Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA)

When Anthropic released Mythos to a small group of trusted partners, the UK had a seat at the table. Europe did not.

Ieva Ilves contends the difference is operational, not political. The UK AI Safety Institute was built as a testing body with secure evaluation processes and a bilateral agreement with the US. Europe has legal authority but no equivalent infrastructure, and that distinction is now decisive. Frontier AI is no longer a consumer product. It is a capability that can shift the balance between cyber offense and defense, and the architecture for evaluating it is being built without Brussels in it.

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A single Kh-101 cruise missile contained 31 foreign components, most from US, European, and Japanese companies. Russia's new Geran-5 drone runs on chips from Texas Instruments, CTS Corporation, Monolithic Power Systems, and Infineon. Some of these chips reach the Kremlin's war machine through grey-market intermediaries. Others arrive inside dishwashers.

Christopher Cytera warns that export controls alone cannot fix this. Once components leave first-tier channels, end-user visibility collapses. He calls for a shared database of high-risk parts integrating Ukrainian forensic findings, a transatlantic task force targeting key transit hubs, and new obligations on chipmakers, white goods manufacturers, e-commerce platforms, and payment providers.

Some leakage is inevitable. The goal is to make it expensive.

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AI is changing the character of warfare. The question is whether the US can integrate it fast enough to maintain its military edge, and carefully enough to keep humans meaningfully in the loop.

That tension framed a standout panel at the National Cyber Innovation Forum, moderated by President & CEO Dr Alina Polyakova, with Aaron Bishop, Acting Principal Deputy CIO, and Earl G. Matthews, General Counsel at the United States Department of War; Joe McCaffrey, Chief Information Security Officer at Anduril Industries; and Joseph Larson, Vice President and Head of Government at OpenAI.

The conversation examined how emerging technologies are augmenting the warfighter and reshaping military operations. Many thanks to the National Security Institute (NSI) for convening this critical conversation.

Russia's own economic ministry now forecasts stagnation through at least 2027, and its numbers are more pessimistic than the Central Bank's. That is a significant reversal.

Alexander Kolyandr contends the Kremlin has formalized a trade-off: war spending and inflation control come first; growth does not. The National Welfare Fund is nearly exhausted, the budget faces a shortfall of up to $42 billion next year, and civilian investment is the first thing cut. Higher oil revenues from the Iran conflict offer temporary relief, not structural repair.

Not a collapse. A long, slow decline, now officially in the forecast.

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Europe has roughly 5,000 main battle tanks on paper. The reality is far less reassuring. The fleet is fragmented, unevenly maintained, and built around national orders rather than mass production. Russia lost around 1,400 tanks in 2024 alone and kept fighting.

Juraj Majcin warns that Europe cannot absorb that kind of attrition, and its production lines are not built to recover from it. Joint procurement, standardization, and serious industrial scaling are not optional extras for European defense. They are the baseline.

Deterrence requires the ability to hold ground. That still means tanks.

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A stray drone near Lithuania's border with Belarus grounded flights at Vilnius International Airport and activated NATO's Baltic air-policing mission on Wednesday. Schools sheltered children. The prime minister was evacuated.

This is not an isolated incident. Similar intrusions have hit Latvia and Estonia in recent days. A NATO jet shot down a drone over Estonian airspace on Tuesday. Finland issued an alert last week. Russia's war in Ukraine has been consistently spilling into EU and NATO territory.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was direct: Russia and Belarus bear "direct responsibility." The Kremlin's shadow warfare doctrine depends on ambiguity and incremental escalation. The Baltics are making clear they will not absorb it quietly.

https://www.politico.eu/article/lithuania-air-alert-stray-drone-nato-eu-russia-tensions/

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"The Trump administration should recognize that it is squarely in the US national security interest to strengthen relationships with natural allies in the face of intensifying competition with the now mature China-Russia partnership." Christopher Walker

Putin and Xi have met for the 50th time since 2012. The relationship has only deepened as both regimes have grown more emboldened, and the agenda will not be friendly to Western interests.

May 20, 2026 Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s hard-line finance minister, said on Tuesday that he had ordered the eviction of Palestinian residents of a West Bank hamlet after learning that the International Criminal Court prosecutor had requested a warrant for his arrest. – New York Times

"Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have come to a meeting of the minds on some very fundamental things about world order." Christopher Walker

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Despite record Russian drone deployments, Moscow has been unable to convert pressure into meaningful territorial gains. In January, February, and April, Ukraine liberated more territory than it lost for the first time since the summer 2023 counteroffensive.

Margaryta Khvostova and Amelia Hadfield make clear that this is attrition working in Ukraine's favor. Ukrainian strikes have cut Russia's oil export capacity by at least 40%. Ukraine plans to manufacture 7 million drones this year. Kyiv's porcupine strategy is maturing.

The critical variable remains Western support. Inconsistency is the risk that could still unravel it.

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Iran is charging $2m per oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. Indonesia's finance minister last month floated the idea of tolling the Strait of Malacca. If the rules-based order is crumbling, European nations with convenient chokepoints may be tempted to follow suit.

Chris Stephen maps the legal landscape. Turkey could exit the 1936 Montreux Convention with two years' notice and start charging ships through the Bosporus. Denmark, the Netherlands, Romania, and Ukraine are bound by older treaties with no exit clauses, some signed with countries that no longer exist. UNCLOS prohibits marine tolling, but a third of the world's countries, including Iran and the US, never signed it.

For most of history, tolls were the norm. The word "tariff" comes from medieval ships paying passage through the Strait of Gibraltar. That history may be less distant than it appears.

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The US fired more than 850 Tomahawks during Operation Epic Fury. At current production rates, replenishing them would take a decade. The Pentagon is already weighing whether to redirect European-funded interceptors to restock US inventory in the Middle East. Lithuania has been told that ammunition deliveries will be delayed.

Luka Ignac makes clear that without a strategy to build out the allied industrial base, the financial pledges made at the Hague Summit will simply deepen European dependency on the US. At the moment, Washington's focus is shifting to the Pacific. Between 2022 and 2024, 51% of European NATO equipment spending went to American suppliers, up from 28% the previous period.

The answer is not to choose between US suppliers and European factories. It is to bring US technology onto European soil through joint ventures that build capacity where the demand actually sits.

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