The Week

Washington’s Russia policy came into sharper focus and the peace track got thinner. Ukraine was reported to have paused its refinery strikes, then hit three refineries in three days. Populist-right candidates lost in Serbia and Brazil and fell short in Israel, and the AI trade turned from rally to sell-off within four days.

The US–Russia economic track became clearer this week. On Monday, NYT and FT reporting showed that sanctioned Novatek had secretly funded and directed the $25bn Polar LNG venture in Alaska, and that Witkoff and Kushner had discussed the deal with Putin in September (FT, Monday). On Wednesday the administration was reported to be weighing sanctions relief for the Russian Direct Investment Fund (NYT, Wednesday). The diesel trade grew during the week: one cargo on Monday, three tankers on Wednesday, and seven tankers carrying about 288,000 tonnes by Friday (Guardian, Friday). Russia’s position did not move. It reportedly asked for NATO troops to leave Poland, and Putin used a 90-minute call with Støre and Stubb to repeat the pre-1997 NATO borders demand (BBC, Wednesday). Ushakov said Europe would not attend the November talks, and on Friday Russia added a new condition: a Ukrainian strike halt around its 4 November holiday (ISW). On Sunday Rubio said he did not know whether a negotiated peace was achievable, and Zelensky went to Erdoğan to discuss a Turkish mediator role (Kyiv Independent, Sunday).

The week’s sharpest contradiction was over refinery strikes. On Friday the WSJ reported that Kyiv had stopped hitting Russian refineries under US pressure (WSJ, Friday). Within 48 hours drones had hit Bashneft’s Ufa refineries and LUKOIL’s Kstovo plant, and sources said Ukraine had never agreed to a pause (Kyiv Independent, Saturday, Sunday). The coverage does not say whether the WSJ report was wrong or whether the pause simply did not hold. Refineries were not the only targets. The rest of the strikes went after Russia’s industrial base: VSMPO-AVISMA titanium on Monday, the largest drone attack on Moscow so far (about 613 drones) on Thursday, Russia’s only body-armour precursor plant, and a solid rocket-fuel plant on Sunday (Militarnyi, Ukrainska Pravda). Air defence developed in the opposite direction. On Tuesday Hegseth had not signed off interceptors for nearly a month, and only 24 Patriots had arrived in 90 days. On Saturday the US approved a $2.1bn sale of 500 PAC-3 MSE, but delivery is expected in the early 2030s, and in the same period other security funding was halted (Reuters, Saturday). Russia struck Kyiv’s Pivdennyi Bridge and a university, and a drone hit Dnipro’s railway station and killed at least 15 (Tuesday, Friday).

Elsewhere, the populist right lost ground. Students ended Vučić’s twelve years in Serbia, and Lula beat Flávio Bolsonaro 51.8–48.2 (Monday). Bolsonaro then left Brazil despite a court order to surrender his passport, and Washington offered him visas (AP, Wednesday). Israel’s election left Netanyahu short of a majority in a hung Knesset. Netanyahu’s bloc had about 56 seats with 60% counted, Arab turnout reached about 80%, and the IDF chief of staff reportedly refused a pre-election Iran action without signed legal authorisation (Times of Israel, Wednesday). No final result appeared in the week’s coverage. Institutions also came under pressure: Poland’s constitutional court was occupied at 1am by a president who called the judges’ move a coup, and Novaya Gazeta announced it will close on 9 November (Saturday).

The AI trade turned during the week. On Tuesday Anthropic’s S-1 showed $16.3B in first-half 2026 revenue and compute commitments of several hundred billion dollars, and AI stocks rose (SEC, Tuesday, Wednesday). Friday’s edition reported that Alphabet had lost about $500bn after admitting that AI summaries were hurting ad revenue, and the Nasdaq closed Friday down 2.86% as investors questioned AI spending of nearly $1 trillion (BBC, Friday, Saturday). In Norway the same build-out showed up in power policy: NVE warned of 35–55% higher prices by 2035 if data centres keep growing, and Senterpartiet wants to stop new ones (Aftenposten, Thursday). For self-hosters, last week’s pattern of attacks on AI tooling continued. Backdoored Claude Code extension versions 2.1.312–313 reached about 5,000 Cursor users and planted SSH keys (Phorion, Saturday). Binance’s up to $6.3bn breach reportedly started on one engineer’s compromised laptop (Guardian).

In the Gulf, the week ended on Saturday with four tankers on fire after hitting mines in Hormuz (Al Jazeera). The days before it saw pressure and diplomacy at the same time. The US deployed a third carrier and began evacuations, Gulf states drafted a package to reopen Hormuz, AP reported that Russian satellites help Iran’s proxies target Saudi sites, and Vance wrote to Rezaei to restart talks (Guardian, Friday). The coverage did not report Brent prices this week.

Threads

Questions

From last week:

• “Does the trilateral Ukraine–US–Russia meeting take place in early November with a named Russian delegation, or does Moscow let it slip?” — Open. No meeting and no named delegation by 1 November. Moscow now says it is ready “after November 4” and has added a strike-halt condition, which points to slippage, but early November is not over (Friday, Sunday).
• “Does the Oleshky ceasefire take effect, and on which date: Gerasimov’s 27 October or the White House’s 29 October?” — Resolved. It took effect and held long enough for the evacuation to finish, with the last group flying out of Gomel on 31 October. It was the longest local truce since 2022, and by Sunday it was over. ISW notes that Russia used it to rotate troops and repair logistics. The coverage never says which start date applied (Al Jazeera, Sunday).
• “Does the United States strike Iran before the 3 November midterms, after them, or not at all by the next review?” — Open. No strike was reported through 1 November, and last week’s Sunday deadline passed without one. Trump reportedly promised no action before 3 November, and AP reports that allies were told to prepare for the period after the vote. The question can only be scored after the election (Wednesday, Thursday).

Posed this week:

• Does the final Israeli count give Netanyahu’s bloc 61 seats, and does anyone receive the mandate to form a government by the next review?
• Does Ukraine strike any Russian refinery between 3 and 5 November, around the National Unity Day halt that Moscow made a condition for talks?