According to Iranian authorities, the Ukrainian attack on vessels sailing between Russian and Iranian ports on the Caspian Sea killed one Iranian sailor and injured three others, prompting Tehran to summon Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires and condemn the strike as a “hostile and criminal act.”
It marked Ukraine’s first known attack on an Iranian vessel — it has previously hit Russian targets in and around the sea — and caused Iran’s foreign ministry to describe President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “the head of the Ukraine regime”. It pledged the late July attacks would be answered. Zelenskyy subsequently confirmed Ukrainian strikes against vessels which he said were transporting Iran-linked military cargo, thus removing any ambiguity regarding Kyiv’s intent. One vessel was traveling from Russia’s Astrakhan to Iran’s port of Anzali.
Ukraine has had more than enough legal justification to attack Iran for several years. Putting aside the 2022 downing of a Ukrainian jet by Iranian air defenses in 2020, killing 176 people, Tehran has given very extensive military aid to Russia since 2022. The importance of Tehran’s assistance has declined from its peak, but the symbolism of a Ukrainian attack at a time when the US is engaged in hostilities with the Islamic Republic is clear.
From Kyiv’s perspective, striking the logistics chain that links Iran with Russia imposes costs on both. Rather than attempting to intercept weapons after they reach Russia, Ukraine seeks to disrupt supply before equipment enters the military production cycle.
For Iran, however, the implications are much broader. Tehran has consistently maintained that it is not directly participating in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and has portrayed commercial shipping across the Caspian as civilian activity. The attack undermines this by highlighting the widespread belief that the Caspian transport network has become an integral element of Russia’s war effort.
The Caspian Sea is important for Russia and Iran as the only direct connection they possess. It was through that artery that the first Iranian Shahed drones reached Russia in 2022.
Iran has abstained from open military retaliation. But while this was attributed to the diffusion of tensions after the Iranian and Ukrainian foreign ministers held a brief phone call, Iran’s hesitancy is better explained by practical limitations.
The Islamic Republic does have ballistic missiles that could reach and successfully hit targets in Ukraine, but doing so would be a costly operation with only a limited impact on Ukraine. A Machiavellian reading would suggest that it might even be welcomed in Kyiv, as a demonstration that Ukraine and the US are fighting the same enemy. The Kremlin is surely extremely nervous about any Iranian campaign for just this reason.
The attack demonstrates that Iran suffers real weaknesses on the Caspian. The country’s attention is mostly focused on the military and security situation in the Gulf, Iraq, and to a certain degree around Afghanistan and Pakistan. This also means that, in terms of military capabilities, the Caspian is less defended; that explains how easily the United States has been hitting the military targets there. Israel also hit there in March, doing serious damage to the Iranian navy.
Iran’s retaliation might therefore come later and more subtly. In this, it’s likely to be aided by Russia and the extensive military and intelligence ties. For instance, Iran could increase deliveries of missile components, drone technology or electronic warfare systems, effectively allowing Russia to impose additional military costs on Ukraine. Moscow values such support, but Iran too is in dire straits when it comes to weaponry and dual-use components for its own defense. Cyber operations are most likely, given that Iranian cyber organizations possess demonstrated capabilities that can undermine foreign infrastructure and government networks (although Ukraine too boasts extensive cyber capabilities).
What of Ukraine’s growing role in the South Caucasus? Lately, Kyiv has been actively developing military and economic ties with Azerbaijan, which has often been targeted by Iranian officials as a country allegedly hosting Israeli intelligence assets. Baku’s ties with Kyiv could further inflame those fears in Tehran, given that Azerbaijan is interested in Ukraine’s drone capabilities.
The targeting of Iranian and Russian vessels in the Caspian Sea signals the widening geography of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Ukrainian drones have already visited Russian-occupied Abkhazia, in Georgia, and some parts of the North Caucasus.
Indeed, the Caspian Sea — long regarded as a closed strategic space shared by Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan — could now be evolving into another active theater of geopolitical competition. Ukraine is no longer limiting its long-range campaign to military infrastructure directly connected to the battlefield, and is increasingly targeting the wider logistics architecture sustaining Russia’s war effort.
Emil Avdaliani is a research fellow at the Turan Research Center and a professor of international relations at the European University in Tbilisi, Georgia. His research focuses on the history of the Silk Roads and the interests of great powers in the Middle East and the Caucasus.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
A panel of international experts drafted a definition of the crime of ecocide in 2021 as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with the knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”
Yet, despite numerous efforts at both national and international levels, including by the Ecocide Law Alliance, most civil-law states lack a crime of ecocide in their criminal codes.
While its criminalization would be complex and politically contentious even in peacetime, armed conflict creates an urgent need to establish legal frameworks for adjudication and accountability for severe environmental harm.
Ukraine has faced significant challenges investigating and prosecuting ecocide since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, and there is little room for delay. Faced with continuous environmental destruction, Kyiv had no choice but to move forward with investigations and charges as the war continued.
Although efforts to adjudicate ecocide are underway, including the 2023 destruction of the Kakhovka dam, attacks on the Sumy ammonia plant, and an attempt to destroy a nuclear facility in Kharkiv, there are legal and investigative constraints that require robust efforts from the investigative, prosecutorial, and judicial communities.
In the absence of established jurisprudence on ecocide, courts will be required to interpret and apply key elements of the crime with little guidance. This is particularly true for the requirement that environmental damage is widespread, long-term, and severe.
The most relevant available guidance comes from the interpretation of international humanitarian law on protecting the environment during armed conflict. This includes Article 35(3) and Article 55 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit warfare expected to cause widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment.
The authoritative International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) commentary on these provisions was developed in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and the US’s extensive use of the Agent Orange defoliant. According to that commentary, “long-term” damage is understood as harm lasting more than a decade.
But such an approach is difficult to align with the realities of an ongoing war. Ukraine’s authorities cannot wait 10 years before assessing environmental harm and pursuing accountability. Courts will need to develop a more practical and context-sensitive interpretation.
The concept of “widespread” raises similar challenges, and Ukrainian prosecutors have increasingly focused on identifying patterns of conduct rather than viewing incidents in isolation. The destruction of dams and other water-management infrastructure, for example, has been a repeated tactic by Russian forces across the country.
International humanitarian law specifically protects works and installations whose damage or destruction could unleash dangerous forces, including the water behind dams and dikes, under Article 56 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. Demonstrating a broader pattern of attacks may help establish the widespread nature of the environmental harm.
The notion of “severe” environmental damage also remains open to interpretation. It is not clear if severity should be assessed primarily by reference to the impact on ecosystems, biodiversity, and individual species of flora and fauna, or if it should also encompass the consequences for human populations, whose livelihoods, mental and physical health, and living conditions are affected.
Given the interconnected nature of environmental and human harm, courts will likely be required to address both dimensions.
There is a further question over attempted ecocide, and whether it should give rise to criminal liability. This is particularly relevant in situations where an intended environmental catastrophe was prevented only through the intervention of Ukrainian emergency services or other factors.
In such cases, the anticipated irreversible damage may not have materialized, but the perpetrators deliberately targeted facilities that could have caused catastrophic consequences.
Courts will need to determine what evidence is sufficient to prove both the intent and the environmental consequences sought in an attack.
Several indictments alleging the crime of ecocide under Article 441 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine have already been submitted to Ukrainian courts, but they have not yet received substantive judicial consideration, nor has the Supreme Court issued guidance on interpreting the criminal elements.
The coming years are likely to be decisive in shaping both Ukrainian and international understanding of ecocide in armed conflict, and the understanding that environmental damage caused by Russia’s aggression extends far beyond Ukraine’s borders.
Pollution, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem destruction have regional and global consequences, making accountability for such crimes a matter of concern for the whole world.
Ensuring those responsible are held accountable is essential not just to deliver justice for affected communities in Ukraine, but to strengthen deterrence against similar conduct in the future.
Anna Stakhanova is a legal expert specializing in international crimes, prosecution reform, and accountability. Her research at CEPA focused on Transitional Justice policy for Ukraine. In her most recent position, Anna worked as the Key Expert on Accountability for International Crimes with the EU Project Pravo-Justice in Ukraine, where she advised and trained key stakeholders within the Ukrainian justice system. Prior to this, Anna served as an International Consultant on Accountability for War Crimes with the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in Poland. Anna holds an LLM in International Law from the London School of Economics, along with master’s degrees in law and linguistics from National University of Odesa Law Academy and Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University.
Isabella Nieminen is a Program Assistant with the Democratic Resilience program at CEPA. A recipient of the Fulbright Award and the Critical Language Scholarship, her research interests include transitional justice, civil society resilience, and the humanitarian-development-peace nexus.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Western analysts said its missile stockpiles would last six months. Four years later, Moscow is producing more than 100 ballistic and ballistic-trajectory weapons every month, and plans to double that by the year’s end.
Putin knows that Ukraine is chronically short of interceptors to bring down its ballistic missiles and that will be a major worry once winter nears. But he also knows that Ukraine now has the means to hit back. This developing battle will not be one-sided, and it is absolutely in Western interests to ensure Russia suffers as much, or more, pain as it dishes out.
The Kremlin now seeks to exploit a gaping wound. The war against Iran has depleted the availability of Patriot missile interceptors, and there is no obvious fix, beyond President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “millions” of calls to allies seeking more.
Russia is racing to raise production. It now produces ballistic missiles much faster than the United States produces PAC interceptors to stop them. That gap will not close soon, and in the meantime, that spells serious trouble for Ukraine.
This winter is likely to be extremely hard. The scale of Russia’s production advantage is worrying. In a single week, according to Zelenskyy, Russia launched 61 missiles, including 56 ballistic missiles, more than 1,560 strike drones, and 1,540 aerial bombs, while also intensifying attacks on railways, fuel infrastructure, and energy facilities.
That scale reflects the arithmetic of a production race Russia is now winning. In July alone, Moscow fired more than twice the ballistic and cruise missiles it used in June, 364 versus 178, including a 34% increase in ballistic missiles and a tenfold surge in guided aviation bombs. These are not stockpile drawdowns. Russia has replenished much of what it fired and is accumulating reserves to hit even harder.
Putin is applying what we might term the Stalin Principle. Place critical facilities deep in the interior, protect them with the best available air defenses, and run the economy in service of the military machine.
The Votkinsk Machine Building Plant, Russia’s primary Iskander producer, sits 1,500 km (900-plus miles) from Ukraine’s border, inside the country’s densest air defense umbrella. It has expanded its workforce, built new production workshops, and runs around the clock on 24-hour shifts.
Ukrainian intelligence estimates this factory and similar facilities will be able to produce up to 700 Iskander 9M723 ballistic missiles this year alone, with Russia already exceeding its monthly targets: in July, it produced 65 against a planned 60; and 87 Kh-101 cruise missiles against a planned 72.
Taken together, its production lines could provide Moscow with more than 100 ballistic or ballistic-trajectory weapons every month.
Ukraine has been hitting back. Its less-advanced long-range drones have nonetheless hit Russian oil refineries with extraordinary frequency and precision. Likewise, grain facilities and naval dockyards, while Crimea is effectively under siege. Taken as a whole, Ukraine is far better able to hurt Russia than at any earlier point of the four-year war, but while it is hitting missile and component factories, it has not yet seriously degraded output.
Russia’s growing ballistic missile capability enables a doctrine that has been in place since the front lines froze: a systematic infrastructure campaign designed to weaponize winter and make Ukraine increasingly ungovernable.
Since October, Russian attacks have damaged more than 9 gigawatts (GW) of thermal, hydropower, and combined heat-and-power capacity, more than half of Ukraine’s roughly 17.6 GW of generation capacity available for the 2025-26 heating season. Ukraine has restored 4 GW and is racing to restore another 6 GW before the 2026-27 heating season. Moscow is seeking to destroy faster than Kyiv can rebuild. The coming winter, just months away, will be a test of national resilience and a contest between Russia’s expanding strike-production base and Ukraine’s increasingly stretched air defenses and infrastructure-repair capacity.
Energy is only part of the target set. Since January 2026, Russia has carried out 250 attacks against Naftogaz facilities, not isolated strikes but a sustained campaign to reduce domestic gas production and exhaust repair capacity simultaneously. Overnight on 6-7 August, Russia carried out one of its largest recent attacks on Ukrnafta, damaging seven oil and gas production facilities in eastern Ukraine and forcing several sites offline.
The geographic spread and frequency point to a single objective: force Ukraine to defend a dispersed network of facilities that cannot all be protected at once with finite interceptors.
Railways are the third front. Within the last week, Russia reportedly attacked Ukraine’s railway 41 times, damaging 11 locomotives. Russia is also targeting repair teams. The cumulative effect is a logistics crisis in slow motion: reduced capacity to move military supplies, evacuate civilians, and export the goods Ukraine needs to fund its own defense.
Is there an answer?
There is. Western assistance to new Ukrainian anti-ballistic missile systems is key, and so too are increased Patriot interceptor deliveries — Zelenskyy said on August 13 that he needs at least a fivefold increase in stocks.
But that will not be enough. Ukraine must be able to attack the production sites on multiple fronts simultaneously. That means financing the mass production of long-range weapons, like the Ukrainian-produced Flamingo and other developing systems, plus providing the intelligence, components, and targeting support needed to strike missile factories, storage sites, and launch infrastructure within range.
It means closing the sanctions gap, tightening export controls, and imposing secondary sanctions against the companies and countries supplying Russia with foreign electronics and machinery. European dual-use components are still being found in recovered Russian weapons. That is not a secondary issue. It is a direct contribution to the missiles hitting Ukrainian cities.
As long as Ukraine’s strike capabilities cannot consistently reach the production facilities that matter most, the West as a whole will remain on the losing side of this missile-production race; bear in mind that alliance officials say an open Russian attack on NATO by 2029 is entirely possible.
Europe could, of course, finally start to confront what has so far been politically avoided: extending air defense coverage from NATO territory over western Ukraine, a proposal known as Sky Shield, thereby freeing Kyiv’s finite interceptors to concentrate on the regions most exposed to ballistic attack rather than defending the entire country simultaneously.
Russia has spent four years building a production base designed to outlast the Western response. This winter will reveal whether Ukraine and its allies can counter it.
Maksym Beznosiuk is an analyst whose work focuses on Russia, Ukraine, and international security. He is an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC.
William Dixon is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC. He specializes in cyber and international security issues.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Europe’s dependence on Kremlin energy has fallen dramatically. From next year, all remaining Russian gas imports will be banned under EU legislation now being phased in.
Not only has reliance on an aggressive neighbor lessened, but developments over the past decade signal that Europe can exploit new opportunities to shut out Russian gas even after the Ukraine war concludes.
Take Romania, which is on the verge of an important increase in offshore gas production, adding substantial new volumes to a regional market where demand growth struggles to keep pace.
That produces a dilemma — will Romanian gas end up competing with supplies from its most important strategic partner, the United States, or should its policymakers treat these volumes as part of a new regional energy security architecture?
The answer matters far beyond Romania.
The EU’s gas diversification drive and the collapse of Russian pipeline flows forced Europe to accelerate investment in alternative supply routes.
One of the most important developments has been the emergence of the so-called Vertical Gas Corridor along the Trans-Balkan pipeline, a route that once carried Russian gas via Ukraine, Moldova and Romania to the Balkans and Turkey.
After Russia redirected flows to another corridor via Turkey in 2020, the pipeline was largely left idle, creating an opportunity to repurpose it as a south-north corridor linking Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Moldova.
In recent years, it has been used for US liquefied natural gas (LNG), Azeri gas, and some remaining Russian supplies into Central and Eastern Europe.
At the end of 2027, when Russian gas is due to be completely phased out, the corridor could also carry Romanian offshore gas.
Neptun Deep, Romania’s flagship Black Sea project, holds an estimated 100 billion cubic meters (bcm) in reserves, and if actual reserves align with initial forecasts, the country could nearly double its production to 17-18 bcm/year, consolidating Romania’s role as the EU’s top gas producer, although, admittedly, much smaller than non-EU supplier Norway.
But rising production brings a new challenge: finding markets for surplus gas.
Even assuming current domestic demand of around 10 bcm/year and an additional 3-5 bcm/year from new gas-fired generation and limited industrial growth, Romania could still be left with significant excess volumes.
What to do? At first glance, neighboring markets seem an obvious outlet for Romanian gas, but each has its constraints.
While Hungary’s gas demand is relatively great by regional standards, limited interconnection capacity, geopolitical considerations, and long-term supply contracts constrain its ability to absorb Romanian exports.
Meanwhile, Bulgaria’s growing battery storage, renewables, and planned nuclear investments are likely to curb future gas demand growth.
As a result, Romania risks entering an increasingly crowded regional market, competing with other fuels and mainly US LNG, where the EU has promised to increase purchases.
The search for buyers has naturally focused on end-user markets, but that may be the wrong way to view Romania’s surplus gas.
Romania’s northern neighbor, Ukraine, offers a different opportunity.
For years, high tariffs, transmission costs and regulatory barriers limited the commercial appeal of exporting gas to Ukraine.
Those constraints are gradually easing.
Initially a reluctant neighbor, Romania has now started to collaborate more with Ukraine, cutting tariffs and even considering limited exports. All this is helping to improve the actual economics of moving Black Sea gas north.
While Ukraine’s gas demand could rise significantly once the war ends and reconstruction begins, its greatest value may lie in its vast underground storage capacity. In many ways, circumstances are aligning for closer energy cooperation between Romania and Ukraine.
Under Romanian legislation, the government has pre-emption rights over new Black Sea gas production, giving it the option to purchase volumes before they are offered to other buyers.
The government has already opted to use this statutory right to purchase around 5 bcm from Neptun Deep between 2028 and 2034.
On the other hand, the EU is now working to update its security of supply regulation and has been in talks with Ukraine to create a strategic stock for Europe.
Although several Central and Eastern European countries, including Romania, maintain underground gas storage facilities, these are largely geared toward commercial use.
Their capacity, flexibility and cost structure make them less suitable for strategic stockholding, particularly when compared with Ukraine, which has made up to 10 bcm of storage capacity available to European companies.
This gives Ukraine a unique advantage as the only country in the region capable of accommodating large-scale strategic reserves while also providing substantial commercial flexibility.
Creating a strategic gas reserve in Ukraine would not only help shield European consumers from increasingly volatile, geopolitically driven energy markets, but also give the EU a stronger stake in protecting Ukraine’s critical energy infrastructure.
By combining Romanian offshore production with Ukrainian storage, Europe could create a regional strategic reserve capable of enhancing energy security across Southeast and Central Europe. In doing so, it would transform surplus gas into strategic leverage.
If policymakers fail to seize that opportunity, Romanian gas will simply enter an increasingly competitive market, battling US LNG for a limited pool of demand.
The choice Europe faces is therefore not merely commercial; it is geopolitical.
Petroslava Bratanova is an External Affairs Intern at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and is pursuing a Master’s in International Energy Transitions at Sciences Po Paris.
Aura Sabadus is a senior energy journalist writing for Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS), a London-based global energy and petrochemicals news and market data provider. She is also a Non-resident Senior Fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
An SUV or a truck with a heavy machine gun mounted in the trunk bed along with a three-man crew is an increasingly common sight on Russian roads. Grouped into mobile fire groups, their task is to shoot down the Ukrainian drones proliferating across the country’s airspace.
They also demonstrate the latest, extraordinary FSB effort to expand its growing empire, with the spy agency’s tentacles becoming ever-more evident as they reach across the authoritarian state.
Since July, articles praising those gun carriers have increasingly been appearing on Russian TV and pro-Kremlin media, even though they are uncomfortably reminiscent of footage from the Syrian war, when such trucks were ISIS’s favorite weapon. Heavy machine guns on open vehicles hardly scream reassurance in a police state, but the regime judges it wise to acknowledge this everyday reality, and dress it up the best it can.
The mobile fire groups began emerging across the country in the spring as Ukraine stepped up deep strike attacks on Russian targets. By July, reports of the formation of such teams came from Russian regions as far from the Ukrainian border as the Leningrad region, Karelia, North Ossetia, Siberia and Archangel.
It didn’t escape even pro-Kremlin media that the tactic isn’t very sophisticated: the cars used by the groups became nicknamed tachankas — a reference to the horse-drawn cart or wagon carrying a heavy machine gun pointing out the back that was widely used during the Russian Civil War of the early 20th century.
On the surface, it appears a motley, ad hoc attempt to find a solution to the looming Ukrainian drone threat. This is why some groups are staffed with army reservists who signed military contracts. Some act as part of established army units, and some, apparently, are not within the military at all; in early July, it became known that Gazprom had signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense to set up mobile fire teams tasked with “patrolling and protecting gas supply facilities.”
But here and there, the introduction of these new units also appears to be used by the FSB to build the agency’s own anti-drone empire.
In the occupied Donetsk region this spring, the mobile fire groups became an integral element of the regional air defense system, which was baptized, apparently in imitation of the Israeli system, as the “Donbas Dome”, and run by the Donetsk regional department of the FSB.
In the republic of North Ossetia in the Caucasus, the local FSB department formed the first mobile groups. And in the Krasnodar region, the governor has been urging private companies to help create the mobile groups with, and under the oversight of, the regional FSB.
This is part of a wider plan. On August 11, FSB director Alexander Bortnikov made a strong claim for the agency’s expanding role in drone defenses. Speaking at the National Antiterrorist Committee, a sort of government coordination body, he called for “improving the system for countering drones” and adopting a “comprehensive approach,” which in Russian bureaucratic lingo usually means supervision by his agency.
The FSB boss’s interest in leading the fight against Ukrainian drone attacks is quite extraordinary even against the backdrop of exploding refineries and warehouses across Russia.
The main mission of the FSB as the country’s major security service was traditionally focused on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, e.g., preventing terrorist and sabotage attacks and exposing spies. Gunfire was generally left to others.
Russia already has plenty of means at its disposal, including its 2.4-million-strong Armed Forces and the National Guard (Rosgvardia), which is essentially another small army of approximately 370,000 people, and which includes numerous anti-drone units as well as a separate department in charge of protecting enterprises and companies.
Rosgvardia, which evolved from the Interior Ministry’s armed units, is equipped not only with modern assault rifles and machine guns, but also with armored vehicles, artillery, and drones. Rosgvardia’s main role is, essentially, to maintain political stability in the country by military means.
Now this role is being increasingly taken over by the FSB, and here, as in many other areas, the agency has been doing so by duplication; by creating substitutes for existing military units.
This is part of a much wider and more ambitious program. The FSB has also been expanding its powerful special forces, seemingly rivaling the military’s Special Operations Forces Command; the FSB also has its own air force including helicopters and transport aircraft, and since last summer the agency has been building its own nationwide system of prisons and prisoner transfer system, including its own boats and trains, parallel to the system operated by the Federal Prison Service.
It appears that the FSB, relying on Putin’s support, is using his trust to turn itself into a more militarized force. With more people, more money, more guns and more responsibility, the FSB is no longer merely a secret police force.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book , Our Dear Friends in Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in 2025.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
There are two remarkable things about the Ukrainian war documentary Peace for Nina, now touring the film festival circuit.
The first is the story it tells.
Ukrainian soldier Ihor Branovytsky was captured by Russian separatists when they overran Donetsk airport in 2014. After that, he vanished. The film follows his mother Nina’s search as she tracks down fellow prisoners who recount the horrible truth that Ihor was executed by a paramilitary leader and former car wash employee, Arsen Pavlov, nicknamed Motorola.
Remarkably, as news of her quest spread, a Kyiv journalist tracked down Motorola’s cellphone number. More remarkable still, Motorola gave an interview from across the front line. He wouldn’t comment on Branovytsky’s death, but blithely took credit for executing 15 other prisoners. A year after that, Motorola was himself dead, blown up by a bomb planted in the elevator of his apartment block by an unknown assassin.
The second remarkable thing is how Nina was able to piece together what happened to her son between his capture and death. This was possible through videos uploaded by the separatists themselves. Video evidence like this has sparked a revolution in war crimes justice. The prevalence of the cellphone has allowed anyone to become a war crimes investigator, giving prosecutors around the world an avalanche of evidence.
Its availability has already transformed Ukraine’s war crimes investigations, the most extensive ever undertaken in history. Since the Russian invasion, more than 1,020 indictments have been issued, most backed by voluminous data.
“In Ukraine the level of video evidence they have is just next level,” Dr. Alexa Koenig, co-director of America’s Berkeley University Human Rights Center, told this author. “A Tsunami has hit international criminal justice.”
Dr. Koenig has been developing protocols allowing lawyers to navigate war crimes video archives, and many trials now hinge on such evidence. Germany jailed a Syrian official who arrived disguised as a refugee, when video evidence revealed the torture he inflicted back home. Another Syrian was convicted in the Netherlands for a brutal execution, thanks to film uploaded by his own staff celebrating it. In The Hague, the International Criminal Court jailed a Congolese warlord thanks to video confirming his use of child soldiers.
But marching in lockstep with the spread of video evidence are the fakes. AI images are often indistinguishable from the real thing. “Pictorial evidence is clearly on the up, technology is improving,” says the International Bar Association’s executive director Mark Ellis. “But potential manipulation of these types of videos, that too has increased.”
His solution was to invent an app, Eyewitness to Atrocities, which is free to download and guarantees images arrive at a special hub tamper-free. Launched in 2015, Eyewitness will shortly celebrate, if that is the right word, receiving its 100,000th war crimes image, the bulk from Ukraine.
This video revolution comes with its own problems, with lawyers obliged to sift through mountains of files. This is keenly felt by defense teams, who operate with a fraction of the staff available to prosecutors. “In a normal ICC trial there might be 20,000 documents disclosed, but in these (digital) cases, where evidence is collected from just about anyone with a phone, you might end up with 200,000,” says Marie-Helene Prouix, a defense lawyer at The Hague. “It’s hard to imagine how a defense team can manage that, given the limited resources and time they have.”
The video revolution is also grueling, as investigators hunt through thousands of distressing images for the one they want.
That also formed a central part of Nina’s five-year search, trying to piece together a timeline from the moment Ihor was first shown in captivity, arriving at a rebel base on a tank. She meets witnesses and relatives of other victims, and finds a silver lining in the community she builds with other grieving parents.
But the film also records her discovery of a heartbreaking image. When Ihor went to war, his mother gave him a blue fleece to stay warm. He took it, cheerfully telling her he wouldn’t wear it because it made him look unsoldierly. He wore it in captivity, though, which drew Nina’s attention to one of thousands of videos she searched.
There he was in his fleece, standing in line with other prisoners, his face bloody from a beating, shortly before he was murdered.
“She fights not only to have her son’s killing recognized as a war crime, but also to ensure that no other victim is denied justice,” says the film’s director, Jeanne Dovhych. “We have values as a civilization, and we must defend them.”
Chris Stephen is a former war correspondent with The Guardian. He has written on war crimes justice matters for publications including The Hill, International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Counsel, the magazine of the Bar Association of England and Wales. He is the author of The Future of War Crimes Justice (Melville House, London and New York) and Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic (Atlantic Books, London and New York).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Ukraine’s war crimes investigation and prosecution system has matured substantially since 2022, with specialized war crimes departments now embedded across the Office of the Prosecutor General (OPG), regional prosecutors’ offices, the Security Service, and the National Police.
Independent reviewers, including the War Crimes Trial Monitoring Initiative, have reported that the justice process is broadly effective. But it faces structural and legal constraints that threaten to undermine its efficiency as the number of cases grows.
The most acute structural gap is capacity. By June 2026, more than 240,000 episodes had been recorded in the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations in Ukraine, a volume of cases few investigative or prosecutorial bodies could reasonably process.
While the number of episodes will not necessarily equal the number of prosecutions, as some will be merged due to common perpetrators, the means used, or the targeted territory, it is still a titanic workload.
And training support compounds the imbalance. International technical assistance has concentrated heavily on prosecutors and investigators, while judges and defense attorneys have received limited and less targeted capacity-building.
As cases move toward trial in greater numbers, this uneven investment has left criminal justice capacity lagging the demands of complex atrocity adjudication. The defense function in war crimes proceedings is also systemically under-resourced and will only get worse as the caseload grows.
A significant number of cases also expose the absence of coherent prioritization. Trial monitoring data shows that the average interval between notice of suspicion and verdict is more than two-and-a-half years, a pace incompatible with adjudicating every registered episode individually.
This is why international partners and Ukrainian civil society have consistently pressed for a comprehensive strategy of case prioritization and aggregation. The OPG’s War Crimes Prosecution Strategy, adopted in April, has begun to address this gap, but, without an effective department-wide prioritization framework, the system risks incoherence as the volume of cases outpaces capacity.
Investigative tools and procedural requirements applied to war crimes investigations are outlined in the Criminal Procedure Code, but legislation created for peaceful conditions often fails to reflect the realities of wartime investigations. This includes the collection of battlefield evidence and excessive formal requirements on expert evidence, such as OSINT analyses, digital evidence assessments, and ammunition expertise, which can limit their use and delay verdicts.
In contrast, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is well adapted to the realities of armed conflict. Rather than imposing rigid admissibility requirements at the investigative stage, it places responsibility on judges to assess the admissibility and relevance of evidence in light of the circumstances in which it was collected.
Command responsibility and crimes against humanity also only entered Ukrainian criminal legislation in October 2024, complicating adjudication of earlier conduct. While international law doesn’t recognize limitation periods for crimes, and courts are permitted to read the Criminal Code consistent with international law, domestic practice on retroactivity remains unsettled.
Ukraine’s continued use of trials in absentia, without an expressly codified provision for retrial on the accused’s appearance, raises a related concern. While European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence is unambiguous on the right to retrial, the Criminal Procedural Code’s provisions are open to interpretation.
The absence of a dedicated provision against forced passportization, and other violations of customary international law, also leaves a victim-centered gap in the legislative framework, one increasingly relevant given the widespread use of the practices in Ukraine’s occupied territories.
The Office of the Prosecutor General sent proposals to parliament to address several of these legislative gaps, but lawmakers are yet to start a substantive review, leaving vulnerabilities unresolved while the system grapples with a rapidly expanding caseload.
Sustained, targeted, and cross-institutional support, spanning investigators, prosecutors, judges, and defense counsel, together with a case prioritization framework and timely legislative reform, will be essential to ensuring the system’s continued credibility and effectiveness at scale.
Anna Stakhanova is a legal expert specializing in international crimes, prosecution reform, and accountability. Her research at CEPA focused on Transitional Justice policy for Ukraine. In her most recent position, Anna worked as the Key Expert on Accountability for International Crimes with the EU Project Pravo-Justice in Ukraine, where she advised and trained key stakeholders within the Ukrainian justice system. Prior to this, Anna served as an International Consultant on Accountability for War Crimes with the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in Poland. Anna holds an LLM in International Law from the London School of Economics, along with master’s degrees in law and linguistics from the National University of Odesa Law Academy and Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
President Xi Jinping’s speech at the recent Shanghai World Artificial Intelligence Conference presented his country as an appealing champion of open, multilateral, accessible AI to benefit all of humanity.
For many countries, the US offers something different — closed models, paying for someone else’s computing power, relying on infrastructure located in other jurisdictions and accepting that Washington can change the terms of access at any time. China counters with cheaper, open models that can be downloaded, adapted to local languages, and run with much greater autonomy.
Recent advances by companies such as DeepSeek, Zhipu, and Moonshot show that this is not merely propaganda. Kimi K3 is capable of competing with some of the best US models. This strategy could democratize access to AI. It can reduce costs, weaken the stranglehold of US companies, and enable countries that could never afford to fund a state-of-the-art model to develop their own applications. China is transitioning from being viewed as a copycat to becoming a vast laboratory for widespread adoption.
But to confuse that with altruism would be naive. China does not offer open technology because it has discovered a philanthropic calling, but because openness creates ecosystems, sets standards, and generates dependencies. A country can freely download a model and yet end up depending on chips, cloud services, development tools, updates, security systems, or communications infrastructure controlled by Chinese providers.
The most effective form of dependence is not one that is imposed, but one that seems rational. China does not need to conquer countries or force them to adopt its technology; it is enough for it to become the cheapest, most accessible, and most functional option. When the American alternative requires paying more, giving up more autonomy, and accepting political conditions, the decision practically makes itself.
President Xi promised thousands of training slots, international cooperation centers, and AI-based tools for developing countries. He also presented the new global organization promoted from Shanghai as an alternative to a technological order dominated by a handful of powers and companies. The initiative aims to position China as the natural partner of the Global South and as a guarantor that AI will not become a new mechanism of exclusion. It is consistent with his vision outlined in 2022 that “China cannot develop without the world, and the world also needs China.”
Does that make China a reliable partner? Not necessarily. The same country that speaks of AI “for the good of humanity” maintains one of the most sophisticated systems of digital censorship and surveillance in the world. The Chinese government is using AI to strengthen its social control, and its models must adhere to very specific political restrictions on issues such as Tiananmen, Taiwan, Xinjiang, or the leadership of the Communist Party.
President Xi’s insistence that AI must remain “safe and controllable” may seem reasonable, but in the Chinese context it also means “subordinate to the state.” Open-source code does not necessarily imply political openness, ideological neutrality, or the absence of censorship. A model can be technically modifiable yet still incorporate biases, restrictions, or priorities derived from the environment in which it was created.
Nor can the US convincingly present itself as the guardian of free technology. Its companies monopolize models, data, chips, and computing power, while its government uses sanctions, export controls, and extraterritorial jurisdiction to preserve its advantage. Its proposal for freedom often means, in practice, the freedom to contract services from US companies under the terms they set.
The real question is not whether the world will be better off if China wins. Replacing one technological hegemony with another can hardly be considered a victory. The best scenario is one in which Chinese competition breaks up oligopolies, lowers prices, and opens up opportunities for Europe, India, Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
China can make a decisive contribution to a multipolar world. But taking advantage of what it has to offer requires setting aside any paternalistic fantasies. Beijing and Washington both seek influence, markets, and the ability to set the rules.
China’s great skill lies in having understood that, when the dominant power begins to close doors and act as a jealous guardian of its privileges, there is no need to present itself as a conqueror. It is enough simply to offer cooperation. The challenge for the rest of the world is to accept that cooperation without confusing it with benevolence and, above all, without trading one form of dependence for another.
Enrique Dans is a Senior Fellow with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Tech 2030
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
US AI policy is suffering from whiplash. It veers between the temptation of imposing strong export controls and the fear that protectionism will only help China catch up.
The administration banned allies from obtaining access to Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable 5, only to backtrack and open access. It abandoned early ideas of mandatory government checks, only to backtrack again and impose a voluntary framework under which AI labs would give authorities access to frontier models 30 days before their release.
The release of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 highlights the confusion. The model costs only half of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, yet its capabilities are not far behind. Not surprisingly, startups in both the US and Europe are shifting to Chinese alternatives such as DeepSeek, Qwen, and now K3. Open-weight models allow companies to freely download the parameters learned in training, build on top of them, and then run the model in their own cloud.
Washington is divided on how to respond.
One camp supports designating Chinese models as a national security risk and restricting their use by American companies. Another believes that protectionism would prove counterproductive and exclusively benefit expensive proprietary models developed by US leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic.
The case for banning Chinese open models rests on two claims: that they were built on stolen American technology, and that the models carry national security risks. White House Office of Science and Technology Director Michael Kratsios alleges that K3 trained on Anthropic’s models and export-controlled NVIDIA chips. While so-called “distillation” training is standard industry practice, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has hinted at possible sanctions on Chinese companies that practice it.
The second argument against the Chinese models concerns their safety. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that open-weight models pose unique risks because developers cannot revoke access, update safety guardrails, or prevent misuse once released. The UK’s AI Security Institute found it easy to bypass cybersecurity safeguards on Chinese open models.
Dean Ball, a former White House staffer who drafted the US AI Action Plan and now serves as Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, has advocated for government guidance and recommendations that add regulatory risk to using Chinese open-weight models.
Most of the American AI industry rejects these arguments. Restricting access to open-weight models would only entrench the power of leading labs at the expense of smaller companies, former White House AI adviser David Sacks has asserted. Nearly 200 startups sent a letter to the administration arguing that Chinese open-weight models have become a critical resource for smaller developers that cannot absorb the cost of frontier models.
“There’ll be hundreds of companies that instantly die,” said Suhail Doshi of the startup Particle. AI powerhouses NVIDIA, Meta, and Microsoft agree, cautioning that a ban would undermine competition and innovation.
Critics also reject the open is unsafe argument. Closed AI models are not inherently safer than open ones, NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, AMD, Hugging Face, and more than three dozen other companies wrote in a recent public letter. They can be breached, misused, or fail in ways outsiders cannot detect. Concentrating advanced capability behind a handful of closed systems creates single points of failure, rather than eliminating risk.
Although no side can yet claim total victory, this anti-protectionist camp seems to be winning. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly considering measures to encourage US labs to release open-source models. And the administration’s new pre-release framework applies only to closed models.
But winning the open-source debate has not made American AI policy more coherent.
American AI labs have built their business models around proprietary subscription models, and their commercial advantage relies not only on performance but on customers believing access will remain reliable. This has left US labs facing additional regulatory burdens while competing against cheaper rivals, even as allies remain uncertain about continued access.
The new framework’s secrecy makes this a geopolitical problem. For allies that cannot see the benchmarks against which the models will be tested, they are left without knowing what the safety criteria is, and cannot rule out that those criteria will change at the administration’s discretion. Nor does the US government necessarily have the expertise to run these evaluations alone, as the work of third parties like the UK AI Security Institute has shown.
The question for Washington is no longer how to restrict China’s models, but how to restore confidence in American AI. Should AI governance prioritize denying capabilities to China or cultivating a competitive AI industry? Those two goals are becoming difficult to pursue simultaneously.
Marta Granados Hernández is a US Google Public Policy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a master’s candidate at Georgetown University’s Master of Science in Foreign Service program, concentrating in Science, Technology, and International Affairs.
Ian Hoerr was an intern for the CEPA Tech Policy Program in the Summer of 2026.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Tech 2030
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation