Suspected Russian drone attacks sank a cargo ship and forced the evacuation of another vessel within two dozen miles of the coast of Bulgaria in the Black Sea on October 13. The latest attacks mean that five ships have been attacked in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries—spurring requests for NATO to redeploy counter-drone systems to provide more protection.

Although there is no hard proof that the drone attacks originated from Russia, one of the ships that came under attack was the Ukrainian-operated coastal freighter Chelsea 3, registered under the flag of Malta. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev told the Russian ambassador in Sofia that “it makes no sense for Ukraine to destroy its own ships in the Black Sea, and the results of these strikes favor Russia’s interests,” according to The Associated Press.

All 15 members of the Ukrainian-owned Chelsea 3 were safely evacuated by Bulgarian rescue operations after the ship was reportedly struck by three aerial drones.

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Throttling of mobile internet system will affect Kyiv’s air defences more than its strikes on oil refineries. Now Zelenskyy must be hoping that US intel holds

In Ukraine the situation was already jittery enough. Donald Trump has been inventing ceasefires and buying Russian diesel to shore up his flagging popularity, while a sinister new wave of faster, jet-powered drones are breaking through Kyiv’s stretched air defences. Casualties are rising as the weather turns.

Overnight, Russia bombed three power plants that supply Kyiv, aiming to cut off heating and electricity to the city. According to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for a second night in a row no warning came from Ukraine’s western allies of the incoming ballistic missiles – and so no air raid alert was issued.

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© Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

© Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

© Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

President Zelenskyy’s allies must show the Russian president that American perfidy won’t alter the course of a war the Kremlin is losing

When Donald Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of re-entering the White House last year, no one with any depth of insight into the conflict believed him. But Mr Trump took his own words seriously enough to feel the lack of a ceasefire as an affront to his self-image as a master dealmaker. After a period when it seemed that Kyiv’s European allies had steered the US president away from pro‑Kremlin partisanship, he has reverted to the grotesque view that Ukrainian capitulation is a necessary precondition for peace.

These are the perilous circumstances in which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met Andy Burnham on Wednesday in Downing Street. In recent days, the US president has called for a change of government in Ukraine. He claimed that a partial ceasefire had been agreed, while Russia escalated its bombardments. According to Mr Zelenskyy, the latest missile strikes have come without the intelligence warnings from the US that have, in the past, facilitated self-defence. There have been reports of Ukrainian soldiers losing access to the Starlink satellite network, controlled by Elon Musk, the US tech oligarch. This raises suspicion of coordinated pressure to tip the scales in Russia’s favour after many months when Mr Putin’s forces have failed to deliver significant advances and his country’s economy has been suffering from the effect of Ukrainian missile and drone counterstrikes.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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© Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

© Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

© Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

Despite the expansion of Starlink and other communications satellite services, most of the world’s Internet traffic still travels through subsea cables crisscrossing the ocean floors. Those fiber-optic cables coexist with a network of oil and gas pipelines and submarine power cables—and all these crucial links connecting countries and continents now face growing sabotage risks as gray-zone warfare and open conflicts have become widespread.

The rising risks to the world’s invisible infrastructure beneath the waves are the main subject of a new book by Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who leads the Threats to the Global Maritime Order Initiative. Her book, titled Undersea War, explores the modern rise in suspicious incidents in which ships dragging their anchors for unusually long periods have cut or damaged undersea cables and pipelines, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

Braw acknowledges that about 60 percent of undersea cable damage is primarily due to human error during fishing and shipping activities, when weighted nets or anchors drag across the seabed. Natural hazards like storms and undersea landslides also account for a smaller proportion of such incidents. In total, between 150 and 200 cables are damaged each year and usually repaired quickly.

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Outage of terminals managed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX comes as Russia launches ballistic missiles at Ukraine without any advance warning from US

Ukraine’s military has suddenly had its access to Starlink satellite internet terminals restricted as the Trump administration has increased pressure on Ukraine to halt long-range strikes on Russia’s oil industry immediately.

The terminals, which are distributed and managed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are a key component of Ukraine’s military operations and the sudden restrictions on the terminals travelling at high speeds on Tuesday evening led to the failure of several combat missions, said an adviser on military technology to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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© Photograph: Reuters

© Photograph: Reuters

© Photograph: Reuters

Firms turning crude oil into the ‘workhorse’ fuel stand to gain most despite economic fallout from record prices

• Business live – latest updates

Days after Donald Trump announced a deal to import Russian diesel into the US in an effort to lower soaring pump prices, the world’s energy watchdog has warned that the global fuel shortage will drag into 2027.

Trump’s temporary sanctions reprieve was criticised for offering “too little, too late” to temper the sky high pump prices triggered by the shutdown of war-damaged refineries in the Middle East and Russia – once the world’s second-largest diesel exporter behind the US.

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© Photograph: Martin Meissner/AP

© Photograph: Martin Meissner/AP

© Photograph: Martin Meissner/AP

Xi's 'death watch' will become a global spectacle - "Xi will have to pick a relative unknown — all the current members of the Politburo Standing Committee are too old to step into his shoes — raising a host of troubling questions. Would a designated successor catapulted to the top be strong enough to command the loyalty of the powerful military? Could he hold the Party together?"

China now faces a period of prolonged political uncertainty. Carl Minzner, a US legal scholar and senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, predicted a "long twilight" with the economy sagging, social discontent rising, and the state using "grid management" — surveillance techniques used to maintain control over Xinjiang and other restive border areas. A succession struggle is unlikely to remain within China's borders, Tyler Jost, a professor at Brown University, and Daniel Mattingly of Yale University argued in Foreign Affairs last year, noting that Xi's prize goal is unification with Taiwan and "if he hears the succession clock ticking, he could become more willing to gamble on war." I'm betting that the end of the Xi era will look a lot less like Deng's, whose passing created hardly a ripple — by then, he'd handed over power and put in place a system to ensure smooth leadership transfers — and more like Mao's, a drama that involved a bloodless coup (the arrest of the so-called "Gang of Four" led by Mao's widow), intervention by the People's Liberation Army, and show trials. We had a foretaste of this kind of turmoil when Xi took power in 2012. A carefully constructed power transfer was upended by the arrest of Xi's main Politburo rival, and there were wild internet rumors of a military coup, tanks in the streets of the Chinese capital, and gunfire near the leadership compound. Xi has wrenched China back to an era of one-man rule. But having attained the pinnacle of power — next year he'll likely get a fourth five-year term in office — Xi now has to reckon with the consequences for his country. As Deng himself warned, "building a nation's fate on the reputation of one or two people is very unhealthy and very dangerous. --- *Notable:

• In 2025, during Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Beijing, a hot mic picked up a conversation between Putin and Xi in which the two discussed organ transplants and the possibility of living forever. Musing on such procedures, Putin told Xi (through a translator) that with modern technology organs could be transplanted again and again so that "(you can) even achieve immortality." While a largely hypothetical conversation, it hinted that staving off old age and death — maybe for eternity — is top of mind among the world's most powerful autocrats.

As America Retreats, a New Era of Autocratic Surveillance Advances [ungated] - "A crackdown in Uganda shows how new technologies, Chinese influence and America's moral retreat are making the world safer for autocrats."[1]

Ugandans have discovered that, increasingly, there is nowhere to hide. Civic life here is defined by thickening webs of state surveillance built with foreign help. Chinese cameras and facial-recognition software monitor the streets; Russian radio frequency chips implanted in license plates have been tracking cars in real time; Israeli software plunders the private contents of phones. Technology has created an intrusive eye that never blinks — a stealthy weapon for dictators keen to stifle speech and thought. Welcome to our menacing new world, a place where authoritarians — established and aspiring alike — enjoy tolerance from the international community; wield cheaper, quieter and far more powerful surveillance tools at home; and reach across borders to help one another hang on to power.

viz. @EdwardGLuce: "Another US president would be pressuring Russia to stop slaughtering innocents. Trump is instead giving them the means to kill more."

• Iran Has a Secret Weapon in Its War With America: Help From China - "Trump wants to preserve relations with Xi, but Iranian customs data show Chinese entities have made thousands of shipments of components used in drones and missiles."
• The Houthis Are Building an Advanced Missile With Chinese Parts - "New report shows how Yemeni militant group is developing medium-range weapons independently of Iran."

cf. China's growth machines - "China is not the world's largest command economy. It is a continent-sized Silicon Valley."[2]

• @RuxandraTeslo: "Chinese industrial success is... because properly incentivised local governments compete ruthlessly with each other to secure investment."
• @bswud: "Whereas many of the West's most important city governments capture only a small amount of the spillovers from successful clusters, and thus have very little reason to foster them, in China, they get a huge amount of the upside and can re-invest it in further growth."
• @kyleichan: "It's useful to think of the Chinese Party-state as a giant corporation..."

also btw... Brazil's racket society - "As Bolsonarismo outlives Bolsonaro, what does Brazil reveal about where politics everywhere is heading?" (via|previously)

As Latin America's largest economy and its most populous democracy, Brazil has long served as a bellwether for the region, and increasingly for the world. Analysts of neoliberalism have used "Brazilianization" to describe a future of informal work, fortified elites, and hollowed-out states that they see arriving in the global North. The outcome of the runoff will help decide whether Brazil holds out against a regional turn toward Trump-aligned strongmen, a wave that has already swept Argentina, Ecuador, and, most recently, Colombia. The stakes are high. Lula's third term delivered growth, rising wages, and record-low unemployment, but it was hemmed in by a hostile Congress, and household debt and the cost of living kept climbing. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has intervened with unusual openness. It has imposed punitive tariffs and sanctioned a Supreme Court justice, and it has designated Brazil's two largest criminal factions as terrorist organizations. As Benjamin Fogel wrote in Jacobin before the vote, "something deeper and more paradigmatic is going on" than ordinary frustration with an incumbent. In this conversation, editor William Shoki speaks with Fogel, the Deputy Director of the Alameda Institute, a historian of Brazil and contributing editor at Jacobin (as well as an alumnus of Africa Is a Country), to unpack the first-round results, the coalition of interests behind Flávio, and the political economy that makes it cohere. They discuss why Brazilian capital has made its peace with predation, why anti-corruption politics so often breeds cynicism, how "security slop" became the right's signature policy, and what Brazil and South Africa reveal about everyone else's future.

Special forces officer Serhii Kuznetsov denies involvement in the 2022 blasts that left pipelines badly damaged

A Ukrainian soldier led a team of divers that, acting on the order of state authorities, laid explosives on the bed of the Baltic Sea to blow up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, a court has heard.

On the opening day of his trial in the German city of Hamburg, Serhii Kuznetsov, who was a special forces officer with the Ukrainian military at the time of the pipeline attacks in 2022, was accused by prosecutors of being an accomplice to war crimes by attacking civilian infrastructure, causing an explosion, damaging property and disrupting public services.

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© Photograph: Markus Scholz/Reuters

© Photograph: Markus Scholz/Reuters

© Photograph: Markus Scholz/Reuters