On Sunday, as Moscow and Kyiv prepared for a second round of meetings in Istanbul, Ukraine used a barrage of drones to target Russia’s fleet of strategic bombers at their home bases deep inside Russian territory. The operation, planned for over a year, is Kyiv’s latest high-risk attempt to shift the trajectory of a war that is increasingly moving in Moscow’s favor. But while it appears spectacular at first glance, the strike will not help Ukraine’s battlefield position or improve its prospects in its three-year war against Russia. Instead, it is likely to hurt Ukraine strategically and operationally, hardening Russian resolve, increasing the risk of escalation, and placing remaining military support from the Trump administration under threat.

Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb” carried a high shock value, not only for its creativity but also for the targets chosen and the resulting visuals of Russian aircraft aflame. Ukrainian leaders were quick to celebrate. Volodymyr Zelensky called it a “brilliant result”, proclaiming that “we are doing everything to make Russia feel the need to end this war.”

Any Ukrainian victory will be Pyrrhic, however. The loss of some of its strategic long-range bombers, if confirmed, would undoubtedly be a blow to Russia’s military force and will be especially concerning to Moscow given the role the aircraft play in the country’s nuclear deterrent. But the costs imposed by Ukraine’s attack will not prevent Russia from continuing its war of attrition on Ukraine’s eastern front, or force it to back off its campaign of drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian cities.

Even in the attack’s aftermath, Russia has a large and capable air force ready to support the war in Ukraine. Just as importantly, the Kremlin’s military advantage will be unaffected by the latest strike. Russia’s defense production will proceed unabated, and Moscow will continue to exploit Ukraine’s shortages of manpower and weapons to take additional ground in Ukraine’s eastern regions, whittling away Kyiv’s remaining sovereign territory.

Ukraine’s attack will also do little to convince Moscow that it is time to stop fighting. If anything, it will have the opposite effect, strengthening Russian resolve and popular support for the war. Far from pushing for peace, Russia is likely to retaliate by escalating attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure or surging Russian forces along the line of contact.

What’s more, the Ukrainian operation weakens Kyiv’s position in ongoing negotiations to end the war. First, it plays into Vladimir Putin’s narrative that it is Kyiv, not Moscow, which is the instigator of the war and the impediment to peace. Second, it places at risk what remains of American support for Ukraine.

Coming on the eve of peace talks, Donald Trump — who was reportedly not warned ahead of time — is likely to see the attack as a direct violation of his demands that both sides find a way to end the war. Washington will be spooked by Ukraine’s willingness to target a piece of Russia’s nuclear triad without consultation, given the risks of nuclear escalation such a decision brings with it. Whether the Trump administration will impose consequences on Kyiv remains to be seen, but a cutoff of US military aid or intelligence sharing would further constrain Ukraine’s military on the eastern front, perhaps severely.

Ukraine’s leaders may hope that high-profile strikes on valuable Russian targets will galvanize its international supporters and prove it can still achieve a military victory. The reality, however, is that these operations divert valuable resources away from the defensive battle that Ukraine should be focused on in its own eastern regions. In the end, Kyiv’s daring attack on Russia’s bomber fleet may do more harm than help to Ukraine, costing it US military and intelligence support, strengthening Russia’s will to fight, and eroding its leverage at the bargaining table, even as its own military struggles to hold on along the front line. This is a high price for a fragile Ukraine to pay.

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Jennifer Kavanagh is a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities.

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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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