In roughly thirty-six hours, the Houthis seized Mokha and Mayun Island at the mouth of the Red Sea; Iranian strikes damaged American aircraft at a base in Jordan; two vessels were hit off Oman; Saudi Arabia shut the pipeline designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz; and oil surged.

Any one of those events would normally command a market’s attention. The problem is that they are happening at once — and they are attacking the escape routes built to compensate for one another.

That is the story today: the Middle East is running out of workarounds.

• Yemen. The Houthis have seized Mokha and Mayun Island, dramatically expanding their control of Yemen's Red Sea coast and giving them positions astride the approaches to Bab al-Mandeb. Military spokesman Yahya Saree told Al Jazeera that Saudi-backed forces were pushed out of six districts, and that navigation remains safe for all shipping except Saudi vessels — a carve-out that is itself the threat. Yemen’s internationally recognised government says its army has begun striking a designated “kill box” near Mokha.

• Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has shut the East-West Pipeline, which carries crude from the Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red Sea and is the main way around Hormuz. The foreign ministry says drones launched from Iraq were responsible and that it is holding off retaliation to let Baghdad act. Gulf News reports satellite imagery and NASA thermal-anomaly data southeast of Medina raising the possibility of a Houthi strike, with no independent confirmation. Civil Defence has activated early warning in Abha and Khamis Mushait.

• Jordan. CBS News, citing people with direct knowledge, reports Iranian strikes on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base damaged several US aircraft — an A-10 lost a wing, and about eight F-15s took light damage and returned to service. No American deaths reported. The military significance extends beyond the damaged aircraft: more than 30 Patriot interceptors were reportedly fired defending the base, further drawing down precisely the defensive stockpile Washington has been worrying about.

• Oman / Hormuz. Four projectiles struck two vessels about four nautical miles west of Khasab late Thursday, setting one alight (UKMTO Warning 133-26). Iran’s Foreign Ministry says a regional meeting on Hormuz shipping convenes in Oman on Monday with Iraq and Gulf states.

• Washington. Al Arabiya reports, citing sources, that Trump has told Mohammed bin Salman the US will supply intelligence and targeting assistance, with CENTCOM chief Adm. Brad Cooper now in the kingdom. A senior administration official frames the posture as protecting freedom of navigation while regional partners lead.

Why it matters: The oil price is almost secondary to what markets are beginning to price: the disappearance of optionality.

For months, every Middle East disruption came with an answer. Hormuz becomes dangerous? Move Saudi crude west through the East-West Pipeline to Yanbu. The Gulf becomes difficult? Use the Red Sea. One shipping lane closes? Pay more, reroute and keep the cargo moving.

Those workarounds are now being attacked simultaneously.

The Houthis have taken Mokha and Mayun at the entrance to Bab al-Mandeb. Saudi Arabia has shut the pipeline built to bypass Hormuz. Ships are being struck off Oman. And Washington is supplying targeting intelligence as the fighting spreads.

That changes the calculation. Markets are no longer pricing a temporary blockage at one chokepoint. They are pricing systemic inflexibility — the possibility that the spare routes, excess capacity and logistical detours designed to absorb a shock may themselves become part of the battlefield.

Hormuz was the problem. The Red Sea was the workaround.

Now both are contested.

President Vladimir Putin arrived in India early Friday for a three-day visit to attend the BRICS leaders’ summit and deepen strategic ties with New Delhi. On Friday afternoon, Putin met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for bilateral talks focused on trade and energy. Sources cited by Indian media said the two leaders would discuss expanding Russian-Indian trade to $100 billion by 2030, supported by increasing cooperation in rail transit, steel production, critical minerals, fertilizers and nuclear energy. The Kremlin said earlier this week that the possible sale of Russian Sukhoi Su-57 stealth fighter jets to India is also on the agenda. A delegation of more than 300 Russian executives is accompanying Putin to New Delhi to negotiate supply chains and food security contracts. Putin is scheduled to give a speech at the BRICS business forum later on Friday. The main plenary session of the bloc’s leaders will take place on Saturday, followed by an expanded session the following day with partner states and international organizations. BRICS was created in 2009 as a forum for major emerging economies seeking greater influence in global affairs. BRICS has since expanded beyond its original group of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa to include Ethiopia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran and the UAE. This year’s BRICS summit seeks to lift the bloc’s global profile even as the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran splits its members, with Tehran and Abu Dhabi on opposing sides of the conflict. - Moscow Times

The European Union is set to provide Ukraine with €6.1 billion in additional assistance to help the war-weary country purchase military equipment, notably the Patriot interceptors badly needed to shoot down Russia's devastating ballistic missiles. The funding, announced on Friday, will come from the bloc’s €90 billion support loan, which reserves €28.3 billion for military aid and €16.7 billion for budget aid this year. The loan’s “Made In Europe” requirement will be lifted to procure Patriots, which are made in the United States, and drones, which depend on Chinese components. The newly allocated €6.1 billion represents the final allocation under the €28.3 billion envelope. Payments are being made in gradual instalments after Brussels checks and verifies the contracts that Kyiv signs with private companies. So far, €8.35 billion in defence funding has been wired. The news comes as allies race to supply Ukraine with air defence systems as Russia escalates its bombing campaign, including through jet-powered drones, ahead of a winter that EU officials expect to be the harshest yet of the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy estimates his army will need about 300 Patriot interceptors to make it through the winter safely - Euronews

Tuesday’s shutdown of British airspace was set off by flight data entered by a UK military aircraft, the FT reports on its Saturday front page. Four people briefed on the incident told the paper the flight plan began a chain of events that closed Britain’s skies for hours and triggered a wider air traffic control meltdown, which took several attempts to restart. The FT calls the data spurious. Two others briefed on the matter said the military origin had no specific bearing on what followed; the MoD declined to comment. Transport secretary Heidi Alexander summoned NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe on Wednesday, said the outage was not unavoidable, and demanded a review within a week. Only the NATS board can remove him, though the government can withdraw support — and with the Civil Aviation Authority’s own investigation six months out, next week’s review is the decisive document. One person close to the process told the FT that Rolfe is “toast.” Airlines say they were assured a 2023 NATS failure would not recur; one executive told the paper the recommendations were described as fully implemented but the evidence was never shown. Travellers faced delays of up to ten hours, with schedules recovering only by Friday.

Standing in the town that sheltered thousands of stranded Americans after the Sept. 11 attacks, former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien marked the 25th anniversary Friday with a pointed message for the United States: “Never mistake our generosity for weakness.” The 92-year-old former leader, who was prime minister at the time of the attacks, drew a standing ovation after telling his “American friends” that Canadians may be tolerant and kind but “we bow to no one.” U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra rose afterward and hugged him. “I say that not in anger, but as one friend to another,” Chrétien said. “Friends need to be honest with each other.” The unusually blunt remarks came during a solemn ceremony honoring the nearly 3,000 people killed in New York, at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93, and remembering Gander’s extraordinary response to the attacks. Gander, Newfoundland opened its arms to nearly 6,600 airline passengers diverted there when the U.S. government shut down airspace during 9/11. The remarks came at a striking moment in Canada-U.S. relations. The longtime allies are embroiled in a trade war under U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly talked about making Canada the 51st U.S. state - AP

The journals….

Put today’s stories side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. The Ukraine war is no longer contained to Ukraine. It is spreading: people, technology and tactics are all moving outward from the Ukraine war.

Start with Pyongyang. Its first contingent was mauled in Kursk, but the survivors are now instructors. CNN reports that wounded North Korean soldiers went home to teach comrades drone warfare, and a fresh wave of 8,500 troops now in Russia includes a drone unit capable of striking inside Ukraine. Kyiv says Moscow may ask for up to 50,000 more. Meanwhile Pyongyang is using Ukraine as a missile test range and asking for S-400 air defences in return. Thousands of combat-tested soldiers will eventually go home to a border 50 kilometres from Seoul.

The technology is travelling too. Iran gave Russia the Shahed drone. Russia industrialized it, and is now passing the know-how on. Ukraine’s former intelligence chief said Moscow and Pyongyang had agreed to start building capacity to produce Geran and Garpiya drones on North Korean soil, and up to 12,000 North Korean workers and engineers have reportedly been recruited to Russia’s Yelabuga drone plant. Further afield, Russia has delivered drones and armoured vehicles to Madagascar since its October 2025 coup. In Venezuela, Ukraine's military intelligence chief said last year that more than 120 Russian military personnel, commanded by a general sacked over battlefield failures in Ukraine, were training local forces, including in drone operations.

Bottom line: Ukraine is the laboratory, but the experiment isn’t staying there. North Korean veterans take battlefield experience home. Iranian engineers and students take technical knowledge home. Russian instructors carry drone warfare farther abroad. And beneath the Arctic, Moscow is rehearsing how it could disable the infrastructure connecting the West itself. Wars export more than destruction. They export knowledge. And nearly five years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some of the most consequential weapons leaving the battlefield aren’t missiles or drones. They’re the lessons about how to use them.

News Briefs
Russian universities are training Iranian specialists in fields with clear military applications, and some return home to join entities linked to Iran’s armed forces, according to an investigation by Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian-language investigative unit. Drawing on a decade of published research, Systema found collaboration extending beyond legacy areas like missile propulsion and uranium enrichment into technologies now in play in both the Ukraine war and the US-Israeli war with Iran: electronic warfare, GPS spoofing and AI for drones. The pipeline is widening. By 2025, nearly 10,000 Iranians were enrolled at Russian universities, a 42 percent jump in two years. At St. Petersburg’s ITMO, Iranian co-authors had nearly caught up with Germans, previously the city’s top research partner. Among the cases RFE/RL documents: Ali Mohammad Amouei, a Moscow Aviation Institute graduate specializing in gas turbine engines of the type used in cruise missiles and drones, rose to a senior post at Farsco, later sanctioned by Washington, while continuing to publish with MAI contacts. Mohammad Hosseinpour Khanmiri co-developed a uranium and thorium isotope measurement method in St. Petersburg, then applied it to ore from Iran’s main uranium deposit at Saghand. None of the Iranians named responded to Systema’s requests for comment. Sciences Po’s Nicole Grajewski told RFE/RL that Iranian PhD research abroad is rarely free of government ties or ulterior motives, adding that Tehran has typically been the one pursuing deeper cooperation. Why it matters: US sanctions on MAI, Bauman and other Russian universities have not severed the academic channel, which may prove harder to police than hardware transfers.

Russia Rehearsed Cable Sabotage in the Arctic, Allies Say

NATO allies caught Russian submarines this spring near Norway’s Svalbard archipelago rehearsing the use of a secret weapon designed to disable undersea cables without leaving a trace, two Western officials told Reuters.

The exercise was run by GUGI, Moscow’s deep-sea warfare directorate, using submersibles to simulate deploying the technology in a conflict with NATO. A joint British, Norwegian and US operation tracked and confronted the vessels, which abandoned the drill and left. No cables were damaged. Officials declined to say how the weapon works. London and Oslo also briefed Moscow directly, hoping the knowledge they had uncovered it would deter its use.

Britain and Norway said in April they had tracked three Russian submarines during a month-long covert operation in the region, but the weapon, the location and the US role had not previously been reported.

The stakes are high. Two fiber-optic cables link Svalbard to the mainland, carrying data from SvalSat, the world’s largest satellite ground station and part of NASA’s network. Nearby lies the Bear Gap, the passage Russia’s Kola-based nuclear submarines would use to reach the Atlantic.

Why it matters: Some US analysts fear Russia may test NATO’s Article 5, three US officials told Reuters, and cutting subsea cables could be central to any such move. Europe has expanded its reliance on seabed infrastructure while shrinking its ability to protect it.

Houthi rebels captured a key Red Sea port on Thursday from Yemen’s Saudi Arabia-backed government, strengthening the Iranian proxy’s hold on one of the region’s two critical waterways. Reuters reported that the sweeping offensive was powered by arms and advice from Tehran. It puts the militia one step closer to controlling “arguably Yemen’s most strategically valuable real estate” near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, an expert told The New York Times. A drawn-out Middle East conflict could permanently damage oil demand, Semafor’s energy editor argued, as alternative energy sources proliferate; oil prices hit $108 a barrel Thursday for the first time since May.

• Oil prices keep climbing as the war with Iran keeps clogging the global flow of crude, and they leaped Thursday to their highest levels since before the summer. That worsened worries about inflation and cranked up pressure within the bond market, helping to send stocks lower again on Wall Street - AP

President Donald Trump pledged Wednesday to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, an extraordinary gambit to reverse his party’s sagging fortunes in November. The dubious promise would most likely cost more than $1 trillion and require congressional approval, and would further exacerbate the country’s nearly $1.8 trillion annual budget deficit and concerns about inflation. “If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump said during the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas. “It will be called the Trump Dividend.” He likened the payments to a corporation’s distributions to shareholders, citing “our tremendous strength and success economically.” Within an hour, Vice President JD Vance appeared to try to walk back Trump’s proposal — at least in part — by suggesting the dividend payments would not go to the wealthy. Vance suggested it could be paid for by U.S. tariff revenues, though the suggested payment dwarfs what the U.S. has taken in through the protectionist measures - AP

Tung Chee-hwa, who led Hong Kong through its first years back under Chinese sovereignty, died on Tuesday evening at 89, the South China Morning Post reports. Xinhua said he died surrounded by family. Tung was a shipping magnate with no political résumé, and one whose family firm had been rescued by Chinese state-linked money in the 1980s. Speculation about Beijing's choice ended when Jiang Zemin crossed a crowded room to shake his hand, and a 400-member Selection Committee made it official in 1996. His tenure was a series of shocks. Within months of the 1997 handover came the Asian financial crisis, which drove his government to spend HK$118 billion propping up the stock and futures markets in 1998. Then came SARS, and in 2003 a push for Article 23 security legislation, shelved after an estimated 500,000 people marched. His pledge to build 85,000 homes a year was quietly dropped. He resigned in March 2005, citing health, then became a vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, China’s top political advisory body, and an informal go-between in US-China relations. Tributes came from Beijing, whose liaison office called him a “close friend” of the Communist Party, and from every one of his successors. Carrie Lam praised his humble approach; Donald Tsang called him approachable and broad-minded. Why it matters: Measured against those who followed, Tung belongs to a different Hong Kong. When the streets filled in 2003, he backed down. Two months before quitting, he publicly admitted his government had misread public concerns, a mea culpa hard to imagine from the city’s leadership today. Since then, Beijing has imposed the 2020 National Security Law, and in 2024 John Lee’s legislature passed Article 23 unanimously in under two weeks. Tung’s warm, grandfatherly manner, which political scientist Lau Siu-kai told the SCMP won over public sentiment, now looks like a relic of a more forgiving era.

The journals…

I won’t re-litigate the tariff arithmetic. You saw it yesterday. What matters is what came next.

On Tuesday, hours after Canada’s counter-tariffs took effect, Trump signed five executive orders barring a range of Canadian products from entering the United States at all — most alcohol, certain dairy, motorcycles, and a list of oddments down to whey concentrate and cane molasses. Effective September 29. Not a tariff. A ban.

A senior administration official explained the choice on background, and it is the most important sentence of the week: Washington went with outright bans rather than tariffs because some Canadian provinces had pulled American alcohol from their government liquor stores.

Then, the same day, Trump directed the agency that runs U.S. federal procurement to strip Canadian-origin products from its awards schedules, complaining in a post that Canada and its provinces had shut American small businesses out of their procurement markets.

Note what has happened here. Twice in one day, the escalation was aimed squarely at provincial policy. Ottawa is no longer the only address.

Note also the instruments. A tariff makes you expensive — you can hedge it, absorb it, wait it out. A ban makes you absent. A procurement exclusion makes you ineligible. There is no margin to eat and no clever routing through a third country. A distillery that spent fifteen years building U.S. distribution is simply gone from the market on the 29th.

Each Canadian move is now met with a new category of weapon rather than a bigger version of the last — and the old ones stay in place. The tariffs didn't come off when the bans went on.

And savour the sequence, because it is instructive. Carney spent August asking the premiers to put American liquor back on the shelves as a concession to get a deal. Several resisted, including Ontario, which is one of the biggest purchaser of booze anywhere! The deal collapsed anyway. Canada is now being punished for a policy Ottawa was already trying to unwind — and which was never uniform in the first place. Alberta and Saskatchewan never had a ban. New Brunswick restored American products months ago. A Dalhousie scholar who studies economic coercion has pointed out that it was never an embargo, a blockade or a boycott in any technical sense. It was patchy, provincial and half-reversed, and it has been answered with a federal wall.

The damage will not be evenly spread. Big firms have trade counsel and balance sheets that absorb eighteen months. The wineries, the craft distillers, the forty-person family manufacturers in southwestern Ontario have a line of credit and one customer across the river. Ottawa’s package will keep some of them breathing. It will not find them a new customer.

Which is the point of this piece.

Take ice wine — arguably the finest thing Canada makes that Canadians themselves barely drink. It moves as a duty-free gift, and it commands serious money in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea. As of September 29 it does not have an American market at any price. There is nothing left to discount into, no tariff to eat. The door is shut.

That is the starting pistol. Not for wine — for every small and medium producer that spent three decades calling a drive to Detroit an export strategy.

Now the uncomfortable part, and it is the conversation I have been having out here in Asia since the 1990s. Canadian businesspeople hardly come often enough, if at all. The flight is too long. They get tired. Meanwhile the Australians are here, the Kiwis are here, the Irish and the Danes are here, and they are eating lunches that should have been ours.

Here is the concrete step, and it needs no signature from Ottawa.

When I lived in Asia in the late 1980s and 1990s, the provinces ran trade offices out here. Aggressive ones. British Columbia’s people were getting Canadian beer onto store shelves in Taiwan — not writing a white paper about it, actually doing it, buyer by buyer. That machinery has withered.

Provinces do not need federal permission to open an office in Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta or Taipei. The embassies will support them, as they always have. But the initiative is provincial, the money is provincial, and the timeline is months rather than mandates. Some still exist, including in China — which rather proves the point that the model works and has simply been starved.

And the premiers now have no excuse to sit this out. Washington has named them. It has built an import ban explicitly around their liquor policy. They are belligerents in this whether they wanted the part or not — so let them fight where they can win. Not in Washington, where they have no standing and less leverage, but in markets where a premier with a delegation and a decent product still opens a door.

The economies out here are growing while North America argues about the price of eggs. Carney’s government, after January’s reset with Beijing, set a target of lifting exports to China by 50 per cent by 2030. Ambitious, and I support it. It is also unreachable at current staffing, because the plumbing no longer exists on the ground.

Trump has done Canada one accidental favour. He has made the diversification argument for us, in public and at volume. The question is whether Bay Street treats this as weather to wait out or as the week the map changed.

I fly home Friday. I’ll report what I find.

News Briefs
U.S. President Donald Trump signed new executive orders on Tuesday, ramping up retaliation after Canada imposed its latest set of duties on the United States. The five orders, which will take effect later this month, will completely bar the import of certain Canadian goods, including motorcycles, some dairy products and alcoholic beverages. It comes after Ottawa’s tariffs — a response to the 50 per cent duties Washington hit Canada with last month — took effect just after midnight EDT Tuesday. After Ottawa’s duties were implemented, Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that Canada’s pivot away from the United States will come at a cost, but the alternative would be far worse. “In the spring of last year, I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us. And I promised that that will never, ever happen,” Carney said in a video posted on social media. Since negotiations fell apart last month, Trump has taken aim at Canada almost daily but his latest orders are a significant escalation of trade tensions between the two countries. Trump used Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to hit Canada with 50 per cent tariffs, accusing Canada of treating the U.S. unfairly. He pointed to provincial bans on U.S. liquor imports and quotas on certain U.S. vehicles — put in place in response to Trump’s initial tariffs — as well as Canada’s supply-managed dairy system. Tuesday’s executive orders justified Trump’s latest move by saying Canada didn’t stop its discrimination against U.S. autos, dairy and vehicles so now they are able to block the import of certain products because it is “consistent with the interests of the United States and the public interests.” Trump also posted on social media earlier Tuesday that he is directing the federal agency that oversees government procurement to remove all Canadian-origin products from its “awards schedules.” In a post on social media, Trump said “the Canadian Government, including Canadian Provinces, have banned American Small Businesses and Companies from selling into their Government Procurement Markets.” “That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam,” Trump posted. “From now on, NO RECIPROCITY — NO ACCESS!” Trump seemed to be referring to Ottawa’s “Buy Canadian” policy, which was launched after the president targeted Canada with tariffs and threats of annexation. Some provinces have implemented similar policies - Global News

• Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc said in a statement on social media Tuesday night that the government is assessing the latest moves. “Our first priority remains on protecting and supporting Canadian workers, farmers, families, and businesses from these unjustified actions,” he wrote, adding that he is in contact with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. “When the U.S. is ready to engage, our government will work in good faith and constructively towards a more secure mutually beneficial trading relationship that fully respects Canadian sovereignty,” LeBlanc said - CTV

Houthi forces launched a major attack on southwestern Saudi Arabia early Tuesday, hitting oil infrastructure and King Khalid Air Base near Khamis Mushait and injuring dozens of civilians. Saudi-led coalition officials vowed a resolute response. It is the sharpest escalation since the UN-brokered truce of 2022. The strikes put a month-old alliance to its first real test. On August 7, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Shehbaz Sharif signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, declaring an armed attack on one signatory an attack on all three. The language borrows from NATO’s Article 5; the machinery does not. The text has never been published, and the pact created no joint command, no standing forces and no defined trigger. Whether Islamabad and Ankara do more than issue statements will determine if Mecca is an architecture or a piece of paper. The stakes are compounded by geography. With Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi crude has been rerouted through Bab al-Mandeb — the strait the Houthis are now pushing toward. The ICRC warned Tuesday that the widening hostilities risk a broader regional conflict. President Mirjana Spoljaric said continued fighting would bring more deaths, displacement and catastrophic disruption to health care, water, fuel and electricity, and that humanitarian action cannot substitute for respect for international humanitarian law or political will to de-escalate.

Putin Has Named His Price, And it is Ukraine

Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, told Rossiya 1 that Putin has told Trump the United States could have an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine on one condition: that Washington end all assistance to Kyiv. They should stop providing any aid, in Ushakov’s phrasing. He added that talks could resume in the trilateral format, according to our monitoring of the pro-Kremlin channel.

Read that carefully, because it is not a peace proposal. It is an invitation for the United States to deliver a Russian victory and be credited as the peacemaker for it. Moscow is not negotiating with Ukraine through Washington. It is asking Washington to disarm Ukraine on its behalf. The summits, the envoys, the root causes — all of it is scaffolding around that single ask.

The context makes it sharper. Witkoff and Kushner saw Putin in Moscow on Saturday and Zelensky in Kyiv on Sunday, their first wartime visit to the Ukrainian capital, and came away with warm language and nothing else. Hours after they flew out, Russia put ballistic missiles and drones into the city.

Which is the backdrop to the FT’s Christopher Miller reporting that CIA director John Ratcliffe is being lined up for a larger role, while the White House considers scaling back Witkoff and Kushner. Five people familiar with the thinking described the shift.

Ratcliffe is not a newcomer. He made a covert trip to Moscow in late August, met SVR chief Sergey Naryshkin and FSB director Alexander Bortnikov, and floated a Trump–Putin–Zelensky summit. He reportedly came away judging Bortnikov someone who could help restart the process — an assessment worth sitting with, given whose institution that is and what it has done in Ukraine these four and a half years. The CIA declined to comment.

One caveat, flagged as exactly that: the Russian emigré outlet Agentstvo, citing a Kremlin source, reported that Putin declined to see Ratcliffe on that trip, having concluded from accounts of the CIA director’s view that Russia is starting to lose that he was detached from reality. It is unverified. If it holds, promoting the man Putin refused to meet is a curious way to restart a negotiation.

The premise of the reshuffle is that the intelligence channel carries more weight in Moscow than the envoy channel. Perhaps it does. But Ushakov has just said on state television that the channel was never the problem. The price is.

Moscow Stops Pretending

Two civilians were killed at a Ukraine–Moldova crossing overnight. This time Russia’s defence ministry claimed the strike by name.

Russian drones hit the Starokazachye border crossing on the Moldovan frontier in the early hours of Wednesday, setting the checkpoint alight. Ukraine’s Border Guard Service reported dead and wounded among civilians waiting near the barrier. Moldova’s count: two killed, two injured, among them a Moldovan citizen who declined hospitalisation and drove on to Chișinău. The crossing is closed.

The dead fell one kilometre from Moldovan territory.

I’ve used this crossing repeatedly. On an ordinary night it holds cars, minibuses and people going about the smallest business imaginable.

What is new is not the strike. Since August, Russia has worked steadily through southern Odesa oblast’s road links — the Zatoka bridge on 1 August, the Maiaky bridge on the M-15 nine days later, then the crossings themselves at Tabaky and Vynohradivka. The pattern was legible from the map alone, which is why I have written it as a pattern rather than a plan.

What is also new is that Moscow has now said it. The Russian defence ministry confirmed the strike and named the crossing’s logistics facilities as its target. Ukraine’s foreign minister called it a deliberate effort to sever transport links with Moldova. Both capitals now describe the same object.

The night before, Moldova had already been overflown. A drone entered from Ukraine at 4:20 p.m., headed toward Chișinău, skirted the city to the north and crossed into Romania near Ungheni before doubling back and exploding in a sunflower field at Mihăilenii Vechi, Rîșcani. Moldovan police confirmed it carried explosives and ran a turbojet engine — a Geran-4 or similar, not the propeller-driven Shahed Moldova has grown used to. Seven aircraft were affected: three held on the ground at Chișinău, three put into holding patterns, one diverted to Iași on the captain’s decision. The Institute for the Study of War read the flight as a test of Moldovan air defence and of NATO’s eastern posture. There were 17 airspace incursions in August alone — more than in all of 2025.

Chișinău heard it. President Sandu said the war has reached Moldova’s borders. Her defence minister, Anatolie Nosatîi, went further: he cannot rule out deaths inside Moldova, and the country cannot modernise its air defences as fast as Russia is improving its drones.

That is a defence minister, on the record, describing a gap.

A spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex says the couple were surprised to see a letter sent on behalf of King Charles clarifying that Prince Harry and Meghan remained non-working royals. The spokesperson said the couple, who have recently moved back to the UK, “were a little surprised not to have been told about this in advance”. But royal sources say Prince Harry and Meghan were made aware of the letter, sent on Monday afternoon, before it was made public. It is also understood a security committee, which includes Home Office representatives, is meeting this week to look at the level of taxpayer-funded security that should be given to the Sussexes who are now resident in the UK. The Royal and VIP Executive Committee - known as Ravec - decides security for royals and public figures and Prince Harry has previously complained about a lack of adequate police protection in the UK. The Home Office does not comment on such decision making - and would be unlikely to reveal the outcome of such a meeting. In terms of Prince Harry and Meghan being “surprised” by the King’s message on Monday - it’s understood that reflects the lack of time given to them to respond - BBC

The journals…

Of all the things that could mark the worst week in modern Canada–U.S. relations, a cartoon was not on my list.

Hours before Canada’s counter-tariffs were due to bite, Donald Trump posted an image to Truth Social of himself in a USA Hockey jersey, standing over a sprawled Mark Carney in a Hockey Canada sweater. The caption: “Get up, governor.” Earlier the same day he had declared the Canadian dollar’s exchange rate “unacceptable.” By Monday afternoon he was demanding a boycott of a Canadian aerospace company, Bombardier.

Canadians woke up to all of it, and I suspect a great many of us needed a Tim Hortons double-double in hand before we could accept it wasn’t a nightmare.

An animated version is now circulating — the same cartoon, moving, in which Trump cross-checks the prime minister to the ice and beats him with his stick. Whether that clip came from the president or from one of the accounts that launders his output is, at the time of writing, unresolved. Nobody in the White House has bothered to disown it. Nor would it be out of character: in February, after the U.S. beat Canada for Olympic gold in Milan, Trump posted an AI video of himself punching Canadian players on his way to the winning goal.

I try to be careful with the word unhinged. But there is no honest alternative for a head of state taunting his closest neighbour — a treaty ally and founding NATO member — with a humiliation meme, on the eve of a rupture that will cost workers on both sides their jobs. The “governor” line is not a joke. It is the 51st-state fantasy in cartoon form, and Canadians read it exactly that way. That we now have to spend a morning establishing which version of our own humiliation the president personally endorsed is itself the point.

Then the tariffs landed. At 12:01 a.m. Eastern Tuesday, Ottawa’s retaliation took effect: roughly C$27.6 billion — about US$20 billion — of American goods, hundreds of product lines, duties from 15 to 50 per cent. Steel and aluminum doubled to match Washington’s rate. Furniture, appliances, farm equipment, dairy, electronics. Cotton T-shirts. The language is “dollar for dollar,” and that is the point: not a bargaining posture, a mirror.

Economists are right that this will raise prices at the till, and that most of it won’t bite until contracts roll over next year. They are also missing the larger story. This was never about the price of a sofa.

The Bombardier tell

“NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!” Trump wrote, unless the company builds its aircraft on American soil. Set aside that its business jets are among the most reliable flying, and used across the U.S. corporate fleet. Set aside that Bombardier’s own reply was to note it already operates in ten states, and that the wings, engines and avionics are largely American-supplied. Banning Bombardier means taxing Wichita and Fort Lauderdale.

For Canadians the company is not an abstraction. It began as a snowmobile maker in rural Quebec and became a global aerospace player. It is one of the things we point to. Threatening it is not an economic argument; it is a poke in the eye, and it will be received as one.

The potash slap shot

That is the loud version. The quiet one I wrote about here months ago, and it tells you none of this was improvised. Canada is the world’s largest potash producer, most of it from Saskatchewan, and the overwhelming share of what goes into American soil comes from us. There is no quick substitute — on paper, one of the strongest cards Ottawa holds. So watch what Washington did with it. In December the administration lifted sanctions on Belarus’s potash sector in exchange for 123 political prisoners, and eased them further in March. Then in May the State Department circulated a paper to Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine, obtained by RFE/RL, asking all three to permit transit: American firms wanted to buy and ship Belarusian potash, and avoiding Russian ports meant a route through their territory. All three refused.

The stated rationale was prying Lukashenko from Putin. Judge it on its merits. But if you intend to put a 50 per cent wall around Canadian trade, you would want an alternative source of the one commodity your farm belt cannot do without, lined up in advance. I can’t prove intent. I can point out the pattern: the noise is on Truth Social, and the manoeuvre happened six months earlier in a document nobody was meant to read.

The levers we haven’t pulled

Here is what Washington appears not to have priced in: Canada has barely started. What has been announced is conventional. The unconventional sits untouched — electricity flowing to millions of American households, oil moving south, uranium, critical minerals, potash. Ottawa has been disciplined about not reaching for any of it, and there is a case for keeping that discipline. But the option exists, public opinion increasingly supports using it, and every meme makes it likelier. The potash episode is also a warning: those levers are worth less every month Washington spends quietly building around them.

Because that is the real effect of Sunday night. Polls already showed most Canadians backing retaliation knowing it will cost them; humiliation content doesn’t soften that, it hardens it. Carney, whose position now rests entirely on not blinking, has been handed a gift he didn’t need. Meanwhile the trade map is being redrawn — not north–south, the way it has run since the 1965 Auto Pact, but east–west inside the country and outward, to Europe, to the Indo-Pacific. That is no longer rhetoric. It is procurement policy.

What Singapore sees

I write this from Singapore, and it is worth stepping out of the North American frame.

Thailand is a U.S. treaty ally. So are the Philippines, currently absorbing the most consequential maritime pressure in the region. Singapore isn’t one formally, but it is about as close as a country gets without the paperwork — hosting American naval logistics, quietly underwriting the U.S. presence here for decades. All of them are watching Washington take a hockey stick to its closest friend, largest trading partner and the country that shares its air defence. The lesson is not subtle: alliance with the United States is no protection from the United States. That is a tactical problem for planners in Manila and Bangkok. It is also an ethical one, and the ethical version travels faster — through Seoul, through Copenhagen, where the Greenland obsession has not gone away, and through every European capital recalculating what an American guarantee is worth.

We are in uncharted waters, and I don’t say that for effect. In modern history there has been no period in which the United States treated its allies as adversaries and its adversaries as peers, simultaneously and on purpose. Canada has become the test case the rest of the world is studying.

Which brings me to the part hardest to convey to people who don’t know the country. Canadians are not built for this. We are, by long habit, the ones who apologise first and split the difference. Staying in a fight with our largest partner, knowing it will cost us, runs against much about how we behave. That is exactly why it matters that we’re doing it anyway — and why nobody in Washington should mistake the politeness for softness.

We sing about the true north, strong and free. The free part we have always taken as given. It is the middle word being asked for now.

I fly to Canada on Friday to report this from the ground, before UN high-level week. I suspect the mood I find will be angrier, and steadier, than Washington expects.

More from the road this week for World Briefing Plus subscribers.

Israeli Foreign minister Gideon Saar says Israel will close the British consulate in Jerusalem - one of four “counter-measures” against the UK. Israel is also banning 11 MPs from entering the country, including Zarah Sultana, Jeremy Corbyn, and Diane Abbott. The move comes after UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament the UK would ban the import of goods from Israeli settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank. Miliband said “ethnic cleansing” was being carried out by “settler terrorists” and accused the Israeli government of turning a “blind eye.” Eleven countries - including France, Canada, Spain and Poland - will implement the same sanctions on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law. Israel has been planning to develop 1,200 new homes in the occupied West Bank and there has been a rise in settler attacks on Palestinians this year - BBC

A Chinese state-owned firm has supplied Russia with the materials required to build hundreds of kamikaze drones, according to internal Russian company shipping documents obtained by POLITICO. The records, which have been reviewed by Western governments, provide the clearest evidence yet of a Chinese-state corporation continuing to aid a sanctioned company in the Kremlin’s military industrial complex. The shipping and customs documents reveal the Chinese firm disguised the shipment of 46 tons of carbon-fiber chemicals to a subsidiary of Russia’s Rosatom earlier this year. The corporation develops the key components of the kamikaze drones Moscow said to have been used to attack a shopping mall in central Ukraine in August, killing at least 16 people. Chinese components have long been retrieved from Russian drones following strikes on Ukraine. Yet the documents gathered from Russian sources by the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre — a Kyiv-based think tank close to the Ukrainian government — detail for the first time how a Chinese state firm exported crucial drone-making components directly to Russia. The USCC has shared the documents with the U.K. and U.S. governments. These revelations “would allow the [U.S.] State Department to sanction” the Chinese supplier, because they “establish” shipments to Rosatom’s subsidiary after it was sanctioned by much of the West, said David Albright, founder and president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security think tank. The shipment, he points out, is disguised with a customs code for exports like nylon and polyester. The U.S. House Select Committee on China has reviewed the documents and determined they are “legitimate,” according to a U.S. government official familiar with their contents. The Ukrainian government has also reviewed the documents and confirmed their authenticity, a Ukrainian official said. Both officials were granted anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on the record. The Chinese government has consistently denied providing weapons to support Russia’s war on Ukraine. “We would not add fuel to the fire, and above all we would not profiteer” from the conflict, Chinese leader Xi said in 2023. The scale of the shipments and the military importance of the Russian company receiving them, however, suggest Chinese officials are either turning a blind eye to that assistance or are actively facilitating it, said multiple U.S. weapons experts, former intelligence officials and diplomats.

Russia hammered the Ukrainian capital with ballistic missiles, killing at least two people in a major attack hours after White House envoys left Kyiv amid a renewed push for peace negotiations. The September 8 attack followed a lull in near daily attacks that underscored Russia’s intent to press forward in its nearly 4 1/2-year war on Ukraine despite astronomical casualties. Emergency workers pulled bodies from the rubble in one district of Kyiv while firefighters battled to put out fires from the attack, which also included jet-powered drones -- a powerful weapon that Ukraine has struggled to defend against. At least 10 people were wounded, emergency officials reported. The Russian attack included dozens of ballistic and cruise missiles along with more than 160 drones overnight, Ukraine’s military said. Over the past week, Russia has hit Ukraine in near daily attacks. Ukraine’s ability to defend against the assaults has been severely constrained by a lack of missile interceptors, above all US-built Patriots. The attack came hours after US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner departed Kyiv following meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other officials. Prior to Kyiv, the pair visited Moscow for talks with President Vladimir Putin - RFE/RL

A British MP has referred Andrew and Tristan Tate to Counter Terrorism Policing over a 40-minute video the brothers filmed themselves — riding a T-80 tank, lobbing grenades and firing a flamethrower on a Russian military range during a June trip to Moscow. Writing in The Moscow Times, Kateryna Shenheliia reports that Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, former chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, made the referral in late August. The question is whether the pair should have registered under the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme; undeclared work for a specified foreign power carries up to five years. No evidence has surfaced that Moscow paid or directed them. Their representative calls the trip private and personal. Shenheliia’s argument is that the access — including an officer joking about a medal from the defense minister — is not something you can simply buy, and that’s exactly what the law was written to expose. Charges look unlikely on this front. The brothers are in Miami awaiting extradition on sex and trafficking charges — material prosecutors find far more workable.

The journals…

Voters in a small eastern German state gave the far right 43.8 per cent on Sunday, more than double its 2021 result. The governing centre-right party fell to 17.2, its worst there ever. Chancellor Friedrich Merz called it a turning point with consequences "on the international stage" - because the winners, and two other parties that did well, all want Germany to stop arming Ukraine. By his count that's about 60 per cent of the vote. Merz has an interest in framing his defeat as everyone else's extremism, and lumping the established Left Party in with the far right is a stretch. On Ukraine specifically, the arithmetic holds.

Before you file that under “Europe lurches right,” look at the rest of the year. Hungary ejected Viktor Orbán in April after sixteen years. Britain’s Reform UK has slid roughly nine points from its autumn peak. Sweden votes this Sunday with the incumbent right-leaning bloc trailing.

The pattern isn’t ideological. It’s that incumbents are losing, everywhere, on cost of living and immigration, and the beneficiary depends entirely on who was holding the job. Where the centre-right governs, the harder right collects. Where the nationalists govern, the liberals do.

Why this matters beyond Europe: two of the three insurgent movements gaining ground want immigration cut sharply and support for Ukraine cut with it. The elections that decide whether that becomes policy rather than noise:

Sweden — 13 September 2026, this Sunday
France — presidential, April–May 2027; Macron term-limited, National Rally leading polls
Italy — general due by autumn 2027
Poland — parliamentary, autumn 2027
Spain — general due 2027

Germany’s national elections are more than two years away, but DW says that Bundeskanzler Merz’s job is on the line after the humiliating results in Saxony-Anhalt. To make matters worse, two more state elections are on the horizon and bad results there for the the CDU could see another incumbent walk towards the exit door.

For now, nothing until Sunday, then a fourteen-month gap, then four in a row. Which is worth remembering when officials warn - as European defence officials did this morning - that Russian operations and grey zone warfare are timed to coincide with elections.

News Briefs
Berlin’s political establishment is staggering after the far-right Alternative for Germany scored a historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday night, forcing mainstream parties to confront how to keep it from power — and explain its stunning rise. The AfD won 43.8 percent of Sunday’s vote, more than doubling its 2021 result. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union crashed to 17.2 percent, its worst-ever showing in the eastern state. Thorsten Frei, leader of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, called the result a “turning point for our country” and said conservatives must ask why they were no longer reaching voters. CDU Secretary-General Franziska Hoppermann rejected any debate over Merz’s future and again ruled out cooperation with either the AfD or The Left. The rout piles pressure on Merz, who once vowed to cut the AfD in half but has been chancellor while the far-right party has boomed in the polls. The AfD, meanwhile, claimed a mandate to govern. Co-leader Alice Weidel hailed a “historic result,” while fellow co-leader Tino Chrupalla declared: “Ulrich Siegmund will be our new minister-president,” referring to the party’s lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt - Politico

The Russian Foreign Ministry announced on Monday that it is closing Germany’s consulate in St. Petersburg. The German consulate in St. Petersburg must cease its operations by September 18 at the latest, according to the Foreign Ministry. “It was the German authorities who, once again, provoked a new round of escalation in bilateral relations,” the Foreign Ministry said, adding Berlin “bears full and complete responsibility” for the consequences. The move is a direct response to Germany’s decision to close the Russian consulate in Bonn and Russia’s cultural center in Berlin, a decision Russia labeled “unfriendly.” Germany recently announced those measures after it said Russia was responsible for an attempted drone attack at Leipzig Airport. The EU, too, said the incident had all the signs of “state sponsored terrorism.” The Leipzig airport is an important international freight hub, also used for providing support to Ukraine. Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov rejected Germany’s allegations, calling them “the beginning of a real war.” - DW

• Russia and North Korea opened the first road bridge linking the two countries on Monday, coming after months of construction delays. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and North Korean Premier Pak Thae Song presided over a ceremony via video link to mark the official launch of traffic along the two-lane bridge, which stretches one kilometer (0.6 miles) over the Tumen River. Mishustin hailed bilateral relations as being at an “unprecedentedly high level of comprehensive strategic partnership,” adding that the bridge, which cost 9 billion rubles ($104 million), would boost trade and tourism. A rail bridge, built in the 1950s, already connects the two countries. Some observers have said that the bridge will provide Russia and North Korea an additional route through which they can discreetly move military cargo and personnel. In 2025, North Korea’s shipments of rocket artillery, shells and short-range ballistic missiles to Russia were estimated to be between $7 billion and $13.8 billion, according to the Institute for National Security Strategy, a government-funded research institute in South Korea. Russia and North Korea have deepened military ties since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In 2024, the two countries signed a mutual defense treaty that requires them to provide military support if either is attacked - Moscow Times

The headline from the talks: Volodymyr Zelensky expects the war to continue into the winter. Beyond that, little that’s new. In fact, Donald Trump’s envoys arrived in Kyiv with few fresh ideas, largely reviving earlier proposals. Asked on Times Radio this morning whether anything should be read into the fact that the delegation went to Moscow first, I was unequivocal. It’s the established pattern: Putin gets the stage first, front-loads the American side with his narratives, and only then do the envoys continue on to Kyiv. The result is a Russian leader repeatedly given the upper hand - including cases where Zelensky and Trump agree on something in person, only for a phone call from Moscow to follow and the decision to be reversed. Also discussed: the envoys’ framing of the war as a problem to be solved with a business approach - and how much good that has actually done.

China will inject $45 billion into its largest banks and insurers, its biggest recapitalization push in decades as Beijing looks to boost the country’s faltering economy. China’s growth target is already its lowest since 1991, and the economic picture is darkened further by a real estate downturn that is straining local government finances and undercutting spending capacity, Goldman Sachs said in a note to clients. A raft of property-sector measures unveiled last week, however, largely “rehash policies Beijing has already been rolling out piecemeal,” Trivium analysts said. Domestic consumption has also flatlined. Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s “insistence on preserving stability instead of addressing China’s serious structural problems threatens [China’s] ascent,” an Atlantic columnist argued - Semafor

Seven Indonesian airports, including two serving Jakarta, remained closed on Monday (Sep 7) because of volcanic ash from eruptions at Mount Anak Krakatau as around 341,000 travellers were affected by flight cancellations and delays, officials said. Ash from Anak Krakatau, which sits halfway between Java and Sumatra islands, has blanketed Jakarta and several surrounding areas since it erupted late on Friday, leading to the closure of the airports for safety reasons. Around 341,000 people have been affected by the delay, diversion, or cancellation of 2,961 flights, said Indonesia’s chief infrastructure minister, Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono. Jakarta’s main airport, Soekarno-Hatta, will remain closed until 11.59pm local time (12.59am, Singapore time), the airport’s operator said. Transport Minister Dudy Purwagandhi said the Jakarta airport’s closure aims “to give the airport time to clean the runway, taxiway and apron”, and give airline operators time to prepare their fleets. “We want to ensure that the volcanic ash is moving away from the airports located around Mount Anak Krakatau,” he said. It is unclear until when the remaining six airports would be closed. One other airport in South Sumatra has been reopened - CNA

President Trump appeared to suggest on Sunday that New Mexico should be renamed “New America,” prompting swift backlash from the state’s Democratic leaders over his latest effort to put an American stamp on geographic names. On social media, Mr. Trump shared an image of a map of New Mexico with the word “Mexico” crossed out with a red X and replaced with “America.” The White House re-shared the image shortly after on its official X account. The president posted again several hours later, with what appeared to be an A.I. video of him placing a label with the word “America” over “Mexico” on a “Welcome to New Mexico” road sign. Mr. Trump has no legal authority to rename any state, which in New Mexico’s case is written into its Constitution. Any proposed change would have to originate within the state, a prospect that New Mexico’s Democratic leaders rejected forcefully on Sunday. “New Mexico’s name isn’t up for debate — it’s been ours since before the United States existed,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham wrote on social media. Representative Melanie Stansbury was more blunt: “Oh hell no!” she wrote on X, adding, “Our state’s name carries generations of history, culture, and family — and it belongs to us.” The origins of New Mexico’s name predate the founding of the United States. In the 16th century, Mexicans called the territory north and west of the Rio Grande “New Mexico,” according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The state’s name is also written into Article 1 of its Constitution: “The name of this state is New Mexico, and its boundaries are as follows,” the first page reads - NYT

The journals…

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Kyiv by train on Sunday, their first visit to the Ukrainian capital since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Volodymyr Zelensky met them near St Sophia’s Cathedral, a UNESCO site whose windows and frames were reportedly damaged on Friday when a Russian strike hit the headquarters of Ukraine’s SBU security service. Twelve people were injured in that strike, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko. The envoys were walked past the damage before the talking started.

They came from Moscow, where they had spent three hours with Vladimir Putin on Saturday, followed by dinner. That sequence is the most revealing thing about the day. The party being asked to concede was briefed second.

What emerged afterwards was thin. Witkoff told reporters in Kyiv the US side was “very encouraged” by a discussion he called “substantive, important.” Kushner said Trump’s interest was not only in ending the current war but in building the conditions for a durable peace. They said finding peace matters greatly to the president. They thanked their hosts for their hospitality. They noted that Putin had asked a great many questions in Moscow. On territory, on security guarantees, on sanctions relief, on a timeline - nothing. A White House official said next steps would be announced in the coming weeks.

At the press conference Kushner set out the framework. From President Putin's perspective, he said, there are certain objectives, but also different aspirations he has for his country that can be achieved once this is concluded. Then the method: Trump comes from the business world, where you think in terms of win-win, of creating opportunities for both sides to do what's in their interest. War is negative sum; peace is positive sum. Zelensky sat two chairs away. Win-win presupposes two parties with legitimate competing interests to reconcile. This was an invasion. The day before, Putin told the same envoys he expects Russia to meet its goals and wants the root causes of the war resolved.

The economic upside also has to land somewhere. The same morning, The New York Times published classified Ukrainian audits showing $1.2 billion lost to fraud, waste and mismanagement in 2024 alone, and contracts routed to suppliers under criminal investigation.

The one concrete item was the trilateral format, which the envoys said they welcomed the return of. This deserves more scrutiny than it has received, because “trilateral” has meant two different things over the past thirteen months and only one of them is plausible here.

The leaders’ version - Trump, Putin and Zelensky in a room - has been promised since Alaska in August 2025, when Trump announced arrangements were underway. It never happened. CIA Director John Ratcliffe raised it again during an unannounced Moscow trip in late August. Dmitry Peskov shut it down in public within days: a trilateral is possible only to formalise agreements, and no agreements exist. That was ten days ago.

The delegation version is the one that actually took place. Ukraine, the United States and Russia met in Abu Dhabi in January, the first time all three sat down together since 2022. Zelensky announced it from Davos. Witkoff and Kushner went to Moscow first, then on to the UAE. Then it collapsed, and Washington’s attention went to the war with Iran for six months.

So the envoys are almost certainly proposing to restart Abu Dhabi, not to convene a summit. Worth saying plainly, because a returning format that already failed once is a different proposition from a breakthrough, and the two are being reported as though they were the same thing.

Why now

The timing is not a mystery. Americans vote on 3 November. Diesel hit a record $5.88 a gallon on Saturday, according to AAA. Gasoline is running near $4.12 nationally, up roughly a dollar year on year, against $2.98 before the president started his war with Iran. Republican internal polling, per Axios, shows voters assigning the blame for that to the White House. One GOP operative’s assessment of the problem: “We can’t message that away.”

Here is where it connects to Kyiv. The administration has spent the past week distributing that blame outward, and part of it has landed on Ukraine. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Fox on 2 September and pointed to Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy assets and refined products as a source of upward price pressure worldwide. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, on the same network on Saturday, said that to understand diesel you have to look at Russia and Ukraine. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has tried Joe Biden.

The mechanism they are pointing at is real, and it is not small. Ukraine’s long-range campaign against Russian refineries and export terminals has been the most consequential thing to happen to oil supply outside the Gulf. Reuters this year put roughly 40 per cent of Russia’s oil export capacity offline - around two million barrels a day - and called it the most severe supply disruption in modern Russian history. Bloomberg has reported Russian refining running at a 24-year low. Ukraine’s own General Staff claims strikes have disabled close to 43 per cent of designed refining capacity. Take even the conservative reading and this is genuine supply removed from a market already tight because of Hormuz.

What makes the blame awkward is the next fact. In July, according to Ukrainian officials cited, American intelligence has reportedly been helping guide those strikes - plotting drone routes, mapping the gaps in Russian air defence. Washington is now attributing the price at its own pumps to a campaign its own agencies helped make possible. And Republicans’ internal polling, according to Axios, still lands the blame on Iran regardless.

So the argument is not baseless. It is selective. And it is being made, loudly, by cabinet secretaries, eight weeks before an election. Then two envoys boarded a train to Kyiv.

There is a question worth putting to the White House, and it is not rhetorical: is one of the American asks that Ukraine stop hitting Russian oil infrastructure? Because Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign against refineries and tankers is among the very few forms of leverage Kyiv currently has. Also, on the administration’s own telling, a driver of the price at an American pump eight weeks before a midterm. Nobody put that to the envoys on camera.

The winter

The three-day pause that made the visit possible is not a ceasefire. Both capitals announced it as a limited arrangement scoped to the envoys' travel. It expires. Putin said Moscow would do its utmost to provide for the safety of the negotiations - a formulation about the negotiators, not about Ukraine. And it did not hold outside the two capitals in any case: drone strikes killed a 74-year-old man in Zaporizhzhia and wounded three others on Sunday, while a drone damaged an apartment building in the Khmelnytskyi region, wounding seven.

Earlier, Ukraine’s Air Force reported that Russia attacked Ukraine with 108 long-range drones and small cruise missiles, the BBC reported. Kyiv’s air defences downed 82 drones and six missiles, but 11 locations were hit, with debris falling at a further seven sites.

Still, the two sides spared each other's capitals, and that is not nothing. In diplomacy this gets called a confidence-building measure. It was closer to a security detail.

Ukrainians go into this winter short of air-defence interceptors, with a grid that has been hit repeatedly, and food warehouses being repeatedly struck. Not to mention with Russia now flying fast, jet-powered drones that give less warning. The envoys will leave. The pause has an expiry date written into it. That is not a forecast; it is the terms of the arrangement.

The third round of talks on Sunday evening brought in national security advisers from Britain, France and Germany. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov called the Moscow leg frank and constructive. Kirill Dmitriev called it an important peacemaking visit. Nobody has said what is actually in the proposal.

After the talks Zelensky said he expects the war will continue, and that Ukraine is counting on American energy and air defence support through the winter. That is the assessment of the man the proposal was brought to.

The Alternative for Germany party has a strong lead in a regional election, but it is unclear whether it will be able to form the country’s first far-right state government since World War II, exit polls indicated Sunday. Alternative for Germany, or AfD, went into the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt seeking an absolute majority in the state legislature to govern on its own. That would overcome the so-called “firewall” of mainstream parties’ refusal to work with AfD. A first state government would be the biggest prize in the party’s 13-year history, at a time of widespread discontent with an unpopular national government that has yet to persuade voters it can get the country’s sluggish economy moving. It would be at least a symbolic blow to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose center-right party has led Saxony-Anhalt for 24 years. The polls for ARD and ZDF public television put AfD on around 44% of the vote, more than double its showing five years ago in the region of 2.1 million people west of Berlin. That was far ahead of the Christian Democratic Union, the center-right party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz that currently leads the state, which was seen polling 18.5% and losing about half its support. The exit polls put AfD at least marginally short of an absolute majority. Franziska Hoppermann, the national general secretary of Merz’s CDU, said that it was “a very difficult result for us” - AP

🌋 Ash Cloud Grounds Jakarta: 170,000 Stranded

Around 170,000 passengers have been left stranded after ash from the erupting Anak Krakatau forced Indonesian authorities to suspend operations at eight airports, the BBC reports. Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International - more than 150km from the volcano - was the first to close on Sunday morning, after ash was detected in nearby airspace. The transport ministry put the number of delayed flights at 1,558, with airports shut until midnight.

Airport operator Angkasa Pura gave a narrower count for Soekarno-Hatta itself, telling Reuters that 301 flights were affected, 58 of them international. By 14:28 on Sunday, the Terminal 3 international departures board was a single column of red: Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Penang, Shenzhen, Pudong, Incheon, Colombo, Taipei, Subang - cancelled, cancelled, cancelled. Only the late-afternoon Emirates flight to Dubai was still holding at "delayed." Singapore Airlines dropped its Jakarta flights for the remainder of the day.

The board told the story in four languages at once - dibatalkan in Indonesian, متأخرة in Arabic, 取消 in Chinese - a rough map of who was stuck: Gulf, Chinese and Southeast Asian traffic grounded in the same hour.

Transport Minister Dudy Purwagandhi named the eight affected airports as Soekarno-Hatta, Halim Perdanakusuma, Radin Inten II, Husein Sastranegara in Bandung, Budiarto Curug, Pondok Cabe, Taufik Kiemas and Atung Bungsu, according to Aerotime; six had been closed earlier in the day, with two more added after the wind shifted. Semarang and Surabaya were readied as alternate landing fields. Purwagandhi was blunt about the sliding deadlines: as he told reporters, no airport reopens while ash remains in the air and the paper tests keep coming back positive.

The volcano began erupting late Friday. Indonesia’s volcanology agency PVMBG, quoted by the state news agency Antara, timed the first eruption at 23:07 on 4 September, with two more on Sunday. Lava fountains and booming sounds carried as far as 700km, and the BMKG weather agency tracked ash drifting east at 20,000 feet and west at 50,000 feet. Purwagandhi said the decision to close the additional airports followed tests showing ash had reached West Java.

The atmosphere at Soekarno-Hatta was surprisingly calm, with airline and airport staff directing stranded passengers to re-booking counters and desks stocked with bottled water and snacks. Hotels near the airport were said to be at capacity, and a quick scan of airline sites showed no availability to key destinations such as Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Bangkok. My own late Sunday afternoon flight to Kuala Lumpur on an Indonesian carrier was cancelled; I was re-booked onto the same service on Tuesday. It was my second major disruption from volcanic activity in as many years, after Mt. Etna in Sicily.

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Surface waters across the Mediterranean Sea reached an average temperature of 28.54ºC on 13 August, the highest recorded since at least 1940, Spain’s State Meteorological Agency reported on Sunday. Aemet itself noted on social media that throughout almost the whole of August the sea was breaking daily temperature records, one after another, with barely any respite. The warning comes just weeks after Mercator Ocean International, which implements the Copernicus marine service, confirmed that July had already been the hottest month ever measured in the Mediterranean. The average that month was 27.07ºC, with a margin of uncertainty of ±0.27ºC, beating the previous maximum, set in July 2025 (26.68ºC), by four tenths of a degree. Mercator Ocean’s comparison series begins in 1993, meaning that both bodies, despite using different methods and reference periods, concur in describing a sea that has entered a thermal regime not seen before. Data from late June were already pointing that way. Aemet (source in Spanish) warned at the time that Mediterranean temperatures had reached levels more typical of the second half of August, when the sea is usually at its warmest. At the start of the summer, temperatures rose to 2.6ºC above normal, to the point that the sea exceeded the average usually seen in mid-August while it was still June, an anomaly the agency itself described as exceptional - Euronews

The journals…

I filmed this week’s briefing video (below, after the paywall) from Jakarta, with the city behind me and the air thick enough to see. Southeast Asia’s haze season is bad again this year - six of the world’s twenty most polluted major cities were in this region on September 1. There has been a treaty on this since 2002. It has changed almost nothing.

That’s the thread running through the whole briefing. A Trump peace mission arriving in Moscow and Kyiv this weekend while the strikes continue. An SCO declaration in Bishkek that found hard language for Iran and left Ukraine out entirely. And the one deadline that does bind: Tuesday, when Canada’s counter-tariffs hit more than 700 American goods.

Ten minutes, filmed Saturday, before Monday’s headlines catch up.

The Saturday video briefing is for World Briefing Plus members. It's where I say the things that don't fit in a column, and it lands before the week starts. If you've been reading the free edition and want the Saturday film too, you can upgrade here.

Trump's tariff window is "closing by the hour." I sat down with Times Radio for a 30-minute conversation on the US–Canada trade war, Carney's position, and what came out of the G20 and SCO summits. Almost a quarter million people have watched it so far. Watch the full interview.

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The vessel, the Professor Molchanov, was seized off the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, according to Covington, the U.S. law firm representing Naftogaz. The 71-metre (233-foot) vessel can carry 32 crew and 52 passengers and has a library, sauna, bar and two restaurants, according to the Cruisemapper website. It is used for scientific expeditions and commercial cruises.

The Svalbard governor’s office issued a statement confirming that the ship had been seized and would be held in Svalbard, adding: “The governor will take care of the crew and passengers on board the vessel.”

Russia’s ambassador to Norway, Nikolai Korchunov, said in a statement that Moscow would pursue the ship’s release through legal channels. “We insist on the immediate release of the vessel and on ensuring the safety of its passengers and crew,” he said. It was not immediately clear how many passengers and crew were on board.

Naftogaz has been pursuing legal action against Russia since 2016 to seek compensation for the expropriation of its property in Crimea. A tribunal in The Hague in April 2023 ordered Russia to pay Naftogaz $4.2 billion plus interest and legal costs. “Russia cannot evade responsibility simply by refusing to comply with an international arbitral award,” Naftogaz Acting CEO Sergii Fedorenko said - Moscow Times
Three things the wire copy skips. The ship was taken at Barentsburg, the Russian coal settlement that sits on Norwegian soil under the 1920 Svalbard Treaty. It grants Moscow commercial rights on an archipelago Norway owns. The Professor Molchanov is not just a tourist vessel; it carries supplies to the two Russian settlements and their 392 residents, and Oslo’s foreign ministry now says it will assist the Russians stranded there, noting that Russian firms are routinely granted sanctions relief to bring in food. And this is not a one-off: Naftogaz has proceedings running in roughly ten jurisdictions, with more than €40 million frozen in Finland — €3.7 million of it already handed over — and mortgages registered on €120 million of Russian state property in France. Moscow calls it piracy. What it actually looks like is a state enforcing a court order against another state and then feeding that state's citizens the same week. The Svalbard Treaty obliges Norway to do both, and it is doing both.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were planning to visit Moscow and Kyiv on Sept. 5–6, but Witkoff “started to get scared,” prompting discussions about alternative plans, a person familiar with the matter told the Kyiv Independent. “The Russians don’t want them to come here to Kyiv, and Witkoff is always sensitive to Russian sentiment,” the person said. “They’re being told there that it’s dangerous.” The envoys had planned to travel to the Ukrainian capital by plane, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Those plans are now in doubt, with the logistical hurdles potentially affecting the timing of the trip. One person familiar with the matter previously told the Kyiv Independent that Witkoff was uncomfortable traveling to Kyiv by train, as the airspace over the capital remains closed. The revelation comes a day after President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sept. 3 that Witkoff and Kushner had confirmed they could visit Ukraine. Kyiv has suffered a relentless barrage of Russian jet-powered drone strikes, facing eight straight days of attacks as of Sept. 3. A person close to the Trump administration confirmed to the Kyiv Independent that the visit was planned but said it “might still be canceled.” The U.S. had previously asked Ukraine not to strike Moscow during CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Russia on Aug. 25. One person familiar with the matter said the White House has also asked Russia not to attack Kyiv while U.S. envoys are visiting, but so far, “Russia did not commit” to doing so. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the White House had likewise asked Ukraine to halt strikes on Moscow during the envoys’ visit. He did not say whether Moscow had agreed to refrain from attacks on Kyiv while the U.S. officials are there. The trip would mark the first visit to Ukraine by the two U.S. envoys, who have made multiple trips to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We are ready to meet with them in Ukraine,” Zelensky said. “This is very important. It is important that the United States remains active.” Washington has not commented on Witkoff and Kushner’s plans to visit Ukraine. Witkoff and Kushner were expected to make their first visits to Ukraine earlier in August, but the trip was postponed, allegedly because U.S. President Donald Trump wanted to keep the diplomats close due to the unresolved standoff with Iran - Kyiv Independent

• No details about the substance of the meetings have been released, but they meant to press for a diplomatic solution, a US official told CNN Friday.
  World Briefing reported in late May that Moscow had already grown tired of the envoys' periodic visits and wanted a formal negotiating process instead. It now appears content to keep them on a short leash.

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday he will ask Europeans to repay the American aid provided to Ukraine under the administration of his predecessor Joe Biden. Trump has long demanded that Europeans shoulder more of the cost of Western support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, which began more than four years ago. “Hundreds of Billions of Dollars was given to Ukraine and NATO, free of charge, that Europe would have paid for - If they were only asked, but we will be asking for that money, though somewhat belatedly!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. The American president did not specify which countries he believed should pay - Euronews

• The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) said Friday that it was “conducting an operation targeting a criminal organization led by an official from Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office.” The criminal organization is “involved in protecting a network of scam call centers and laundering illicit assets,” the NABU said. The NABU detained Serhiy Kropyva, a deputy head of the international cooperation department at the Prosecutor General’s Office, a law enforcement source told the Kyiv Independent.

Ukrainian-Canadian Bohdan Chomiak, who writes a newsletter out of the suburbs of Kyiv, sent this to his subscribers this week. We’ve quoted him here before. He’s given permission to reprint it.

One group that suffers more than can be imagined from this invasion are pets. My dog not only stops sleeping when the air raid alert sounds, he runs to the bathroom and hides behind the toilet. He needs to be held for ten minutes before he stops shivering.

My neighbors at the dacha, their dog was so scared that he dug a hole under the fence and ran away.

The street dogs in my neighborhood howl for minutes after every explosion.

My friend’s cat leaps onto the refrigerator and skinnies down to the base, coming back out in a few hours.

Given that most attacks are unsuccessful means that the UAVs, missiles and rockets explode mid air causing extreme stress for pets. Successful strikes do the same.

Their world is broken and the only fix is victory.

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Africa’s richest man said his refinery’s much-anticipated IPO would launch soon, a move that could mark a step-change for the continent’s financial and energy markets. Aliko Dangote said the firm would seek to raise $5 billion, potentially making it Africa’s biggest-ever public offering. The cash will help the Nigerian refinery more than double its production — already the largest on the continent — to around 1.4% of global capacity. The move is also expected to attract more funds into the country’s energy sector: The International Energy Agency head said the country could double its investment in five years as nations seek trustworthy partners after the fallout of the Iran war. Another Dangote-backed mega-refinery is in the works in Kenya - Semafor

A chocolate replica of New Delhi’s India Gate intended as Belgium’s gift to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was damaged on its way to India, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said Thursday. De Wever joked about the mishap at a press conference alongside Modi. He had planned to present him with a sculpture “made out of the best Belgian chocolate.” “But unlike the real India Gate, which has stood almost for a century, the chocolate version didn’t even survive the journey to India,” De Wever said. “Chocolate is excellent for diplomacy, but not excellent for diplomatic travel.” The gift carried a more serious message. India Gate is a war memorial in New Delhi, and De Wever said the replica was meant to honor the more than 9,000 Indian soldiers who fought and died in Belgium’s Flanders Fields during World War I. A backup version is still waiting in Belgium, De Wever said. He promised the replacement would fare better: “One way or another, I will get it to Prime Minister Modi in one piece.” - Politico

Melania Trump has opted out of showing support for Donald Trump at the president’s midterm convention, according to a report. A White House official told the Washington Examiner that the first lady has no intention of attending the event in Dallas next week, which Trump will headline in an attempt to give the GOP a much-needed boost ahead of the Nov. 3 elections. Melania’s absence is the latest humiliation for Trump surrounding his midterm convention, with dozens of Republican lawmakers already confirming that they will not be attending and citing an array of excuses. Melania not joining her husband for the two-day televised event is also another example of the first lady largely being absent from public life and not even attempting to carry out duties associated with her White House position. Melania is often missing for weeks at a time during Trump’s second term, with a Daily Beast analysis from early August revealing that she had been seen publicly on only 38 days of the year so far. As of Sept. 4, she has made only 40 public appearances - The Daily Beast

The journals…

Scott Bessent’s chair’s statement, issued September 1, closes with a single line: the document was agreed by all G20 members present except China, which objected to paragraphs 4, 10, 11 and 13. There was no communiqué, because consensus no longer exists to produce one.

Read the text and the shape of the dispute becomes clear. Seventeen paragraphs sailed through: artificial intelligence as a general-purpose technology, financial literacy, Basel III, stablecoin frameworks, FATF and scam compounds, a call for the IMF and World Bank to help countries grow. Paragraph 12 even name-checks Trump Accounts, a domestic American retirement savings product, in a G20 text, and Beijing let it pass without a murmur. What China objected to were the only four paragraphs in the document that describe an identifiable adversary.

Paragraph 4 raises continued disruption to energy trade and calls for free and predictable navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. Paragraphs 10 and 11 are the imbalances section: countries should eliminate non-market policies and practices that worsen imbalances, and those running excessive and persistent surpluses should remove distortions that suppress domestic consumption and produce an over-reliance on exports for growth. Paragraph 13 commits the G20 to faster debt treatments and to contributions from official bilateral creditors. Nobody is named anywhere. Nobody needs to be.

Beijing’s Foreign Ministry said it “deeply regrets” the outcome and called for coordination based on consensus and equal participation. Then came the real reply — not through diplomatic channels, but through Yuyuan Tantian, the CCTV-affiliated account Beijing uses to place authorised leaks on trade. Its piece, published Thursday and translated in full by Bill Bishop’s Sinocism, accuses Washington of “smuggling in its own agenda” (夹带私货): writing the vocabulary of overcapacity and “China shock 2.0” into a multilateral text so that tariffs and export controls already imposed acquire a G20 imprimatur for the next round. Collect on the same grievance twice. A negotiator, quoted anonymously, notes that the G20 has never defined “non-market policies and practices” - and that the phrase traces to the 2018 Section 301 investigation of China.

On that specific point, the document supplies the receipt. The last sentence of paragraph 11 asks the IMF and the OECD to improve the data necessary for analysing imbalances, including their coverage of non-market policies and practices. That is the mechanism. An undefined American term, carried into a G20 text, then handed to two international institutions as a standing collection mandate. Next year it isn’t a talking point. It’s a dataset. Beijing’s objection to paragraph 11 is not wounded pride; it is an accurate reading of what the sentence does.

Consider where Xi Jinping was while all this was happening. The SCO summit in Bishkek ran August 31 to September 1 - the same two days as Asheville. Kyrgyzstan closed its chairmanship with the Bishkek Declaration and 27 accompanying documents, with António Guterres in the room calling for a more multipolar order. Kyrgyzstan is also, as I noted on the BBC, among the most willing destinations anywhere for precisely the goods paragraph 10 of the G20 statement describes. China–Kyrgyz trade hit $11.7 billion in seven months, led by EVs, batteries and solar. Set that against a Kyrgyz economy of roughly $23 billion a year and a population of 7.3 million, and the arithmetic answers itself: a country that size is not consuming half its annual output in Chinese electric vehicles. It is a doorway. The American argument, delivered as a live demonstration in a friendly capital - while the same government was in Asheville objecting to the language that describes it.

None of this is new; it is only quieter. In November 2018, at APEC in Port Moresby, Chinese officials were reported to have pushed their way into the office of PNG Foreign Minister Rimbink Pato in an eleventh-hour attempt to rewrite the draft communiqué. Police were called. Beijing called the account simply untrue. APEC ended without a joint statement for the first time in its history. That was tantrum diplomacy in its raw form - a door, a shove, a chairman’s statement.

I first put a name to it for CNN in 2019, after the Osaka G20, where the discord was sparked by Washington’s refusal to sign on to Paris climate language, and where the operating rule had become that whoever screamed loudest or bullied hardest got their way. I ended that piece saying it was too early to declare tantrum diplomacy ascendant over multilateralism. Asheville is a reasonable answer.

Because look at the inversion. In Osaka, the United States was the holdout blocking the text. In Asheville, it wrote the text, embedded the disputed term into an IMF work programme, and let a footnote name the holdout for it. Nobody had to force a door. The tantrum has been proceduralised - logged in a footnote, rebutted by WeChat, and answered with a rival summit 10,000 kilometres away. And with Washington chairing the G20 this year and Beijing hosting APEC, both capitals own a stage. Neither has much incentive to produce a communiqué on it.

One more date worth marking: the IMF and World Bank annual meetings convene in Bangkok in October. Paragraph 11’s data mandate will have had six weeks to start moving by then.

Volodymyr Zelensky has reprimanded two rival Ukrainian security services and demanded an investigation after the agencies were involved in a shootout on the streets of Kyiv. In his evening address, Ukraine’s president said an “absolutely disgraceful incident” had taken place involving units of Ukraine’s largest espionage agency, the SBU, and the military intelligence service, HUR. “Here in Ukraine, the only people anyone should be shooting at are the Russian occupiers, in defence of Ukraine,” he said. Zelensky said prosecutors would investigate the incident. The violence has raised questions about Kyiv’s ability to keep in check agencies whose influence and resources have greatly increased since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. After violence erupted overnight and on Wednesday morning in the sleepy Berezniaky district, the SBU had issued contradictory statements — first saying it had worked with the HUR to foil a Russian “terrorist attack”, then later that it had been involved in a stand-off with a “group of individuals” trying to block SBU officers from carrying out a search. Agents from the SBU’s elite “Alpha” unit opened fire and arrested three people who “belong to one of the units of Ukraine’s defence forces”, the intelligence agency said in its later statement. The SBU said several people had been injured “among those who resisted”. The incident appears linked with previous reports about the arrest of a commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps, a unit of Russian nationalists fighting for Ukraine and attached to HUR. The unit is headed by Russian far-right extremist Denis Nikitin - FT

• Volodymyr Zelensky is planning a visit to Canada next week, but the trip is not yet finalized, sources from both countries said Wednesday. Five sources with direct knowledge of the planning said Mr. Zelensky’s government is arranging a visit to Canada midweek. Three of the sources said the travel will include business and community events in Toronto, for which invitations have already been issued. However, some of the sources also cautioned that while plans are in the works, the high-level visit could still be called off. The trip is aimed at persuading Ottawa to provide more assistance to Kyiv as it fights off the Russian invasion.

The Dutch central bank announced Wednesday that it has moved billions of dollars worth of its gold reserves out of North America in a move it described as “crisis preparedness” in a time of global political unrest. It said that between March and August, some 86 metric tons (94.8 tons) of gold were transferred to London from the combined total of around 313 metric tons (345 tons) held in New York and Ottawa, Canada. Before the move, New York housed 31.3% of the Dutch gold and Ottawa held 19.7%. After the move, both cities now hold 18.5%, the bank said. The bank owns 612.4 metric tons (675 tons) of gold that was worth 72.2 billion euros (about $83.6 billion) at the end of 2025. “With this relocation, we have improved the tradability of our gold reserves,” the bank’s governor, Olaf Sleijpen, said in a written statement. “We expect that we will never need to use them, but we do need to strengthen our resilience and preparedness.” More than 27 metric tons (30 tons) of gold were “physically transferred” from the United States and Canada to the Dutch bank’s heavily guarded vault on a military base near the central town of Zeist, the bank said, without elaborating on exactly how the gold bars got across the Atlantic Ocean. A similar quantity of gold was transferred from Zeist to London. The rest of the relocation was achieved by selling around 59 metric tons (65 tons) of gold in New York and using the proceeds to buy gold in London - AP

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Brussels Moves to Dismantle Its Own Diplomatic Service

The European Commission is quietly drafting plans to break up the European External Action Service and absorb much of it into the Commission itself, the FT reports - a partial unwinding of one of the EU’s signature institutional reforms of the past twenty years.

According to the FT, officials from the Commission’s secretariat-general and its legal and budget arms are mapping which EEAS functions could be transferred to existing departments. The driver is a Franco-German push for a foreign policy overhaul by year’s end, with capitals frustrated that the service has failed to coordinate coherent responses to Ukraine, Iran, Trump’s foreign policy, and the rise of economic coercion as a tool of statecraft.

Money is the other half of the story. The EEAS costs roughly €1bn a year, and the FT notes that any transfer of powers could be folded into the December negotiations over the EU’s 2028–34 budget - a moment when member states are pressing Brussels to cut. Supporters argue consolidation would also align diplomacy more closely with the Commission’s real leverage: trade, aid, digital regulation and technology.

A stripped-down EEAS would survive, retaining peacekeeping missions and military training. Paris and Berlin have proposed compensating Kaja Kallas with expanded personal oversight of an enlarged external relations portfolio.

Kallas pushed back after meeting EU foreign ministers, telling reporters, per the FT, that most backed the existing institutional setup and that member states did not want to surrender steering of foreign policy. She framed the trade-off bluntly: consolidation into the Commission only works if her role oversees those services.

Connecting the dots: Read this less as a foreign policy debate than as a budget one. Every multilateral institution is being told to shrink at once. At the UN, the Secretariat entered 2026 cutting thousands of posts, with the UN80 reform agenda effectively swallowed by the organisation’s worst liquidity crisis in decades and a collapse in donor funding. Brussels is now running the same play: a €1bn diplomatic service is an inviting target heading into talks on the 2028–34 budget, and “efficiency” is doing familiar work as a synonym for cuts.

The personal dimension matters too. Kallas arrived in Brussels with a shrunken domestic mandate - after the revelation that her husband held a stake in a logistics firm still moving goods to Russia, her approval rating in Estonia had fallen to around 16 per cent by early 2024, with major Estonian newspapers calling for her resignation. In Brussels, her critics have made much the same complaint the FT’s sources make now: that she still operates like the outspoken national prime minister she was, staking out positions ahead of the 27 rather than brokering their consensus. Slovakia’s Robert Fico has openly called for her to go.

But the structural point outlasts the personality one. The EEAS was built in 2010 to give the EU a diplomatic voice independent of the Commission. Dismantling it during a war on the continent - while Washington’s reliability is in question - would concentrate external action in an institution answering to Brussels rather than to capitals. Watch next month’s leaders’ summit.

Prominent Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong has pleaded guilty to a charge of foreign collusion in a second national security case that could see him jailed for life. Wong, 29, entered the plea at Hong Kong’s High Court in the district of Admiralty on Wednesday. He is accused of asking foreign countries to “impose sanctions or blockade, or engage in other hostile activities” against China and Hong Kong in 2020, after Beijing imposed a national security law on the autonomous territory. The offence is punishable by a prison term of three to 10 years, or up to life imprisonment if it is deemed to be “of a grave nature”. Wong is already serving a nearly five-year sentence for subversion and was due to be released next year. He emerged as one of the most internationally recognised faces of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement during the Umbrella Movement protests in 2014. The movement served as a catalyst for the 2019 protests that led to Beijing’s imposition of the national security law. Wong also co-founded Demosisto, a pro-democracy political party that launched in 2016. The party disbanded in 2020 on the same day the national security law was enacted. Prosecutors said on Wednesday that Wong had written for newspapers and spoken to media outlets to call for international sanctions against China and Hong Kong after the security law took effect, and met with foreign politicians including former US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio. After the charges were read out to him, Wong stood up and told the judge loudly, “Confirm”. The judge said the sentence will be decided “as soon as possible” but did not specify a date - Al Jazeera

The Pentagon has scrubbed internal documents after an explosive report was leaked that revealed pushback against Pete Hegseth’s orders. The Washington Post had sparked an uproar with its report detailing concerns from top military leaders about the war, prompting a furious response from Pentagon officials, including the defense secretary. In response, the Defense Department removed documents associated with the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), which had been kept on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), sources told the Post. The SDOB was at the center of the Post’s reporting on top commanders voicing their disagreement with Hegseth’s order for some troops in the Middle East to stay there longer amid the prospect of prolonged military operations against Iran. The Navy’s top admiral, along with leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command, and the U.S. Southern Command, were said to have responded to the troops’ extension in the Middle East with “non-concurs” in the SDOB, which was seen by unnamed sources who revealed the internal disagreement to the Post. It remains unclear how the removal of such documents could impact military planning. A former defense official who routinely viewed these documents told the Post that purging the SDOB will “dramatically reduce the number of people who have direct access to it,” which could constrain urgent planning needs. Commanders and their staff who rely on the SDOB to make time-sensitive decisions can still rely on the database, the official said, but added that it is now “certainly more difficult.” Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesman, did not deny that the documents were removed - The Daily Beast

The journals…

The United Nations Environment Programme released a report in Nairobi today conceding what climate scientists have warned for years: the world will cross 1.5°C of warming, probably within the next few years. The best-case scenario in Limiting Overshoot: Navigating Exceedance of 1.5°C and Pathways Towards Return peaks at 1.8°C. Most scenarios run higher.

The number is not really the story. The framing is.

For a decade, “keep 1.5 alive” was the organizing slogan of UN climate diplomacy. UNEP has now replaced it with “overshoot, peak and decline” — an argument about how far past the line we go and how long we stay there, rather than whether we cross it.

Officially, 1.5°C has not been abandoned. UNEP's own summary of the report calls it a cornerstone of the Paris Agreement in the same breath as it describes exceedance as "widely assessed as unavoidable" — the objective is now to cross the line, minimize the overshoot and eventually return below it. But that is a profound change nonetheless. UNEP anticipates this reading and rejects it, arguing that overshoot is a case for urgency rather than resignation. The distinction is real. It is also the argument that becomes available once prevention no longer is.

The timing matters. This is a Spotlight Report, not UNEP's flagship Emissions Gap Report, which lands closer to the summit. That makes it a separate and deliberately early intervention.

COP31 opens in Antalya on November 9 under one of the oddest arrangements in the summit’s history: Türkiye hosts and runs the public programme, Australia chairs the negotiations, and Pacific states supply much of the moral urgency. Both COP31 principals quoted in UNEP’s release — Australia’s Chris Bowen and Türkiye’s Murat Kurum — use the report to point toward Antalya.

In other words, the incoming COP leadership is setting expectations more than two months before delegates arrive: 1.5°C is no longer something the world can realistically avoid crossing. The argument now is over how badly we overshoot it — and whether we can ever get back.

News Briefs
The Financial Times reports today that Russia has been covertly helping Iran develop advanced supersonic cruise missiles, based on leaked correspondence, travel records and patent filings. The transfer centres on ramjet propulsion — the technology that lets a missile sustain supersonic speed over distance — and the FT says the programme began in 2023 and continued through the twelve-day Israel-Iran war. The significance is in the direction of travel. For three years the Moscow-Tehran arms relationship ran the other way: Iranian Shahed drones, then Russian-built copies, launched nightly at Ukrainian cities. What the FT describes is Russia settling that account with something far higher up the technology ladder. Drones are cheap and disposable. Ramjet propulsion is a capability Iran has wanted for decades and could not build alone. Two implications. Iran’s ability to threaten US carriers and warships in the Gulf changes if this matures — and Washington resumed strikes on Iranian-linked targets in the region this week. And the sanctions architecture built around Russia’s arms exporters after 2014 has not stopped the transfer. Note the timing. Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian shook hands at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Kyrgyzstan yesterday, where Putin spoke of Russian solidarity with the Iranian people. The public embrace and the covert programme are the same policy.

• Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei says the killing of four people - including a child - at a wedding celebration was a “war crime”. The Iranian Red Crescent says they were killed when shrapnel from a US missile hit a house in southern Iran - Iranian media initially said five people had died. The US military says it is aware of the reports but that it never targets civilians, and was striking Iranian targets in response to “recent attempted” Iranian attacks. In response to US strikes on Iran, Tehran launched missile and drone attacks at American targets across the Middle East on Wednesday - including in Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq and Bahrain. The latest strikes appear to be more widespread and more intense, signalling a serious military escalation, the BBC says. Meanwhile, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps says two oil tankers hit mines while trying to cross the Strait of Hormuz - BBC

The German government said on Tuesday that it had concluded that Russia was responsible for an attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport last month and ordered a series of measures in response, including the closure of a consulate and a Russian cultural center in Berlin. German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said intelligence findings indicated that individuals involved in the attack were acting on behalf of Russian state agencies. “Taken together, police investigations, patterns of the offenses and intelligence findings establish Russian responsibility for the attempted attack at Leipzig Airport,” he said. Standing alongside Dobrindt, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said Germany did not view Leipzig as an isolated incident. “It fits into a broader pattern of Russian hybrid operations in Europe,” he said. Wadephul said Germany’s response would include closing Russia’s consulate general in Bonn and terminating its agreement with the Russian House cultural center in Berlin. Russia’s ambassador to Germany was summoned on Tuesday. Responding to Germany’s announcement, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow would respond to what she called Berlin’s “anti-Russian action,” according to Interfax news agency. She did not elaborate - Moscow Times

• Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned airlines and insurance companies on Tuesday that the presence of Ukrainian drones had made Russian skies dangerous to use and that they were effectively closed. “Today, we want to warn every airline that uses Russian airspace, every insurer, everyone who still uses key Russian airports: the Russian sky is becoming completely dangerous,” Zelensky said in his nightly video address. Ukraine poses no threat to civil aviation, he said, “but there will be drones in Russia‘s skies and due notice must be taken….Although Russian authorities are not properly announcing it, Russian airspace will effectively be closing. The war started by Russia is closing its own skies,” Zelensky added. The full risk of Ukrainian drones to aviation over Russia is not clear, but there have been deadly incidents of civilian aircraft being mistakenly targeted in the region. Aviation risk advisory firm Osprey Flight Solutions said in an alert to clients that while the majority of Ukraine’s drone and missile strikes were likely to occur within 300 kilometers (186 miles) of the border, daily attacks deeper inside Russia were near-certain through 2026, including near Moscow and St Petersburg. “There is also a realistic possibility that the frequency of Ukrainian strikes will continue to increase in the short term deep inside Russian territory,” the alert said. “It is assessed that miscalculation and/or misidentification is likely in areas related to the Ukraine conflict.” - Reuters

Ottawa Quietly Delists Chubais
Canada removed one of Putin’s former envoys from its sanctions list this month. No announcement, no explanation - just a line repealed in the Gazette while the government insists its Russia policy has never been tougher.

On August 26, in the Canada Gazette’s Part II, under the heading Regulations Amending the Special Economic Measures (Russia) Regulations, a single item was repealed: number 1509, Anatoly Borisovich Chubais.

There was no press release. No statement from Global Affairs. The order, approved on the recommendation of Foreign Minister Anita Anand and dated August 13, runs to two operative sentences. Its stated justification is that the minister received a delisting application “that provides reasonable grounds.” Which grounds, the document does not say.

Chubais is not a marginal figure. He ran Russia’s privatisation programme in the 1990s, the process that manufactured the oligarch class. He headed the state nanotechnology corporation Rosnano for more than a decade. Until March 2022 he was Putin’s special representative for relations with international organisations — a serving envoy of the state that invaded Ukraine. Canada listed him in mid-2025, after Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation named him among the Kremlin insiders it wanted sanctioned following its founder’s death in an Arctic penal colony.

He applied to be removed in September 2025. When Ottawa did not respond within the ninety days the regulations allow, he went to the Federal Court in February seeking an order compelling a decision; by then, his filing noted, 162 days had passed. His case was that he had “historically” opposed Putin, had opposed the war, and had lived in exile since 2022. He also directed Global Affairs to a Council of Europe parliamentary decision declining to recognise the Anti-Corruption Foundation as a Russian democratic force - incredibly, using a ruling against Navalny’s organisation to undo a listing that organisation had prompted.

Six months after filing, he was off the list. He may now enter Canada, and Canadians may do business with him.

This is not a one-off. In February, Ottawa quietly removed former Rosneft Belgian-born executive Didier Casimiro by the same route — application, Gazette notice, no comment. A pattern is becoming visible: apply, wait out the deadline, litigate, and Canada’s Russia list turns out to be negotiable, one line at a time, in a publication almost nobody reads. The additions come with ministers at podiums. The subtractions come in the Gazette.

Set that against the posture. Canada has sanctioned more than 3,400 individuals and entities since 2014 and rarely misses a chance to say so. Canada is also the only G7 country that has not expelled a single Russian diplomat since February 2022 — the last expulsions were four, in 2018, over the Salisbury poisoning. Ottawa appears to be leaning into questionable arithmetic rather than principle: Russia has dozens of accredited diplomats in Canada, Canada has barely a dozen left in Moscow, and any reciprocal round would finish off the embassy.

Global Affairs Canada did not respond by deadline to questions about the grounds for the decision, whether the Federal Court application bore on its timing, or how many people have been removed from the Russia list on application since February 2022. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress did not respond to a request for comment, or to a question about whether it was consulted before the delisting.

The regulatory impact statement accompanying the order says Canada’s delisting process supports the fair and transparent application of sanctions. Asked to explain one, the department said nothing.

A segment from my BBC World Television interview on Tuesday, connecting the dots between the G20 finance ministers' meeting in North Carolina and the SCO summit in Kyrgyzstan — with analysis up top on why Modi's language on Russia's war in Ukraine appears to have shifted.

Donald Trump has melted down over a minute-long ABC News segment about his disastrous war in the Middle East. The network’s chief White House correspondent, Mary Bruce, reported on Tuesday evening that the Trump administration was looking to “turn up the economic pressure” on Iran as the two countries traded military strikes for the first time since June. Not long after the broadcast, the 80-year-old president posted on Truth Social, denying the report and appearing to contradict Bessent’s comments. “I’m not trying to force Iran to the bargaining table, as ABC Fake News reported,” he said. “I couldn’t care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement. I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing. They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?” he added. Trump’s post ended with his usual sign-off—“President DJT”—although his Truth Social posts are mostly written and sent by his $150,000-a-year assistant, Natalie Harp, 35 - The Daily Beast

The journals…

Europe’s finance ministers won a small symbolic battle in Asheville on Monday and quietly lost the larger one.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov walked into the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in North Carolina — his first in-person appearance since Russia’s full-scale invasion — with no advance word to allies. The Trump administration, which holds the G20 presidency this year, simply seated him. Germany’s finance chief, Lars Klingbeil, told his European colleagues he would not stand beside the man; the Europeans held, and the traditional family photo was taken without Siluanov, out of camera range. Then Scott Bessent posed for a picture (above) with him alone.

That is the day in one frame: allies preserving a symbol, Washington cheerfully trading it away for the bilateral it actually wanted.

The pushback inside the room was real. Klingbeil confronted Siluanov in plenary. Poland’s Andrzej Domański said Russia lies constantly. Bessent, by one account, cut Siluanov off when he tried to raise areas of mutual interest: nothing is possible until the war is over. Fine. But the White House line — that this president will never shy away from talking to the people he needs to talk to — is not a strategy, it is a permission slip. Follow it honestly and there is no argument against seating Pyongyang at the next one.

Now hold the seating chart up to the light. South Africa, a founding member, was snubbed through its own presidency — Washington boycotted the Johannesburg summit outright — and has since been barred from the 2026 meetings altogether, the first exclusion of its kind in the group’s history. Domański, whose government is not a member either, was in the room as a guest of the host. And the chair a founding member is not permitted to occupy was warmed on Monday by the finance minister of the state prosecuting the largest war in Europe since 1945. That is not a rules-based forum. It is a guest list.

Consider what that state was doing while its minister sat there. The barrage on Kyiv began at six o’clock the same evening — 218 drones and decoys, a third of them jet-powered, plus ballistic, cruise and anti-radar missiles across nine regions. At least twelve dead, six of them railway workers killed by a ballistic missile on a depot. Ukrainian children went back to school in the morning through it. Sixth consecutive day.

Here is what should worry allied capitals more than a photograph: none of this was improvised. It was a sounding. Put a Russian minister in the room unannounced, see what the traffic will bear, and price the G20 December leaders’ summit version accordingly. The answer came back on Monday: a photograph he was cropped out of, and then everyone sat down again.

Washington has said since April that Russia is invited to every G20 meeting this year, the December leaders’ summit at Trump National Doral included. Moscow accepted. Who it sends is deliberately unresolved — the Kremlin’s formulation is that Putin may go, may not, or someone else may go in his place, and Trump has said he doubts his guest will come while making clear he would be delighted if he did. That ambiguity is not an accident; it is leverage, and it runs until December. Anchorage last August is the precedent, and it should be read as a warning rather than a memory. Trump gave Putin a red carpet, a military honour guard and a motorcade, and came away with nothing — no ceasefire, no prisoner release, not even a communiqué. The Kremlin wrote the staging and Washington paid for it. Doral would be Anchorage with nineteen witnesses and a greens fee.

So the declaration needs to come now, as I said on BBC World Television this evening from Jakarta, before the seating chart is drawn, not in the departure lounge in December. If Putin comes to Miami, we do not. Not a walkout. Not another photo boycott. An absence. Otherwise members will arrive in Florida and discover, as they did in Asheville, that the arrangements were made without them.

The counterweight came, of all places, from Bishkek. With cameras rolling and Putin beside him, India’s Modi called him “my friend,” praised the trade relationship, and then told him that every day the war continues sets humanity back and that the world must move from endless war to an end of war, to a cessation of hostilities. Politico’s correspondent described Putin as visibly uncomfortable, looking at the floor and tapping his feet. It is the sharpest Modi has been since Samarkand in 2022, when he told the same man this was not an era of war — and more pointed, because Samarkand was a lament about war in general and this was a demand about a particular one. Putin’s answer was gratitude and a promise: thank you, prime minister, we are moving forward along this path. Six hours later the missiles hit Kyiv.

Note the symmetry. On the day India publicly told Russia to stop, the United States seated Russia’s finance minister at its own G20 table for the first time since the invasion. New Delhi delivered the message Washington used to deliver. Washington delivered the chair. Talk about mixed messaging.

Now the discount. Modi’s language has moved; India’s barrels have not. Russia supplied more than half of India’s crude in June and July and around 43 per cent through late August, and Russian exports to India ran past $34bn between April and July, up some 60 per cent year on year. He is also speaking with a gun on the table. Washington cut India’s tariff to 18 per cent in February on the understanding that New Delhi would wind down Russian crude — an understanding the Indian side never put in writing — and on 7 August the US Senate voted 86 to 11 to authorise tariffs of up to 100 per cent on the largest buyers of Russian oil (but the Lindsey Graham legacy bill is struggling to get on the House agenda). Twelve days from now, Modi hosts Putin in New Delhi for BRICS.

So: a real shift, and a cheap one. The tone has moved. The alignment has not. The refinery contracts have not moved at all.

And New Delhi is no longer the interesting case. I am writing this from Jakarta, where the government of Prabowo Subianto has agreed to take up to 150 million barrels of Russian crude in stages through the end of the year — at least half of a year’s worth of the country’s crude imports — on preferential terms, under a government-to-government framework built by presidential regulation. The imports are routed through Lemigas, the state oil and gas testing centre, rather than through Pertamina. That is not an administrative quirk. It is a shield: structure the trade so the exposed party is the state itself and no Indonesian company has to weigh the sanctions risk. The first cargo, ESPO crude out of Kozmino, docked at Balikpapan in June.

Jakarta will tell you, correctly, that this is energy security — Hormuz closed, crude above $100, fuel rationing at home, production long past its peak. But note what made it possible. Washington issued its first waiver for Russian barrels in March. Once the United States conceded that Asia could not balance its oil market without Russian crude, the sanctions architecture stopped being a wall and became a queue.

Which is the thread running through all of it. The waiver in March, the seat in Asheville, the open question of who walks into Doral in December. Each was defended on its own terms as pragmatism. Together they are a policy, and everyone outside the room can see it — which is precisely why the middle powers are hedging, and why Modi can say the right thing in Bishkek while buying about two-million barrels a day from the man he is saying it to.

Ukraine’s foreign minister put it more plainly than I can, hours after the strikes: it is time to signal to the Kremlin that imitating diplomacy does not work anymore.

Speaking to BBC World from Kuala Lumpur on Merdeka Day — Bishkek and Asheville convened on identical dates and made opposite offers. Putin worked nine bilaterals; Washington told allies that dollar access means cutting Tehran off. Recorded before we learned Russia's finance minister had turned up in Asheville.

News Briefs
Russia launched a large aerial assault in and around Ukraine’s capital overnight into Tuesday morning, killing at least 12 people and wounding more than a dozen others, including three children, local authorities said. Ukraine’s air force said that Russia began the attack at 6 pm on Monday, using ballistic, cruise and anti-radar missiles, as well as 218 drones and decoys. About a third of the drones were reportedly jet-powered. The main targets were the Kyiv and Odesa regions, the air force said in a statement on Telegram. It was the first day of the school year, with several million children returning to class. The overnight strikes marked the sixth consecutive day of Russian attacks on Kyiv, following an unprecedented stretch of air raid alerts that began last week. The warnings continued at a near-constant pace throughout the rest of the week, forming a sustained, multiday barrage that has increasingly involved the use of fast, jet-powered drones. The relentless attacks have subjected Kyiv and its residents to prolonged danger and disruption, with strikes coming during both nighttime and daytime hours - Euronews

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov on Monday that Washington will not grant Russia economic relief or negotiate side agreements until Moscow ends its war against Ukraine, a source told Reuters. The meeting between Bessent and Siluanov took place on the sidelines of a G20 summit of finance ministers and central bank governors in Asheville, North Carolina. The United States currently holds the rotating G20 presidency. Siluanov’s unexpected visit, his first in-person attendance at a G20 event since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, drew immediate criticism from European officials. “Receiving the Russian finance minister here sends a signal I find troubling,” German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil told reporters. Klingbeil said he would have preferred a clear U.S. stance denying Siluanov a regular guest platform. Earlier, a U.S. official told Reuters that the focus of the Bessent-Siluanov meeting was President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine. Russia‘s Finance Ministry said the two officials discussed economic cooperation within the G20 framework. However, when Siluanov tried to discuss areas of mutual interest, the source said Bessent interrupted him, emphasizing that “nothing is possible until the war is over.” Asked about Siluanov’s attendance, White House spokesman Kush Desai told AFP that the Trump administration has been working with Russia to push for a peace deal that “would stop the endless bloodshed that the president has really condemned.” “The president and the administration will never shy away from talking with the folks we need to talk to, to further that,” Desai said. “That’s what we’re working on here at the G20.” - Moscow Times

The UK Maritime Trade Operations center (UKMTO) reported that a tanker was struck by three unknown projectiles while completing an outbound transit of the Strait of Hormuz. According to UKMTO Warning 124-26, the incident occurred approximately 17 nautical miles (31 km) east of Khasab, Oman, on August 31. UKMTO said the tanker reported being struck by three unknown projectiles. The agency reported no casualties or environmental impact and said authorities were investigating. It advised vessels operating in the area to transit with caution and report suspicious activity. Separately, UKMTO said on August 31 that it had received a report of an incident involving a tanker and military forces in the Indian Ocean. The agency provided no further details and said relevant investigations were ongoing. The incidents come amid a renewed escalation between the United States and Iran and heightened security concerns around the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump claimed an average of 30 ships a night are passing through the Strait of Hormuz with the assistance of the US Navy - RFE/RL

Solar surpassed coal as China’s top source of power for the first time ever, underscoring the country’s remarkable rollout of green energy as it looks to contain the impact of the Iran war. Solar accounted for almost a third of total installed capacity at the end of July, up from virtually nothing just a decade ago. The world’s largest oil importer has ploughed into renewables at an unprecedented scale, expanding overall power generation and boosting energy-intensive industries like AI. The Iran war has proved that Beijing’s long-term energy strategy was prescient, an expert argued: “China’s dependence on imported oil remains substantial, but the geopolitics of energy are shifting,” a researcher at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies wrote - Semafor

The journals…

Two summits, two worldviews - same week. In this recap of my on-air and written analysis: the G20 finance ministers' meeting on US soil, where the empty chairs say as much as the agenda (sanctions, scams, export controls, and Washington's ultimatum to allies on cutting ties with Iran). And the SCO summit in Kyrgyzstan, where China, India, Russia and Iran are trading bilaterals, development pledges and quiet workarounds to those same sanctions. One summit hands out a term sheet. The other hands out a catalogue. Filed from Kuala Lumpur as Merdeka Day draws to a close

Facing increasing confrontations with the West, Russian President Vladimir Putin looks eastward to restore his country’s standing in the region at a major summit in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital. It comes at a time of increased difficulties for the Kremlin leader, with Russia’s economy in tatters due to Western sanctions and Ukrainian drone strikes, ally Iran battered in war, and the leaders of former client states such as Syria and Venezuela ousted amid a muted Moscow response. Putin is set to hold bilateral meetings with Iranian President Masud Pezeshkian and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, among at least seven others, starting August 31 on the sidelines of the two-day Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Putin is also expected to hold bilateral sessions with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of non-SCO nation Turkey. Kremlin officials said Putin has at least nine bilateral meetings scheduled as Moscow looks to place Russia as a counterweight to Western influence in the region. Putin and Xi have often used SCO gatherings to put up a united front against Western influence in the region. Xi arrived late on August 30 and held his first meeting with Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, who will serve as host of the summit. Along with Russia, Iran, India, and China, the SCO grouping consists of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Not all members are allies, of course, with nuclear powers Pakistan and India often on the brink of war with each other. The organization began as the “Shanghai Five” in 1996 but began expanding to other regional nations starting in 2001. Along with Turkey, other nonmember nations and others participating and observing will include Armenia, Azerbaijan, UN chief Antonio Guterres, and heads of several Moscow-oriented international organizations. Putin is scheduled to meet Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, whose country has long been an ally of Russia but which has angered Moscow by seeking to move closer to the West.

• Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin are expected to discuss the Power of Siberia 2 project in a meeting in Bishkek on Monday, according to the Kremlin. “The issue will be discussed bilaterally,” Russian presidential aid Yury Ushakov reportedly said. “It will be discussed not only at the level of the [September 1-4] Eastern Economic Forum [in Vladivostok], but also in the meeting with the Chinese leader, which will take place on August 31.” Ushakov was responding to a question on whether the two sides were going to finalise the agreement over the long-stalled pipeline, a flagship project designed to boost Russian gas deliveries to China and further consolidate ties between the two neighbours. Iran has vowed to stand firm after the US announced fresh sanctions against 60 entities and individuals around the world, and concerns are growing that the latest sanctions could ignite a new flashpoint in US-China ties just weeks ahead of Xi’s visit to Washington. About half of China’s total seaborne crude oil imports in 2025 transited the Hormuz Strait, according to Chinese commodity market intelligence provider JLC. However, China’s vast pipeline network allows it to source oil and gas overland from Russia and Central Asia, mitigating the risk of maritime disruptions. First proposed in 2006, the planned 2,600km (1,616-mile) Power of Siberia 2 pipeline is expected to deliver 50 billion cubic metres (1.77 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas annually to China via Mongolia from the Arctic gas fields of Yamal in Russia - SCMP

Iran said on Monday that it has launched strikes targeting US military positions in Jordan in response to Washington’s first attack on its territory in a month, marking a fresh flare-up in the six-month war. Tehran’s elite IRGC said it struck two US military air bases with ballistic missiles in Washington-allied Jordan, causing “heavy damage”. Shortly after Iran’s announcement, the Jordanian army said it had intercepted eight missiles, without stating their origin. The strikes came after the US revealed on Sunday that it had attacked Iranian rocket launchers on Larak, a small island in the Strait of Hormuz. Washington said its attacks were aimed at preventing Iran from launching more sea mines into the strait, days after it announced it had completed clearing explosives from the strategic waterway. The exchange of fire came just days after the war hit the six-month mark amid little to no visible progress in negotiations between the two sides to end it. Separately, the United Arab Emirates said that it intercepted an Iranian drone over its waters Monday. “This dangerous escalation constitutes a blatant violation of the UAE’s sovereignty, security, and stability, and a direct threat to the safety of its citizens and residents,” the Foreign Ministry said. - Euronews/AP

The number of people missing in Nepal after the massive flash flood on Wednesday has risen to 4,247 - with at least 903 people known to have died. The missing figure is a sharp rise from 2,502, which was announced on Sunday. Of those missing, 3,655 are Nepali citizens, with 592 foreigners unaccounted for. In Tibet, the official death toll is 16, with 546 reported missing, according to Chinese state media. Among the missing are 933 hydropower workers, many of whom were working in tunnels - BBC

Russia threatened “massive strikes” against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure on Sunday after weeks of Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil facilities, as both sides target the economic systems sustaining the war. A Ukrainian drone strike sparked a fire at one of Russia’s largest oil refineries on Friday, capping a record-setting month of strikes that have disrupted fuel production and worsened gasoline shortages. Russia has responded with intensified attacks on Ukraine, including a strike near Kyiv on Friday that killed 38 people in the year’s deadliest attack. The campaign against infrastructure threatens economic activity in both countries and unfolds as Moscow faces accusations of using “gray zone” tactics against NATO countries, including drone incursions and other hostile actions designed to undermine the bloc. Earlier this month, Ukrainian Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal told POLITICO that “Putin wants to finish off (Ukraine’s) energy system” and that Kyiv would work on strengthening its energy and infrastructure resilience to avoid a repeat of last winter’s freezing blackouts. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials have also said that their intelligence suggests Russia is planning a new ground attack on Kyiv. Pavlo Palisa, deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, told reporters that Russian military chiefs have been tasked by the Kremlin’s political leaders with planning and preparing for attacks on both the Ukrainian capital and the city of Chernihiv - Euronews/POLITICO

• Russia has hit printing presses and publishing houses across Ukraine in a series of recent attacks, destroying 12 million books and damaging other icons of Ukrainian history and culture. Local media report that Russia has destroyed one third of all the books printed in Ukraine this year. More than 35 publishing facilities have been hit over recent weeks. Museums, art galleries, film studios, libraries, and opera houses have also been damaged. At Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the capital's large medieval monastery and cultural heritage site, the golden domes of the Dormition Cathedral were hit - BBC

A Georgia farm owner is gutted after she says cops came onto her property and fatally shot her baby donkey, HeeHaw. Hannah Israel claims on Facebook that Polk County cops had entered her pasture without permission to allegedly look for a missing person last week ... saying that’s when they shot and killed little HeeHaw. She wrote ... “They claimed he ran up to them braying and they thought they were in danger and shot and killed him after trying to taze him. HeeHaw was raised in the house and did petting zoos he never knew a stranger. And was shot and killed in his OWN pasture for doing what donkeys do. Alerting to a stranger.” Hannah believes there’s “no way” the shooting was legal and is planning to take action. She’s launched a GoFundMe for her legal fees. The police launched an investigation. The crowdfunding campaign has raised more than $70K of its $90K goal so far. Hannah says any extra money will go back to her animals’ feed and care. This isn’t the first time in recent months cops have come under fire for fatally shooting animals. In June, Los Angeles police got a ton of heat for shooting and killing Jameson the dog after his owner had been celebrating the Knicks championship win. The family is suing the city for excessive force and negligence after bodycam footage showed an officer had shot the poor pup four times - TMZ

The journals…

It is rare to get a clean natural experiment in geopolitics. This week we get one.

On August 31 and September 1, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meets in Bishkek: Xi, Putin, Modi, up to 21 heads of state, a bloc worth close to $30 trillion, with a development bank on the table. On exactly the same two days, in Asheville, North Carolina, Scott Bessent hosts the G20 finance ministers. Same 48 hours. Two competing answers to who writes the rules.

Remember what kind of G20 this is. Washington boycotted last year's Johannesburg summit, which I covered, and Trump has since barred South Africa from the 2026 meetings altogether while cutting off payments and subsidies - the first outright exclusion in the group's history. In its place, Poland has been invited as a guest of the host: the first Central or Eastern European country ever asked to a leaders' summit, despite the IMF's own revision confirming it has not yet displaced Switzerland from the top 20, a milestone now projected for 2028. Warsaw's ambition for full membership is undimmed. But note what just happened to the entry criteria. A founding member is out and a guest is in, and neither decision had anything to do with GDP.

Not that South Africa is likely to notice the snub this weekend. They were rather busy at Cape Town’s DHL Stadium, where the Springboks put 33 on the All Blacks to level the series, a week after losing the world number one ranking. Trump can withhold an invitation. He can’t withhold that.

The contrast is in the offer. Bishkek is selling connectivity: the China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway, and $11.7bn in China–Kyrgyz trade in seven months, led by EVs, batteries and solar. Asheville is selling conditions - Bessent will tell counterparts that continued access to the dollar-based financial system depends on cutting remaining ties to Iran, and a Treasury official expects it in every single bilateral. One summit arrives with a catalogue. The other arrives with a compliance form.

Xi and Putin sit down on the 31st, their second face-to-face this year, and they have rather more than longevity to discuss. Power of Siberia 2 is on the agenda again — 2,600km, up to 50 billion cubic metres a year via Mongolia, Russia’s answer to the European market it lost. It has been “on the agenda” for years; May’s Beijing meeting ended without a breakthrough. Watch whether Bishkek finally moves it. Putin also meets Erdogan on the Black Sea and Ukraine, Modi, Tokayev, and - note this - Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Iran, the country Bessent is demanding every G20 member cut off, is a guest of honour at the other summit. Meanwhile the Kremlin says it has no information that talks with Washington and Kyiv might resume next month.

And watch François-Philippe Champagne. Canada’s finance minister sits down with his American host roughly a week before Ottawa starts tariffing him. Washington hit $20bn of Canadian goods with 50% tariffs on August 22 - applying even to CUSMA-compliant goods, with no expiry date. Mark Carney called it a miscalculation and will match it dollar for dollar from September 8. Every minister in that room will be doing the same arithmetic: if a treaty partner and neighbour gets 50% with no end date, what is a signature worth?

Xi doesn’t stop at Bishkek either. He flies on to Cairo, his first Egypt visit since 2016, in the 70th anniversary year of China–Arab relations - courting the Arab world in the very week Washington is squeezing it.

Note the traffic between camps. Indonesia, a full BRICS member, will sit in Asheville. Nobody is defecting. Everybody is hedging.

Written from Kuala Lumpur, where Anwar Ibrahim is skipping Bishkek (after attending for the first time last year) - though the simpler explanation may be visible from the street: tomorrow is Merdeka Day, and the flags are already up.

News Briefs
Iceland's 'No' camp has narrowly won a referendum on whether to resume the country's suspended European Union membership negotiations officials confirm. The final results were confirmed as 105,399 (47.2%) said "Yes", while 118,040 (52.8%) said "no". A total of 225,031 votes were cast, resulting in a voter turnout of 82.5%. The “No” outcome will shelve the EU debate in Icelandic politics for at least two more years. The nation of roughly 400,000 people, first sought EU membership after the 2009 financial crisis pushed its economy to the brink, but accession talks stalled in 2013 once a euroskeptic coalition took power. Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir’s current Social Democratic-led government revived the question this year, arguing that a more volatile international climate made it worth asking voters whether to pursue closer EU ties. Iceland’s relationship with Brussels won’t fundamentally change either way, though: the country already participates in the European Economic Area and the passport-free Schengen zone, and both arrangements stay intact. The referendum itself carries no legal force, but the government has committed to abiding by whatever Icelanders decide - Euronews

At least 752 people have died and more than 2,500 people are missing in Nepal, local officials say, after flash floods on Wednesday. In Tibet, the official death toll is 16, with 546 reported to be missing, according to Chinese state media. A new lake has formed in Tibet after a landslide occurred downstream of the existing barrier lake, Chinese state media says. A barrier lake is a body of water formed when debris dams up a river. An existing barrier lake, which formed in the aftermath of the flash floods, had reportedly been depleting naturally following concerns it could result in more flooding. Chinese Central TV (CCTV) says a monitoring drone detected a landslide on Saturday, which then resulted in debris forming a new blockage and a new barrier lake. A second flood could have serious consequences, even if it is smaller in scale than the first, a disaster risk expert tells the BBC

Russian forces struck a transhipment terminal in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv on Aug. 29, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed on Telegram. The attack caused a temporary power outage that shut down the port city’s public transport network. Refuelling vessels and unloading points for fuel and lubricants were also hit, the ministry said. Across the border in Russia, three people have been killed and nine injured in a Ukrainian drone attack in the Russian Belgorod region. According to local authorities. Three of the injured are in serious condition, the authorities said. In Kyiv, Russian missiles struck logistics warehouses Moscow claimed contained components for Ukraine’s domestically produced Flamingo cruise missiles, which Kyiv uses to strike oil terminals and logistics hubs in Russia. The Moscow Times could not immediately confirm that the affected facility was related to Flamingo manufacturing - Moscow Times

• Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that the death toll from Saturday's Russian drone strike on a munitions depot in the village of Myla, in the Bucha district near Kyiv, had risen to 38, with 20 people injured and four still missing. Writing on Telegram, Zelensky said "the extent of contamination in the area is significant" as emergency crews worked to extinguish the remaining fires and bomb disposal teams cleared the site. The strike triggered a massive detonation and secondary explosions that sent flames into surrounding residential areas, damaging around 50 buildings and forcing the evacuation of more than 380 residents, according to regional officials. Among the dead was Taras Didych, mayor of the nearby village of Dmytrivka. It is one of the deadliest single incidents Kyiv’s suburbs have seen since Russia’s full-scale invasion began more than four years ago. Ukrainian prosecutors have opened a criminal negligence investigation focused on why explosives were being stored so close to homes - Euronews

The Sound of No One Clapping: Europe won’t cheer Mark Carney out loud. Watch what it does instead

When Donald Trump’s 50 per cent tariffs on roughly $28-billion of Canadian goods took effect at one minute past midnight on August 22, Mark Carney did what almost no allied leader has done in eighteen months: he refused to sign. He called the tariffs a miscalculation, said Washington’s final demands were uneconomic and unfair, and announced Canada would match them dollar for dollar from September 8.

Then he waited. Across Europe, nothing happened.

Eric Reguly, the Globe and Mail’s European bureau chief in Rome, went looking for a senior politician anywhere on the continent willing to applaud, and found exactly one: Paolo Gentiloni, the former Italian prime minister and EU economy commissioner, who said Carney had delivered “the speech I would like to hear in Europe.” One, out of twenty-seven member states.

The silence is the story.

Reguly’s explanation is fear - not of Trump alone but of the men around him, Lutnick, Greer, Vance. Better the lopsided deal you already swallowed than a worse one you provoked. That reading is hard to argue with. Germany’s carmakers and Italy’s exporters don’t have Canada’s option of pivoting to another continent. Europe is the other continent.

I’d add a second reason: nobody knows which register works. Keir Starmer went further in ceremonial deference than any European leader and got a marginally less bad outcome, not a good one. Giorgia Meloni, once the bloc’s designated Trump whisperer, has taken to telling him publicly that the friendship has cost her at home. And yet Mark Rutte took obsequiousness at NATO to a place most thought beneath a secretary-general, and is broadly judged to have kept the Americans in the tent. Caught between those two data points, capitals do the safest available thing, which is nothing.

There is a third reading, and it’s the one worth watching. National leaders are quiet. The institutions are not.

Ursula von der Leyen has invited Carney to sit in the chamber for her State of the Union address in Strasbourg on September 16; he addresses the European Parliament himself the next day. As Reguly points out, the last American president to get that podium was Ronald Reagan, in 1985. An EU–Canada summit follows in Canada on October 29 and 30.

That isn’t a cheer. It’s calendar space, protocol, and a platform Washington cannot obtain - considerably more useful.

The money is moving the same direction. Reguly catalogues the shopping list: attack submarines from Germany’s ThyssenKrupp, early-warning aircraft from Sweden’s Saab, over-the-horizon radar from Australia, talks on Italian jet trainers, and an increasingly live question about the Gripen versus another tranche of F-35s. That question gets easier every time Trump reaches for the tariff baton.

If anyone still thought this was a negotiation about trade balances, Thursday settled it. Trump ordered Interior to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” within thirty days, mused about doing the Atlantic and Pacific next, and said there was no message in it - before explaining the message at length. Carney noted the name comes from the Wendat Ontari’io and predates both Confederation and the Declaration of Independence.

You don’t rename your neighbour’s lake over a dairy quota. Which brings us to Reguly’s harder judgment, and he is right about it: Carney’s error wasn’t last week’s walkout. It was the year spent assuming a deal was available from a president driven by spite rather than economics.

Europe’s silence is not neutrality. It’s triage - every capital calculating separately how much noise it can afford. The applause, when it comes, won’t arrive as applause. It will arrive as signatures.

So the question isn’t who spoke up for Carney last week. It’s who is in the chamber in Strasbourg on September 17, and who is still in the room in Canada on October 30.

The journals…

Russia is planning for 600,000 recruits across 2026 and 2027, according to Ukrainian intelligence, with the next wave expected in September. People are already leaving. Many are heading to Georgia. But as I’ve been reporting from here, a large Russian community has been embedded in Thailand for years now. They have embedded themselves deep into real estate and money changing, moving sums that raise obvious questions about where the money is coming from and how it is avoiding sanctions.

Before that: the executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” and Trump’s off-hand musing that the Atlantic and Pacific might be next. Buffoonery - but instructive. If the map is up for grabs, Carney, Premier Pillai and Premier Eby should consider renaming the Alaska Highway, or simply folding it into the Trans-Canada network.

Also: a growing backlash in Thailand and the Philippines against disruptive Israeli tourists.

The week ahead - the SCO summit in Bishkek, G20 finance ministers in Asheville with Champagne there for Canada, and the run-up to UN week.

Watch below. World Briefing Plus subscribers get the video edition every Saturday.

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Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday that negotiations are on a “deep pause” while Russian forces advance in the east - a shift from his summer line confirming ongoing dialogue with US negotiators. Ukraine, he said, knows Moscow’s demands and won’t discuss them. Putin’s precondition is unchanged: full Ukrainian withdrawal from Donetsk, or is it the entire Donbas?

The timing is the story. Peskov spoke days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s unannounced trip to Moscow - and three outlets have three explanations for it. The New York Times reported he went to push a peace deal. The Wall Street Journal tied the visit to Russian mobilization plans. The Washington Post reported that the trip was preceded by fresh classified intelligence indicating the Kremlin believes the United States has been weakened by six months of war with Iran, and that Ratcliffe’s mission was less about Putin being cornered than about Russia’s conclusion that Washington is depleted and cannot intervene. The assessment reportedly points to shortages of Patriot interceptors, Tomahawks and other munitions after the Iran campaign.

That is not an abstraction in Kyiv. The Associated Press reported this week that Ukraine is badly short of American-made Patriots and that Russia now mounts major barrages every few days to burn through what remains.

The arithmetic showed up on Aug. 27. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said Kyiv spent 872 minutes - nearly 15 hours - under air raid alert across 13 separate alarms, a single-day record for the capital since February 2022. Eight more followed by Thursday morning. Regional governor Tymur Tkachenko reported one killed and four injured. Ukraine’s Air Force counted 164 drones launched nationwide, 137 downed. Odesa, among other cities, have also been badly hit this week. Warehouses are a major target.

Ratcliffe’s reported but debatable argument to his counterparts was that escalation would drive Trump toward Zelensky. It is a threat priced in a currency Moscow has just judged Washington short of. Meanwhile the president himself waved the danger away Thursday - “He’s not going to be attacking a NATO territory” - while declining to explain his intelligence chief’s errand. The gap between the White House line and the agency’s own reading is doing more work here than anything Peskov said.

Watch Belarus. Lukashenko arrived in Russia Thursday for talks with Putin scheduled Saturday, officially on bilateral cooperation and “security matters.” If the Kremlin wants to test a depleted America without touching Article 5, Minsk is the cheapest place to do it.

And then, for millions of Ukrainians, there’s winter coming into clearer focus….

Rescuers worked through mud and debris Friday in areas devastated by a catastrophic flash flood along the Himalayan border between Nepal and China, continuing the search for hundreds of people still missing as the death toll rose and authorities warned that a newly formed, overflowing lake could trigger further flooding. Nepali police say the death toll there has risen to 547, and the disaster management authority said Friday that 977 people were still unaccounted for. Meanwhile, there is little information on survivors on the Chinese side, where the death toll rose to five Friday and China state media reported 558 people were missing. Flood survivors, including injured people, were taken to Kathmandu and other locations. Foreigners from multiple countries were among the missing, many of them trekkers and pilgrims. Randhir Jaiswal, Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman, told reporters that 320 Indian nationals remain uncontactable. Meanwhile, the International Red Cross said it estimates at least 93,000 people “have been affected and are in great need.” Scientists said it is too early to draw a direct connection between global warming and Wednesday’s catastrophe. However, they said that as Earth’s temperature rises because of human activities such as burning oil, gas and coal, the chances of such disasters increase, especially in the Himalayan mountains, which are warming considerably faster than many other parts of the world - AP

China’s embassy guards in London have been accused of brandishing electroshock weapons at protesters to intimidate them. London and Beijing are now embroiled in a diplomatic row over the incident, which is also being investigated by police. UK Government officials warned China that actions by a foreign state to intimidate or harm individuals on British soil would not be tolerated, The i Paper has been told. Security workers allegedly pointed the weapons towards protesters during heightened tensions outside the embassy in Portland Place on 3 July. UK officials have raised the matter directly with the embassy, a Government source said, while a Metropolitan Police investigation remains ongoing. “Any attempts by a foreign state to coerce, intimidate, harass, or harm individuals on UK soil will never be tolerated,” the source added. The diplomatic row is likely to raise fresh questions over China’s conduct and its alleged attempts to silence dissidents in the UK. While ministers will await the outcome of the police investigation, the insider said: “Where there is evidence of a crime, we will not hesitate to act.”

President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday that the Strait of Hormuz is open, that the United States has “control” of the waterway alongside its blockade of Iran, and that American minesweepers have cleared it entirely. Millions of barrels, he said, are moving out every day. Ship-tracking data tells a narrower story. Kpler recorded 121 crossings through the strait in the week of 17–23 August, up marginally from 118 the week before - and still a fraction of normal pre-war traffic. Just over half of last week’s transits were classified route-undetermined; 56 moved under the unilateral scheme Iran has imposed since the conflict began - passage on IRGC terms rather than freedom of navigation. The mine-clearance claim also comes amid continuing attacks on commercial shipping. On volumes, Energy Secretary Chris Wright puts flows at roughly 9 million barrels per day; independent trackers have recorded considerably less, with some estimates closer to 5 million. Wright attributes the gap to covert transits that trackers cannot see. Insurers and charterers are not pricing an open strait: they are pricing one that is partially open, conditional, and unsafe.

• Donald Trump had to be called out live on air by Fox News after the 80-year-old president had a meltdown over the network’s reporting on his Iran war. During Thursday’s Special Report, the program’s chief correspondent, Jonathan Hunt, described how there had been “no significant developments” between the U.S. and Iran to end the now six-month conflict. Hunt also noted, accurately, that Trump had confirmed there were no plans for talks between the two countries. Trump, who spends an extraordinary amount of time watching cable news in the White House, then blasted Hunt and Special Report anchor Bret Baier in a Truth Social rant. “Jonathan Hunt of FoxNews did a particularly inaccurate report on the Failing Islamic Republic of Iran. I don’t want to meet, they do,” Trump wrote. “In fact, they are begging to make a deal. Bret Baier should straighten out his flunkies, for a change! President DJT.” After showing Trump’s Truth Social post on screen, Baier then humiliated the president and corrected him on several fronts. “First of all, Jonathan Hunt is not a flunky. He’s a great reporter,” Baier said. “Second of all, Mr. President, we didn’t say you wanted to meet. In fact, we played a soundbite that you didn’t want to meet, and there are no negotiations. “We said that Treasury Secretary Bessent is hoping to meet with G20 countries to increase the pressure on Iran, and that Gulf state allies, including Qatar, are inside Tehran trying to get Iran to agree to concessions,” Baier added. “That was what was said.” Trump’s war with the Middle Eastern country has dragged on for six months with no real end in sight. The president’s meltdown at Fox News for stating that there isn’t even currently a plan to try to end the war came after he shared some AI slop on Truth Social declaring “Mission Accomplished” in Iran - The Daily Beast

The US is reportedly in talks with Venezuela’s interim government to take a “massive” stake in the South American country’s oil resources. The proposed deal would give Washington part ownership of fields containing 90 billion barrels’ worth of proven crude deposits, more than doubling US reserves. “Calling this deal huge would be an understatement,” a US official told Axios. Venezuela’s oil production has jumped under Washington’s custodianship, though questions abound about where those profits, which were intended to help rebuild the country, have ended up. Meanwhile, Venezuela is also considering quitting OPEC, potentially dealing a further blow to the oil cartel it helped to found just four months after the UAE left, Bloomberg reported.

Malaysia to repatriate 1,500 Myanmar refugees as hostility toward Rohingya grows

Malaysia said Thursday it has finalised the first phase of a voluntary repatriation programme that will return some 1,500 Myanmar refugees home, CNA reports. The Home Ministry said the first phase takes place on September 29 and covers 1,476 Myanmar nationals identified by the Myanmar government. “The repatriation process will use two Myanmar Navy warships and one hospital ship,” the ministry said.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim had earlier said Myanmar agreed to take back 5,000 ethnic Rohingya amid rising tensions with local communities. Per the ministry, roughly 4,008 people — mostly Rohingya — will be channelled into the Refugee Registration Document (DPP) programme this year, while 5,000 others go through voluntary repatriation. It counted 10,388 Myanmar nationals in immigration detention depots as of August 15, though not all qualify as refugees.

The BBC, meanwhile, reports a fierce new wave of hostility against Rohingya nine years after a former prime minister encouraged them to come. Barred from public schools, Rohingya children attend unlicensed community learning centres now increasingly exposed to haphazard, sentiment-driven crackdowns; several have closed in recent months. One school in Selangor suspended classes for a month and reopened in late July telling students not to wear uniforms and to head straight home. Rohingya have also been evicted from villages they had lived in for years, with some residents telling Malaysian media their presence risked social problems. UNHCR puts the Rohingya population in Malaysia at more than 126,000 — second only to Bangladesh — though rights groups believe the true figure is higher.

Singapore: Forest Clearance Plans Trigger Rare Public Protest

Government plans to rezone forested land for housing have triggered an unusual burst of open dissent in Singapore, Al Jazeera reports.

The Housing and Development Board announced last month it would clear about 15 of Maju Forest’s 23 hectares at Sunset Way, plus at least 10 hectares of Gillman Forest. Petitions have drawn more than 60,000 signatures, and over 2,000 people rallied this month at Speakers’ Corner — Singapore’s designated venue for citizens to hold demonstrations without a police permit, subject to restrictions.

Per the report, official impact assessments found 178 animal species at Gillman and 113 at Maju, including the Sunda pangolin and the critically endangered straw-headed bulbul, of which a third of the global population lives in Singapore. Al Jazeera also cites a 2023 study estimating the city-state is on course to clear 7,331 hectares of forest — 1.2 times its existing parks and reserves combined.

The government cites housing demand. Al Jazeera quotes Minister of State for National Development Alvin Tan telling parliament that flat launches are oversubscribed more than fourfold. Days before the rally, Tan said more green space would be retained than originally planned, conceding it would mean fewer homes.

The debate widened on 23 August, when PM Lawrence Wong announced plans to merge several southern islands into a larger landmass for industry and defence - a reclamation project that will require enormous quantities of fill material.

The sand question

That dependency has its own file. Mongabay reports that Cambodia appears to have resumed sand exports to Singapore despite a national ban imposed in 2017 after dredging was found to be damaging riverine and coastal ecosystems. Khlem Yonviseth, director of the Koh Kong provincial mining department, told Mongabay the ban had been lifted and that his office licensed the dredging and approved the exports; Mongabay reports he provided no documentation, that it could find no official announcement of any lifting, and that relevant national agencies did not respond to requests for comment.

According to Mongabay, the dredging on the Trapeang Rung River falls within the boundaries of Tatai Wildlife Sanctuary and Botum Sakor National Park. The outlet traced at least four bulk carriers from Koh Kong to Singapore’s Tuas Port, site of a state-backed reclamation project, after activist group Mother Nature Cambodia tracked the vessels in videos published in July and August. Mongabay reports the licensed company, Catalyst Marine and Resources, is linked to Starhigh Asia Pacific, a Singaporean firm active in regional sand mining. The reporting establishes the shipping route and the licence; it does not establish that the sand was illegally exported.

The journals….

The Wall Street Journal reported the purpose first. CBS News and RFE/RL have since independently confirmed the thrust of the reporting. Ratcliffe was there to tell Moscow not to attack a NATO member state. RFE/RL’s sources put a sharper point on it: the warning was specifically about Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Everyone involved is working hard to make it sound like nothing.

Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR, confirmed on Thursday that the meeting happened and immediately drained it of significance. A “working-level meeting,” he said. A “standard working format.” Nothing special. He noted that he meets foreign intelligence chiefs almost weekly, in person or online. Dmitry Peskov confirmed Ratcliffe met intelligence officials but not Putin, though Putin was briefed. President Trump called the trip “very sort of semi-routine,” then added that “something may come out of it.”

You do not send the director of the CIA to Moscow on a semi-routine basis. There is no such thing.

Why the assessment changed

For four and a half years, Washington’s working assumption was that Putin would not open a second front while the first one was consuming him. That assumption has been quietly retired.

One factor appears to be Ukraine’s increasingly effective deep-strike campaign. Wave after wave of long-range drones have hit refineries, logistics hubs and warehouses inside Russia, from the Afipsky refinery to the Astrakhan gas processing plant to Ozon distribution centres. The concern in Washington is that mounting pressure inside Russia may not simply pin Putin down; it could encourage Moscow to seek leverage elsewhere.

Heather Conley of the American Enterprise Institute framed the logic to the Journal: the objective is not territory, it is fracture. Challenge NATO’s credibility, and separate the United States from its allies. As she put it, the question mark is how Washington would respond.

That is precisely the question a limited incursion is designed to ask.

The summer of alarm bells

Ratcliffe’s flight was the culmination of something, not the start of it.

A letter dated 30 July, seen by RFE/RL, went to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warning of a “deteriorating security environment” in the Baltics, citing an “increased frequency of airspace violations and drone incursions.” It was signed by the three Baltic commissioners - Kaja Kallas, Andrius Kubilius and Valdis Dombrovskis - along with their Polish and Finnish EU commissioners. That put senior European officials from five of NATO’s most exposed eastern and northern members on the same piece of paper.

RFE/RL also independently reports additional summer intelligence about possible Russian false-flag operations and explicitly says there was no indication of an imminent conventional attack. The reporting also makes clear that the exposure is not confined to the Baltics. Recent cases of alleged or suspected Russian involvement in assassination attempts, arson and drone incursions span Germany, Poland and Slovakia.

This is the shape of the actual threat. Not tank columns crossing a border, but sabotage, deniability, and a NATO membership arguing among itself about whether Article 5 has been triggered.

The British front

Run parallel to all of this: London is now being threatened directly.

On Monday, on his first foreign trip as prime minister, Andy Burnham stood outside St Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv on Ukraine’s 35th independence day and announced Britain would release classified technical information on British-made Storm Shadow components to help Ukraine build its own long-range missiles.

Peskov called it adding fuel to the fire. Burnham’s reply: “Who started the fire? That’s the question, isn’t it?”

Maria Zakharova then warned that any British military facilities and equipment, in Ukraine and beyond its borders, could become targets. Kremlin adviser Andrei Fedorov, a former deputy foreign minister, told the BBC that Moscow had not entirely ruled out paramilitary action against British factories producing drone and missile components, and that a response might eventually be visible rather than merely verbal. Attacks from “unknown sources” is the operative phrase, and it is not subtle.

Classified Storm Shadow component data are the escalation Moscow has spent three years insisting it would not tolerate, the Kremlin’s red line. Handing over the means of production, rather than the weapons themselves, moves the target from a stockpile to an industrial base - one that sits in Lancashire and Hertfordshire, not Kharkiv.

Connecting the dots

A number of things are happening at once.

Ukraine’s drone campaign has made Russia’s war economy hurt. At the same time, Moscow appears to be looking for softer places to apply pressure: the Baltic states, where deniability is cheap, and Britain, where the industrial supply chain is exposed. And Washington, having watched this develop over a summer of intelligence, sent its spy chief to say the quiet part in person.

And here is the contradiction: Washington is warning Moscow not to test NATO at precisely the moment it is telling the alliance’s European members to prepare to carry more of the burden themselves.

The uncomfortable precedent is November 2021. Bill Burns flew to Moscow and warned against invading Ukraine. By his own account, Putin was unmoved. The invasion came three months later.

That does not mean this warning fails. It means the warning itself is the signal worth reading. You send a CIA director when you have specific intelligence and you want the other side to know you have it.

What to watch

• The NATO readout. Elbridge Colby met Mark Rutte and allied ambassadors in Brussels on Thursday, telling them Europe must take primary responsibility for its conventional defence while insisting the United States remains committed to NATO. The more important question now is what allies were told behind closed doors about Ratcliffe’s Moscow warning - and what leaks out afterward.

• The Iran thread. CBS reports Ratcliffe also raised Iran, warning of further sanctions if the Strait of Hormuz does not reopen to shipping. Ratcliffe’s trip came a day after Washington launched a new pressure campaign against Tehran. A single trip carrying two warnings tells you something about how thin the channels have become.

• Sabotage attribution. Watch how European governments characterise the next factory fire, rail incident, drone sighting, territorial waters incursion. The shift from “under investigation” to naming Russia is the real escalation ladder here.

• Whether Moscow answers. Naryshkin says he meets counterparts weekly. If the channel is genuinely routine, expect a reciprocal contact within weeks. Silence would be the more telling response.

A Russian military lieutenant colonel was killed in a car explosion in St. Petersburg, the local news outlet Fontanka reported Thursday. The blast occurred around 10 a.m. local time near a supermarket in the Shushary neighborhood. The officer’s wife was also in the car and badly injured, Fontanka reported. Investigators later confirmed the death of one person and hospitalization of another but described the incident only as a “vehicle fire,” not an explosion. They added that a criminal probe was underway. Russia has accused Ukraine of carrying out several assassinations of military officers since the full-scale invasion. Ukrainian sources have claimed responsibility for some of the attacks while denying involvement in others. There was no immediate comment from officials in Kyiv in response to Thursday’s reported blast - Moscow Times

More than 1,000 people were missing in Nepal and the Tibet region of China after a torrent of mud, water and ice swept away villages and bridges. Officials said at least 335 people had been killed. A lake of rising water has formed at a site along the China-Nepal border - prompting fears it could burst its banks. Among the missing were hundreds of foreign tourists. The Nepal Tourism Board said on Thursday that 644 tourists were out of contact, including 517 foreign nationals. They include visitors from 19 European countries as well as China, India, the United States, Canada, Ukraine, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Australia. Nepali officials are urging travellers to inform the nearest police or security authority, local administration, travel agency, guide or tour operator of their location and in a statement said “please remain calm, stay informed and follow official safety instructions”. The disaster has particularly affected Rasuwa and neighbouring Nuwakot, north of Kathmandu and close to Nepal’s border with Tibet. Nepal has long been one of Asia’s most popular destinations for backpackers, hikers and adventure travellers, attracted by its dramatic Himalayan landscape, relatively affordable travel and combination of mountain trekking, historic cities and Buddhist and Hindu culture. The country is home to eight of the world’s 10 highest mountains, including Mount Everest, and official figures show 1.16 million international tourists visited Nepal in 2025, including more than 165,000 who went trekking. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said the worst-affected areas were “extremely difficult to reach” - with many vital supplies being delivered by helicopter. The United Nations said about 10,000 households needed “immediate relief.” - NYT/Euronews/Telegram/BBC

• Rescue efforts in China are being led by the People’s Liberation Army, but state media said they face multiple challenges.The Air Force did manage to use a brief weather window to fly a drone over the area to try to find survivors and assess how safe it was for rescue teams to enter. The border town of Gyirong is the main crossing for people and traffic heading between Nepal and China. Video footage appears to show a crushing wall of water crashing through buildings and washing away trucks and cars. Thousands of pilgrims were making a journey along this route from Nepal towards a sacred mountain in Tibet. This is also one of the most controlled and politically sensitive regions of China. Access to Tibet is restricted for foreigners. All the information we receive is from Chinese state media which is also carefully controlled - BBC

Meta vowed to institute sweeping changes to Facebook and Instagram as part of an $18 billion settlement with 48 US states that had accused the platforms of promoting “known harmful” and addictive features to children and teenagers. Meta said Wednesday it will hold users under 18 to two-hour daily limits and block usage at night unless parents consent, potentially transforming how young Americans interact with social media apps and providing a template for thousands of similar lawsuits globally; part of the settlement will only be paid out if TikTok and YouTube introduce similar restrictions. Meta is locked in a separate fight over backlash against data centers as anti-tech sentiment among US voters balloons into a “bipartisan rebellion” against AI, Semafor’s David Weigel wrote - Semafor

Dolly Parton fans are pushing to honor the country singer in a huge way following her death by renaming Nashville International Airport after her. A Change.org petition calling for the airport to become “Dolly Parton International Airport” has now passed 100K signatures ... gaining more than 50K supporters in the day since Dolly died Tuesday at 80. The petition was launched in January 2025 and had been sitting at around 53K signatures before news of Dolly's death ignited a massive new push. Sheryl Crow is all for it too ... saying during a Katie Couric Instagram Live Stream that renaming the airport after Dolly is a no brainer. Tennessee State Representative Todd Warner also says he plans to introduce legislation seeking the change. It would be a major hometown tribute ... Dolly was born near Knoxville, became a music superstar in Nashville and spent much of her life there. As we first reported, Dolly’s inner circle scrambled to bring close family and friends to Nashville after her health took a dire turn over the weekend. Those close to her initially hoped she would recover and be released, as she had after prior health setbacks, but the situation became increasingly serious. Dolly died Tuesday morning at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being admitted early Friday with various ailments. Her reps later revealed she had been battling cancer and was surrounded by loved ones when she died - TMZ

The journals…

On Tuesday morning, the President of the United States announced that he is giving “serious consideration” to renaming Lake Ontario. It is to be called Lake America. The reasoning - his, not mine - that Washington does not expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.

He then posted a map with the old name crossed out and the new one in gold lettering beside an American flag, because of course he did.

Mélanie Joly’s reply was the correct one: we will always call it Lake Ontario. Doug Ford called it rhetoric. Dominic LeBlanc declined to engage at all, which is federal policy now and probably wise.

But let us suspend wisdom for a moment.

Because if we are opening the map and reaching for the marker, Canada has options. Quite a lot of them, actually.

Mount Kennedy is safe

The obvious target sits 4,238 metres above sea level in the St. Elias Mountains of Yukon.

Mount Kennedy is spectacular, remote and entirely Canadian: the ground, the park, the jurisdiction, all of it. If the new rule is that governments may rename whatever geography they happen to control, we could have the paperwork started by lunch.

Except we won’t. Because we’re grown-ups.

Canada named that previously unnamed peak for John F. Kennedy in 1965, as an act of mourning for a murdered friend. That March, Robert Kennedy climbed it, becoming the first person to stand atop a mountain bearing his brother’s name. It remains one of the most genuinely moving gestures in the history of Canada–US relations.

And Canadians adore Kennedy. Camelot. He came to Ottawa early in his presidency and spoke of two countries bound by more than a shared continent.

The relationship was never as warm as the speech. Kennedy had little patience for John Diefenbaker, and the feeling was returned with interest. Which is rather the point: two governments that genuinely disliked each other still managed a gesture like this one.

Trump treats names as assertions of ownership. Mount Kennedy was named for almost the opposite reason: affection.

So Mount Kennedy stays. You’re welcome, America.

The Alaska Highway, however

Sorry, this one we can no longer live with.

The highway stretches 2,450 kilometres from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, Alaska. The US Army built it during the Second World War as a strategic supply route after Pearl Harbor.

Fair enough. Thank you for the road.

Though the Americans did not find their own way through. Local First Nations guided the engineers along routes they already knew, and Ottawa now attaches Indigenous Benefit Plans to much of the work it does on the road.

But 1,900 kilometres of it - almost 80 per cent - run through British Columbia and Yukon. The US Army handed the Canadian sections over in 1946, and civilian traffic started rolling two years later. That was eighty years ago.

Which raises a question. Why is 1,900 kilometres of Canadian highway still advertising an American state?

Under the new Lake America doctrine, this is clearly untenable.

So, regrettably, we have no choice.

The Canadian portion shall henceforth be known as the Canada Highway.

This will require British Columbia, Yukon and Ottawa to agree, since the federal government owns only 835 kilometres of it.

Signs will need changing. Google Maps will catch up eventually. Alaska may retain its own stretch once motorists cross the border, because we respect American sovereignty.

We are not unreasonable people.

There are other candidates

Consider Boston Bar, British Columbia. The name comes from the Chinook trading jargon of the Fraser Canyon, in which Americans were “Boston men,” after the ships that carried them. The name does not merely honour Americans. The name means Americans. It has sat there, unmolested, for a century and a half.

There is Roosevelt Campobello International Park in New Brunswick. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s beloved summer home, sitting on a Canadian island and jointly administered by both countries. Safe. Lovely place.

Then there is British Columbia itself, the deep cut. “Columbia” derives from the Columbia River, named for an American trading vessel. Queen Victoria bolted “British” onto the front in 1858 precisely to distinguish the territory from the American side.

The entire province is named after a naming dispute we won. We’re keeping that too.

This is what restraint looks like.

What renaming can actually be for

There is a version of this that Canada does properly, and it is worth the contrast.

In 2021, the W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council and Gulf Islands National Park Reserve changed McDonald Campground, near Sidney, B.C., to SMONEĆTEN. Parks Canada does not call this a renaming. It calls it a name reclamation, which is the whole point. SMONEĆTEN is SENĆOŦEN for “place of pitch” - the spot where W̱SÁNEĆ people gathered sap from Douglas firs for fire-starting, for patching wounds, for sealing canoes.

Nobody invented that name to win an argument. It was there first, and it was put back.

Lake Ontario is the same case, which is the irony Trump has not noticed. The name is Iroquoian and it predates both countries. It was never his to rename. For that matter, it was never ours either.

We have form

Canadians who think even the Canada Highway sounds unserious should know their own history.

In 1946, Mackenzie King renamed Banff’s Castle Mountain in honour of Dwight Eisenhower. The change rippled outward - the family bungalow camp at Castle Junction, in business since 1939, spent the next three decades trading as Castle Eisenhower. Albertans never really accepted it. In 1979, after thirty-three years of grumbling, Castle Mountain got its name back, and Eisenhower was left with a single tower on the eastern end as a sort of geopolitical severance package.

At the base of that same mountain sit the remains of the Castle Mountain Internment Camp, where between 1914 and 1920 Canada confined its own residents as enemy aliens, most of them Ukrainian, and did not formally acknowledge it until 2005.

So Canada has un-named an American general before. It took a generation, but we got there.

We are also capable of stopping ourselves. In 2000, Ottawa floated renaming Mount Logan after the late Pierre Trudeau. Surveyors, scientists and Yukoners killed the idea almost immediately.

Canadians will tolerate a great deal. Apparently we draw the line at mountains.

The part where we admit we already won

There is also an awkward detail in all of this.

Trump Tower Toronto opened in 2012. The Trump name came off in 2017. The building became the Adelaide and subsequently the St. Regis.

Trump International Hotel & Tower Vancouver opened in 2017. The hotel closed in 2020; the Trump branding disappeared and the property eventually reopened as the Paradox.

Both disappeared for the most Canadian of reasons: not an executive order, not a presidential proclamation and not a map in gold lettering, but ownership changes, contracts and commercial reality.

Quietly.

Without a single post.

That is the Canadian method.

We removed Trump’s name from his buildings and left Kennedy’s name on his mountain.

Wab Kinew put it better this week. Canada’s response, the Manitoba premier said, has shown the rest of the world “that you don’t have to take a knee, you don’t have to bow down.”

Nor, it turns out, do you have to shout.

The serious bit, briefly

Renaming is cheap, which is precisely why politicians do it.

It costs nothing to type, generates a day of headlines. And it leaves the underlying tariffs exactly where they were - 50 per cent on roughly US$20 billion of Canadian goods, with Ottawa’s retaliation landing September 8.

But something more valuable is being spent.

Mount Kennedy exists because in 1965 Canada wanted to say something to a grieving ally that words could not carry, and reached for a mountain.

The Gordie Howe Bridge exists because two countries decided to build something together and name it after a man both could claim. Trump spent this year trying to stop it opening, demanding half of it, and Canada held the ribbon-cutting without him. Murray Howe, standing there, said only that he wished everyone could have come.

Those names are remnants of something far harder to construct than a tariff wall, and far easier to destroy: goodwill.

That is why Mount Kennedy should stay Mount Kennedy.

The tragedy isn’t that Canada could rename it.

It’s that a gesture like naming it feels almost unimaginable today.

The Alaska Highway, though? Welcome to the Canada Highway.

News Briefs
The Canadian government has announced its plan to hit the United States with dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs on hundreds of American products after U.S. President Donald Trump’s 50 per cent tariffs on roughly C$28 billion worth of Canadian goods came into effect. On Tuesday, the White House released a statement that outlined what it claimed were a “record of Canadian abuse,” including restrictions on U.S. products and retaliatory measures. Trump shared several posts on Tuesday where he openly considered renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” In response, a candidate in the Toronto mayoral election proposed renaming New York state “the province of New York.” Meanwhile, several premiers spoke on the trade war between the two countries, including Ontario’s Doug Ford, who told U.S. media that he told Prime Minister Mark Carney to reject the Trump administration’s latest offer.

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he believes Trump will change course on his new tariffs on Canada soon, as he faces increasing political pressure back home. “Imagine the phone calls Donald Trump’s receiving from members of his party, not from those condemning him from my party,” Newsom said in an interview with CTV News’ chief political correspondent Vassy Kapelos on Tuesday. “I think it’s a matter of days, if not weeks, the latest, where he completely flips on this and then tries to save face.”

CIA director John Ratcliffe visited Moscow on Tuesday for talks with Russian officials, two U.S. officials cited by Axios said. This was Ratcliffe’s first trip to Moscow since he took office and the highest-level visit by a Trump administration official to Russia since January. Ahead of Ratcliffe’s trip, the U.S. told Ukraine that a senior delegation was traveling to Moscow and asked it to suspend strikes until it leaves, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. Ratcliffe departed Washington on Sunday and traveled on a U.S. government plane to Latvia. Several social media posts reported he had spent only a short time on the ground in Moscow. The nature of the journey suggested the stakes were high, Glen Howard, a Russia expert who is chairman of the Saratoga Foundation, a US-based think tank, told RFE/RL. CIA directors don’t go to Moscow unless it is to ask something,” Howard said, adding that they do not “travel all the way to Russia unless it is important.” “Burns went there in November 2021 before the Russian invasion to warn them not to invade Ukraine,” he said. At that meeting, former Director William Burns met with Nikolai Patrushev, who was then serving as secretary of Russia’s Security Council.

• Vladimir Putin has stepped up efforts to recruit women into the war against Ukraine, as Kyiv’s summer drone offensive piles unprecedented pressure on the Kremlin. Women can sign military contracts in any Russian region after a Spring rule change, with recruiters advertising positions on Telegram channels, according to Polish investigative publication Vot Tak. Russian women have increasingly reported unsolicited outreach. A resident of Kaliningrad named Nadezhda said she received a call offering a $35,000 contract immediately after enrolling her child in kindergarten; she declined, and recruiters never called again. Another woman, the mother of a seven-year-old, recalled her reaction to a similar pitch: “As soon as they told me, ‘Would you like to sign a contract to defend the motherland? We’re calling and offering it to girls, too,’ I said, ‘Are you f---ing nuts?’” Mediazona reported that even a pregnant woman received a military summons - The Daily Beast

• Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford came away from a visit to Kyiv on Tuesday acknowledging that he couldn’t promise President Volodymyr Zelensky that Congress would approve long-awaited sanctions against Russia anytime soon. “My best understanding I could pass on to him was that the House plans to take this up in September. But obviously, I don’t set the schedule on that,” Lankford said, noting that Zelensky urged for it to come soon. “He’s very interested in additional economic pressure on Russia, knowing that every dollar that they get, they use to be able to buy a weapon to be able to kill Ukrainians.” Lankford spoke to POLITICO from Poland, following his two-day trip to Kyiv over the country’s independence day. He said he spoke to Zelensky for about 20 minutes alongside his colleague Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) backstage at a prayer breakfast. Lankford appears to be the most prominent sitting elected Republican to make the trip to Kyiv for the annual event — particularly noteworthy after the death last month of Sen. Lindsey Graham, a staunch Ukraine advocate. Graham had been working with Blumenthal on the sanctions package the Senate passed in early August and which the House has yet to clear. Lankford, a longtime Ukraine supporter, pushed for the sanctions bill after Graham’s death, urging his colleagues to “finish what he started.” - POLITICO

Malaysia and Indonesia have agreed to step up measures to tackle transboundary haze as Putrajaya gears up for National Day celebrations amid unhealthy air quality levels linked to fires in neighbouring Indonesia. Sixteen areas in Malaysia had “unhealthy” Air Pollutant Index (API) readings as at 9am on Wednesday (Aug 26), local media reported. They included parts of Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia. A day earlier, about 30 areas had unhealthy air quality. Malaysia’s 69th National Day celebration is set to take place at Dataran Putrajaya on Aug 31 while the Malaysia Day celebration will be held in Kuching, Sarawak on Sep 16. Malaysia’s Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability (NRES) Minister Arthur Joseph Kurup said the commitment to ramp up measures with Indonesia was reached during a phone call on Monday with his counterpart Jumhur Hidayat, news agency Bernama reported. “With the El Nino phenomenon expected to intensify towards October 2026, coinciding with the Southwest Monsoon, both nations are fully committed to stepping up prevention and early suppression measures,” Arthur said in a statement. He also expressed the Malaysian government’s appreciation to Indonesia for granting official clearance for cloud seeding operations to cross its airspace, targeting areas along their shared border. Sarawak, which borders Indonesia’s Kalimantan on Borneo island, has been worst hit by the haze - CNA

The journals….

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is considering changing the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” as the trade war between the United States and Canada intensifies. Such a change would be reminiscent of the Republican president’s unilateral action last year by executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The United States and Canada are locked in a trade dispute, with Canada expected to announce retaliatory measures Tuesday. That’s in response to the Trump administration enacting 50% tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian goods over the weekend after talks between the countries broke down. “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer,” Trump said Tuesday on social media. Ontario is Canada’s most populous province and is home to the country’s auto industry. The rhetoric between the two countries is escalating, with Trump telling Canadian leaders Monday to “fall in line” or face consequences “far WORSE” than existing tariffs. Prime Minister Mark Carney has accused Washington of trying to subordinate Canada. Trump also threatened new 50% tariffs on Canadian vehicles, auto parts and steel, while Carney said U.S. trade demands showed that Washington wanted to “destroy our major industries,” including autos, steel and aluminum - AP

• The US cancelled planned military exercises with South Korea just weeks after scaling back separate drills with Seoul’s forces, amplifying worries in Asia over American support. The latest pullback was because of limited availability of US troops as a result of shortages caused by the Iran war; US President Donald Trump curtailed previous exercises in part over South Korea’s lack of support for the conflict. Though the two countries insist they remain close partners, US allies in the region have voiced alarm over the moves, which analysts say raise questions over American commitment to seeing off a rising China. Beijing, for its part, is reportedly completing construction of an artificial island in disputed waters of the South China Sea - Semafor

Andrei Fedorov, an adviser to the Kremlin, says there might be a “semi-military” response against UK drone factories by “unknown sources” over the sharing of blueprints for British-made cruise missile components. His comments on BBC Newsnight come as UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham says he plans to travel to the US next month with European leaders to lobby US President Trump on Ukraine’s defence needs. He said that while the details were not “fully confirmed”, it is “likely” he will go. The trip would be his first to the US since becoming prime minister in July. “Leaving today, I’m quite clear what I need to do in the next few weeks,” he said following his official visit to Ukraine on Monday, during which he promised to continue pressuring Russia. The UK has also agreed to hand over blueprints for British-made components for the Scalp missile, a French version of the UK’s Storm Shadow cruise missile. The blueprints will allow Ukraine to produce the long-range weapon domestically. Fedorov, who is Russia’s former deputy foreign minister, said Putin was facing “serious” pressure “to undertake certain measures against UK”. Asked on BBC Newsnight where the pressure was coming from, Fedorov responded, “public opinion polls, it’s coming from journalists, from mass media”. Asked what a “semi-military” response might look like, Fedorov said “it could take the form of something might happen with enterprises, with factories which are producing drones for Ukraine.” - BBC

• Ukraine faces a €23 billion hole in its defense budget this year, leaving Kyiv scrambling for cash to fight Russia even as Western leaders gathered in the capital to mark the country’s independence day and pledge ongoing support. The money is needed not only for weapons and air defense, but also to pay soldiers, support the families of those killed and ensure Ukraine has the supplies it needs to start 2027. The funding gap originated after the defense ministry brought forward spending originally planned for the second half of the year, while the EU’s €90 billion loan was delayed by roadblocks from Hungary. “At the beginning of the year, decisions were made at the ministry to use in the first half of the year funds that were intended to be disbursed in the second half,” President Zelensky said during a meeting with reporters on Saturday. The shortfall comes on top of €30 billion in funding Europe has already pledged to Ukraine this year as part of the €90 billion loan. Purchases made included “fiber-optic drones, middle-strike drones, interceptors,” former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told POLITICO in June.

New in The Globe and Mail today.

The pressure on Kyiv to hold elections is building. It is coming from Washington, from parts of Europe, and increasingly from inside Ukraine itself. My argument: under current conditions, a safe and credible nationwide vote isn’t realistic. Millions displaced, territory occupied, soldiers at the front, and no one able to guarantee a polling station won’t be hit. But “not now” can’t mean “not ever, and no discussion.” Zelensky has moves available short of a national ballot - and the longer he leaves the question open, the more likely someone else answers it for him.

Read it here

Locked In: Moscow Squeezes Exits as Mobilisation Fears Mount

Russians looking for a way out - whether across the border or off the passport rolls - are finding both routes narrowing at once.

Security forces have stepped up street-level recruitment, Euronews reports, with the anti-war project Idite lesom logging 14 appeals in mid-August from men who said they were detained and pressured into signing military contracts at police stations or enlistment offices. The group’s Ivan Chuvilyaev told Euronews the surge began around 10 August after only isolated cases in July, with reports stretching from Novorossiysk to Birobidzhan (but apparently not in the key cities of St. Petersburg or Moscow). Prison authorities are being used as a recruitment channel, and civilian recruiters are working debtors and the unemployed through job ads and personal contacts. More than 80,000 people have sought the project’s help since February 2022.

The pressure comes amid reports that the Kremlin is preparing a fresh mobilisation wave after September’s State Duma elections - claims Ukrainian officials including President Volodymyr Zelensky have repeatedly made, and which Moscow denies. Western intelligence sources told the Wall Street Journal that mobilisation-preparedness drills took place in Kaliningrad last month. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the reports as ideological agitation.

Groups helping Russians leave say inquiries have jumped sharply since mid-July. A coordinator with the German initiative inTransit told Euronews the mood recalls 2022, with people fearing that if they don’t go now they won’t be able to go later - and that a contract could be signed in their name whether they resist or not. The Unified Register of Military Records, live since May 2025, has made departure far harder once a summons lands.

Cutting ties permanently has also become steeper. RFE/RL reports that a law in force since 22 July raised the state duty for renouncing Russian citizenship from 4,200 rubles (about $50) to 50,000 rubles (roughly $592), while the consular fee for applications filed abroad went from $130 to $1,200. Applicants interviewed by RFE/RL’s Current Time describe years-long waits, checklists that shift without notice, documents that expire before appointments can be secured, and consulates that decline to advise. Moscow has published no nationwide renunciation figures since 2023; Estonia, one of the few countries reporting its own, recorded 107 renunciations in 2024 and 126 by late August 2025, amid backlogs after Russia shuttered consulates in Tartu and Narva.

Rights activist Lev Ponomaryov told RFE/RL he believes the obstacles are deliberate — designed to keep a visible exodus from Russian citizenship from becoming a story in itself.

Sources: Euronews (Alexander Kazakevich); RFE/RL, reporting by Current Time correspondent Artyom Filatov.

Who Runs the UN Next - and Who Decides

For the first time in its 80-year history, the United Nations may select a woman as secretary-general: five of the eight nominated candidates are women, and many member states argue the turn is long overdue. But as the Security Council grinds through its months-long, famously opaque selection process, gender is far from the only factor in play, the Washington Post reports.

The Trump administration, which holds a veto on the Council, is working to ensure the next leadership aligns with its plans for cutting the UN’s budget and workforce, according to the Post. Washington also wants fundamental change in how the body handles the three pillars of its charter: peace and security, development, and human rights - and adherence to international law. US Ambassador Mike Waltz told a Senate hearing this spring that the institution needs strong, effective leadership, with reform and a return to basics on peace and security at the top of American criteria.

High-level US officials at the New York mission conducted multiple candidate interviews over the summer, with two new names surfacing this month and more nominations possible before a final decision. Trump has not commented on a New York Post report that he wants FIFA president Gianni Infantino for the job, though one longtime observer quoted by the Post cautioned against ruling out an October surprise.

The clock is real: António Guterres’s five-year term ends on 31 December.

I’ll be in New York during UN week as this plays out - including taking part in a closed-door debate on whether the UN is still fit for purpose. More from the ground then.

A dangling packing strap on an Air Arabia plane led a London airport worker to a grim discovery: the body of a stowaway hidden in the aircraft’s landing gear compartment. The man, whose identity was not released, was found unresponsive following a flight from Tangier, Morocco, in June. Emergency services were called, and the man’s cause of death was determined to be cardiac arrest, followed by hypoxia and hypothermia. The coroner said the wheel compartment would have been extremely cold, with little available oxygen, and he had “reason to believe this death was unnatural.” Separately, a ground crew worker at Montreal Trudeau International Airport died hours after being struck by an aircraft backing up on a runway. The flight, operated by French bee, collided with the man at about 7:30 p.m. Monday, minutes before it was set to take off for Paris. The man was sent to hospital with serious injuries, according to Montreal police. Officials later said he was in life-threatening condition in hospital - The Daily Beast/Global News

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Ukraine marked 35 years of independence on Monday with U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham in Kyiv on his first foreign trip since taking office, co-chairing a Coalition of the Willing meeting alongside European Council President António Costa, Moldova’s Maia Sandu, Luxembourg’s Luc Frieden and Estonia’s Alar Karis. Burnham’s office said London had agreed to let the defence firm MBDA release classified information on British components in the long-range Scalp missile, the French twin of Britain’s Storm Shadow. The Associated Press counted nearly a dozen visiting leaders. A day earlier, the Nordic-Baltic Eight met President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv and, in a joint declaration published by the presidency, pledged to sustain military and financial support.

The optics buried a rough fortnight. On Aug. 18, ousted defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov broke the wartime taboo, calling in a nine-minute video address for a legal mechanism to hold elections and arguing, per CNN, that democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia.

The next day, Zelensky dismissed Iryna Mudra as deputy head of his office by decree, hours after NABU and SAPO announced an operation targeting an alleged criminal organization led by a sitting and a former MP and involving senior presidential-office officials. Ukrainska Pravda reported searches at premises linked to Mudra and MP Vadym Stolar; MP Oleksiy Honcharenko said she was detained that night.

Zelensky answered over the weekend, telling journalists an election now would be a tsunami splitting the country - and impossible while Moscow refuses any ceasefire. Time noted he also disclosed a US$27-billion defence ministry shortfall for the rest of the year.

Connecting the dots: in December, under Trump’s pressure, Zelensky said Ukraine could vote in 60 to 90 days given security guarantees, and asked his party to draft the law. Eight months on, no draft. Meanwhile KIIS finds those willing to wait until the fighting ends have fallen to 57 per cent from 69 in March. Fedorov didn’t create that mood. He read it.

• Russia’s second-largest retailer, Ozon, reported that four of its logistics centers across southern Russia were targeted in the overnight attacks. Ozon said a large fire broke out at its logistics hub in the town of Enem in the Krasnodar region as a result of a drone attack. It also reported a fire at one of its facilities in the republic of Dagestan following drone strikes. Multiple videos shared on social media showed multiple drones flying into the warehouse in Dagestan. early Monday morning before bursting into fireballs. Men with automatic rifles could be seen trying to shoot down the drones as they flew toward the facility. Ozon also said workers were evacuated from its warehouses in the nearby republic of Adygeya and the Stavropol region, though neither facility was damaged, it added. Shares in Ozon fell by as much as 28% on the Moscow Exchange following news of the attacks, while shares in its major shareholder, private equity firm AFK Sistema, fell by more than 13%. Ukraine began attacking Ozon warehouses this weekend after more than a month of strikes against facilities owned by its biggest competitor Wildberries. Officials in Kyiv have accused Wildberries of supplying the Russian military with drone parts and other equipment. Ozon suspended operations at its logistics center in the Samara region after it was hit by Ukrainian drones on Saturday - Moscow Times

US President Donald Trump said Monday that he would double tariffs on Canadian vehicles beginning in 2027, as the neighbouring countries spiral towards an escalating trade war. “On January First, 2027, Tariffs on all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel, will be increased to 50%,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. The current US tariff on autos stands at 25% for non-US content, while imported steel to the United States generally faces a 50% duty. Trump’s latest threat comes after the North American neighbours failed Friday to reach a deal to avert new 50% tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on select Canadian goods. The White House had alleged “discriminatory treatment” by Canada against US alcohol, automobile and dairy products in rolling out the duties. Trump delayed their implementation by three days last week as Washington and Ottawa stepped up negotiations towards a trade pact. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Monday said Canada has been “pragmatic, patient and persevering” in an effort to reach an agreement with the US, but his priority was to get the best deal for his country, not a deal “at any price or any time frame”. “The goal of our trade negotiations with the United States has always been to get the best deal for Canadians, never a deal at any price or on any time frame,” Carney said. Following the collapse of trade talks, Carney announced retaliatory tariffs on the US. Carney accused Washington of using “economic integration as a weapon” and said “its signature was written in pencil” - France 24

• Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Canada should be prepared to cut off electricity and critical minerals to the U.S.: ‘You won’t get a grain of sand out of Ontario,’ he said. Meanwhile, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling for Carney to reconvene Parliament to get details on the proposed U.S. trade deal he rejected. Carney has said he will brief opposition leaders early this week - CBC

• Carney said at an event in Lévis, Quebec that he did not rule out a return to the negotiating table with the Americans. However, that would need to be preceded by an attitude that Canada is “not a subsidiary of the U.S., that Canadian industry will not be disadvantaged, that Canadian industry will not be subject to “constant headwinds.” He concluded: “Thats not something we will accept.”

President Donald Trump heads into the second half of his term with key vacancies among his senior White House staff. That means whoever comes off the bench must contend with the possibility of a Democratic-controlled Congress, a slew of subpoenas, a lingering war in the Middle East and an open Republican presidential primary. James Braid, the top liaison to Congress, this week announced his exit. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she would depart the week before. Replacements for either have not been announced. Though it’s not unusual for staff to depart around the midterms, Trump’s desire to run the country through a handful of close, fiercely loyal aides means each loss is more impactful than in a White House where power and responsibility are more diffuse. Trump announced Friday that his pardon attorney and longtime ally Ed Martin would leave for the private sector, coming on the heels of a similar announcement regarding White House counsel David Warrington. Before these departures, Trump’s second term was notable for most aides staying in their posts and faithfully executing Trump’s desires — largely without infighting or distractions - POLITICO

China hosted Iran’s deputy foreign minister for talks last week related to the US-Iran war, Beijing announced Sunday, disclosing the previously unreported meeting one day before Washington is expected to unveil “the toughest sanctions in history” against Tehran. The Trump administration has warned of an “Economic D-Day” for Iran and its trading partners, including China, a major importer of Iranian oil. Beijing has moved to insulate itself economically, slashing crude imports nearly 50% since the war started, according to The Wall Street Journal, and bolstering domestic energy. Experts warn that Beijing’s resilience could complicate Washington’s strategy. China, writes Shanghai Institutes for International Studies’ Zhao Long, is adept at “containing spillover, reducing risks, diversifying dependencies, [and] avoiding strategic entanglement.” - Semafor

• The Trump administration on Monday announced an effort intended to cut Tehran off from the global economy. But after days of framing the plans as an “economic D-Day,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced more of a warning shot: Without naming names, he said countries that continue to do business with Tehran would face U.S. sanctions. It was not clear what the United States could do to further disrupt Iran’s flailing economy without inflaming tensions with China, the world’s largest buyer of Iranian oil - NYT

A law signed by President Shavkat Mirziyoev on August 14 expands the powers of the Presidential Administration, headed by his 41-year-old eldest daughter Saida Mirziyoeva, making its chief the deputy chair of the Security Council — the body overseeing Uzbekistan’s security, law enforcement and military structures. She will also coordinate the council’s members. London-based Central Asia analyst Alisher Ilhomov told RFE/RL she was already the de facto number two, but without a firm legal basis; the new law gives her one, letting her consolidate authority over the security agencies. Mirziyoeva joined government in 2019 with no political background, and was named to head the restored post of administration chief in June 2025, after taking the Uzbek co-chair seat on the American-Uzbek Business and Investment Council that November. The law also grants some senior administration officials lifetime immunity after leaving office — five years for other managers — covering their homes, vehicles, correspondence and electronic data, and sharply limiting criminal proceedings against them. Gazeta.uz journalist Shukhrat Latipov questioned both the scope of those guarantees and the speed of passage: the lower house approved it on August 6, the Senate on August 7, and Mirziyoev signed a week later.There has been no official signal that Mirziyoeva is being groomed to succeed her father, who won a third term in 2023 with 87 percent and pushed through a constitutional overhaul letting him stay in office until 2037. Ilhomov reads the change less as a handover plan than as insurance — a trusted figure positioned to hold the state together if something unexpected removes Mirziyoev. Reporting by Farangis Najibullah and Khiromon Baqozoda for RFE/RL, August 22, 2026.

The Netherlands will not participate in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, its broadcaster said on Monday, saying the event can “no longer be considered neutral” given divisions over the Gaza war. “It is undeniable that international conflicts are increasingly affecting the Contest, undermining its neutral character. The Eurovision Song Contest has therefore become a platform for division,” said Taco Zimmerman, Director-General of AVROTROS, in a statement from the broadcaster. The contest has recently been hit by a wave of boycotts over Israel’s participation. Earlier this month, organisers announced they were excluding any country involved in an armed conflict from hosting the competition. “However, the recently announced changes...do not provide sufficient confidence that the independent and neutral character of the Eurovision Song Contest has been restored,” said the AVROTROS statement. Israel came close to winning the competition in both 2025 and 2026, ultimately finishing second on each occasion. Next year’s event, the world’s biggest live televised music event, will take place on 15 May in Bulgaria’s Black Sea city of Burgas - Euronews

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The Verdict: Ottawa walked. Trump had signalled a deal was at hand on Tuesday and paused the tariffs to let it be finished; by Friday midnight there was no deal. Carney says the trade war was not Canada's choice but that good-faith efforts were met with a bad offer. Fifty per cent duties on US$20-billion (about C$28-billion) of Canadian goods took effect Saturday. Canada retaliates Sept. 8.

What Scuttled It: Not softwood, not dairy - trucks. Washington offered to cut tariffs on Canadian cars from 25 to 15 per cent, then clarified late in the process that the relief covered light vehicles only. That leaves out the F-350s and F-450s Ford is retooling its Oakville, Ontario plant to build - a $5-billion commitment a Globe and Mail source says is now in question - and the Silverados coming off GM's Oshawa line. Carney says no rationale was given. A source with knowledge of the talks told the Globe that Canadian negotiators learned of the exclusion only late in the process. The second fight was over parts: Ottawa wanted Canadian content treated the way American content already is. Washington balked. Without that, even 15 per cent wasn't the win it looked like.

And The Part That Isn’t About Cars: Carney cited American language that would have constrained Canada’s ability to negotiate with third countries - a sovereignty clause dressed as a trade term. Quebec’s red lines were cultural: bilingual labelling and French-language policy. Premier Christine Fréchette says language isn’t negotiable.

Washington’s Version: The USTR says Canada walked from the best terms offered any major exporter and blames Ottawa for late demands and reversals - a precise inversion of Carney’s account. Both capitals accuse the other of moving the goalposts. Then Trump, posting Sunday morning after the tariffs landed: Canada wants the benefits of statehood without the statehood. The annexation line never really left the room; it just goes quiet while a deal looks possible.

The Tell: Both capitals agree trucks killed the deal. Neither agrees who put them on the table. US officials tell POLITICO Ottawa made a late ask on heavy trucks; Carney says Washington carved trucks out after the auto framework was settled. POLITICO reports that Greer ran the talks while the concessions in play - autos, steel, aluminum - sat with Lutnick at Commerce, which felt the framework was sprung on it.

If that’s right, nobody moved the goalposts. There were two sets. And that’s worse than bad faith, which is at least a position you can negotiate against. This is a counterparty that can’t bind itself.

Pretty Much Seeing Eye-to-Eye: Which in Canada is the real story. Poilievre, Blanchet, Lewis and Doug Ford all backed the walkaway. A Léger poll released Monday had 56 per cent of Canadians demanding no further concessions. Fifty years ago, Canada gave America a book celebrating what it called the "unique friendship between two countries." This weekend Carney read the newer room. He also used a word Canadian prime ministers do not casually apply to Washington: "attacked."

In retrospect, perhaps a comfortable Canada-US partnership under Trump was always a bridge too far. The warning was there when he delayed the opening of the multibillion-dollar Gordie Howe International Bridge - itself a symbol of the enduring partnership he was already putting under strain.

Watch: The treaty, not the tariffs. Carney noted Saturday that the tariffs are bad news for the USMCA agreement covering most North American trade, which is up for renegotiation this year. That’s the real board. Greer says there are no further talks scheduled; Washington is instead preparing measures answering Canadian retaliation. Watch whether Ford’s Oakville commitment survives the fourth quarter - and whether Mexico gets caught in the crossfire of a dispute it isn’t party to. In the meantime, listen for the sound of California zinfandel, Oregon pinot noir and Kentucky bourbon going down the drain in the provinces that still have some to pour.

The Uncomfortable Part, Oh Canada: There’s a case to be made that this is good for Canada, and it isn’t the one about resilience.

We are victims of our own geography: ninety per cent of us live within a couple hours of the border, and we built an economy around the assumption that the easy market would remain easy. It didn't. We should have looked east and west decades ago and mostly didn’t, because south was closer.

What we lack isn’t capacity. It’s appetite.

At a Canadian business event in Singapore this year I listened to people complain about the fifteen-hour flight and the jet lag, and hedge about opening a permanent presence in Asia. Lee Kuan Yew once described the same problem to me from the other end: the Singaporean who won’t get on the plane to China because home is comfortable. Dare I say it? We are a much larger version of that, with much less excuse.

If it takes a trade war to get Canadians off the couch - to make snowbirds reconsider the Florida condo, to make a company stop treating Asia as an unaffordable business trip - then perhaps the tariffs will have bought us something after all. Not militancy. A footing.

We are going to have to become more aggressive than we find comfortable. We should have started years ago.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has “questions to answer” about corruption in his government, his sacked defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov has told the BBC. Fedorov, a popular minister who modernised the armed forces and pioneered drone warfare, was fired last month after reportedly falling out with the head of Ukraine’s armed forces. He told the BBC a money laundering investigation announced last week raised questions about Zelensky’s awareness of potential corruption in his inner circle. Fedorov also reiterated that “democracy should not be the hostage of Putin” - but stopped short of declaring his own political ambitions days after he posted a video calling for elections in Ukraine. Fedorov said it was his “moral right” to start the conversation about elections. “We should not be afraid of discussing it. That’s what democracy is all about. If I cannot share my ideas and be open about them with my own society, then what are we fighting for?” If elections were never held, he said, “then we are no longer a democracy”. He shied away from criticising the president directly and declined to answer whether he backs Zelensky to win any election - BBC

• Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected calls for wartime elections to be held in the country, calling them “a tsunami” that would “split Ukraine” at a time when Russia is increasings its deadly attacks. Speaking to journalists in Kyiv on August 22, Zelensky said: “Elections right now are a tsunami for the state that will split Ukraine. Therefore, my strategy is to bring the country to the end of the war and preserve an independent and sovereign state,” Zelensky said. He made the comments as Kyiv hosted the NB8-Ukraine summit on August 23, bringing Nordic and Baltic leaders together with Zelensky on the eve of Ukraine’s Independence Day. Leaders from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Norway convened in the capital, according to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha. Other senior representatives from partner countries were also in attendance - RFE/RL

• Russian President Vladimir Putin said in comments published on Saturday that Kyiv had opened “Pandora’s box” with its strikes on Russian economic targets, saying that Russia would hit back at Ukraine’s “most sensitive economic sectors.” Ukraine has this summer escalated a campaign of drone strikes targeting Russian economic infrastructure, including oil refineries and online retailers’ warehouses, seeking to destroy infrastructure it says is central to Russia’s war effort. Russia has responded with strikes against Ukrainian economic infrastructure, including Ukrainian grain exports via the Black Sea. “The Kyiv regime set out to damage our economy. What did it do? It opened this Pandora’s box itself. Well then, expect a response targeting your most sensitive economic sectors,” Putin said in comments to a Russian state television journalist. He said that the strikes, which have jeopardized Ukraine’s agricultural exports, would not cause global food shortages, because Russia would be able to replace Ukrainian exports, even as Kyiv has targeted Russian grain export infrastructure. “We do face challenges regarding the shipment of our goods, but we will resolve these issues. Consequently, there will be no shortage on the global market,” Putin said. Russia and Ukraine had previously adhered to a Turkish-brokered deal to protect grain exports on the Black Sea. But Russia exited the deal in 2023. The Russian leader also restated his position that Moscow is open to peace talks, but only on the basis of “realities on the ground,” rather than what he called “exotic” proposals that he said had been made by Ukraine via intermediaries - Moscow Times

Europe continues to struggle with the consequences of extreme weather, with Serbia, Bosnia, Spain, and Poland all facing severe conditions. In Serbia, the EU has sent helicopters and firefighters to support local crews battling a blaze that has engulfed more than 1,600 hectares of vegetation in the Deliblatska Pescara nature reserve, 60 kilometres east of Belgrade. The effort is also being assisted by a Russian Ilyushin Il-76 water bomber deployed since Thursday, alongside several Serbian army helicopters. Meanwhile, Spain has faced a weekend of contrasting weather extremes. Torrential rain and flooding in Tarragona left 11 people injured and disrupted road and rail services after more than 145 mm fell in some areas. Further strong thunderstorms are forecast across eastern and northeastern Spain, while an unusually powerful Atlantic low is bringing heavy rain to Galicia.Further north, severe weather has also struck Poland. Since Friday, storms have wreaked havoc across the country, with firefighters responding to more than 6,500 incidents - Euronews

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