Russia’s chief negotiator has been tempering expectations of late. Despite Donald Trump reportedly wanting a Ukraine ceasefire agreement by 20 April this year, Grigory Karasin, who led the Russian delegation in the ceasefire discussions with the US last week, recently said that he expects no result until the end of this year or beyond. Unsurprisingly, Trump was reportedly “very angry”, threatening secondary tariffs on Moscow.

This is not the first indication of the Kremlin eyeing up 2026 as the timeframe for a truce. Last month, a document by a think tank closely aligned with Russia’s FSB security service urged that “a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine crisis cannot happen before 2026”. So why is the Kremlin so eager to delay a peace deal until next year specifically?

Moscow wants time to put itself in a better position for the negotiations to come. In line with recommendations outlined by the think tank, Vladimir Putin last month publicly offered that the US could develop his country’s mineral deposits, including in the occupied territories of Ukraine. Putin knows that the White House will be even less likely to push for him to withdraw from those regions if it is comfortably ensconced in a lucrative deal to extract the area’s resources.

That is not the limit to Moscow’s machinations, with Russia trying to strengthen its hand in peace talks by capturing more land. Last week, Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Russia was preparing to launch a new spring offensive in the coming weeks, with a particular focus on the Sumy and Kharkiv oblasts. Ukrainian analysts expect a multipronged attack which could last six to nine months.

Russia is also waging war away from the battlefield. The same think tank recommended using this period to worsen America’s relations with both China and Europe. The plan seems to have already swung into action: the Kremlin has demanded that the Russian Agricultural Bank must be reconnected to the Swift international payment system for Moscow to implement the Black Sea ceasefire, a condition that requires European acquiescence.

Yet, while US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants to keep the proposal “on the table”, Germany has distanced itself from the idea and European Commission Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Anitta Hipper is insisting upon the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine as a precondition. Agreeing would entail acceding to a Russian demand, while refusing would put Europe on a collision course with a US President furious it was standing in his way.

Given that delays work in Moscow’s favor, why set any deadline and not just keep going indefinitely? Ukrainian intelligence indicates that the financial cost of the war is too high for Russia, taking resources away from its own development and large-scale projects, and that the Kremlin wants an end to sanctions so as to access the foreign technologies it needs for gas production and in the Arctic. Kyiv’s spooks further hold that Russia wishes to widen its horizons beyond the conflict in its backyard to concentrate on geopolitical rivalry with the US and China.

The Kremlin’s tactic of signaling interest in peacemaking while simultaneously dragging its feet at every stage is now so obvious that even Trump is picking up on it. The impatient US President can reassure himself on one point, however — this is not a strategy that Moscow intends to implement forever, with the Kremlin likely seeing next year as the deadline for a ceasefire. After four brutal years of war, Putin may then, finally, be ready to come to the negotiating table.

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Bethany Elliott is a writer specialising in Russia and Eastern Europe.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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