Blog
India in Central Asia: Strategic autonomy in Eurasia’s changing geopolitics?
September 30, 2026India’s engagement with Central Asia is increasingly acquiring a security dimension that goes beyond traditional military cooperation. Geography, the instability emanating from Afghanistan, terrorism, drug trafficking, cybercrime and the changing balance of power in Eurasia have created a broad convergence of interests between India and the Central Asian republics. At the same time, the region is navigating an increasingly complex geopolitical environment shaped by Russia, China, the United States and the European Union. For India, this makes Central Asia not merely an extended neighbourhood, but an important component of its wider Eurasian strategic outlook.
The Guarantor Steps Back: the Gulf states after American primacy
September 24, 2026America has stopped acting as the Gulf's security guarantor. With Hormuz, the East-West pipeline and Bab al-Mandab all closed or struck by Iran or its allies, the Gulf states are left with no bypass and no protector.
The Houthis Close the Gate
September 10, 2026On the morning of 10 September 2026 the Houthi forces, who call themselves Ansar Allah, entered the port city of Mocha on Yemen’s Red Sea coast and took the port and the airport without a serious fight, because the Saudi backed government forces holding the city had already withdrawn during the night. Three Yemeni government sources confirmed the loss to Reuters, and the government itself said nothing for most of the day, which in this war is usually the clearest confirmation of all. Mocha was not an ordinary town. It had been in the hands of the anti Houthi coalition since early 2017, it was the main military and logistical base of Tariq Saleh’s National Resistance Forces on the western coast, and before that it had served as a base for the United Arab Emirates. Losing it removes the last significant government anchor on the Red Sea, and it sits between sixty and seventy five kilometres north of the Bab al-Mandab strait.
Putin's Three-Day Favour
September 5, 2026On the evening of 5 September 2026 the American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner sat down with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, and the meeting ran for more than three hours. Before it began, the Russian president made a point of telling his guests that Kyiv had not been struck since midnight. It was offered as a gesture of good faith, and much of the reporting that followed described it as a ceasefire. It was not a ceasefire. It was a decision to stop hitting one city for three days, taken for the duration of a visit, and everything that lay outside that narrow line continued exactly as before. The distinction matters more than it might appear, because the shape of the pause tells us a great deal about how Russia understands the war, what it is willing to trade, and what it is not.
Russia-Ukraine: The War Turns to Strangulation
August 30, 2026The war has changed shape. Neither side can move the front line in any way that decides the outcome, so both have shifted their main effort to destroying the other’s economy from the air and at sea. Russia is closing Ukraine’s sea exports by attacking merchant ships rather than ports. Ukraine is burning Russian refineries and airbases at ranges that now reach the Gulf of Finland. Two developments in the last forty-eight hours matter more than anything else in this report. Ukraine struck the KINEF refinery at Kirishi in Leningrad Oblast, which is one of the largest refineries in Russia, and it did so as part of a mass attack reaching towards St Petersburg. At the same time Ukraine disclosed intelligence that the Kremlin has ordered its military to prepare ground offensives against Kyiv and Chernihiv. The two facts point in opposite directions, and holding both is the analytical problem of the moment. Ukraine is inflicting deeper damage on Russia than at any previous point in the war, while simultaneously warning that Russia is preparing to widen it. A note on sources appears at the end, because the material for this period comes in three very different tiers and they should not be read alike.