Russia has announced that it will no longer abide by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, meaning that it could again use short- and intermediate-range nuclear-capable missiles. Although the US withdrew in 2019, accusing Russia of having violated the agreement, Moscow had until now observed a self-imposed unilateral moratorium on the deployment of such arms.

Why the sudden change? It would be easy to consider this merely the latest bout of sabre-rattling in the ongoing tit-for-tat exchanges between US President Donald Trump and Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev. Last week, Trump said he was sending nuclear-capable submarines to the “appropriate regions” in response to Medvedev’s own nuclear threats.

Yet, on one point, it may actually be worth listening to what the Kremlin is saying. Moscow has a long history of leveraging nuclear threats to achieve its aims. It is therefore unlikely to be mere coincidence that its statement simultaneously raised concerns about Washington and Berlin’s plans to deploy Typhon and Dark Eagle missile systems on German territory from 2026. With Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Warsaw and even Berlin itself all within range of Moscow’s own deployed missile systems, this may be another case of Russia adopting a strategy of nuclear blackmail based around threatening Nato capitals, this time in a bid to get Germany and the US to back down.

The potential ramifications don’t end there, and there is a newly heightened risk of a nuclear incident. The Robert Lansing Institute notes that, following Moscow’s exit from the INF Treaty, the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear-capable systems such as “the modernized 9M729 Iskander-M or RS-26 Rubezh increases the chance of a sudden or accidental nuclear exchange due to shorter flight times and ambiguous payloads”.

That is before one considers the heightened risk to Ukraine. Back in June, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Moscow was mass-producing its Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile, which it had used to strike Dnipro last November. Lest this seem an idle threat, last week the Russian leader revealed that Oreshniks will be positioned in Belarus by the end of the year.

It is currently impossible to know for sure what impact Oreshniks may have on the battlefield in Ukraine. November’s hit didn’t carry an explosive charge and so we have not witnessed what Oreshniks are capable of when fully loaded. We also do not know how many will be deployed, what battlefield strategies they will serve, and whether Russia truly believes its own propaganda about the new weapon.

Yet mass production implies a strong degree of faith. As a further sign that this could have a significant impact on the war in Ukraine, Putin has claimed that the Oreshnik travels at 10 times the speed of sound, cannot be intercepted, and is so powerful that the use of several in one conventional strike could prove as devastating as a nuclear strike. It also has a range that violates the INF Treaty. Should allies attempt to assist Ukraine, perhaps by supplying some form of defensive weaponry, we have seen the nuclear blackmail that awaits European capitals.

It would be easy and comforting to treat this as another of Russia’s empty threats. It would also be wrong. Moscow’s exit from the INF Treaty is not intended to intimidate Trump, but to clear the path for the potentially devastating use of Oreshniks in Ukraine. When Medvedev tauntingly posted to “expect further steps”, he addressed it to “all our opponents”. He was likely thinking of neither Washington nor Brussels, but of Kyiv.

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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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