World Briefing Hot Take
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.
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