept the Russian version of events. Instead, they believe, Moscow’s new effort to recruit Circassian returnees into the Russian army has three main goals. First, it seeks to reduce the number of Circassians in the North Caucasus both by having some of them killed in the war and by discouraging others from trying to come. Second, it helps Moscow with its war by providing the Russian army with cannon fodder. And third, and this may be especially important in Moscow’s calculations now, it is intended to sow discord between the Circassians and the Ukrainians who have increasingly shown greater interest in the fate of the Circassians and support for the effort of that nation to gain international recognition of the Russian genocide against their nation.

Outlook

The Qaraf case will greatly compound Moscow's problems among Circassians, not just in the North Caucasus but also in its vast overseas diaspora, where ever more people are paying attention to the recent development. However, the impact of this tragedy is not limited to these two groups. Instead, it is affecting other nations in the North Caucasus, like the Chechens, who can easily see that what the Russian government is imposing on the Circassians is a prelude to what it is likely to inflict on them. As a consequence, both Circassians and other non-Russians in the North Caucasus are becoming radicalized in their opposition to Moscow, something that could spark new violence there and jeopardize Russian control.

To avoid such outcomes, Moscow will likely deploy more military units into the North Caucasus to maintain stability there, something it is loath to do given the scarcity of Russian manpower to fight in Ukraine, or it will altogether have to scrap this project. Putin may prefer the former course to the latter, but either option is fraught with difficulties for the autocratic leader given that both highlight the weakness of the center brought on by the war in Ukraine, something cooler heads in the Russian capital might have recognized in advance but that Putin failed clearly to foresee.

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by George Vișan

In the early hours of June 5, 2026, a Ukrainian Sargan-3000 USV was discovered inside the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanța. The USV became entangled in a protection barrier on Pier 78 (Dana 78) in close proximity to facilities operated by the National Agency for Saving Human Life at Sea (ARSOVM), Romania’s maritime search and rescue service. The Ukrainian USV was likely part of a swarm of four sea drones en route to attack the Russian naval base at Novorossiysk from their home base in Odesa. The Ukrainian sea drone likely lost course as a result of Russian Electronic Warfare (EW) countermeasures, which disabled the USV. Following the Constanța drone incident, it should be noted that the Ukrainians hit Novorossiysk again using a similar Sargan-3000 USV after the June 5 incident, failing in their first attempt to sink a Russian patrol boat but later succeeding on July 14.

Romanian authorities attempted to disarm the Ukrainian drone in Constanța’s harbor after quickly establishing contact with their Ukrainian counterparts. However, around 10:30 am the drone exploded inside the harbor. Fortunately, the Ukrainian authorities warned their Romanian counterparts in time that the USV would self-destruct, and the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team tasked with the drone’s neutralization had enough time to evacuate. The subsequent explosion destroyed an ARSVOM facility and lightly damaged the pier, and as a result, no one was injured.

*Image above: Ukrainian drone explosion at Port of Constanța on June 5

The Importance of Constanța

Despite the positive outcome, the incident was extremely serious. The Port of Constanța is Romania’s biggest Black Sea port and handles, on a regular basis, oil and energy-related products, as well as chemical fertilizers, including a major oil terminal. One of Romania’s recently announced new naval priorities is to extend its military port facilities at Constanța by creating a new naval base to replace the outdated facility located deep inside the harbor. These plans are linked with Romania’s ongoing process of modernizing its naval forces and securing its maritime interests in the Black Sea. Efforts to create a new naval base are a welcome long-term development that would increase the capabilities of the Romanian Naval Forces. However, steps should be taken immediately to improve harbor security in the Port of Constanța due to the harbor’s vulnerability to the threat of unmanned systems.

Constanța is also the main operating base for the Forțele Navale Române (Romanian Naval Forces). Vessels with weapons systems on board are frequently moored at the main naval pier as ships regularly enter and leave the port. The risk of a large explosion remains high. The recent incident with the Ukrainian Sargan USV demonstrates the vulnerability of ports and harbors to unmanned systems. Both Ukraine and Russia have used unmanned naval systems to regularly infiltrate and strike targets within ports and naval bases up and down the Black Sea coast.

The Lack of Anti-USV Defenses

What is particularly concerning about the protection of the port of Constanța is that, at the time of the June 5 incident, it lacked an adequate system for detecting USVs. However, it did have an operational system for detecting and jamming UAVs, but it proved ineffective against USVs. Romania’s coastal surveillance system, SCOMAR, is not designed to detect sea drones. Its mission is optimized for law enforcement, to detect smugglers or vessels that fish illegally in Romanian waters. The system cannot detect surface targets smaller than 6 meters in length, and given their low profile and hulls built mostly of composites, USVs are practically invisible. SCOMAR is operated by the Ministry of the Interior and not by the Ministry of Defense.

A further consequence of the June 5 incident is that it revealed a complex - if not convoluted - decision-making process among different Romanian governmental agencies and ministries that deal with Constanța’s port security. For example, following the incident, the Romanian Ministry of Defense issued a statement claiming that the navy cannot protect maritime infrastructure during peacetime and that no legislation is in place that would authorize the military to intervene to resolve similar incidents or deal with potential grey zone activities.

Naval Basing Options & Constraints

Romanian Naval Forces are small and mostly obsolete despite past and current efforts to bring them into the 21^st century. Currently, the Romanian Navy is divided between the ports of Constanța and Mangalia, which have dedicated military port facilities, while the nascent naval air arm is based at Tuzla, a small locality situated between the two ports.

The 53^rd Frigate Flotilla and the 146^th Mine Warfare Squadron are homeported in Constanța, along with a number of auxiliaries (tugs, logistics ships, diver support ships and school ships). The 150^th Missile Squadron and the 50^th Corvette Squadron are homeported in the military harbor in Mangalia. Its ability to host large surface combatants is hampered by a road bridge that connects it to the rest of southern Dobruja and to the border crossing with Bulgaria. Mangalia is particularly important because it has a naval shipyard at Șantierul Naval 2 Mai that is used for maintenance and repair.

The Romanian Navy has always shared the port of Constanța with the merchant marine and the civilian operator of the port. However, the need to create a separate naval base from the civilian infrastructure was not considered a high priority. Historically, the navy has always been the smallest branch of the Romanian armed forces and is usually treated as an afterthought when it comes to funding. Usually, military vessels have been assigned to Pier O (Dana Zero) of the Port of Constanța. As the port was developed by the government and owned by the state, this situation never posed a problem.

In 1937, an attempt was made by the government to build a separate naval base for the navy and another commercial port on Lake Tașaul, which lies a few kilometers north of Constanța. The project did not progress beyond the groundbreaking ceremony due to a shortage of funding and the start of the Second World War. During World War II, the Royal Romanian Navy used the port of Constanța as its main base, and the Soviet Air Force and Soviet Navy repeatedly bombed the port, seeking to destroy both civilian and military shipping, in an effort to make the port’s infrastructure unusable. After the war, the project to build a separate naval base was abandoned and instead, in 1975, a refinery and oil terminal were built at the mouth of Lake Tașaul.

During the communist era, Romania’s small Black Sea fleet primarily used the ports of Constanța and Mangalia. As the state owned both the ports and the shipyards, the need for dedicated facilities for the maintenance of military vessels was not required. The Romanian Navy would simply use the civilian shipyard facilities for complex maintenance operations. Additionally, shipyards in both ports constructed new surface combatants for the Romanian Navy as commissioned by the communist regime.

The fall of communism changed all that. While the ports remain government-owned, the shipyards have been privatized. For maintenance operations that cannot be handled by the Navy’s logistics bases, a complex procurement process should be conducted, with a single shipyard ultimately selected to perform the work

Inaction on the New Naval Base

In 2025, the Romanian Ministry of Defense announced plans to expand the military port of Constanța. These plans include the development of a new military pier near the southern sea wall of the port. Selected for its accessibility and proximity to the strategically vital Danube-Black Sea Canal, this location offers significant operational advantages. The base’s connectivity streamlines logistical support, enabling seamless joint operations with the Romanian Land Forces alongside interagency cooperation with the Ministry of the Interior and the Lower Danube Authority. Moreover, the new military pier will facilitate docking operations for Romanian navy ships as well as allied vessels that plan to visit the port. It will also host new infrastructure to help improve naval operations for deployments to not just the Black Sea, but also the Danube as well.

Despite being announced in 2025, no additional information has been published about the project, and so far no acquisition procedure has been launched to begin development of the new naval base. If completed, the extension of the military facilities at the Port of Constanța would greatly assist in the modernization and development of the Romanian Naval Forces and enhance its ability to project power to protect the offshore Neptun gas field. The new base would move some units of the Romanian Navy from their current location deep inside the harbor to a central point near the entrance, significantly enhancing its response time to sea-borne threats emanating from the Black Sea.

In light of these developments, two important pieces are missing from the government plans announcing this project. As the project has initially been presented, it does not have repair facilities, dry docks and/or floating docks needed to perform maintenance operations on the ships of the fleet. Such infrastructure would obviate the need to procure maintenance services from civilian shipyards, with the exception of complex maintenance procedures.

*Image above: Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV)

The second key issue concerns port security. The port of Constanța is extremely vulnerable to sea drone attacks, not only USVs, as evidenced by the June 5 explosion. If a Ukrainian USV were jammed or hacked by Russian Electronic Warfare (EW) countermeasures, then it could easily end up in Romania’s biggest port. Any well-planned sea drone attack involving a swarm of USVs could do extensive damage to port facilities and the military vessels moored inside it. The port is even more vulnerable to Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) than to USVs, as UUVs can infiltrate undetected if a port lacks adequate defenses and subsurface sensors. The difference between a USV and a UUV is that a UUV operates entirely beneath the water's surface (like a submarine or submersible), while a USV navigates on top of the surface, similar to a jet ski.

The port’s vulnerability to underwater unmanned vehicles (UUVs) is even higher than that posed by USVs, because UUV’s would have the specific ability to infiltrate without being detected in any port that is not protected and lacks adequate sensors to deal with unmanned systems.

Countering the USV Threat

To prevent a similar breach from occurring again, a network of early-warning sensors should be installed. Following the drone incident, an interim solution was considered for early warning against further potential USV infiltration incidents. Two Ocean Aero Triton autonomous underwater and surface vehicles (AUSV) were acquired and are now being used by the Coast Guard for surveillance missions outside the Port of Constanța.

Romanian authorities have yet to offer any public solutions to how to counter the threat posed by USVs. On August 28, 2025, Russian sea drones launched a surprise attack inside the Danube sinking the Ukrainian intelligence ship Simferopol. Moscow will in all likelihood continue to search for ways to infiltrate Romanian port facilities due to its previous success. What Romania urgently needs, before implementing any plans of expanding its military port facilities in Constanța is the creation and deployment of a sensor network to detect unmanned systems.

Acoustic sensors, FLIR sensors, LIDAR, and radar should be deployed in proximity to the ports of Constanța, Mangalia, and at the Danube River distributaries (mouths). This sensor network should be under the command of the Romanian Naval Forces and complement the existing Integrated Maritime Surveillance System (SCOMAR). Destruction of the unmanned systems once detected should be achieved using drone interceptors, air assets (helicopters, Unmanned Aircraft System, or UAS), air defense systems and surface combatants. Without adequate means to protect maritime infrastructure, Romania risks losing access to the sea as well as its navy.

Outlook

Efforts to develop military facilities in the Port of Constanța will greatly contribute to the development and modernization of the Romanian navy. However, securing the current port facilities should be prioritized and strongly reinforced in the near term as a result of the emerging threat posed by USVs. The threat matrix in the Black Sea has evolved exponentially over the past 18 months as the array of sophisticated threats grows due to the widening use of sea drones in naval warfare. Losing access to the sea and to the global markets can be achieved not only through blockade but also by destroying port infrastructure and Romania’s efforts to create a new naval base in the Port of Constanța will need to keep this factor in mind.

About the Author:

George Vișan is an expert on Romania and Black Sea Security and works as an expert on issues of peace and war for the Romanian Diplomatic Institute. He holds both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Bucharest, and has published extensively on Romanian security and defense policy. From February 2022 to February 2024, he served as an advisor to the State Secretary for Strategic Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE). His opinions and research in this article are his own and do not reflect the official positions of the Romanian Diplomatic Institute nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania.

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Hi everyone!

As Russia prepares for the upcoming State Duma (parliament) elections from September 18–20, 2026, tremendous speculation exists as to whether Moscow will initiate a nationwide military mobilization to mount one final effort to defeat Ukraine in the fifth year of Putin’s war, while Russia moves closer to exhausting its manpower base.

In our new special report, “Russia’s Force-Generation Strategy After the Duma Elections,” Senior Fellow Roger N. McDermott evaluates the trajectory of Moscow’s military recruitment pipeline, the viability of a post-election call-up, and the long-term outlook for Russian force generation as Moscow struggles to find enough military personnel to offset its battlefield losses, now estimated to be 1.4 million, killed, wounded and missing through June 2026.

Key Takeaways & Findings

• Post-Election Mobilization Dynamics: While an immediate post-election announcement in September is politically sensitive, a post-ballot decision implemented during October or late autumn is far more credible. However, Moscow is more likely to intensify its current model of “mobilization by other means”—combining targeted compulsory measures, financial incentives, regional targets, and administrative pressure—rather than declaring an open nationwide draft of 300,000–500,000 men.

• Force-Generation System Under Strain: Russian volunteer recruitment saw a sharp drop in Q1 2026 (70,500–71,200 new contracts, or ~800/day) before recovering slightly to ~1,000/day (see graph below). While the system has not failed, its efficiency is rapidly declining. Municipalities, employers, bailiffs, and prison officials are constantly pressured to sustain manpower intake to replace battlefield losses rather than building substantial net force growth.

• Military Impact vs. Immediate Effect: A potential public target of 300,000–500,000 personnel should be understood as a phased program spanning several months aimed at rotational relief, filling rear-area roles, and building operational depth for 2027. Bottlenecks in training capacity, equipment, junior leadership, and Ukrainian interdiction risks prevent such a force from rapidly converting into immediate combat power before winter.

• Evaluating the Evidence: While digital registry reforms, administrative updates, and local decrees confirm that the Russian state has significantly enhanced its technical capacity for a call-up, there is currently no evidence confirming that President Vladimir Putin has authorized a final mobilization plan, quota, or official execution date.

It is critically important to understand the real mechanics of Russia’s force generation in terms of assessing the long-term sustainability of Moscow’s ongoing military operations and operational dynamics going into 2027, which will likely be a decisive year in the war. Please download the full report: 👉 here.

Sincerely,

Glen E. Howard

President, The Saratoga Foundation

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By Alexander Melikishvili

Speaking at the XXII Forum of Interregional Cooperation in Omsk on July 25, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev for the first time suggested to his Russian counterpart that the war in Ukraine be frozen. He characterized the war as an “interstate conflict” and emphasized that its nature was “not entirely clear to many, including us.” Tokayev also categorically rejected the idea of Kazakhstan as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine. The Kazakh leader’s choice of venue could not have been better, as Russia has such a close level of cooperation at the regional level only with select countries in its “near abroad,” including Armenia, Belarus, and Uzbekistan.

The timing of Tokayev’s remarks reflects the urgency that Kazakhstan feels due to the adverse impact the war has on the operations of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) at Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Kazakhstan is vitally dependent on the uninterrupted operations of the CPC’s Yuzhnaya Ozereyevka terminal near Novorossiysk because roughly two thirds of its oil exports reach global energy markets (mainly Europe) through that chokepoint.

On July 17, a news report, citing the CPC’s Telegram channel, noted that the ExxonMobil-chartered tanker Nordic Zenith (sailing under the Liberian flag) was attacked by two drones en route to the CPC terminal, where it was scheduled to load Kazakh oil. The drones caused a fire aboard the vessel, leading to the partial evacuation of the crew, but the vessel remained afloat. On July 19–20, more tankers came under Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) attacks, according to two press releases issued by the CPC. On July 19, the Liberian-flagged ASIA and Marshall Islands-flagged NISSOS IOS were attacked by UAVs while they were loading from the CPC’s single point moorings (SPMs) 1 and 2. On July 20, the Cameroon-flagged tanker NELSA was attacked by UAVs as it was loading at SPM-1. None of these attacks resulted in any sunk vessels, oil spills, or damage to the CPC’s assets, including SPM-1 and SPM-2. Interestingly, neither the CPC press releases nor the press statement released by Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on July 19 mention Ukraine by name.

Kazakhstan’s Black Sea Nightmare

The attacks prompted the CPC to temporarily suspend its operations. However, because Kazakhstan is so dependent on Novorossiysk for its oil exports, any disruptions at the CPC terminal imply that oil production at its three main oil fields—Kashagan, Karachaganak, and Tengiz—must be reduced. On July 23, Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Energy announced that a “controlled adjustment” of production levels had been introduced without specifying its scale. Nonetheless, two anonymous industry sources told Reuters that, as of July 22, the extraction of oil and gas condensate in Kazakhstan had contracted to 1.63 million barrels a day (compared to the daily average of 2.07 million since the start of the month). Per these accounts, daily oil production at the Tengiz field had to be lowered to 406,000 barrels on July 22, instead of 925,000.

On July 27, Reuters reported that CPC interruptions resulted in oil production being halved in Kazakhstan. Chevron owns a 15% stake in the CPC and a 50% stake in the Tengizchevroil international consortium that is developing the Tengiz field, which explains why Chevron raised its concerns with the Trump administration, as reported by The Wall Street Journal on July 24.

Kazakhstan can certainly withstand short-term CPC interruptions, even if they stretch into weeks or months, because it has ample foreign currency and gold reserves, which, as of the end of June, stood at $127.31 billion, according to the National Bank of Kazakhstan. Commenting on the CPC interruptions on July 24, the Chairman of the National Bank, Timur Suleymenov, stated that Kazakhstan’s central bank was ready to stabilize the exchange rate, if necessary. It appears that the crisis has been averted, as Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Energy reported on July 27 that the offshore loading of tankers had resumed at the CPC’s SPM-1 and SPM-2. In particular, the Liberian-flagged tanker SEA MAJESTY and the Greek-flagged tanker Milos were receiving Kazakh oil (belonging to Tengizchevroil) without any interruptions. While Kazakhstan and US energy majors can breathe a sigh of relief, their critical dependence on the CPC remains unchanged.

No short- or even medium-term solutions exist to fix this problem, as Kazakhstan sends about 60 million tons of oil for export via the CPC on an annual basis. Given the existing pipeline topography in the region, namely that the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) and/or Atasu–Alashankou pipelines (to China) are limited in their export capabilities, it is simply not possible to reroute this much oil via these energy outlets. BTC capacity is 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd), while the CPC pipeline is 1 million bpd, and any effort to reroute additional oil from this overland pipeline to Azerbaijan via the Caspian is virtually impossible.

These logistical bottlenecks are further exacerbated by the surprising announcement of the Russian Ministry of Defense on July 22, according to which Russia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), extending 200 nautical miles from the coast, has been declared unsafe for commercial navigation due to attacks by Ukrainian UAVs and seaborne USVs (unmanned surface vehicles). Although this announcement is advisory and does not prohibit vessels from entering Russia’s EEZ in the Black Sea, it will definitely increase insurance premiums, making maritime transportation of all cargo, including oil, more expensive. It reflects the continuously deteriorating maritime security situation in the northern part of the Black Sea, where, according to the Ukrainian military, 124 vessels linked to Russia were attacked between July 8 and July 20, including 89 tankers, as quoted by Bloomberg on July 23.

Meanwhile, Russia is also not sitting idly by. It is regularly attacking vessels carrying cargo to and from Ukraine. On July 21, for example, it attacked a Liberian-flagged LPG tanker en route to the Ukrainian port of Reni, wounding three crew members, Agence France-Presse reports. On July 19, in the gravest maritime attack to date, Russia launched three Kh-59/Kh-69 cruise missiles against the Guinea-Bissau-flagged (and Turkish-owned) bulk carrier GOLDEN LEO (carrying grain) in close proximity to the port of Odesa, killing ten sailors, including four Indian nationals, and prompting the Indian government to summon the Russian Chargé d’Affaires, Mr Vladimir Ladanov, on July 21.

Outlook

Following the formal warning that Ukrainian authorities reportedly received from the Trump administration late last week not to attack CPC assets and non-Russian tankers in the Black Sea due to concerns expressed by the CEO of Chevron, Mike Wirth, it is very likely that Ukraine will comply. Officials in Ukraine are eager to capitalize on the US commitments made after the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7–8, including the license to manufacture interceptor missiles for Patriot air defense systems that are vital for shooting down Russian missiles. Thus, Kyiv would not want to jeopardize this positive momentum in its at times tumultuous relations with Washington.

Kazakhstan greatly matters to the United States because it accounts for 2% of global oil production. Knocking Kazakhstan’s oil exports offline by destroying the CPC terminal (all three SPMs) would increase oil prices, which is something that the White House is keen to avoid, especially ahead of the contentious midterm elections in the United States in November. It is almost certain that the CPC and Novorossiysk are a priority issue to be discussed by Trump and Zelensky when they met in Washington earlier today.

As for Kazakhstan’s options, there is a trans-Caspian pipeline project that would leave Russia out, connecting Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan across the Caspian seabed, but here the biggest impediments will be Russia and Iran. The Caspian littoral states abide by the 2018 Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea, which contains clauses that both Russia and Iran interpret as allowing them to veto any trans-Caspian projects under the pretext of environmental concerns.

Russia will do everything within its power to derail any pipeline project that would reduce Kazakhstan’s dependence on the CPC and Novorossiysk. This includes Kazakhstan’s oil pipeline to China, which has limited throughput capacity and would have to be significantly expanded, requiring considerable capital investment. More importantly, at present Russia uses the Atasu–Alashankou pipeline to export 10 million tons of oil annually to China via Kazakhstan. In fact, Kazakhstan and Russia signed an agreement only recently to increase this volume by 2.5 million tons.

Lastly, Kazakhstan’s predicament is the toxic legacy of Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s First President, who failed to see the wisdom of maintaining diverse oil export routes. Although Tokayev has consistently spoken of the need to diversify oil export routes since assuming the presidency in 2019, little has been done in practice apart from the modest volumes sent in transit via the Baku-Tbilisi Ceyhan pipeline.

About the Author:

Alex Melikishvili is a senior country risk analyst with more than a decade of experience working in the private sector (S&P Global, IHS Markit) with a focus on Eurasian security. Alex holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

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by Andrew McGregor

In the latest phase of an insurgency that began in 2012, the ability of Mali’s military regime to fend off a rebel insurgency has been sorely tested by a rebel offensive that began in April with coordinated attacks across Mali’s 479,000 square miles (by comparison, Texas covers a total area of 268,596 square miles).

The offensive is being carried out by an unlikely partnership of two Tuareg-dominated groups – the Salafi-Jihadist Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa’l-Muslimin (JNIM, led by Iyad Ag Ghali) and the separatist Front de Libération de l’Azawad (FLA, led by Alghabass Ag Intalla). Though the latter seek the creation of Azawad, an independent state in northern Mali, Ag Ghali and his followers seek the transformation of Mali into an Islamic State based on Shari’a. For the purpose of operations, the two groups work closely together in northern Mali, while operations in the Central and Southern regions of Mali are often carried out by JNIM alone.

Mali’s military regime is defended by the Forces Armées Maliennes (FAMa, led by Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces Élisée Jean Dao) and their Russian partners, the Africa Corps, which succeeded the Russian Wagner Group in June 2025. The Wagner “withdrawal” (many Wagner personnel in Mali simply switched over to the new Africa Corps) was accompanied by a significant uptick in JNIM and FLA attacks, most notably in regions of Mali where the militant groups had not previously operated. There is significant friction between FAMa and the Russians, who tend to operate independently while helping themselves to FAMa arms and equipment. The Russian military presence has been accompanied by a sharp increase in human rights abuses and civilian casualties, though all parties to the conflict have demonstrated little respect for civilian life.

The coordinated attacks in April (which included strikes in the capital itself) shook the Malian regime and led to the loss of a number of population centers in the north, including Kidal, Aguelhoc and Tessalit in the Kidal region, Ber in the Timbuktu region, and Tessit in the Gao region. The loss of Kidal came as a shock to the Africa Corps, which had proclaimed its role in taking the rebel stronghold in November 2023 by raising a Russian flag over the city. The insurgents also succeeded in killing FAMa commander Sadio Camara during an attack on the Kati military base outside Bamako.

Rebel Offensive – July 2026

On July 4, the FLA and JNIM launched coordinated attacks in Aguelhoc (retaken by government forces after April), Anéfis, and Gao in the north, Sévaré in the central region (home to a large army base and an airport), and at the prison at Kéniéroba in the south (46 miles from Bamako), where many opposition figures are held (the latter attack failed to free any prisoners). The dispersed July attacks followed similar the pattern used in April. Airstrikes were carried out against JNIM/FLA fighters concentrated at Aguelhoc in the northeast, where the latest insurgency began with the slaughter of the Aguelhoc FAMa garrison by jihadists under the command of Iyad Ag Ghali in 2012.

Anéfis has a small population of 8,000 residents, but is strategically located and home to a base used by both FAMa and the Africa Corps. Most of Anéfis was taken by the rebels on July 4, but parts of the Malian/Russian garrison continued to fight, with the Russians defending their position with drones. Intense fighting followed at Anéfis on the 5^th and 6^th as rebel reinforcements poured in on 4x4 trucks. By July 7, FAMa drones and fighter jets began taking a toll on attackers. As fighting continued on the 8^th, a Malian/Russian relief column of 60 vehicles left Gao for Anéfis, with air cover provided by helicopters and surveillance drones.

The militants inflicted a devastating July 9 attack on the relief convoy. Military assistance was required from Niger and Burkina Faso to relieve the attack on the Russian/Malian column. Nonetheless, FAMa issued a proclamation that declared the situation had stabilized. Before switching to regional sweeps, FAMa claimed the elimination of 330 “terrorists” and the re-occupation of Anéfis. During a ceremony in Bamako celebrating the FAMa/AC “victory” in Anéfis, an Africa Corps speaker declared “Terrorism is a scourge created by Western countries to divide and dominate.”

The FAMa Strategy

FAMa commander Elisée Jean Dao led Mali’s National Guard (the“Brown Berets”) in the January 2013 Battle of Konna (the first significant reverse for Iyad Ag Ghali and the jihadist coalition) and the retaking of Gao from the Islamists. After advanced military training in France in 2015, Dao supported Colonel-Major Assimi Goïta’s post-coup junta in 2020. Dao served as ambassador to Gabon and China before becoming Mali’s Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces in May 2026. His appointment in May came at a time of continuing purges of senior FAMa officers suspected of ties to opposition figures and would-be mutineers.

General Dao insisted on July 11 that FAMa and its Russian partners had delivered a severe blow to the insurgents by allowing them to “concentrate their forces” in Anéfis before launching a coordinated counter-offensive that inflicted heavy losses. According to Dao, this strategy allowed government forces to target rebel military assets rarely caught out in the open, including armored vehicles and heavy weapons, as well as large numbers of the usual motorcycles and “technicals” that provide mobility for the insurgents. According to the general, one thousand rebels were “neutralized” at a cost of 30 soldiers killed and 60 wounded in the relief operation.

In the jubilation that followed FAMa’s expulsion of the insurgents from Anéfis, General Dao also spoke at length about the strategy that enabled the “victory.” The general began by describing the government’s April loss of the cities of Kidal and Tessalit as “a ruse” that brought the insurgents “within range.” Anéfis, in a “truly flat terrain,” was held as “a kind of bait” to draw out the enemy’s armored vehicles, anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank guns and artillery for destruction, a method of bypassing the insurgents’ concealment skills: “Operation Anéfis was part of a comprehensive strategy for us that allowed us to gradually reduce the enemy’s capabilities, and well, they let themselves be caught, hoping to gain control…”

Financial incentives are another part of the regime’s strategy; a reward of 2 billion CFA francs ($3.5 million) was offered in June by Mali’s government for information leading to the “capture or neutralization” of JNIM leader Ag Ghali. Further rewards were offered for Ag Ghali’s Fulani deputy, Amadou Koufa, and Tuareg separatist leader Alghabass Ag Intalla.

*Image above: 50 Captured FAMa Soldiers After JNIM Convoy Attack

July 18 Ambush

Only days after General Dao proclaimed the success of the regime’s strategy, a FAMa convoy leaving Anéfis for Gao was ambushed near Tabankort by the jihadists and separatists on July 18, with over 50 soldiers and allies from pro-government militias killed and 24 taken prisoner. A convoy of Africa Corps personnel was reported to have left earlier for Gao; some reports claim no Russians were involved in the July 18 ambush, while others claim some Russians were with the FAMa convoy and among the known dead. Echoing the ruthless and demoralizing slaughter of bound FAMa prisoners at Aguelhoc by Ag Ghali’s Ansar al-Din movement in 2012, it appears that many of the prisoners taken in the latest ambush were massacred. Several armored vehicles were reported to have been taken intact, replacing earlier rebel losses.

The Role of Algeria

An Africa Corps statement claimed that that two leading Tuareg militants were eliminated during the fighting; FLA military leader Mbarek Ag Akli and JNIM military planner ‘Abd al-Rahman Zaza (Ag Akli was later seen alive on video discussing the battle). An unconfirmed local report alleged that Iyad Ag Ghali was seriously wounded in the battle and was transported with other wounded militants to an Algerian military hospital in the Saharan city of Tamanrasset. Malian authorities have frequently accused Algeria of harboring Tuareg militants over several decades, even though Algiers has a long record of acting as a mediator between Bamako and Tuareg rebel movements in northern Mali.

Mali’s relations with Algeria began to improve in July, a year after Algeria took down a Malian surveillance drone allegedly operating in its airspace. The sudden rapprochement is viewed as benefitting Algeria and Russia while further weakening French influence in the region and forestalling American efforts at a rapprochement with Mali. Russia favors the revival of the never fully implemented 2015 Algiers Accord as a means of restoring peace and security to the restless north after years of warfare and Russian military intervention has failed to provide a military solution.

Foreign Interference?

According to General Dao, the type of weapons FAMa is now encountering in the field are more suggestive of those held by a state rather than a rebel group, a situation the general believes is indicative of foreign support for the insurgents. Regime-friendly media in Mali attributes FAMa and Africa Corps difficulties to the entry of “battalions of mercenaries” into the conflict, including Algerians, Polisario fighters and Ukrainian instructors, all under the supervision of French legionnaires.

It was further claimed in the Malian press that the July 4 offensive was committed by “terrorists in the pay of Western powers” led by French president Emmanuel Macron “and some neighboring countries,” notably Algeria and Mauritania, who are alleged to be “awaiting the green light” from Paris before launching attacks against FAMa positions.

Ag Ghali, meanwhile, has called the cooperation of Mali’s ruling military council with “Russian proxies” traitorous, and has cited it as a reason to reject any negotiations with the state.

Outlook

The expansion of insurgent operations to Central and Southern Mali as well as the massive Northern province has forced FAMa to spread its forces across the nation rather than address the rebellion in the north alone, the traditional pattern. The joint insurgent strategy involves pulling Malian and Russian military resources in several directions at once, exposing convoys rushing to one hot-spot or another to ambushes in unfamiliar country.

Despite promoting a Salafist religious belief foreign to most Tuareg Muslims, Iyad Ag Ghali not only survives, but grows in power and influence every year. This is attributed to his strategic understanding of the Sahel conflict, one that has brought ideologically opposed Tuareg separatists under his leadership.

Does Ag Ghali seek the creation of a Chad-type situation, where a tiny desert minority (in Chad’s case, the Zaghawa) controls a large and diverse nation by force of arms and exclusion of other groups in the power structure? Given that the Tuareg are as divisive as the Zaghawa (both rebels and rulers in Chad hail from the same group), the main challenge to a Tuareg-led Islamist government in Mali would inevitably come primarily from rival armed Tuareg groups, including not only the separatists but also those (mostly from the vassal class) still loyal to Bamako. Unless Ag Ghali believes he can actually replace the existing government with that of an Islamic State, then it is likely that the growing number of attacks in the center and southern provinces and the blockade of fuel destined to Bamako are designed less to seize territory than to destabilize Mali’s military regime by exposing its weaknesses, internal rivalries and reliance upon an unpopular and erratic military partner, the Russian Africa Corps.

About the Author:

Dr. Andrew McGregor is director of Aberfoyle International Security, a Toronto-based consultancy specializing in the security issues of Africa and the Islamic world.

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By Vasif Huseynov

On July 16, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov arrived in Moscow for a two-day official visit, holding talks with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on July 17. The two ministries used the occasion to sign a Plan of Consultations for 2026–2027 and to review the full range of bilateral relations — political dialogue, trade, transport, the Caspian, and the South Caucasus. On paper, this was a scheduled diplomatic reset. In substance, it marked the closing chapter of a year-and-a-half-long standoff in which the pace and conditions of reconciliation were largely set by Baku.

A few days earlier, at the fourth Shusha Global Media Forum on July 13, President Ilham Aliyev had already previewed this outcome. When asked about the state of ties with Moscow, Aliyev said: “Relations between our countries are developing very positively. You mentioned the difficulties. Yes, we all know about them. But what is important is that this period is now behind us. I would say that our relations have been fully normalized.”

That formulation, however, was not left to stand on its own. In Moscow four days later, Bayramov used almost the same identical language, telling Lavrov’s press conference that the two states had overcome their difficult period and fully normalized the entire spectrum of bilateral relations. Lavrov, for his part, stopped short of using the phrase himself, merely noting that Moscow had taken note of Aliyev’s statement and shared Baku’s understanding of the current situation — a small but telling asymmetry in how each side chose to characterize the same reconciliation.

A Crisis Moscow Could Not Simply Talk Its Way Out Of

To understand why the sequencing of Russia-Azerbaijan rapprochement matters, it is worth recalling how deep the rupture had been. On December 25, 2024, an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 flying from Baku to Grozny was struck by Russian air defenses as Ukrainian drones entered Russian airspace, then diverted across the Caspian and crashed near Aktau, Kazakhstan, killing 38 of the 67 people aboard. Moscow’s initial explanations — including theories about a bird strike or an onboard gas cylinder explosion — were dismissed by Aliyev at the time as absurd theories unbecoming of the response he expected from Moscow. Baku’s position was clear and sequential: acknowledgment of responsibility, an apology, accountability for those responsible, and compensation.

It took until October 9, 2025, when Putin met Aliyev in Dushanbe, for the Russian president to explicitly acknowledge that Russian air defense missiles had detonated near the aircraft, and to commit to compensation. Even then, it took another six months of technical negotiations before the two foreign ministries jointly confirmed, on April 15, 2026, that all outstanding issues — including the payment of compensation — had been resolved, with the crash attributed to an unintentional action of an air defense system in Russian airspace. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin, asked shortly afterward to confirm the settlement, said only that all issues linked to the tragedy’s aftermath had been resolved, declining to discuss specifics out of consideration for the victims’ families. No compensation figures were ever disclosed. But the sequence itself is instructive: full normalization did not proceed until Baku’s conditions had been met.

Baku’s Balanced, Multi-Vector Foreign Policy

What followed the Moscow talks reinforced the fact that reconciliation was never intended as a return to dependency. Days later, Aliyev traveled to Germany for an official visit, where he and Chancellor Friedrich Merz signed a joint declaration establishing a strategic partnership spanning energy, transport, green hydrogen, digital transformation, and industrial modernization. Aliyev used the occasion to highlight Azerbaijani gas flowing to ten EU member states and recent visits by European Council President António Costa and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to Baku. Restoring dialogue with Moscow and deepening ties with Berlin within the same week is a fairly clear illustration of what a genuinely multi-vector foreign policy looks like in practice: no single relationship is allowed to define the country’s options, and no single capital is treated as indispensable.

This is the frame through which the Russia file is best read — not as a standalone bilateral story, but as one strand in a foreign policy that has spent several years methodically diversifying. Azerbaijan has hosted senior European Union officials, expanded the Middle Corridor and Trans-Caspian energy links, deepened the Organization of Turkic States framework, forged closer ties with the United States, including a visit by the Vice President of the United States, and positioned itself as a facilitator during the U.S.-Iran war, all the while keeping its channel to Moscow open. Restoring ties with Russia does not reverse that trajectory so much as complete it, by resolving the one relationship that had been operating in crisis mode while every other vector continued to move forward.

Moscow’s Weakened Hand in the South Caucasus

Another development shaping Russian rapprochement with Azerbaijan is that in the past eighteen months since the crash Russia’s position in the South Caucasus has rapidly eroded, which went far beyond Moscow’s bilateral standing with Baku. The clearest marker came on August 8, 2025, when the United States brokered a peace framework between Armenia and Azerbaijan at the White House, under which Washington secured a long-term arrangement to develop the transit corridor through Armenia’s Syunik province linking mainland Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave. Branded the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), the arrangement gave the United States a direct operational role in a corridor that, for decades, Russia had assumed it alone would help secure this axis.

Analysts have described the deal as effectively pushing Russia out of key processes in the South Caucasus, noting that Moscow’s traditional role as the region’s principal security guarantor was, for the first time, taken up by an outside power operating on Armenian soil. Simultaneously, this shift coincides with a broader overall decline in Russia’s standing in Armenia itself, where Yerevan has pursued its own diversification away from Moscow-centered security arrangements in favor of Western - and US-facilitated frameworks. In Azerbaijan, the retrenchment of Russian influence has been visible in a different way. In the weeks following the plane crash, Baku moved to close the Russian House in Baku, the local representative office of Rossotrudnichestvo, Russia’s state cultural and soft-power agency, after Azerbaijani authorities said the center had failed to register as a legal entity and had breached local law.

Around the same time, Azerbaijan also shut the Baku bureau of Sputnik, part of the Rossiya Segodnya media group, permitting the outlet only a single accredited correspondent going forward. As of this year, Rossotrudnichestvo’s own leadership was still describing the situation as unresolved: in February 2026, agency head Yevgeny Primakov said Moscow was seeking acceptable options to resume the Russian House’s operation in Baku as soon as possible, noting that the 1997 intergovernmental agreement on cultural centers technically remained in force. Neither institution has reopened yet.

*Map: The International North-South Corridor (INSTC) Versus the Persian Gulf

Moscow’s Strategic Urgency: The North-South Corridor

Against this backdrop, it is worth noting where the balance of need now sits on infrastructure Russia itself greatly depends upon. At his joint press conference with Bayramov, Lavrov was notably direct about why the North-South Transport Corridor’s western branch — running through Azerbaijan and Iran — has become urgent for Moscow specifically. With the Strait of Hormuz crisis dragging on and disrupting global transport routes, Lavrov said the corridor’s importance had grown accordingly. He noted that Iran had finally completed land allocation for the long-delayed Rasht-Astara railway link, the corridor’s last missing segment, and that railway officials from Russia, Azerbaijan, and Iran had already met to discuss the practical steps needed to begin construction, expressing confidence that progress was now within reach.

Read plainly, this is Russia describing a route it desperately needs, not one it is doing Azerbaijan a favor by using. With Western sanctions foreclosing most alternative paths to South and Southeast Asian markets, and a key maritime chokepoint in the Gulf now unreliable, the overland corridor through Azerbaijani and Iranian territory has become one of Moscow’s few dependable arteries southward. Azerbaijan’s own foreign minister noted that Baku has coordinated this project from its inception and is on schedule to raise freight volumes on its section to five million tons by 2028, a reminder that Azerbaijan is not merely a transit host but a central party whose cooperation the corridor’s Russian branch now desperately needs to preserve its relations with Iran.

Outlook

None of this suggests that Baku and Moscow have resolved every point of friction, or that the underlying grievances have fully receded. What the record shows instead is a reconciliation that was carefully calibrated and developed in stages as it restored political and diplomatic channels, while the institutions Russia once used to project cultural and media influence inside Azerbaijan remain closed. Moreover, Moscow’s broader position across the South Caucasus, particularly around the Zangezur corridor, has continued to recede even as bilateral ties with Baku improve. Azerbaijan’s return to dialogue with Russia has come without a return to the pre-2024 status quo, and largely on terms that Baku itself defined.

About the Author

Dr. Vasif Huseynov is the head of the Western Studies department at the Center for Analysis of International Relations (AIR Center) in Baku, Azerbaijan. He is a faculty member at Khazar University in Baku. Dr. Huseynov had previously worked for the Center for Strategic Studies (SAM) and the Public Administration Academy (DIA) in Baku.

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By Emil Avdaliani

Since the fall of the Assad dynasty in late 2024, the Russian military presence has remained a major mystery as to what Moscow’s future will be in Syria. Following Assad’s flight to Moscow on December 8, 2024, Russia has significantly scaled back its presence at its two principal facilities on Syria’s Mediterranean coast: the Tartus naval base and its strategic air base at Khmeimim, located in the Syrian province of Latakia. Russia’s future stay in Syria became even more uncertain after the new government in Damascus terminated the 49-year commercial port management concession granted to the Russian engineering construction business Stroytransgaz.

Russia has also pulled out from Qamishli Airport located in northeastern Syria and restricted its patrolling missions along the border with Israel. This reduced presence has coincided with Moscow’s ever-demanding war effort in Ukraine and the deterioration of Russia’s position in the Middle East following the weakening of its key regional partner – Iran. In fact, for the first time since 2013, Russia currently has no naval presence operating in the Mediterranean Sea.

Yet, over the past several months, Syria’s new leadership has not only maintained working ties with Moscow but even attempted to revive and expand the relationship. This has come as a surprise to many given that the interim government of Ahmed al-Sharaa, once in power, severed Syrian ties with Assad’s other allies such as Iran and Hezbollah. When it comes to Russia, however, the interim Syrian leader has twice visited Moscow: first on October 15, 2025, and then on January 28, earlier this year.

Preserving Russia’s Syrian Footprint: Khmeimim and Tartus

After these visits, the new Syrian government allowed Moscow to maintain a scaled-down military presence in its former Mediterranean bases. The Russian newspaper Kommersant has closely tracked Russian activity, reporting in April that Damascus intended to change the operation of Russian facilities to a non-military role by converting the Khmeimim airbase into a “training and humanitarian facility” for Syrian forces, noted one Syrian official. The move would effectively mean an end to the base’s military functions, and Moscow and Damascus would end up jointly operating the facility. Such a change in terminology would allow Russian sources to continue using Khmeimim airbase, which Kommersant noted is a vital staging area for Russian forces operating in Africa.

To this should be added more recent developments such as the reports in early July when Moscow announced it would get a commercial logistics hub up and running in one of two berths in Tartus. The revelation followed the June 6 announcement by the Russian-Syrian Business Council that Moscow would establish an assembly and distribution center for Russian goods in the strategic port.

In light of these recent developments, when it comes to relations with Russia, Damascus seems to have its own specific logic for how it interacts with Moscow. Firstly, it is about Syria’s economic situation. The Arab country owes around $1.2 billion in Assad-era debt to Russia. More importantly, Syria is in dire need of a large inflow of foreign investments to rebuild the country, and Damascus believes that Russia could be one of those investors. Russian expertise is also of critical importance when it comes to the operation of three large dams on the Euphrates River, which were either built or designed with Soviet assistance. Given the poor condition of these massive structures today, their rehabilitation is far more likely to occur with Russian help than with Turkish or European support.

Russian familiarity with Syria’s needs accumulated throughout decades of close cooperation, as evidenced by how Damascus handled the country’s currency printing issue. In 2025, Syrian authorities extended cooperation with the Russian company Goznak, which had long enjoyed a monopoly in the printing of Syrian currency.

Equally critical is the issue of oil and wheat, of which Russia is a leading exporter into Syria. If during the Syrian Civil War, Iran was Syria’s major oil supplier, the rupture in relations with Tehran left Russia as the primary exporter covering nearly half (46 000-60 000 barrels) of all Syrian oil demand. When it comes to wheat, Moscow’s influence is less decisive given Damascus’s arrangements with other countries. Nevertheless, Russia remains an important supplier of wheat to the Arab country.

The Russia Factor in Syrian Diplomacy

Another issue driving Syrian rapprochement with Moscow is Russian diplomatic power. Russia retains veto power in the United Nations’ Security Council, where it played a critical role in shielding former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad during the early stages of the Syrian uprising and after his violent crackdown on Syrian opposition forces. For Damascus, it will be difficult to completely sever ties with Russia also because the latter was the biggest exporter of weaponry into the country before the downfall of Assad. Despite close ties with Türkiye and the United States, Damascus is unlikely to replace Russian technologies any time soon, which means that the Syrian armed forces will need continued access to Russian weaponry, spare parts as well as technical services.

Equally significant, a wider geopolitical calculus is driving Russo-Syrian rapprochement that factors into the equation for Damascus. A weak Syria that emerged since the civil war broke out in 2011 was a boon to Israel, which has throughout its history opposed the emergence not only of coalitions of Arab states, but also that of a single strong player in its immediate neighborhood. No wonder then that Israel has engaged in an intermittent aerial campaign against military targets in Syria once a new government was formed following the fall of the Assad regime.

A fractured Syria has been unable to counter Israel’s regional ambitions due to the lack of military capabilities and diplomatic support. It is in this context that Russia’s lingering presence in Syria serves as a mitigating factor, a tool to temper Israeli actions in the region, and one that Damascus likely values. Moscow is also perfectly well suited to serve as a mediator between Damascus and Tel-Aviv, which was particularly effective during the Assad regime.

Ties with Russia are also part of Syria’s effort to diversify its foreign partnerships portfolio well beyond its close relations with Türkiye and the improving ties with the United States and Europe. The rapprochement with Russia, however, does not mean that Syria would not try to keep the balance. Indeed, even on issues such as the war in Ukraine, Damascus has simultaneously forged good relations with Ukraine, developing security (primarily drone expertise) cooperation with Kyiv as exemplified by President Zelenskyy’s recent visit to Syria this past April.

Damascus’ approach can thus be characterized as a multi-vector foreign policy balancing Russia, Türkiye, the Gulf states, Europe and the United States. However, this places limits on what Russia can achieve in Syria. Moscow knows that it no longer enjoys the privileged position it once had with the Assad regime. Instead, it now has to compete alongside other external powers for influence within a more diversified Syrian foreign policy. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), for example, is especially pertinent given its seeming ambition to fully control the port of Tartus. Indeed, once Stroytransgaz left, Damascus signed a 30-year concession with DP World, worth an estimated $800 million.

Outlook

Moscow is keen on retaining a military presence in Syria given that the country geographically serves as a mid-point between Russia itself and the African continent where the notorious Wagner Group transformed itself into the Africa Corps. Experts should keep in mind that military facilities in Syria have become all the more important given the troubles the Africa Corps is experiencing in the Sahel region, especially in Mali where the Tuareg rebels led by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) have been pressing on the capital Bamako. Moreover, the bases’ strategic value has further increased following the deterioration of Russia’s relations with Europe and NATO.

At the same time, major tensions remain in Russia-Syrian relations that should not be overlooked. The most significant unresolved issue remains the status of former President Bashar al-Assad. Syrian authorities continue to seek legal accountability for senior figures associated with the previous regime and have repeatedly expressed interest in Assad’s extradition to stand trial for his crimes. Moscow, however, continues to provide political asylum for the former Syrian leader and has shown no indication that it is prepared to reconsider this position. Another area of mutual concern involves the activities of former Assad-era political, military and intelligence figures now residing abroad. Syrian officials remain concerned that remnants of the previous regime could attempt to undermine domestic stability through external financing or political organization. Russian authorities have publicly emphasized that their territory will not serve as a platform for destabilization against the new Syrian government.

Though these differences remain politically sensitive, both governments have deliberately prevented them from dominating broader bilateral relations. Instead, discussions increasingly focus on future cooperation rather than lingering disputes. Syria is thus trying to reshape Russia’s presence in the country in a way that suits Damascus’ interests. It was within this effort that al-Sharaa first pressed against an extensive Russian military presence in the country but then has allowed a limited presence in exchange for greater concessions from Moscow.

The relationship today is neither an alliance nor a rivalry. Instead, it represents a careful partnership based on overlapping strategic interests, with both governments recognizing that cooperation remains more beneficial than confrontation. The elasticity of Russian-Syrian relations underscores Moscow’s broader capacity to adapt to changing political realities in the Middle East.

Although Russia suffered a major strategic setback with the collapse of the Assad regime, it has avoided complete marginalization by recalibrating its objectives and accepting a more limited but potentially more sustainable role in Syria as it struggles to retain its last major strategic foothold in the Middle East. Maintaining naval access to Tartus may matter less to Moscow now, but down the road, once the Ukraine war has ended and Türkiye has removed the constraints of the Montreux Convention, then the strategic importance of accessing Tartus will matter greatly when Russia tries to restore its great power status.

Author Bio

Emil Avdaliani is a Professor of International Relations at the European University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and a scholar of the Silk Roads. He can be reached on Twitter/X at

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by Vusal Guliyev

On May 30, 2026, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan signaled a potentially significant turn in Türkiye–Japan defense relations when he told Nikkei Asia that Ankara sees considerable potential for cooperation with Tokyo in unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Fidan highlighted prospects for joint development and co-production, arguing that the two countries possess complementary technological strengths that could create mutually beneficial opportunities. His remarks came amid a broader intensification of defense contacts between Türkiye and Japan, including high-level ministerial exchanges, visits by Japanese officials to Turkish defense companies, and growing Japanese interest in combat-tested Turkish unmanned systems.

Before Hakan Fidan’s recent remarks, former Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu had previously signaled Ankara’s interest in strengthening defense cooperation with Tokyo, laying an important foundation for the closer Türkiye–Japan partnership that is now taking shape. Speaking at a press conference in Tokyo in September 2022, Çavuşoğlu stated that Türkiye saw significant potential for deepening ties with Japan and expressed hope that Turkish defense companies would eventually be able to export armed drones to the Japanese market. He also noted that several Asian countries, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia, had already demonstrated a strong interest in Türkiye’s defense industry

The growing momentum behind Türkiye–Japan defense cooperation was further demonstrated on May 6, 2026, when the two countries held the first-ever Japan–Türkiye Defense Industry Cooperation Day on the sidelines of the SAHA 2026 International Defence and Aerospace Exhibition in Istanbul. During the event, Japan’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency (ATLA) and Türkiye’s Presidency of Defense Industries (SSB) signed a Letter of Intent aimed at establishing a working-level framework for deeper collaboration in defense equipment and technology. The gathering brought together approximately 40 Turkish and Japanese defense companies and drone manufacturers to explore opportunities for joint research, technology transfer, co-development, and industrial partnerships.

*Image above: Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani meeting with Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Güler

Ministerial-level defense engagement received a significant boost in mid-August 2025 when Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani became the first Japanese defense minister to pay an official visit to Türkiye. During his meetings with Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Güler in Ankara, the two sides agreed to deepen cooperation in defense industries and technology and launch consultations between senior defense officials. Nakatani also visited leading Turkish defense companies and facilities, including Baykar, Istanbul Naval Shipyard, and Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAŞ).

Later, in January 2026, Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Güler highlighted the growing potential of Türkiye–Japan defense-industrial cooperation, describing it as a partnership that could eventually reach a “strategic level.” In an interview with Japan’s Kyodo News, Güler emphasized that combining Japan’s advanced technological capabilities with Türkiye’s production capacity and operational experience could create significant opportunities for collaboration in defense technologies. He also pointed to Turkish unmanned systems, including the ANKA and Bayraktar platforms, as cost-effective and operationally proven solutions that could contribute to Japan’s efforts to modernize its defense ecosystem.

Tokyo’s growing interest in Turkish drone technologies is closely linked to its rapidly changing security environment. Japan is undergoing a rapid transformation from a traditionally pacifist economic power into a more assertive military and geopolitical actor amid intensifying strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific. The strategic vision first advanced by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is now being further expanded under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi through increased defense spending, the acquisition of counterstrike capabilities, enhanced military diplomacy, and historic reforms to Japan’s arms export policy. Recent developments—including the expansion of defense cooperation with the Philippines and Australia, as well as agreements on combat drone cooperation with Ukraine—underscore Tokyo’s transition toward a more proactive and strategically assertive security posture.

As part of this transformation, Japan has invested heavily in emerging defense technologies, including artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, space capabilities, and unmanned platforms. However, despite possessing one of the world’s most advanced technological sectors, Japan’s domestic defense industry has faced challenges in developing cost-effective and combat-proven unmanned systems. At the same time, Tokyo is grappling with a shrinking population and persistent manpower shortages within the Self-Defense Forces, increasing the need for force-multiplying technologies that can reduce reliance on personnel-intensive operations.

In this context, Turkish unmanned aerial systems offer a potentially attractive solution. They combine relatively affordable production costs with extensive operational experience across multiple conflict zones, providing unmanned capabilities that have already demonstrated effectiveness under real battlefield conditions.

Türkiye’s Battle-Tested Drones

The international reputation of Turkish unmanned systems has been significantly enhanced by their performance in several recent conflicts. During the 2020 Second Karabakh War, Turkish-made drones operated by Azerbaijan played an important role in improving battlefield reconnaissance, target acquisition, and precision-strike capabilities. Their effectiveness contributed to Azerbaijan’s military successes and attracted considerable attention from military planners worldwide.

Similarly, during the initial stages of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Turkish drones gained international recognition for their ability to support intelligence gathering, surveillance missions, and strike operations against Russian military assets. These experiences have transformed Türkiye into one of the world’s leading drone exporters and elevated its status within the global defense industry. Turkish manufacturers have demonstrated an ability to rapidly innovate, adapt to battlefield lessons, and produce systems that offer an effective balance between capability and affordability

As Türkiye’s defense industry matures, Ankara is increasingly seeking partnerships that move beyond traditional export relationships. Ankara has strong incentives to deepen defense cooperation with Tokyo. Cooperation with Japan offers access to one of the world’s most sophisticated technological ecosystems, providing opportunities to integrate advanced Japanese expertise in areas such as sensors, artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors, advanced materials, and precision manufacturing. Such cooperation could help accelerate the development of next-generation unmanned systems while enhancing the competitiveness of both countries’ defense industries.

Several areas appear particularly promising for future collaboration. One potential avenue involves intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms designed for maritime operations. As an island nation with extensive maritime responsibilities, Japan requires persistent surveillance capabilities to monitor vast stretches of surrounding waters. Turkish expertise in unmanned aerial systems could complement Japanese sensor technologies and maritime surveillance infrastructure, creating more effective platforms for maritime domain awareness.

Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems offer another promising field for cooperation. The future of unmanned warfare is increasingly shaped not only by platform performance but also by software, machine learning, and autonomous decision-support systems. In April 2026, Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) established the Unmanned Defense Capability Promotion Office and the Unmanned Systems Office as part of a broader effort to integrate unmanned and AI-enabled technologies into military operations. Japan’s strengths in robotics and advanced computing could complement Türkiye’s experience in deploying unmanned systems under operational conditions, potentially leading to the development of more sophisticated autonomous platforms capable of operating in complex environments. On the other hand, expanded cooperation in unmanned defense systems could help Tokyo adapt its defense posture to the challenges posed by a shrinking population.

Beyond bilateral considerations, the emerging partnership carries broader regional implications. In East Asia and the Indo-Pacific, the potential integration of Turkish drone technologies into Japan’s defense architecture could contribute to Tokyo’s efforts to strengthen its Pacific defense. This objective is reflected in the establishment of the Pacific Defense Initiative Office by Japan’s Ministry of Defense in April 2026, a move that underscores Tokyo’s growing focus on strengthening its defense ecosystem through enhanced operational coordination, advanced military technologies, and more integrated deterrence strategies. Greater access to advanced drone capabilities would strengthen Japan’s ability to monitor and respond to emerging threats while reducing operational burdens on manned platforms.

For Türkiye, expanding defense cooperation with Japan would further demonstrate its transformation from a regional security actor into a globally connected defense-industrial power. Ankara has already established defense partnerships across the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and Europe. A deeper relationship with Japan would also extend Türkiye’s strategic reach into Indo-Pacific defense markets and reinforce its growing reputation as a supplier of advanced military technologies.

Outlook

While defense cooperation between the two countries has historically remained limited, changing geopolitical realities and evolving security priorities are creating new incentives for collaboration. The emerging drone partnership reflects a broader convergence between two technologically capable middle powers seeking to enhance their strategic autonomy, strengthen their defense-industrial bases, and respond to increasingly complex regional security challenges. The strategic rationale for closer Türkiye–Japan collaboration appears increasingly compelling. Both countries face evolving security environments that require innovative technological solutions, and both seek to strengthen their defense-industrial capabilities while reducing excessive dependence on external suppliers. The convergence of these interests provides a strong foundation for expanded cooperation in unmanned systems and related technologies.

In sum, Japan possesses advanced expertise in sensors, communications systems, materials, and electronics, whereas Türkiye offers extensive operational experience and internationally competitive unmanned platforms. If successfully institutionalized, cooperation in drone and counter-drone systems could become one of the most important pillars of a broader Türkiye–Japan strategic partnership and a noteworthy example of how middle powers are adapting to the changing dynamics of global security and technological competition.

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About the Author:

Vusal Guliyev is a frequent contributor to The Saratoga Foundation. He is the Indo-Pacific & Eurasian Affairs Analyst at the Baku-based Center of Analysis of International Relations (AIR Center). Mr. Guliyev’s professional and academic experience spans leading research institutions, think tanks, and fellowship programs across Azerbaijan, Türkiye, China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States.

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By Sergey Sukhankin

In June 2026, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov stated that the Russian Armed Forces were integrating AI, robotics, and automated command systems into military management. The statement reflects a broader shift in Russia’s AI policy since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Whereas the original National Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence framed AI primarily as an instrument of digital modernization and economic development, wartime priorities have increasingly repositioned it as a strategic enabler of military effectiveness, technological sovereignty, and state resilience. This evolution is reflected in the revised National Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence until 2030, approved in February 2024, which places substantially greater emphasis on technological sovereignty, domestic software development, and reducing dependence on foreign digital infrastructure. Taken together, these developments suggest that AI has become an integral component of Russia’s wartime mobilization strategy, with civilian AI initiatives increasingly serving as a foundation for military innovation by strengthening the country’s data infrastructure, software ecosystem, and human capital.

This analysis proceeds as follows. First, it examines the institutional and legislative shifts that have altered the trajectory and centralized AI governance since February 2022. Second, it considers how civilian AI development across business, healthcare, education, and infrastructure has become increasingly tied to Russia’s broader sovereignty agenda. Third, it assesses the primary military applications of AI, specifically command-and-control, reconnaissance, drones, logistics, and battlefield management. Finally, it explores Russian writings on the role of AI in information-psychological operations, concluding with an analysis of what Russia’s post-2022 AI trajectory reveals about the relationship between technological sovereignty, military adaptation, and long-term confrontation with the West.

Institutional and Legislative Changes After February 2022

In the post-2022 period, implementation of Russia’s AI strategy has become increasingly centralized. For instance, the Government Sub-commission on the Development and Implementation of Artificial Intelligence has emerged as the principal coordinating body responsible for synchronizing AI policy across ministries, regional governments, state corporations, and research institutions. Unlike many Western AI governance frameworks, the Russian model prioritizes centralized coordination and state-led implementation.

This shift became particularly evident at the AI Journey conference in late 2025. Speaking at the event, President Vladimir Putin argued that Russia should move beyond isolated AI projects toward a comprehensive national implementation plan spanning ministries, industries, and regions. He maintained that AI should become integrated into “virtually every management and production process” by 2030 and presented it as essential for preserving Russia’s technological competitiveness under conditions of geopolitical confrontation. Putin also emphasized that dependence on foreign AI systems creates strategic vulnerabilities, reinforcing technological sovereignty as a central objective of AI policy. AI is thus increasingly framed not simply as an economic technology but as an instrument of national sovereignty and resilience.

As in other strategic sectors, AI development is expected to rely on strong state coordination and financial support. Discussing Russia’s “new digital leap“, Izvestiya argued that AI should become the technological foundation of the country’s next phase of economic development while emphasizing that success depends on coordinated government policy, investment in domestic infrastructure, and strategic state support. Similarly, experts interviewed by Rossiyskaya Gazeta argued that sustained AI development requires stronger mathematics education, expanded domestic supercomputing capacity, increased public investment in research, and support for domestic software ecosystems, drawing parallels with Soviet approaches to strategic technological development. Together, these institutional developments indicate that Moscow increasingly treats AI as a state-directed sovereignty project rather than a conventional modernization program.

Civilian AI: Trends and Changes

Although Russia’s AI strategy increasingly prioritizes national security, military modernization does not operate independently from civilian technological development. Rather, one of the defining characteristics of Russia’s post-2022 AI policy is the gradual erosion of boundaries between civilian and military innovation. Moscow increasingly treats healthcare, education, public administration, logistics, and industrial modernization as components of a broader AI ecosystem capable of supporting long-term strategic competition. Three civilian domains illustrate this trend. These areas matter not because they are military in a narrow sense, but because they build the data, personnel, software, and institutional infrastructure on which military AI adoption ultimately depends.

First, business and economic development. Following the introduction of Western sanctions, the Russian government increasingly identified AI as a mechanism for offsetting labor shortages, improving productivity, and supporting import substitution across strategic industries. The Yakov & Partners report, published in late 2025, estimated that AI could contribute between 7.9 and 12.8 trillion rubles annually to the Russian economy by 2030 while improving productivity across manufacturing, finance, transport, healthcare, and public administration—sectors facing acute labour shortages. The report also found that more than 70 percent of surveyed companies had already deployed generative AI in at least one business function, while nearly half had begun experimenting with AI agents, suggesting that AI adoption has moved beyond pilot projects into mainstream business operations. Similarly, Russian business media present an optimistic outlook. According to RBC, Russia’s AI market could reach approximately $2.1 billion in 2025 while maintaining annual growth rates approaching 45 percent. These projections should be treated cautiously, but they show the weight assigned to AI in Russian industrial policy despite sanctions and hardware constraints.

Second, healthcare has emerged as one of the fastest-growing civilian applications of AI. According to Vedomosti, Moscow’s digital healthcare platform has connected nearly 2,000 medical organizations across more than 70 regions, enabling AI systems to assist physicians in analysing medical images and improving diagnostic accuracy. Beyond healthcare itself, these applications expand Russia’s domestic AI ecosystem by generating large datasets, improving machine-learning models, and strengthening national computational infrastructure.

Third, education and human capital occupy a strategic position within Russia’s AI agenda. Rather than emphasizing digital literacy alone, Russian policy increasingly treats education as a prerequisite for technological sovereignty. The Yakov & Partners report identifies shortages of qualified specialists as a principal constraint on AI development and argues for closer cooperation between universities, state institutions, and technology companies. It recommends expanding mathematics, computer science, and engineering education while strengthening university-industry partnerships to sustain Russia’s AI ecosystem under conditions of international isolation.

Since 2022, given internal developmental trajectory, even nominally civilian AI sectors have moved closer to civil-military fusion. In Russia’s wartime setting, healthcare data, education, software ecosystems, robotics, cryptography, and drone technologies increasingly feed into the same sovereign AI infrastructure that the armed forces can draw upon.

Military AI: Areas of Application

While civilian AI provides the foundation of Russia’s sovereign AI ecosystem, the armed forces have increasingly become its principal destination. Official statements and military publications indicate that the war against Ukraine has reshaped Russian AI priorities – rather than pursuing fully autonomous weapons as an end in themselves, Moscow has concentrated on integrating AI into command-and-control systems, battlefield management, logistics, reconnaissance, and drone warfare. During a meeting of the Military-Industrial Commission in April 2025, President Vladimir Putin argued that “whoever begins using AI in military affairs faster will enjoy enormous – indeed colossal – advantages on the battlefield” and called for accelerating domestic software development for automated command systems alongside expanded production of unmanned aerial systems. This emphasis continued in June 2026, when Defence Minister Andrei Belousov stated that the Russian Armed Forces were actively integrating AI technologies, robotics, and automated command systems into military management, indicating that AI has moved beyond experimental projects to become part of Russia’s broader military modernization agenda.

The modernization of command systems has become the principal area of AI integration with lessons from the war in Ukraine underscoring the importance of rapid data processing, sensor fusion, and real-time situational awareness. Following Belousov’s inspection of tactical command modernization in July 2025, Moskovskii Komsomolets reported continuing efforts to integrate digital communications, automated battlefield management, and AI-assisted command support capable of combining information from drones, reconnaissance assets, electronic warfare units, and artillery into a common operational picture. Similarly, an article published by APNI argues that AI should strengthen tactical command by processing battlefield data, identifying operational patterns, supporting target prioritization, and improving coordination among different branches of the armed forces. One example of practical implementation of this approach is the AI platform Svod, reportedly designed to collect and synthesize operational information from multiple sources to provide commanders with integrated situational awareness rather than raw intelligence streams, illustrating Russia’s preference for decision-support systems over autonomous command architectures.

The war has also accelerated interest in AI-enabled navigation, computer vision, swarm coordination, and autonomous target recognition. According to Arsenal Otechestva defence magazine, future combat effectiveness will increasingly depend on integrating AI with robotics, precision-guided weapons, and unmanned systems capable of operating under conditions of electronic warfare, suggesting that AI will reshape not only individual weapons but also the organization of military operations.

Russian military writing after 2022 presents AI primarily as a decision-support technology rather than a substitute for commanders. Romashkina argues that AI’s main value lies in processing battlefield information, improving logistics, strengthening cyber defence, supporting reconnaissance, and assisting operational decision-making (Romashkina, N. P. “Iskusstvennyi intellekt v voennom dele: vozmozhnosti, ugrozy, perspektivy.” Voprosy kiberbezopasnosti, no. 6 (70) (2025): 158–165). A related study titled “Artificial Intelligence in Military Affairs: Essence, Problems of Development and Operation, Main Areas of Application” advocates a “human-in-command“ model in which AI helps construct digital representations of the battlefield, prioritize threats, model alternative courses of action, and prepare operational orders, while final authority remains with human commanders. Both studies argue that AI should function as a force multiplier embedded throughout command-and-control processes rather than as an autonomous decision-maker. Another analysis broadened this argument by treating AI as a strategic technology and introducing the concept of “cognitive weapons“: tools designed to degrade adversary AI systems through poisoned data, adversarial inputs, or attacks on software and hardware. This moves the discussion beyond AI-enabled weapons to AI itself as a contested battlespace. In other words, Russian military thinkers increasingly view AI systems not only as tools for enhancing combat effectiveness, but also as targets that can be deceived, degraded, or manipulated. Thus, the analysis postulates an idea that Russia must invest not only in military AI capabilities but also in protecting AI systems against manipulation, reinforcing the view that AI will increasingly shape military competition and international power relations.

The clearest articulation of this emerging Russian view appears in an article by Col. (ret.) V. Orlianskii and Col. (ret.) P. Dulniev in the Russian military journal Voyennaya Mysl (Military Thought), which links battlefield lessons from Ukraine directly to the need for AI-enabled command systems and a more flexible force structure. The authors argued that the experience of the war in Ukraine since 2022 demonstrates that Russia’s traditional, fixed organizational model is no longer adequate for high-intensity, technology-driven warfare. The principal lesson is that tactical units must become dynamically organized, capable of being reinforced in real time with drones, artillery, aviation, electronic warfare, and other assets according to rapidly changing battlefield conditions rather than relying on permanently assigned force structures. They contend that the speed of modern combat, the ubiquity of drones, and the transparency of the battlefield have shifted the decisive advantage toward forces able to process information faster, adapt organizational structures more rapidly, and coordinate multi-domain assets with minimal delay.

To achieve this transformation, the authors advocate integrating artificial intelligence into a unified automated command-and-control system spanning tactical, operational, and strategic levels. AI is presented not as a replacement for commanders but as a decision-support tool capable of processing massive volumes of reconnaissance data, identifying targets, modelling courses of action, allocating reinforcement assets, coordinating joint operations, and continuously updating decisions in near real time while leaving final authority with human commanders. They further argue that AI-enabled command systems should underpin a transition to “dynamic force organization,” improve reconnaissance, logistics, and electronic warfare, facilitate the employment of robotic and directed-energy systems, and ultimately reshape Russian military art. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that this vision faces major obstacles, including deficiencies in Russian computing power, microelectronics, software development, data quality, and AI expertise, warning that overcoming these technological shortcomings is essential if Russia is to avoid falling behind the United States and China in the next generation of warfare.^[1]

Information-Psychological Confrontation and AI

Military modernization represents only one dimension of Russia’s expanding AI strategy. AI has also become an increasingly important instrument supporting Moscow’s information operations abroad. While AI has not fundamentally transformed Russian influence activities, it has increased their speed and scale, even if its practical effectiveness remains uneven. A revealing example emerged during Hungary’s parliamentary campaign. According to The Moscow Times, Russian political strategists developed a disinformation campaign – which turned out to be a failure – intended to strengthen Prime Minister Viktor Orbán by portraying him as the defender of Hungarian sovereignty while simultaneously discrediting his political opponents. Subsequent investigations by Reuters found that coordinated Telegram networks amplified these narratives while increasingly relying upon AI-generated content and localized messaging. The pattern resembles earlier Russian influence operations such as the Doppelgänger campaign targeting European audiences – rather than replacing human operators, generative AI enables faster production of fake news articles, manipulated imagery, multilingual social media posts, and synthetic videos.

In this regard, Russian military thought is paying growing attention to AI’s role in gray-zone and sub-threshold operations. An article titled “Teoriya «Myatezhevoyny» E.E. Messnera kak instrument osmysleniya prirody sovremennykh voennykh konfliktov” (”E.E. Messner’s Theory of ‘Subversive Warfare’ as an Instrument for Understanding the Nature of Modern Military Conflicts) in a recent issue of Voyennaya Mysl’ (Military Thought) argues that Evgeny Messner’s concept of “global insurgent warfare” retains significant explanatory value for understanding 21st century conflicts. The authors contend that digital technologies, social media, and artificial intelligence have transformed myatezhevoyna into a “digital-ideological” form of confrontation, in which information, narratives, and collective consciousness become primary targets of strategic competition. They conclude that contemporary national security must protect not only territory and infrastructure but also the state’s cognitive and value space, reflecting the growing importance of non-military instruments in achieving strategic objectives.^[2]

Another article, “Doktrinal’nye transformatsii v sfere psikhologicheskikh operatsiy SShA i NATO s tochki zreniya vozmozhnykh posledstviy dlya bezopasnosti Rossii” (Doctrinal Transformations in the Sphere of US and NATO Psychological Operations from the Perspective of Potential Consequences for Russia’s Security) published in the same journal, argues that recent U.S. and NATO doctrinal changes in psychological operations (PSYOP) represent an expanding threat to Russian national security. The authors contend that Washington’s return to the concepts of PSYOPs, combined with increased funding and broader operational scope, signals an intensification of psychological pressure against Russian society and the Armed Forces. Particular attention is devoted to artificial intelligence, which is portrayed as a force multiplier capable of generating persuasive synthetic content in real time, enabling unprecedented penetration of Russia’s information space. The article also argues that AI-enabled micro-targeting, supported by big data analytics, substantially enhances the effectiveness of Western information campaigns by allowing tailored influence operations against vulnerable social groups. Overall, the authors present AI as a critical enabler of next-generation psychological warfare and gray zone competition rather than merely a technological innovation.^[3]

Taken together, these developments suggest that AI is becoming an increasingly important enabler of Russia’s information-psychological confrontation rather than a revolutionary new instrument of influence. While generative AI has expanded the speed, scale, and adaptability of disinformation campaigns, Russian military thought increasingly views AI in broader strategic terms – as a tool for shaping Western perceptions, protecting the state’s cognitive space, and countering perceived psychological operations organized by the West. This perspective complements Russia’s wider post-2022 AI strategy, in which technological sovereignty, military modernization, and information confrontation are treated as mutually reinforcing components of a single state-directed effort to strengthen national resilience under conditions of prolonged geopolitical competition.

Outlook

Russia’s post-2022 AI trajectory suggests that Moscow is not trying to win the global AI race on the terms set by Silicon Valley or China’s largest technology firms. Instead, it is building a sovereign, state-directed AI ecosystem shaped by wartime pressure, sanctions, and long-term confrontation with the West. The significance of this shift lies less in frontier-model competition than in the way Russia is integrating AI into command systems, logistics, battlefield management, drones, education, healthcare data, and information operations. This does not mean Russia has overcome its technological constraints. Access to advanced chips, computing power, and globally competitive commercial platforms remains limited. It does mean, however, that Russia may gain practical advantages from selective, state-coordinated AI adoption. This marks an important evolution from the pre-war logic of digital modernization – AI is no longer treated primarily as a tool for improving economic efficiency or public administration; it is increasingly understood as infrastructure for wartime governance, military adaptation, and strategic autonomy. The key implication is that Russian AI strategy is assuming the form of a resilience strategy – one designed to preserve military adaptability, state capacity, and informational reach under conditions of prolonged geopolitical confrontation. Judging by repeated statements from President Putin and Russia’s military-political leadership, this confrontation is viewed not as a temporary phase but as a long-term strategic condition likely to endure for the lifetime of the current political system.

^[1] Voyennaya Mysl (Military Thought), No. 2 (February 2026), pp. 10 – 27).

^[2] Voyennaya Mysl (Military Thought), No. 6 (June 2026), pp. 152–158).

^[3] Voyennaya Mysl (Military Thought), No. 6 (June 2026), pp. 77 – 89).

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About the Author

Dr. Sergey Sukhankin is a Senior Fellow at The Saratoga Foundation specializing in Russian military and security affairs, as well as Russo-Chinese relations. He is also an Advisor at Gulf State Analytics (Washington, D.C.) and Fellow at the North American and Arctic Defense and Security Network (Canada).

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By Paul Goble

Even though they do not have a republic of their own, the Circassians both in the North Caucasus and in the diaspora communities abroad have now taken the lead in defending one of the last vestiges of federalism and autonomy in Russia: the right of a federal subject to have a voice on any changes in their republic's borders. The Circassian effort, as impressive as it is, almost certainly will not prevent Moscow from eliminating provisions protecting the rights of the people of Kabardino-Balkaria to control their own borders; but it will simultaneously help mobilize the Circassian people in that federal subject and more generally and prompt other national movements to take up this cause, a development that Moscow fears more than the actions of any republic or region by itself.

Because of such fears about this move and others suggesting that the Circassian national movement is once again on the rise, Moscow has drawn an old arrow from its quiver and sought to undermine that movement by sowing confusion among the 700,000 Circassians who live within the current borders of the Russian Federation and the more than seven million who live abroad, particularly those who live in Turkey and the Middle East.

In early June, ten leading opposition figures in Kabardino-Balkaria, most from the dominant Kabardinian (Circassian) portion of the population, issued an appeal to the KBR parliament to reject a call by the republic procuracy to take out of the republic constitution all references to the right of the republic and its people to guarantee the territorial integrity of Kabardino-Balkaria after the Moscow-imposed KBR agreed to do just that. Moreover, the declaration specifies that “the decision adopted by the Parliament is deeply flawed and poses a danger to the future of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic as a constituent entity of the Russian Federation. We insist on preserving the constitutional guarantees of the republic’s statehood and territorial integrity.”

Further, it declared that: “while the President of the Russian Federation ensures the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation as a unified federal state, this does not preclude constituent entities from enshrining guarantees of their territorial integrity—as an integral part of the unified state—within their own constitutions.” And because that is the case, the ten continue, “removing the provisions establishing the principle of territorial integrity from the Constitution of the Kabardino-Balkar Republic is the most destructive aspect of the proposed amendments. If the provision regarding the inviolability of the republic’s territory is eliminated, the federal center would gain the legal authority to alter the republic’s borders unilaterally.”

“Such a turn of events could lead to the following consequences,” they point out, including the transfer of territories—inhabited for centuries by Kabardinians, Balkars, and other peoples—to neighboring constituent entities of the Russian Federation; the abolition or redrawing of historically established national districts under the guise of ‘the interests of the Federation;’ and the loss of the republic’s final constitutional safeguard against arbitrary changes to its territorial structure at the discretion of the federal center.” And they conclude with the following two points: On the one hand, they say, “we cannot allow the Basic Law of Kabardino-Balkaria to remain silent on the issue of the inviolability of the republic’s territory. This is not a matter of legal technicality, but a question of the republic’s very existence as a national-territorial community.” And on the other, they note, “the intention to remove the aforementioned provisions from the Constitution of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic (KBR) is not an isolated event but part of a systematic effort by the federal center aimed at dismantling the special status of the republics within the Russian Federation—a strategy observed over the past 25 years.”

They were quickly joined in this protest by the leaders of more than 40 Circassian organizations in Turkey, something that has transformed a small domestic problem into an international one and made the Circassians the leader of this resistance. In a sign of just how worried Moscow is about this, the original webpage that included these declarations has been taken down; but a discussion of the content of their appeals can be found here.

No non-Russian nation within the Russian Federation has more of its members living abroad than the Circassians, and none can so quickly mobilize their co-nationals abroad when Moscow violates their rights or the rights of other non-Russians within the current borders of the Russian Federation. Indeed, this foreign base of support gives the Circassians a far greater ability to defend themselves and advance not only their causes but those of other non-Russians, a major reason why the Circassian nation could very well be among the first to escape Moscow’s control as the disintegration of the Russian Federation continues. (For a discussion of that possibility, see this author’s argument at Window on Eurasia, Dec. 1, 2024.)

Outlook

Given what is at stake, it should come as no surprise that Moscow has responded to this development and other signs of growing Circassian activism by closing down websites that carry the Circassian message. It has also revived one of its tried-and-true tactics of sowing confusion in the midst of both by setting up new organizations and media outlets that seek to undermine Circassian unity.

Once again, the Russian security agencies have sought to promote the idea that Circassians and Abkhazians are one people—an idea without historical foundation that knowledgeable Circassians reject but that enough Circassians may find persuasive enough to undermine opponents of that idea and alienate other non-Russians from them. That conclusion is strongly supported by the fact that, in recent weeks, Moscow has once again enlisted many of the same people it used before the 2014 Sochi Olympiad to undermine Circassian opposition to staging the international competition on the site where Tsarist forces carried out a genocide of the Circassians. In doing so, it has compounded the insult on the 150th anniversary of that horrific event. (The author is indebted to the distinguished Circassian historian Adel Bashqawi for calling his attention to this repetition).

Moscow was not able to derail Circassian opposition to the Sochi Olympiad; and most observers would agree that Putin’s decision to hold the games on these blood lands backfired badly on the Kremlin. It also allowed the Circassians to gain influence not only among other non-Russians inside the current borders of the Russian Federation but also among governments and experts in the West. What is now happening in Kabardino-Balkaria may lack the same drama in the short term, but it could well be recorded as an important step toward the restoration of a Circassian republic in the North Caucasus and the emergence of other non-Russian states that will no longer be under Moscow's control.

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By Alexander Melikishvili

Ukraine’s “kinetic sanctions” (drone and missile strikes targeting Russia’s oil and gas sector, including oil refineries) finally forced the Kremlin to acknowledge that these relentless attacks are causing gasoline shortages at a time when domestic demand is peaking due to the summer vacation season. On June 28, President Putin for the first time publicly admitted that the Ukrainian attacks have resulted in “a certain shortage,” but called it “not critical.” In fact, the Russian leader is grossly understating the scale of the problem. According to the Russian investigative platform Mediazona, as of June 26th, some form of fuel rationing was in place in 56 out of 83* regions comprising the Russian Federation. Furthermore, brawls often break out in long lines at gas stations, undermining social stability to the extent that this has already prompted local authorities in at least one location (the Black Sea resort town of Anapa in Krasnodar Territory) to employ Cossack volunteers to maintain public order at the pumps.

*Russian fuel restrictions by region: Image source: Mediazona

In June alone, the Ukrainian military struck eleven refineries across Russia, according to Ukraine’s defense ministry. By early July, the Ukrainian General Staff was reporting that Ukraine had knocked out 42% of Russia’s refining, costing Moscow $13.5 billion in losses since August 2025. Earlier, the Associated Press had reported, quoting the Macro-Advisory consultancy, that these attacks had caused the destruction of about one-third of Russia’s refining capacity, a major milestone for Ukraine. Even Russian government statistics, which should be treated with extreme caution as they are most likely manipulated to create a more favorable picture, indicate that gasoline production has been reduced by 17% to 850,000 barrels a day.

In response to the escalating crisis, on June 1, the Russian government introduced the first-ever ban on the export of jet fuel, which is to remain in effect until November 30. This comes after a restriction on the export of petroleum that has been in place since April and is due to expire at the end of July. Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak also revealed that the authorities are considering a ban on the export of diesel fuel. The situation must be really dire if Russia, one of the world’s top energy exporters, is resorting to such measures.

A Friend in Need: Russia Turns to Belarus and Kazakhstan

To remedy the situation, Russia plans to import 400,000 tons of gasoline per month, according to an anonymous industry source, as reported by Reuters on July 1. However, considering that Russia’s daily consumption of petroleum in summer reaches 110,000 tons, this volume will not be sufficient. Moreover, as Alexander Kolyandr at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) points out, Ukrainian drone strikes have affected eight out of the ten largest refineries in Russia that currently produce about 85,000 tons of gasoline daily, leaving a shortfall of 25,000 tons per day. Consequently, Russia leaned on its long-time ally Belarus, leading to a threefold increase in Belarusian petroleum exports delivered to Russia by rail in the first half of June compared to May, reaching more than 70,000 tons. Belarus is opportunistically profiting handsomely from this arrangement as it has hiked the price of gasoline it sells to Russia. Since May, it has almost doubled to $1,646 per ton, as the Russian business daily Kommersant reports. However, given Russia’s daily consumption, Belarusian petroleum exports are simply not enough.

While Russia has turned to Kazakhstan for help, the degree of influence it wields over Astana is significantly different, which explains why the assistance it has been promised is less significant. Industry sources in Kazakhstan told Reuters that Kazakhstan agreed to supply 50,000 tons of gasoline (Ai-92 and Ai-95) to Russia in July and August as humanitarian assistance. They also noted that the Kazakh side was not enthusiastic about this because it would strain the already tight gasoline market in Kazakhstan while raising potential sanctions risks. It should be noted that, as of July 2, the Kazakh government officially denied receiving any requests for petroleum from Russia, according to Kazakhstan’s Minister of Energy Yerlan Akkenzhenov. Regardless of the veracity of the report by Reuters, which is likely credible, Kazakhstan is dogged by limited refining capacity.

To avoid shortages on the domestic market, Kazakh authorities banned the export of gasoline, diesel fuel, and other oil products, starting from November 2025. Since then, this ban has been extended twice, most recently in April, and it is due to expire in November. However, on 3 July, the energy ministry published a draft law that will extend the ban from November to May 2027.

Outlook

Given production and refining constraints in Kazakhstan and Belarus, they are unlikely to mitigate Russia’s deepening fuel crisis. Nonetheless, this presents Kazakhstan with a excellent opportunity to demonstrate its symbolic loyalty to Russia, even as it balances that relationship against its growing ties with the EU and the United States.

On both fronts, Kazakhstan can boast significant achievements, especially with regard to the European Union, as demonstrated by President Tokayev’s visit to Brussels in June that was preceded by the conclusion of $462 million worth of agreements to deepen connectivity between Kazakhstan and the EU via the Middle Corridor.

Kazakhstan’s constraints are systemic due to its considerably underdeveloped refining capacity. With only three main refineries (located in Pavlodar, Atyrau, and Shymkent), Kazakhstan’s aggregate refining capacity is only 18 million tons annually even though the country produces about 100 million tons of oil per year. The government unveiled ambitious plans for boosting refining capacity, but even the recently accelerated timeline envisions increasing it to 40 million tons only by 2033. This provides Tokayev with the perfect excuse to decline further requests from Russia without angering either the Kremlin or Ukraine.

Unable to shore up support in the “near abroad,” Russia is turning its attention further afield. Naturally, India, as the second-largest buyer of Russian crude in the world in May, emerges as the most reliable option. Reuters reported on 1 July that a shipment of 60,000 tons of gasoline was en route from India to Russia by sea, loaded on two tankers. The Indian energy minister Puri’s superficial denials notwithstanding, anonymous sources with direct knowledge of the relevant deals told Reuters that the said shipment originated with the Indian refiner Nayara Energy, which is 40%-owned by Rosneft. India gets Russian crude at a significant discount, but it’s likely that Russia receives gasoline from India at a premium price considering that, as the Indian authorities claim, Russia imports it via intermediaries.

Even if you add all of the above, including Kazakhstan’s likely one-off contribution and supplies from Belarus and India, the combined total falls short of meeting Russia’s summer peak in daily consumption. This, in turn, proves that Ukraine’s strategy of “kinetic sanctions” is effective as Russia is incapable of repairing damaged refineries quickly enough to offset the reduction in refining capacity caused by the Ukrainian strikes. Nor is the Russian government’s ambitious objective of importing 400,000 tons of gasoline per month enough to cover Russia’s daily demand. In addition, Ukraine also has the option of ramping up maritime attacks against tankers delivering gasoline to Russia as well as targeting the key Russian ports where the imported gasoline is unloaded. Apart from substantially increasing public anger in Russia, Ukrainian strikes against refineries also severely endanger Russia’s agricultural sector by derailing the crucial grain harvest season, as farmers complain that they have no fuel to run combines.

*Note: This total does not include Crimea and four other regions of Ukraine (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia) that Russia unlawfully declared annexed in September 2022.

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About the Author:

Alex Melikishvili is a senior country risk analyst with more than a decade of experience working in the private sector (S&P Global, IHS Markit) with a focus on Eurasian security. Alex holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

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The Houthis are looking for a new enemy. The October 2025 Gaza ceasefire took away the cause that had carried them for two years, and the solidarity-with-Iran line they have tried in its place has gained little traction with a significant percentage of the population wary of Tehran. With the “defending Gaza” narrative minimized, the movement is reaching back for an older adversary — Saudi Arabia, which it fought from 2015 until the 2022 truce — and recasting it as the author of Yemen’s economic ruin. That search itself is a measure of the Houthis’ relative weakness: they are more fragile than they have been in years, underfunded, short of fuel and food, and losing their once-firm hold over some key northern tribes.

Their adversaries, namely the recognized Government of Yemen (GoY), are no stronger. GoY has, for once, made some headway — Saudi Arabia rolled back a UAE-backed offensive by the Southern Transitional Council (STC) in January, and a new GoY defense ministry has begun to weld its disparate forces into something closer to a single army. But the gains are shallow and growing shallower, undercut by the rivalry that jump-started the reforms. through local proxies, and the contest among them prevents GoY and what remains of the STC from consolidating. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates —with Israel backing Abu Dhabi, and Turkey and Qatar supporting Riyadh— pursue rival aims in Yemen.

While the Houthis have spent much of the last three years diversifying supply chains and sources of income away from Iran, the US-Israeli war with Iran has further reduced Iranian aid to the Houthis. Both the Houthis and the GoY are under pressure, and the outside powers that have, to varying degrees, propped them up are the main reason neither can finish off the other.

Searching for an Enemy

Behind the Houthis’ effort to look for an enemy lies increasing economic fragility. The World Food Program announced it was shutting down its operations across the Houthi-controlled north in late January, ending food assistance to a population in acute need. Fuel imports through the Red Sea ports of Hodeidah, Salif, and Ras Issa fell by roughly three-quarters in the first quarter of 2026, with no fuel entering at all in March. The United Nations estimates that more than 18 million Yemenis are facing acute food insecurity, while its humanitarian appeal for the year stood at around 14% funded by mid-2026.

Public-sector salaries across the north have gone unpaid for years, with only periodic payments for a small percentage of public-sector employees. Staple prices across Yemen keep increasing, with the increases most pronounced in Houthi-controlled areas, driven in part by reduced port capacity and the heavy taxes the Houthi authorities levy on what still gets in. The Houthis’ wartime slogans and messages of shared sacrifice ring hollow as members of the Houthi elite continue to construct lavish homes in Sana’a and elsewhere.

The Houthis are now trying to place the blame on Riyadh. They hold Saudi Arabia responsible for the unpaid salaries, so they demand that it release funds from Yemen’s oil and gas revenues and lift restrictions on the northern ports and Sanaa airport. Their media increasingly frames the wider economic crisis as a Saudi-American siege. In June, the movement’s General Mobilization Forces announced full combat readiness, and Abdul-Malik al-Houthi spoke of restoring “full sovereignty” and ending the blockade.

This is a return to a tested approach. The Houthis know from experience that their cross-border strikes on Saudi territory, including the 2022 strike on an Aramco oil depot in Jeddah, were what eventually brought Riyadh to the negotiating table. The threat to Saudi infrastructure remains their most reliable source of leverage. That leverage has only increased with the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia now relies on its East-West pipeline and the port of Yanbu for oil exports, both of which are within easy range of the Houthis’ missiles and drones.

Mobilization and the Tribes

The mobilization behind the Houthis’ anti-Saudi rhetoric is real, but narrower than the slogans imply. Recruitment continues under the movement’s wartime narratives, and fighters have been moved up to the front lines facing GoY and the Saudi border. Houthi authority over the northern tribes has always been more of a bargain than pure loyalty: money and government positions for cooperation, and a credible threat of punishment for anyone who withholds it. Both halves of that bargain are weakening at once — the money because the Houthis’ revenues have collapsed and the threat because two years of war have exposed the limits of what the movement can enforce. Sheiks in the outlying districts who once had no reason to question the arrangement are reassessing it, and with a Saudi-backed government reasserting itself in the south, the Houthis are no longer the only conceivable authority.

That reassessment is already producing friction. Tribal figures in several areas have resisted Houthi demands, and the movement has answered with purges, death sentences, and tighter surveillance of its own ranks. The leadership knows where this can lead. Ali Abdullah Saleh ruled Yemen through patronage as well, and lost it once corruption, falling revenue, and the cost of his wars left him unable to keep paying. The Houthis are nearer to that point now than they have been in years.

The strain is no longer hypothetical. In late June, a tribal call to arms filled the Al-Rayyan area of eastern Al-Jawf with armed men for days on end, drawing delegations from Hadhramaut, Marib, and the Mahra, after the Houthis detained a tribal sheik who had taken up the cause of a woman who said a Houthi-linked arms dealer had seized her Sanaa home. What began as a quarrel over a single house hardened into an organized encampment that named a commander to coordinate any escalation, while the Houthis put their forces in the area on alert. Confrontations like this are usually bought off or mediated before they reach gunfire, and this one likely will be. However, many tribal leaders who were once at least nominally allied with the Houthis sense the group’s weakness and are increasingly reasserting their local authority.

The Bab al-Mandeb

The same fragility that constrains the Houthis on land governs their conduct at sea. They hold much of Yemen’s Red Sea coast and have the anti-ship missiles, drones, and mines to make the Bab al-Mandeb impassable, yet they have left it open. Since the Gaza ceasefire, they have kept to selective strikes; in early June, they hit Israel-linked vessels in the Gulf of Aden and renewed a ban on Israeli shipping, but general traffic has kept moving, and the strait has not been closed. Traffic through the strait has yet to recover to pre-2025 levels.

The Houthis’ restraint reflects both weakness and pragmatism. The Houthis’ ports — Hodeidah, Salif, and Ras Issa — are critical to their finances and north Yemen’s economy. They tax all imports and depend on those imports to feed the north and fund the movement. A wider maritime campaign, or an outright closure, would bring the one response they cannot absorb as easily as they did in previous campaigns: renewed Israeli and American strikes on Hodeidah, which have already damaged port infrastructure and tightened the flow of food and fuel into Houthi territory.

For now, the threat of closure is far more useful than actual closure, and the threat of closing the strait has been replaced by the more potent and direct threat of attacking Saudi Arabia’s oil handling infrastructure. The Houthis’ dire financial situation and the rising threat of social unrest due to rising food prices and shortages mean that they need the strait open to maintain their grip on power.

Captured by Its Patrons

The Houthis’ core constraint is now financial. Yemen’s recognized government (GoY) faces a core constraint: its persistent inability to reform itself or govern the territory it claims. GoY, now more than ever, is dependent on its chief patron, Saudi Arabia, for financial and military support. Saudi Arabia’s increasingly overt management and backing of GoY are critical, but they also subvert GoY’s already limited authority. GoY’s one real gain of the past year, retaking the south, was Saudi Arabia’s work more than its own.

In December 2025, the Southern Transitional Council (STC), backed by the United Arab Emirates, launched “Operation Promising Future,” seizing the oil-rich governorates of Hadramawt and al-Mahra along the Saudi border. Though fought by Yemenis, the offensive was in substance an Emirati one, carried out with Emirati arms and Emirati backing. It came less than three months before the United States and Israel went to war with Iran, and within weeks of Israel’s December 26 recognition of Somaliland across the Gulf of Aden. Together, the offensive and the recognition are best read as an effort by the UAE and Israel to secure positions along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden corridor before the confrontation with Iran began.

The effort failed. Riyadh treated a UAE-aligned force on its southern frontier as a direct threat, hit Emirati arms shipments at Mukalla on December 30, and backed a counteroffensive in January that retook the territory, dissolved the STC, and drove its leader, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, into exile in Abu Dhabi. The UAE withdrew its remaining forces. The episode nonetheless put Riyadh on notice. Saudi Arabia now treats the deepening UAE-Israel partnership as a driver of regional instability nearly on a par with Iran, and sees in it the makings of strategic encirclement along its flanks. Its answer has been to move closer to Turkey and Qatar while distancing itself from Emirati policy, and to take the southern file in hand itself, running it through a Supreme Military Committee under coalition command, a degree of direct control over Yemeni affairs the Saudis had avoided throughout the war.

Somaliland belongs to the same design. For Israel, recognition opened the way to a possible military and intelligence foothold in Somaliland, across the water from Yemen, from which to watch and strike the Houthis at a time when missile fire has all but closed the port of Eilat. A divided and contested Yemen serves that end, as does a southern authority open to the Abraham Accords, which the STC’s leadership had signaled it would join. For Riyadh, the UAE-backed offensive in south Yemen, paired with Israeli recognition of Somaliland, was an existential threat that required a maximal response.

The South

Whatever the maps now show, GoY’s hold on the south is shallow. The STC’s dissolution is disputed by members who reject it and continue to act in the group’s name, and the central demand of the southern movement, self-determination, is a direct threat to GoY and, now by extension, to Saudi Arabia and its regional allies. STC-aligned forces now operate as low-level insurgents against a government they were nominally part of until recently. GoY’s response has been forceful. Its troops fired on pro-STC demonstrators in Aden in February and in Mukalla in early April, killing several, and Human Rights Watch documented the use of excessive force and arbitrary detention in Aden. These actions undercut the already limited authority the government had only just begun to establish.

Yemen’s eastern governorates continue on their own particular trajectories. In Hadhramaut, the governorate that holds most of Yemen’s oil, the Saudi-backed Hadramawt Tribal Alliance (HTA) under Amr bin Habreesh continues to quietly press for autonomy and a larger share of the governorate’s oil revenue. The HTA answers to neither the government nor the southern separatists, and Saudi Arabia courts the alliance as a counterweight to both the GoY and the southern separatists.

Image Source: Yemen Monitor

A Hollow State

The hollowness shows most plainly in GoY’s failure to keep the lights on in Yemen’s wartime capital, Aden. A Saudi fuel grant in January gave Aden close to twenty hours of power a day, an improvement residents had not seen in years. The relief did not last. As summer temperatures rose, outages lasted up to 20 hours a day, with residents protesting in the streets and some sleeping outdoors to escape the heat. A further $150 million Saudi fuel package announced in late May produced no noticeable improvement. Repeated promises followed by repeated shortfalls have become the pattern, and residents have stopped expecting otherwise.

Corruption remains a core driver of the ongoing failures. The electricity sector has long been among the government’s largest budget lines and one of its most plundered, with vast sums spent in recent years for little to show for it. The waste drains the treasury and, worse, leaves the government without the means to deliver the services on which GoY’s legitimacy rests. In most of what touches ordinary life for Yemenis — power, water, salaries, healthcare, the courts — it is a government in form more than in substance, recognized abroad and kept solvent by Saudi transfers.

The exception is the army, the one institution the government has genuinely begun to reform, albeit unevenly. Since February, a new defense minister has consolidated most of the duplicated commands and payrolls he inherited, begun a unified personnel database and biometric payroll to purge ghost soldiers from its rolls, and restored a measure of coordination among forces that had spent a decade pulling apart. Yet the strongest formations still answer to their own patrons and senior commanders rather than to a single chain of command — the Saudi-funded National Shield to the council’s chairman, the southern brigades to the commanders who raised them — and the central authority now drawing them together and funding them is the Saudi-led Supreme Military Committee, not the president of Yemen. Command and control is slowly being unified, but into Riyadh’s hands rather than GoY’s. Even the government’s one act of state-building deepens its dependence on its core patron.

Outlook: What Comes Next?

Neither the Houthis nor the GoY are positioned for or strong enough to launch the kinds of offensives that could reshape Yemen’s political and military landscapes. The front lines have scarcely moved since the 2022 truce and are unlikely to move over near- or medium-term timeframes. All armed parties in Yemen now possess a range of UAVs for surveillance and attack. The diffusion of UAVs further locks in the frontlines, as surveillance is ubiquitous and massing troops carries greater risks.

Due to what it perceives as an existential threat from the UAE and Israel, Saudi Arabia is now more deeply involved in day-to-day affairs in Yemen than it ever has been. Saudi military and civilian advisers are now key decision-makers who, in many cases, are positioned ahead of GoY civilian and military officials. Saudi involvement is unlikely to diminish in the near term, but neither is it likely to force GoY to move toward more durable and effective governance. At the same time, the Saudis, who are acutely vulnerable to a Houthi attack on the East-West pipeline, will continue to placate the Houthis despite their increasing anti-Saudi rhetoric.

The Houthis and GoY show increasing fragility across multiple sectors, which means they remain balanced against one another. This balance means that Yemen faces what it has faced for much of the last decade, a slow, grinding economic decline that punishes the vast majority of Yemen’s 36 million inhabitants while elites on all sides benefit. At the same time, the continued diffusion of increasingly capable military technology and armaments means that a range of armed actors operating across Yemen will be further empowered. This, in turn, further imperils GoY authority and, increasingly, Houthi authority.

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About the Author:

Michael Horton is the co-founder of Red Sea Analytics International (RSAI) and a contributing author at Eurasia Outlook. He has two decades of experience as an analyst and researcher in Yemen and the Red Sea region. Michael has written policy briefs and conducted briefings and seminars for the US National Security Council, the British Foreign Ministry, the British Ministry of Defense, the US State Department, and senior members of the British Parliament and the US Congress. He has written extensively about the region for The Saratoga Foundation, Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Oxford Analytica, and The Economist,.

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