Ukraine’s readiness to accept a 30-day ceasefire is, on the face of it, a broadly positive development. After weeks of public tensions between US President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, bilateral relations seem to be back on track. Zelensky will be invited to the White House and, after Kyiv proactively put together ceasefire proposals, Trump cannot criticize it for being an obstacle to peace. More practically, US military aid and intelligence sharing have been restored. This will prove a relief after the cut-offs put Ukrainian forces under severe pressure in Russia’s Kursk region, thereby risking one of Kyiv’s few bargaining chips for future negotiations.

A question mark now hovers over Ukraine’s presidential elections. This ceasefire appears to fit in with the US plan for Zelensky to face the public at the polling booth after an initial truce, the winner then negotiating permanent peace with Moscow. Whether that is still Washington’s intention remains uncertain, but the US administration was serious enough to recently hold talks with opposition figures Yulia Tymoshenko and Petro Poroshenko to assess the likelihood of an early vote.

For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin has long pushed the narrative that postponed elections under martial law render Zelensky illegitimate, and mean he cannot sign agreements with him. Since this is a topic on which the White House and Kremlin have common ground, Putin will likely demand such a vote — no matter the associated difficulties — as a condition for full-scale peace negotiations to begin.

What of the coming days? Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday stressed that “the ball is now in Russia’s court”, and the US is doing all it can to ensure that Moscow duly volleys it back. Trump has indicated his intention to phone the Russian leader, his Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff is reportedly visiting Putin this week, and Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has not ruled out contact with the US administration.

While Ukrainian officials judge a less than 50% chance of Putin agreeing to the truce, it is in fact likely to be 100%. Despite Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s downbeat assessment that his country will not accept compromises that jeopardize lives, the Kremlin understands the propaganda value of presenting itself as a peacemaker. At stake here is a prize of infinitely greater value than a few more stretches of bombed-out land: the ear of a US president sympathetic to Moscow.

The Kremlin knows that Trump wants a quick deal to stick on his Nobel Peace Prize application form, putting it squarely in Moscow’s interest to appear to be working towards an agreement. In return for staying in Trump’s good books, Russia can hope for an end to sanctions, a much-desired reset in bilateral relations with America, and an invitation to come in from the cold of diplomatic isolation. Russia’s SVR intelligence service this morning boasted of the CIA and SVR directors agreeing to henceforth maintain regular contact. Russia is unlikely to risk upsetting the famously capricious Trump as he pulls away from Europe and NATO, lest he suddenly change course to spite Moscow for having botched “his” peace process.

Moscow will likely abide by the ceasefire, despite having violated multiple truces before. The Kremlin understands that breaking the armistice would constitute self-sabotage, with the real game to be played at the full-scale peace negotiations to follow. Moscow will then take advantage of its rapprochement with Washington to push for concessions unacceptable to Ukrainians and Europeans. Western security officials indicate that Putin will make maximalist demands on land, peacekeepers, and Ukraine’s neutrality. As the best-case scenario, he may win significant concessions, with the US using the threat of fighting without military aid and intelligence to twist Ukraine’s arm. Even in the worst-case scenario, if those demands force talks to break down, his forces are back to war having rested, restocked and regrouped.

“Prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” counselled Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov before the US-Ukraine discussions. An old proverb, yet entirely fitting for current circumstances. While the truce may appear to be in Kyiv’s favor, Moscow can still hope for the best.

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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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