“Know when to walk away from the table,” US President Donald Trump counselled in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal. Following repeated threats from the White House that it would step back from Ukraine peace talks unless they quickly yielded results, the US State Department has announced that America will no longer mediate discussions and that “it is now between the two parties” to make progress.

There is always the possibility that this is in fact a piece of political theatre from Trump. Presumably still dazed from the shock realisation that former KGB officer and current Russian leader Vladimir Putin might not have been acting honestly but “tapping (him) along”, the US President may feel that a dramatic storming out of the negotiating room is what’s needed to make Moscow focus. Indeed, back in 2014 Trump remarked that “the best deals you can make are the ones you walk away from…and then get them with better terms.”

If so, he will be disappointed, since the US withdrawal is far more likely to scupper hopes of peace than encourage them. In its announcement, the US State Department urged Kyiv and Moscow to “present and develop concrete ideas about how this conflict is going to end”. Yet, given earlier US intelligence assessments that Putin remains determined to hold sway over Ukraine in the long term, it is fair to say that any endgame scenarios being drawn up in the Kremlin hinge upon Moscow dominating its neighbour, and so will prove unacceptable to Kyiv.

The parties are too far apart to realistically find common ground by themselves, with their mutual intransigence already amply demonstrated. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week refused to legally recognise Russia’s occupation of Crimea, while Moscow rejected Trump’s proposed peace plan. The Kremlin is, in its own words, in no rush to reach an agreement.

For its part, having just signed the minerals deal and with US military aid on the way, Kyiv will be less likely to negotiate in the absence of any American arm-twisting. Zelensky will also be mindful of domestic pressures, which may discourage him from making the compromises necessary for a deal. Half of Ukrainians still oppose surrendering land under any circumstances, while Kyiv officials are worried that acceding to an agreement deemed unjust at home would stir up unrest in the country.

Ukrainian lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi this week claimed that Zelensky’s position is made more complicated by his desire to “hold on to power at any cost and, possibly, win the [presidential] elections if they take place”. That does not make for a leader willing to risk his popularity by readily offering enough concessions that Moscow would engage, especially when that resulting agreement would bring about an end to martial law and elections that Zelensky would lose thanks to his having signed away parts of Ukraine.

It took just 100 days for Trump to lose interest, this particular deal having eluded a man who considers himself the ultimate dealmaker. Yet, with neither side truly striving for peace and without American encouragement to spur momentum, it is clear that — in the words of US Vice President JD Vance — this war is “not going to end any time soon”.

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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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