Analysis
China Learns War Through Russia
Trading Blood for BlueprintsSince 2024, Chinese personnel have trained at a facility near Volgograd also used by Russia's 8th Combined Arms Army, one of the formations that has fought in eastern Ukraine – The Economist reported, citing European intelligence. The confirmed curriculum there covers drone warfare and urban combat. Separately, the two militaries are reported to be cooperating on electronic warfare, air defense, missile defense and technology for reducing the detectability of nuclear submarines – distinct tracks of cooperation, not part of the same training program. China denies sending personnel to study the war, but is separately reported to be studying Russian data on how Western weapons, including the HIMARS rocket system (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), also fielded by Taiwan, perform under Russian jamming and countermeasures. Documents reviewed by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) indicate Moscow agreed to give China airborne equipment and training relevant to, though not…
Sudan’s Potential LPG Deal Exposes Red Sea Contest
Türkiye’s proposed liquefied petroleum gas terminal at Suakin is not an LNG breakthrough. But it does expose the widening competition for access to Sudan’s Red Sea coast, and the leverage that control of the shoreline gives the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF).Port Deals as Wartime LeverageSudan’s Sea Ports Corporation signed a memorandum with Turkish energy company Argaz on July 15. The terminal would store 28,000 cubic metres of LPG, serve three vessels simultaneously and operate under a build-operate-transfer arrangement. Officials claim it could save Sudan $200 million annually in foreign-currency costs.Those figures remain projections. No cost, financing package, concession length or schedule has been published. Sudanese former energy minister Adel Ibrahim told Radio Dabanga on July 22 that the authorities had disclosed neither competitive bidding nor the feasibility, site-selection and financing work required. More seriously, he said the SAF chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan previously refused to end the army’s monopoly over…
Russia Builds Toward Madagascar’s 2027 Vote
Madagascar lies near the northern mouth of the Mozambique Channel, on the sea lane connecting southern Africa to the Gulf and Asia, next to some of the largest untapped gas reserves on the continent. That position has made it a quiet prize in a contest most coverage still frames as Sahel-specific. Colonel Michaël Randrianirina's October 2025 takeover opened the latest chapter, but Russian interference in Madagascar did not begin with the coup – operatives were manipulating Malagasy politics as early as the 2018 election. What accelerated after 2022 was the scale of it, as Moscow, isolated from Western markets and fighting a war in Ukraine, redirected serious resources into Africa as a second front in its confrontation with the West. Madagascar's transition has simply given that older strategy a fixed date to work toward: the constitutional referendum and presidential election scheduled for 2027.Security Before the Ballot, and Whose Signature Is…
France Rebuilds Influence After Sahel Retreat
Nothing about France's presence in Africa was ever going to vanish. Some twenty African states use French as an official language, fourteen share a currency pegged to the euro, and the commercial and family networks running between Paris and the continent outlast every government now in office. What collapsed in the Sahel was one specific expression of that presence – the garrison. Within three years France lost its bases in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, handed back installations in Chad, Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, and watched Russia become the security partner of choice for the three military governments of the so called Alliance of Sahel States (AES), the mutual-defence bloc those juntas formed in 2023. Paris lost the soldiers and kept the leverage. What the leverage now consists of is the more interesting question.Retreat Without DisappearanceFrance granted independence to its African colonies around 1960 but kept the influence in the…
Moscow Keeps Selling a Peace Ukraine Rejects
Thirty-five minutes in Manila settled nothing and clarified a great deal. When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on July 23 on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum, a leading Indo-Pacific security forum, the two produced no proposal, no timetable and no breakthrough. What the meeting delivered instead was a diagnosis: Washington and Moscow no longer share even a starting point for negotiations on Ukraine, and the formula the Kremlin has carried into every round of diplomacy since 2025 is visibly losing its purchase.Manila’s Empty Half-HourInternational coverage converged on the same assessment: no breakthrough and little optimism, with German broadcaster ARD describing the atmosphere as "not overly optimistic". Calling the meeting useless is accurate in operational terms. Yet it was useful diagnostically, because it exposed how far the two positions have drifted apart.Lavrov again demanded an end to Western arms deliveries to Ukraine,…
Pakistan Is Useful Again. Can That Last?
A few years ago Pakistan was slipping out of international view. Relations with the West had deteriorated, domestic politics were consumed by the confrontation surrounding former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and an economy close to default left Islamabad dependent on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and on emergency support from China and the Gulf. Today Pakistan is useful again. Its most visible success has been mediation between the United States and Iran. Islamabad held its access to Tehran while rebuilding relations with the administration of US President Donald Trump, which made it the principal channel between two governments at war. It hosted negotiations, carried proposals and helped assemble an initial ceasefire framework. The transformation has given Pakistan a standing it has rarely enjoyed since its role in facilitating the US opening to China in the early 1970s. The window is real. The question is whether Islamabad can convert temporary usefulness…
