In November 2023, as Russia incessantly shelled Ukrainian cities, Kyiv decided that it needed to destroy Moscow’s missile carriers. The result, Operation Spider’s Web, came to fruition earlier this month, some 18 months after it was first conceived.

The shock assault on Russia’s strategic bombing fleet hit 41 aircraft and involved bribing Russian customs agents, smuggling drones laden with explosives, and keeping top government officials in the dark. Given the audacious nature of the plot, one wonders what else Ukraine’s military has been mulling over in that time.

If former TV producer-turned-top Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak is to be believed, there will be more to come. This week, Yermak promised more such “surprises” for Russia, pledging that “every Russian must feel what it is like to be in constant danger.” This zeal for surprise strikes is understandable, with Ukraine having strong motives to launch other ambush assaults. The operation demonstrated that Ukraine’s web could cover much more of Russia than previously thought.

Audacious raids grab headlines around the world at a time when Ukraine is battling against the Middle East for newspaper front pages. Successful attacks are something for Ukraine’s beleaguered population to rally around, and Kyiv immediately released footage of the meticulously recorded implementation of Spider’s Web. It shows that Ukraine is not only still in the fight against Russia but actually taking the initiative, with “cards” still to play, no matter what Donald Trump may have suggested. Operations like this are a way to make Vladimir Putin look vulnerable in the eyes of a US President who detests what he perceives to be weakness.

Yet such operations hold battlefield ramifications as well. Kyiv is trying to capitalize on stalled Russian gains. High-level Ukrainian fighters insist not only that the war can still be won, but that asymmetrical methods will be a key facet, the Georgian Legion’s Mamuka Mamulashvili recently claiming that 2,000 strikes could wipe out Russia’s logistics chains.

Ukrainian intelligence sources claim that more operations are being prepared, encouraged by competition between the rival Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). These agencies have different tactics and their rivalry has been compared to that of the FBI and the CIA. Likely targets include the Kerch Bridge, military-industrial complexes, airfields, and command and control posts. Meanwhile, Ukraine has also been interrupting the activities of Russian mercenaries in Africa and weapons shipments to Moscow. Kyiv is eager to show its reach across Russia, a May GUR attack on an army base near Vladivostok constituting the most distant target yet in the war. More targeted killings, sabotage operations and strikes on countries furnishing arms to Russia are probable, along with sea operations. At one stage, Ukraine considered placing sea drones in cargo containers to hit Russian ships in the North Pacific.

While Ukrainian covert operations have sparked tension with the White House in the past, even during Joe Biden’s presidency, Israel’s recent strikes on Iran have shown how an initially reluctant Trump can be persuaded to support assaults once he has seen that they are successful. Ukraine’s Spider’s Web could catch many more Russian flies.

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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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