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Latest Updates

News

Attacks on Ukrainian military recruitment officers have become "regular" and "a major problem," the country's military ombudswoman said, as Kyiv struggles to mobilise men to fight in the fifth year of Russia's full-scale invasion.

Yemen's armed forces say they hit crude transfer lines running from Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province to Yanbu with drones. Riyadh confirmed oil facilities in the Eastern Province were struck but claimed the drones were launched from Iraq.

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam arrived in Baghdad to advance energy cooperation with Iraq, with the revival of the Kirkuk-Tripoli crude oil pipeline emerging as the centrepiece of talks.

African startups raised $1.44bn in H1. While deal numbers fell 42%, acquisitions, cross-border expansion and corporate partnerships increased sharply.

Iran says it holds no talks with the US and will never let Washington set the timing of war and peace, foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said, hardening Tehran's stance after the collapse of the Islamabad memorandum of understanding.

Tech

Syrian super app Labby has raised $10mn from UAE and Saudi investors, in what officials call the first direct foreign investment in a Syrian technology startup. The ride-hailing and delivery platform was announced at a signing ceremony in Damascus.

Serbian insurtech startup Ominimo raised a Series B funding round that valued it at $1.6bn, making it the country's first startup to achieve unicorn status.

Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT surged 472% on its Shanghai debut, briefly becoming the most valuable listed company on the mainland and staking a domestic challenge to Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron in the global DRAM market.

Russia has adopted a law aimed at regulating artificial intelligence in the country, inadvertently admitting that the country has next to nothing in the area of "sovereign AI."

Croatia's grid operator has approved the technical blueprint for connecting the planned Pantheon AI data centre to the national grid, clearing a major regulatory hurdle for what developers say will be the country's largest-ever private investment.

Opinion

Is Volodymyr Zelenskiy more focused on his own political survival than on winning the war? That is the question The Spectator's Owen Matthews asked after the Ukrainian president's reshuffled his government.

Public discourse increasingly casts Central Asia as shedding Russian influence – through decolonisation, a pivot to China, or a push for greater sovereignty – but the reality on the ground is far messier.

Nothing screams political impotence like a national leader losing control over key military appointments at the time of war.

With Putin’s war and economy going badly, the suggestion is that China will soon be seen as the clear number one strategic partner to the Kazakhs.

OSW analysts say PM Péter Magyar's sweeping constitutional changes aimed at restoring the rule of law relied "on tools similar to those for which Fidesz was criticised for years".

Data

The increase in the world’s population is not exponential. The global population is growing, but the growth rate has declined since its peak six decades ago.

Russia's central bank cut its key rate by 25bp to 14% on July 24, defying a market consensus for no change, while raising its 2026 inflation forecast to 6%-7% and cutting its GDP growth forecast to 0%-1%.

The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) sold a record 44 tonnes of gold in the first half of 2026 — the largest six-month drawdown in at least 25 years.

Romania's public debt rose to 60.2% of GDP in April, above the 60% Maastricht threshold, though the monthly increase of RON1.7bn marks a sharp slowdown from the €34bn added across 2025.

Trust in Mykhailo Fedorov has surged since President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dismissed him as defence minister on July 15 as part of a surprise government reshuffle, with a new Rating Group poll putting him second only to the former commander-in-chief.

Features

Germany is paying roughly five times more for natural gas than it did before abandoning long-term Russian supply contracts, Berliner Zeitung reported on July 24.

Ukraine's Caspian strike killed an Iranian sailor and drew a retaliation threat from Tehran. Kyiv calls it interdicting the Iran-Russia arms route, but firing on a third state's vessel outside any declared war raises a harder question.

Rising oil prices will force central bank to hold effective borrowing rates higher for longer.

For the first time since records began, both of the Middle East's great oil chokepoints are shut at once for the first time ever. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since February 28, and now Bab al-Mandeb Strait is also shut.

Mexico staged 13 World Cup matches and generated billions in activity, but Moody's says the tournament will add just 0.13% to GDP this year, far below official hopes.

Blogs

Tourist visas denied based on highly subjective assessments of financial means and intentions to use “return” section of plane ticket.

The stochastic war continues to escalate into a brutal tit-for-tat missile war with both sides continuously rolling out new and improved weapons that could eventually lead to a direct clash between Nato and Russia.

The tit-for-tat missile war escalated at the weekend after Ukraine hit the largest distribution centre belonging to Wildberries, the “Amazon of Russia.” The Kremlin hit back the next day with a massive drone and missile barrage.

What is in store for Ukraine? There are two starkly different possibilities. It can become Finland — a country that lost a war, lost a tenth of its territory, swallowed neutrality, and then got rich. Or it can become Afghanistan.

Ukraine just got a new Prime Minister, Serhii Koretskyi, an oil and gas man that cut his teeth as an oil trader in the private sector before going to run Ukraine’s two biggest energy companies: Ukrnafta and Naftogaz.

bneGREEN

Iran added 668 MW of generating capacity in a week, including 70 MW of solar and a 160 MW combined-cycle unit at Asaluyeh, as Energy Minister Abbas Aliabadi pointed to weekly additions amid summer power shortages.

Exceptionally low water levels on the Danube are threatening to disrupt river navigation in Serbia and have slowed imports of petroleum products, adding pressure to fuel supplies amid high demand and elevated global oil prices.

Sea surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the tropical Pacific have remained above the +2.0°C threshold for a "super" El Niño for more than a week, reaching an anomaly of around +2.1°C by mid-July — more than a month early.

Unlicensed rooftop and self-consumption solar capacity in Turkey reached 24.2 GW by May 2026, taking total installed solar capacity to around 27 GW, according to grid operator TEİAŞ data.

The Caspian Sea's decline owes more to climate change than to dams or river abstraction, a water policy researcher says, with the Volga's navigation-focused dams limiting draw-off and Tehran's groundwater and wastewater plans making little progress.

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