1. Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed that he, President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping meet next month to talk about Ukraine in an attempt to negotiate an end to the four-year conflict that would favor Moscow, said people familiar with the discussions. The plan represents an effort by Putin to capitalize on warming ties between Trump and the Russian leader that have alarmed Ukraine and its allies in Washington and Europe. Such a summit—one without the involvement of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—would be unprecedented and send alarm bells ringing in European capitals and beyond. Putin floated the idea in an Oct. 9 phone call with Trump, said a former Russian intelligence officer briefed on the matter. That conversation also produced a deal for the U.S. to buy Russian diesel fuel and facilitate its sale on the global market. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that discussions were taking place over a potential meeting. (Source: wsj.com)
2. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine:
Neither Russia nor China has directly entered Iran’s war with the United States. They haven’t needed to. By providing intelligence on American targets, military technology and components, and economic and diplomatic support, they can give Iran what it needs without joining its war.
The United States entered the conflict with advantages its adversaries lacked: a vast network of formal allies, military bases, intelligence-sharing arrangements, defense partnerships, and interoperable forces spanning Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Yet many of Washington’s traditional partners were reluctant to associate themselves with the campaign, and some denied the United States specific forms of military access, at least for a time. Others publicly resisted U.S. calls to help secure the Strait of Hormuz.
The contrast illustrates a striking shift since we first described Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as an axis of upheaval in Foreign Affairs two years ago. The United States’ adversaries began this war with this weaker network, and Washington with the far stronger one. But after helping Russia fight its war in Ukraine over the past few years, members of the axis are now finding ways to make their network work in a new theater. They are fine-tuning their cooperation to make their partners more resilient—and more dangerous to the United States—while limiting costs and risks. Washington, for its part, is creating friction in many of its partnerships instead of deepening them, and risks squandering its network just as its adversaries are learning to make more of theirs. (Sources: cnas.org, foreignaffairs.com)
3. Connor Martin:
Last week, Ukrainian drones took out three data centers owned by Yandex, the internet conglomerate sometimes referred to as Russia’s Google, in retaliation for Russian strikes on its own data centers. Because Yandex is thoroughly integrated into Russian life as a provider of cloud services, the strikes caused severe disruptions across the country, impeding Russians’ ability to send emails, make payments, and navigate the streets.
Ukraine’s drone strikes will likely set back Russian AI efforts further, because Yandex’s three supercomputers (located in the data centers that were struck) run on Nvidia A100s—U.S.-designed chips that Russia will be unable to easily replace. And the strikes have continued: earlier this week, Ukraine hit another data center that was under construction, this one belonging to Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank.
But the bigger implication of the Ukrainian strikes is that they have laid bare a fundamental risk to the development and deployment of AI worldwide: its physical infrastructure is vulnerable.
The term data centers can describe facilities that host everyday cloud services or facilities that are purpose-built for training and deploying AI. Some facilities, such as two of the Yandex sites, do both. Whatever their purpose, data centers share certain key features: they are big and immobile, and therefore hard to defend; they are also expensive and labor-intensive to construct, and therefore hard to replace. As AI capabilities increasingly underpin both the health of global markets and countries’ ability to project strength, data centers are proving to be an especially vulnerable node in the technology’s system of delivery, collectively known in the cybersecurity field as its “attack surface.” (Source: cfr.org)
