Sir Ken McCallum, director general of MI5—the United Kingdom’s domestic security and counterintelligence agency—delivered his annual threat update last week. He warned of a “new era” for national security, one that required “a new response.” “The speech could still have gone further in underscoring the importance of soft power and connecting the dots between what is happening in society—polarization, distrust, bigotry, racism—and the country’s vulnerabilities to terrorists or state actors," writes expert @Farah_Pandith and Ezra Hess.

Ukrainian drones took out three data centers owned by Yandex, the internet conglomerate sometimes referred to as Russia’s Google, last week in retaliation for Russian strikes on its data centers. The strikes caused severe disruptions across the country, impeding Russians’ ability to send emails, make payments, and navigate the streets. "These strikes will have minimal effect on the global race to develop and adopt artificial intelligence," writes expert @ConnorMauthor. "Russia is nowhere close to the cutting edge of the field . . . hamstrung by lack of access to cutting-edge chips and by a brain drain of engineers." “But the bigger implication of the Ukrainian strikes is that they have laid bare a fundamental risk to the development and deployment of AI worldwide: its physical infrastructure is vulnerable.” “Companies and nations seeking to protect their data centers should therefore pursue a strategy of redundancy and resiliency.” “At its highest levels of performance, AI’s capabilities can appear otherworldly—but it is fundamentally a technology dependent on physical things. Defending it is just a new version of the oldest problem in warfare: how to hit your enemy’s infrastructure while stopping them from hitting yours.” "As long as they provide value, data centers will be targets," Martin writes. "Countries and companies are well advised to prepare for that future now.”

“Most states even today reward utilities for selling you more energy and penalize them for cutting your bill,” says Amory Lovins, cofounder and chairman emeritus of the Rocky Mountain Institute. “There are hosts of perverse incentives like this, carefully designed often by the incumbents who do very nicely out of selling the energy.”

When President Donald Trump announced a deal to buy diesel from Russia, “it was easy to shrug off the move as a feeble effort to limit energy prices in advance of the midterms,” writes expert Stephen Sestanovich. The story now looks "disturbingly different; the possible consequences, much more serious, and likely to last well beyond the midterms." A day after announcing new diesel imports from Russia, Trump began calling for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s removal from office. He followed this up by claiming that Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to suspend attacks on each other’s main energy targets. "This, it quickly became clear, was pure invention. Reports suggested what had actually happened was that U.S. negotiators were pressing the Ukrainian government to do something far more radical than a mutual ceasefire—to cease its attacks unilaterally, whether Russia complied or not," Sestanovich writes. “It is hard to overstate how much this new public hostility by U.S. officials—above all, the president—has disoriented Ukraine’s leadership,” he writes. “In searching for a new way to handle Trump, Ukraine’s leadership has seemed suddenly at sea." "Rather than see the prospect of postwar riches as the key that will bring Putin to the table, he now acts as though pressure—on Zelenskyy, not Putin—will be the crucial instrument of a breakthrough,” Sestanovich argues.