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Russia Is a Threat to America, Not a Partner
The Trump administration is once again looking for ways to improve the United States–Russia relationship, even as Moscow flouts calls for a ceasefire that Kyiv has accepted. The Russians continue to target civilians in Ukraine and are intensifying sabotage and other terrorist activities across Europe. Moscow is also audaciously aligning with the Iranian regime and providing diplomatic and material support to Iran. Weakening Russia and countering its ability to harm Americans and undermine US interests is the only prudent path forward. Ukraine continues to make gains on the battlefield against Russia, even though it is in dire need of missile defenses and systems that can hit Russian launchers farther inside Russian territory. The US should lead the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to impose costs on Russia for its hybrid war and bolster strategic deterrence.
“If the president wants to meet with [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to talk about Ukraine, I think that would be a serious mistake. If he wants to do something like Yalta, then you have meetings among allies. The United States, with the Europeans, with Ukraine, trying to figure out what to do about Russia. . . .
“After President Trump is arguing now that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is the one that’s standing in the way of peace, you saw [Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey] Lavrov. . . meeting with the foreign minister of Iran. And Lavrov was saying that the Iranian’s cause against the United States was ‘just,’ and he compared it positively with Russia’s cause against the United States’ effort with NATO in Ukraine.
“So, the Russians are supporting the Iranians. They are providing targeting, which the Iranians are then using to hit Americans in the Gulf region. . . . The Russians are also hitting American businesses in Ukraine: Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Boeing, and some others, Philip Morris. . . .
“The Russians view the United States as its number one adversary.”
— Rebeccah L. Heinrichs, Director, Keystone Defense Initiative
On Fox News
“We expected a trilateral meeting this October, too, but it didn’t happen because the Russians came up with another reason not to meet. . . . Almost every day, Russia attacks us massively. . . .
“They already began [what] we call ‘winter attacks,’ but they began it really in September, in autumn. They massively attacked us with thousands of drones per day and then moved to multi-attacks. It means drones and cruise missiles and also ballistic missiles. . . .
“[There are] already drone attacks against Romania, Germany, Poland, Moldova, [and] Bulgaria. . . . Russia [is] already in hybrid war against Europe. . . .
“[In Ukraine,] they killed around 20–30,000 civilians immediately. . . . Around 20,000 children have been deported to Russia. . . .
“When we say we hope that partners will give us security guarantees . . . it’s, again, about the millions of people, that Russia will not come again, will not occupy again our houses, will not kill again all these people, thousands of people, thousands of children. . . .
“If Russia will come again, and I'm sure [they] will, to Ukraine with only one goal—which they never change: destroy us, occupy us, and push us out from our land—if they will come back again, what [will] Europeans be ready to do? What [will] the United States of America do? This answer is a security guarantee for us.”
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine
At Hudson Institute
Hudson Highlights
Peter Rough | The Hill
“Last month, European Union defense ministers gathered in Brussels to grapple with the rising threat of grey-zone attacks. Even the normally taciturn Swiss government is raising the alarm about Russian actions. The August discovery of an explosive-laden drone at Germany’s Leipzig Airport underscores the larger pattern: Beijing, Tehran and Moscow are increasingly using horizontal escalation, . . . the expansion of a conflict to new geographic regions or domains of competition. . . .
“Tehran supplied Moscow with key drone capabilities when Russia was at its weakest in Ukraine. Russia, in turn, has provided Iran with sophisticated military assistance. Moscow is reportedly helping Tehran develop supersonic cruise missiles. China has helped blunt US pressure on both Russia and Iran by supplying Moscow with essential dual-use items for its defense industry and by remaining a major buyer of sanctioned Iranian oil. . . .
“Russian acts of sabotage against European infrastructure should trigger costs in domains the Kremlin values—weapons transfers to Ukraine, restrictions on Russian finance, seizures of sanctions-busting assets. An adversary may choose where to apply pressure, but it should not be allowed to choose where the consequences fall.”
Ludovic Hood | The Hill
“Moscow plans to spend a record $200 billion on defense in 2027, about 35 percent of federal spending. . . . He is strip-mining Russia’s future to fund the front. . . .
“Unable to break Ukraine’s army, Putin is turning on its civilians and its economy. July was the deadliest month for Ukrainians since May 2022, with homes, schools and the electricity grid among the targets. His recent provocations toward Europe, from drone incursions to sabotage and the harassment of NATO ships and aircraft that NATO attributes to Moscow, are not the mark of a statesman extending his influence, but the desperate jabs of a leader who cannot afford a real fight. . . .
“Beijing now supplies roughly 35 percent of Russia’s imports and takes 30 percent of its exports. . . . Russia buys roughly 90 percent of its sanctioned high-tech imports from China, and its liquid sovereign wealth reserves are held in yuan and gold. . . .
“Putin may well outlast his country’s decline. That is the case for deterrence, not concessions. Russia is not a peer to be courted but a declining, dangerous power to be contained. Every month the West keeps up the pressure, the bill for Putin’s war grows—a bill he cannot pay without Beijing and cannot escape by being invited back into the club.”
Marshall Billingslea | School of War
“Russia has an ongoing and expanding and modernizing offensive biological warfare program. . . .
In the past four years, they have really gone on a major, major expansion [with] multi-million dollar investments particularly at the facility outside of Moscow in Zagorsk, which is where they have the smallpox virus. . . .
The reason we’re so concerned [today] about this potential plague outbreak, or plague release, in Irkutsk . . . [is because] we know that the Irkutsk laboratory—that this woman who died was working in—actually had a covert program focused on weaponization of plague. Not only weaponization of plague, but genetic modification of plague to be resistant to antibiotics. . . .
“You’re assuming a level of humanity on the part of the Russian leadership that has never existed. . . . Just look at the meat grinder that Putin’s engaged in in Ukraine. They don’t care about the health of their troops, and they don’t care about the livelihood of their citizenship. . . .
“Certainly they want to have prophylactics developed to inoculate leadership if they, for instance, were to employ smallpox.”
Key Insights
General Alexus Grynkewich | Warsaw Security Forum
“Through our collective strength, we aim to deter and keep the peace. But if someone is foolish enough to attack us, we will fight. . . .
“With the amount of activity that’s going on in terms of sabotage and arson, I think our populations around the alliance are a bit nervous. . . .
“The front line is largely stabilized, and that’s a huge kudos to the fighting spirit of the Ukrainians. . . . [With Russia’s] continued attacks on energy infrastructure that are intended to make it hard on the civilian population and try to break the will of the Ukrainian people, that’s going to make for a very hard winter. I will also say it’s probably not going to work. . . .
“Ultimately, I hope that we can end this conflict and achieve a lasting peace. But if we can’t, I know the Ukrainians are going to continue to fight. . . .
“One of the [Russians’] main objectives is to break the West’s will to continue flowing support to Ukraine. So, one of the best responses is to prove that false to them . . . and show that the Russian premise for their activity is false. You’re only strengthening our resolve.”
Carl Bildt | Council on Foreign Relations
“What is the new thing in the last, I would say, two months, is that the Russians are significantly escalating the war against the Ukrainian economy at large. I was in Odesa in mid-July, and they were then handling 30, 40 ships a day in terms of agricultural exports. All of that is gone. All of the port infrastructure of the Black Sea is gone. All of the agricultural export of Ukraine is gone.
“The last two, three weeks, they have taken out the metallurgical industry—second largest export. They go deliberately against all of the industries. They go against retail. And this is important also because it collapses state income for Ukraine. . . .
“[In] the occupied part of Donbas, [it’s] very difficult to get the numbers, but the number of people living there is less than half what it used to be. And most of them are going to Ukraine. Some are going to Russia as well, it has to be said.
“And what Russia is doing now in the occupied territory is [to] bring in new people from Siberia and other parts. So, they are having a deliberate policy of exchanging the populations in these particular areas. It’s a sort of classical colonization effort, ethnic change that is ongoing.”
Clayton Swope et al. | Center for Strategic and International Studies
“[From October 17–18,] Russia didn’t accidentally get within a kilometer of [the commercial satellite ICEYE-X36]. . . . What we saw, it could be either Russia did a dry run of some activity, concluded some kind of test, or really maybe just hit the pause button. . . .
“There are four others [Russian military satellites]. . . . If Russia wanted to practice RPO (Rendezvous Proximity Operations), there are four great candidates for Cosmos 2612 to work with. . . . You look at this, and you say, ‘hostile,’ because there’s no other reason why you would have done this. To all your points, it’s not just a coincidence. . . .
“Why have sabotage against one ground station for Starlink in Poland? Why have one drone maybe smuggled in to have a drone attack on an aircraft sitting on the ground at an airport in Germany? Why attempt to sabotage one undersea cable? Why jam and spoof GPS signals over Finland? . . .
“To me it’s all about that notion that I think Putin thinks projects strength, which is essentially ‘poke the West in the eye and watch the West do nothing.’ . . . None of them make a material difference in the military strength of the United States or its European allies, [and] they don’t make a difference materially in the conflict in Ukraine. But they prove a point.”
Victor Cha et al. | Center for Strategic and International Studies
“This report documents a series of vulnerable individuals who are lured under false pretenses to labor on the assembly line of drone production [in the Yelabuga special economic zone] for the purposes of advancing Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
“Whether it’s teenage Russian children who are told, ‘It’s merely a work-study program,’ or women and young girls from the Global South who are told that they’re going to be working in hospitality, or North Koreans who are told that they will make more money than they can make at home, only to have 90 percent of their wages confiscated by the regime. . . . These are all different but classic cases of human trafficking, which relies on the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit people in various contexts. . . .
“This is basically the CRINK [China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea] in action, right? As you said, it’s Chinese financing and microelectronics, Iranian-designed drones, and North Korean labor that is pumping out thousands of drones for the Russian war. . . .
“We’re now finding that there are more Russian companies in these [North Korean] special economic zones that are probably complicit in more products that are being pushed out into the global supply chain using forced North Korean labor.”
Russian Foreign Minister’s Statement Openly Aligning with Iran
“I share the assessment provided by my colleague and friend, Foreign Minister of Iran Abbas Araghchi, who noted that our talks were useful, productive, and held in a spirit of trust. We noted the dynamic nature of Russian Iranian cooperation despite the prevailing circumstances. We have a solid foundation on which to build, which includes the updated basic interstate treaty, which entered into force on October 2, 2025, and which, for the first time, enshrined our relations as a comprehensive strategic partnership. . . .
“We noted the robust growth in bilateral trade. In 2025, it increased by 21 percent and in the first eight months of 2026 by more than 10 percent. . . .
“Despite the challenging circumstances that I mentioned several times, Russia has no intention of abandoning the implementation of economic and investment agreements with Iran. Our specialists are gradually returning to the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. . . .
“We continue to provide educational services to our Iranian friends. Nearly 10,000 students from the Islamic Republic of Iran are studying at Russian universities. We exchanged views on pressing regional and international issues. In most cases, our positions either overlap or are close. . . .
“I am confident that Iran’s cause, just like Russia’s, is just.”
Top Reads
Lavrov in Tehran amid Questions over Whether Moscow Is Helping Iran in War with US
Kian Sharifi | Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 21, 2026
Kateryna Shymkiv et al. | Institute for the Study of War
Russia Bombs Kyiv and Ukraine Fires Drones Towards Moscow, Despite Talk of Renewing Negotiations
Olena Harmash | Reuters
Airfield Attack Marked Opening Shot in Putin’s Stepped-Up Sabotage Campaign
Bojan Pancevski | Wall Street Journal
Where and How Putin Could Expand His War in Europe Beyond Ukraine
Atlantic Council
Letter to Trump on the Implementation of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act
Jim Costa et al. | House of Representatives
Russia and Iran Expand Nuclear Cooperation as International Oversight Weakens
Aleksandr Dubrovsky | Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Putin’s Shadow War Against Europe Is Getting More Intense
Hal Brands | Bloomberg
NATO Chief Urges Europe to Brace for More Russian Hybrid Attacks
Andrea Palasciano, Arne Delfs, and Patrick Van Oosterom | Bloomberg
As Putin Wages Shadow War, Europe Looks for a Way to Hit Back
Steven Erlanger | New York Times
“The West Can’t Stop Me”: Space Wars Heat Up as Russia Tails a Ukraine-Linked US Satellite
Katie Livingstone | Defense News
The Integrity Flash, Issue 156
ISR University
