What, according to Vladimir Putin, is Russia’s Temple Mount? The answer to this quiz question is: Crimea. It has “invaluable civilisational and even sacral importance for Russia”, Putin remarked in 2014, “like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism”. Yet, for all its “spiritual” worth, it is the peninsula’s strategic value that is likely looming in the Russian President’s thinking these days.

On Friday, local authorities declared a state of emergency after weeks of sustained Ukrainian air strikes. Kyiv’s campaign to isolate Crimea has battered the area’s transport, military and energy infrastructure, leaving residents grappling with fuel shortages and rolling blackouts. Civilians have subsequently complained of a lack of government preparation.

Crimea’s strife is an embarrassment for the Kremlin, disrupting the start of tourist season and prompting inhabitants to flee from territory that Moscow has endeavoured to portray as safe. The peninsula holds deep personal and political significance for Putin: he has argued that it “has always been an inseparable part of Russia” and that the 1954 transfer of territory to Ukraine constituted an injustice in need of correction.

The 2014 annexation sent his approval ratings soaring, fuelled a wave of patriotic fervour, and was cast as the restoration of Russia’s great power status. It is the territorial acquisition most closely identified with the man himself and its loss would be a political as well as a military blow, puncturing one of the central claims to Putin’s legacy and “legitimacy”.

Crimea has also played a pivotal strategic role in the war, providing the base from which Russian forces launched their 2022 offensive into the south of Ukraine. Isolation operations, such as the one being carried out by Ukraine, often precede an attempt to seize the territory. Yet, in this instance, that seems improbable, with Kyiv likely lacking the resources for anything more than holding a small area, even if it did launch an amphibious assault.

Rather, these attacks form part of Ukraine’s plan aimed at pressuring Moscow to come to the negotiating table. With the Kremlin continuing to drag its feet, Ukraine’s Crimea campaign has reportedly taken Putin by surprise and shattered his illusions at a time when his generals were providing overly optimistic predictions for territorial gains in the Donbas. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also revelled in seeing Russia being forced to redeploy air defence systems to Moscow and Crimea “at the expense of weakening other sectors of their territory and the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine”.

Strikes offer further military advantages by disrupting Russian supply lines to occupied Ukraine. With Kyiv’s attacks sabotaging alternative logistics routes through Russian-held territory, Crimea — and the Kerch Bridge — has become an increasingly critical artery for supplying Moscow’s forces along the Dnipro. As Ukrainian Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has noted, “there is a direct correlation between how much we strike logistics and the number of assault operations taking place on the front line.”

Attacks have pushed out Moscow’s remaining Black Sea Fleet command and control units to Novorossiysk. Control over Crimea is key to disrupting supplies in and out of Odesa and cutting off access to the Sea of Azov. Kyiv seeks to isolate the peninsula entirely while systematically damaging critical infrastructure, thereby creating siege conditions for inhabitants. British intelligence assesses that the degradation of Russian air defences has expanded Kyiv’s opportunities for attack. The bridge, a potent symbol of Crimea’s integration into Russia, has already been temporarily shut.

From Catherine the Great’s 1783 annexation to Putin’s over two centuries later, the peninsula is of such strategic importance that, according to former US Army Europe commander Ben Hodges, whichever side controls Crimea wins this war. Ukraine is demonstrating that while Russia may possess Crimea, this is not the same as controlling it. And for the Russians there? In the words of Fedorov, “hell is beginning.”

---

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

BethanyAElliott

---

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.

---

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

miquelvilam

---