Jamestown Foundation

Executive Summary: The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) recent restructuring of its space sector illustrates the implementation of its “new-style whole-of-nation system” for innovation, again using the space program as a leading test bed for new approaches to manage high-risk, high-reward investments. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has announced further integration of its crewed and robotic lunar exploration programs, and set up separate offices to support and regulate the commercial

This article is the second in a series based on data collected from 16 interviews conducted with civic, humanitarian, and political experts in Kyiv, Ukraine, from April 13–24, 2026. The goal of the project was to obtain an accurate, up-to-date snapshot of the numerous realities that comprise modern-day Ukraine. This piece examines what victory means for Ukrainians four and a half years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country.  Individual participant views do not necessarily r

Executive Summary: Distillation has become essential to the rise of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models. Chinese academic and industry papers published in the period 2024–2026 detail how distillation takes place—including adversarial distillation—and provides insight into the kinds of entities involved in the work of using leading models to build capabilities that rival the world’s best models. The prize is frontier reasoning: the step-by-step “chain of thought” that is the most e

Executive Summary: Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s reported late-June move to leave the presidency while preparing to return as prime minister. This is a continuity maneuver rather than a strategic change of direction. Serbia’s regional posture toward Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro is likely to remain unchanged. Belgrade treats neighbors’ sovereignty as conditional, a logic that resembles the Brezhnev Doctrine’s limited sovereignty model and later Russian President Vla

Executive Summary:  The Kremlin has returned only a small share of the Ukrainian children it transferred to Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine has documented more than 20,000 forced transfers of children, only 2,404 of which have been returned.  Forcibly separating children from their parents during filtration (фильтрация, fil’tratsiia)— Russia’s compulsory security screening of Ukrainian civilians in occupied territories—is one of six major mechanisms Russ

Executive Summary: Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries have sparked a country-wide gas shortage and cost Moscow significant export earnings. They are far from the only threat to Russia’s oil industry. Other, less dramatic threats are likely to prove more significant. Much of Russia’s pipeline network and tanker capacity, dating from Soviet times, is aging and increasingly prone to leaks, reducing the flow of oil to refineries and export markets on which the Kremlin relies while

Executive Summary: Senior Russian officials, including Ministry of Finance and Central Bank of the Russian Federation representatives, warned Russian President Vladimir Putin in early June that continued war spending is straining the economy. Defense spending is projected to consume about a third of the entire 2026 budget, making fiscal balance increasingly difficult.  Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development cut its 2026 GDP growth forecast from 1.2 percent to 0.4 percent. The Janu

Executive Summary: On July 19, David Tsetskhladze, president of the Federal Georgian National-Cultural Autonomy in Russia and a member of the Russian President’s Council on Interethnic Relations, called on Georgian authorities to ensure the safety of Russian citizens in Georgia. A series of incidents involving Russian citizens, including public disturbances, confrontations with Georgian citizens, and a fatal traffic accident, has raised concerns over law enforcement responses and accounta

Executive Summary: Despite successive Western sanctions packages, Russia’s military-industrial complex has expanded since 2022 by exploiting major sanctions gaps, leaving many defense-linked companies, chemicals, and dual-use technologies outside existing restrictions. Russia continues acquiring critical military components through intermediary states, parallel imports, and weak export controls, while thousands of companies—particularly in the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong—faci

Executive Summary: Ukraine has transformed what began as isolated strikes against Russian oil refineries into a sustained strategic campaign that has targeted nearly every major refining facility in Russia, triggering an unprecedented fuel crisis. Russia’s air defense system has proven structurally incapable of protecting oil refineries dispersed across the country’s vast territory. Attempts to shift responsibility for their defense onto private companies, as well as initiatives announced

Executive Summary: A new State Council administrative regulation is the first in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to govern outbound investment as a whole. It defines “resident individuals” as outbound investors for the first time, subjecting private overseas investment to the approval, reporting, security-review, and penalty framework that previously only encompassed enterprises. The regulation arrived amid an escalating campaign against the offshore brokers through which mainland ho

Executive Summary: Russia is experiencing more fuel shortages as Ukraine focuses strikes on Russian oil refineries in Moscow and is able to reach targets nearly 2,500 kilometers (1,553 miles) inside Russia. Officials in Russia are beginning discussions with other countries, including India, about importing oil and claim that the fuel shortages at gas stations are due to Ukrainian strikes, which have led to excessive demand and caused logistical problems. Russians are expressing a range

Executive Summary: Beijing is expanding its “Kinmen model” of gray-zone maritime pressure to other Taiwan-controlled offshore islands and maritime positions. For over two years, it has used political or maritime triggers to challenge Taiwan-administered boundaries, deploy the China Coast Guard (CCG), and normalize its law-enforcement presence in waters under Taiwan’s effective control, but that Beijing claims as its own jurisdiction. Activity in June and July has involved a combination of

Executive Summary: General Secretary Xi Jinping’s reforms to the nomenklatura system has built a selectocracy that is best understood as a realignment with Leninist party-building norms after experiments with more democratic bottom-up mechanisms under Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao. Such changes are intended to strengthen the Party as a whole, not just Xi’s own power.   Notable Xi-era reforms, such as eliminating the use of straw polls for cadre selection, simply reverted changed made

Executive Summary:  Russia continues to demand that Kyiv cede the Ukrainian-controlled parts of its Donetsk oblast, promoting the “spirit of Anchorage” to allege that the United States informally accepted Russian control of the entire Donbas region, which comprises the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, as a starting point in peace talks.   U.S. officials have recently disputed that any agreement was reached during the August 2025 talks in Alaska, resetting the stage for more realistic negotiat

Executive Summary: Many believe in both Russia and the West that Muscovites are more interested in restoring ties with the West and less supportive of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine than are those living elsewhere in the Russian Federation. This is not the case, according to Lev Gudkov, one of Russia’s most distinguished sociologists. Anti-Western and pro-war attitudes are today “much more pronounced” in Moscow than elsewhere, mostly for economic reasons. That d

Executive Summary: The Party pins its legitimacy to success in developing “comprehensive national power” (CNP). Understanding how it conceptualizes CNP may enable the United States to identify effective ways for integrated deterrence to target vulnerabilities the Party has identified and drive perceptions that reduce the leadership’s confidence across constituent elements of CNP. CNP growth in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will not be linear in the coming years, and Beijing’s appro

Executive Summary: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) recently launched a nuclear-capable ballistic missile from a strategic nuclear submarine (SSBN) into the Pacific, leading to backlash in the region. The missile was Beijing’s first publicly acknowledged submarine-launched ballistic missile test into the Pacific, and the second ballistic missile test into the Pacific in under two years. The test coincided with the signing of a defense treaty between Australia and Fiji, the latest o

Executive Summary: The French navy seized the sanctioned crude oil tanker Deliver in the Mediterranean on June 23. This marks the latest in an increasingly frequent series of enforcement measures by European countries against Russia’s shadow fleet. Boardings have a legitimate legal basis, but Russian officials characterize them as piracy and dispute the existence of a “shadow fleet.” At the same time, Russia is accepting more of these ships onto its registry. As sanctions put pressure

Executive Summary: As Ukrainian missile strikes expand across Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin has framed the war as a Western test of Russia’s “resilience,” drawing attention to the structures the Kremlin relies upon to bridge the civil-military divide and reinforce societal cohesion. The state-sponsored Cossack movement has become part of Moscow’s wartime messaging, with battlefield claims, public ceremonies, and official recognition used to portray Cossack formation as evidence