“The Druzhba oil pipeline is taking a rest,” boasted Major Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, on Monday. He was referring to a Ukrainian drone strike on the Nikolskoye pumping station in Russia’s Tambov region. It temporarily halted oil flows through the Druzhba pipeline, the last major artery supplying Russian oil to Moscow’s only remaining buyers in the EU: Hungary and Slovakia.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó denounced the strike as “outrageous and unacceptable”, calling it an assault on Hungary’s energy security and sovereignty. He accused Kyiv and Brussels of trying to drag Hungary into the conflict, reiterating that “this is not our war” and that Budapest intends to stay out of it. Although repairs have since restored the flow of oil, the incident raises several troubling questions.

The first is what Ukraine hopes to achieve. One reading is that Kyiv is trying to strengthen its bargaining position in the current negotiations. Yet the attacks also betray a growing sense of desperation: unable to reverse its fortunes on the battlefield, Ukraine is turning to strikes on infrastructure.

The risks, however, are clear. Such tactics invite Russian retaliation against Ukraine’s own energy system while further alienating EU member states — above all Hungary and Slovakia — which are already opposed to Western military and financial support for Kyiv.

More broadly, the strikes highlight the widening geopolitical scope of the conflict. The Druzhba incident is only the latest in a series of energy-related attacks. On 2 August, the Central Asia-Center gas pipeline in Russia was shut down after explosions in the Volgograd region. The pipeline carries natural gas from Turkmenistan to Russia and is thought to supply key facilities in Russia’s military-industrial base. Just four days later, Russia struck a metering station on the Trans-Balkan pipeline near the Romanian border. Used by Russia before the war, Ukraine’s Naftogaz operated the route for the first time earlier this month to import small volumes of Azerbaijani gas.

Aura Sabadus at the Center for European Policy Analysis points out that these tit-for-tat strikes are “arguably part of a much wider and sophisticated geopolitical battle that is now being fought out from Central Asia in the east to the heart of Europe in the west”. Azerbaijan has shifted towards Ukraine and away from Russia in recent months. In this sense, the Ukrainian strike on the Central Asia-Center pipeline was likely aimed at limiting Russian access to Central Asian gas and thereby preventing any rapprochement with Azerbaijan. Similarly, the attack on the Druzhba pipeline can be seen as an attempt to force Hungary and Slovakia’s energy decoupling from Russia.

However you understand them, these operations make clear a sobering reality: thanks to advances in drone warfare, such attacks are relatively easy to carry out. Even if a political settlement were to end open hostilities, the low cost and high accessibility of drone technology mean that energy infrastructure across the region would remain highly vulnerable — not only to state actors, but also to rogue groups determined to keep the conflict alive.

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Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.

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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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