Yesterday Donald Trump claimed that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has been “playing with fire” — and that had it not been for the US President, “lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia.” This came shortly after the US leader declared that Putin had “gone absolutely crazy” and had been “needlessly killing a lot of people”.

While Trump’s remarks could have come at any moment over the past three years, on this occasion they were provoked by Moscow’s drone and missile strikes over the weekend — the largest aerial attack since the invasion began. However, there had been signs earlier of Trump’s frustration with Putin. This month, the US President confided to donors that his Russian counterpart still wants “the whole” of Ukraine and privately told aides of his shock that Moscow had bombed areas with children.

This weekend’s assault demonstrates the limits of the Kremlin’s strategy of signalling an interest in peace while waging war. It risks puncturing Trump’s inflated ego, showing that Putin is beyond his control and cannot be lured to the negotiating table. It exposes the hollowness of Trump’s affirmations that Russia seeks peace, allowing European leaders to crow that the US is finally waking up to reality. And it stands in the way of the US President’s much-desired Nobel Peace Prize.

Then there are the domestic considerations, with Russia hawks in Trump’s own party trying to force his hand. As such, the US President is reportedly considering stronger measures as soon as this week, yet remains undecided and could still walk away from peace talks. Indeed, his downbeat psychological assessment of the Russian leader could be empty rhetoric. Trump is famously mercurial, with a track record of threatening sanctions on Russia, only to do nothing once the headlines have faded away.

Yet, after the past few days, there has potentially been a real alteration in Trump’s thinking. US officials have revealed that he had previously refrained from targeting Putin because of his personal disdain for Zelensky, his belief that sanctions would harm bilateral trade without deterring Russia’s military, and his conviction that he understood Putin well enough to persuade him to end the war.

Ukrainian officials suggested that this weekend’s attacks could be the opening phase of a new ground offensive, a prospect that left Trump “surprised”. He will need to get over that shock in time to adopt a more consistent strategy once broader operations are underway. He has already prepared “carrot and stick” measures such as the relaxation of sanctions, counterbalanced by the threat of more aid to Ukraine and tough measures on Russia’s central bank, Moscow’s sovereign assets and countries receiving Putin’s oil.

Increased weaponry to Ukraine would not only push Putin to the negotiating table but allow a more confident Zelensky to sit at it. Secondary sanctions on Russia’s energy sales would have the best chance of grinding its war machine to a halt and reportedly have European support, yet could send shockwaves through the global economy. That said, Trump’s favourite word is “tariff” — and the world has already seen his willingness to adopt unorthodox economic measures.

Putin’s strategy of portraying himself as a peacemaker seems to have protected him from the worst of Trump’s ire until now. Yet this weekend’s assault was “playing with fire” — and Putin may get burned.

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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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