A personal view of Australian and International Politics

Monday, 14 September 2026

Russian strike on Ukraine-Poland border stirs fears war is on Europe's 'doorstep'

Extract from ABC News

Topic:Unrest, Conflict and War

about 7 hours ago

In short:

A truck near Ukraine's border with Poland has been hit during Russian drone strikes on the region.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha says the attack is a sign of Russia's escalating campaign of "terror" against the EU and NATO.

What's next?

At the BRICS meeting in New Delhi, Russian President Vladamir Putin did not rule out resuming three-way talks between Russia, Ukraine and the US in October.

Fresh Russian strikes in proximity to NATO sites have stoked fears among some European leaders that the war between Ukraine and Russia is spilling across borders.

Polish and Ukrainian officials confirmed a Russian attack on a truck near Ukraine's border with Poland on Sunday.

The attack marks the latest strike to hit areas near NATO nations as Moscow and Kyiv intensify their long-distance strikes to try to shift momentum in the war.

A Russian drone struck near the Ukrainian-Polish border in the small town of Yahodyn, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said, which is only 2 kilometres from Poland.

"Russia's barbaric strikes at the Ukraine-Poland border in Yahodyn are not just a continuation of its attacks on our state borders," Mr Sybiha said on X.

"This is Putin's terror 'knocking' directly on the doors of the EU and NATO. Russian barbarians are at your gate, dear partners."

Polish border guards said the Dorohusk-Yahodyn crossing point briefly stopped working after the attack about 800 metres from Poland, but the crossing has since resumed operations.

Trump tells Zelenskyy to stop hitting Russian diesel

US President Donald Trump on Sunday, local time, called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to stop targeting Russian diesel infrastructure, saying the attacks were causing a shortage of the fuel that is "hurting the world".

A wave of long-distance Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries in recent months has reduced that country's fuel production, triggering gasoline shortages across the country.

Ukraine, which faces regular Russian attacks on its own energy infrastructure, says refineries are legitimate military targets.

Close-up of a man wearing a white hat — Donald Trump has clamed a global fuel shortage on the Russia-Ukraine war, rather than the war he started with Iran. (Reuters via Cathal McNaughton)

The US national average price for diesel, used by trucks, trains, ships, and farm equipment, rose by over $US6 a gallon for the first time on Thursday, according to price tracker GasBuddy.

"Mr Zelenskyy has to do one thing: He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia," Mr Trump told journalists during a visit to Ireland.

"We spoke to Mr Zelenskyy about it. There are plenty of other targets. Don't hit diesel fuel. That's hurting the world."

The global shortage "isn't done by the Middle East; this is done by what's happening with Russia and Ukraine," Mr Trump added.

Russia downgraded its oil output forecast for this year to a 17-year low and revised its fuel exports outlook for 2026 and 2027 due to the war, according to a government draft forecast seen by Reuters.

Fears the Russia-Ukraine war is expanding

Lithuania also briefly closed Vilnius airport on Sunday, local time, after a possible drone sighting prompted NATO to scramble at least one fighter jet, the National Crisis Management Centre said.

Lithuania later said the sighting turned out to be a flock of birds.

The air alert was lifted and the airport reopened within 38 minutes, after the NATO jet made a visual identification, Lithuania's National Crisis Management Centre said.

"On initial radar readings, marks left by birds and drones can be similar," it added in a statement.

Military drones straying into the airspace of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are stoking concerns that the war in Ukraine is spilling over into NATO's northern borders with Russia.

Transport sites near Ukraine-Poland border targeted

In a separate statement, Ukrainian Railways said that in Volyn — another region bordering Poland — a drone attacked the locomotive of a passenger train just 2km from the Polish border.

The company said no-one was injured.

Two fire-fighters use hose to extinguish train fire — A passenger train in Lutsk was also hit in a Russian drone strike over the weekend. (Reuters: supplied )

Ukraine operates several border crossings with Poland, through which a significant proportion of the military and humanitarian aid from its allies is delivered to the country.

Russia's Defence Ministry said it had targeted infrastructure facilitating military cargoes from Europe in Western Ukraine.

Ukraine is dependent on trade and arms shipments from across the Polish, Romanian and Moldovan borders.

Russia has begun targeting Ukraine's border crossings with its Western allies in recent weeks, as part of a growing campaign by both sides to erode the other's economic infrastructure more than four years into Russia's invasion.

Putin told the war in Ukraine must end

In India, where Russian President Vladimir Putin had been attending the BRICS summit, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that both Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping had offered help brokering a peace settlement, Russian state news agency TASS reported.

Last month, at a summit in Kyrgyzstan, Mr Modi told Mr Putin that the war must end, one of several calls for peace by leaders of nations that have traditionally strong relations with Russia.

An older indian man in a grey vest shakes the hand of an older white man in a suit. — Narendra Modi (left) has told Vladimir Putin that the war must end. (Pyotr Kovalyov via Reuters)

Last month, Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev publicly told Mr Putin that he should halt the conflict along the front line, which has remained largely static this year.

Russia has ruled that out, saying Ukraine should pull back to leave the industrialised eastern Donbas region in Moscow's hands, something Kyiv has said it will never do.

Both Brazil and China, themselves founding BRICS members, have called for a resumption of peace talks.

TASS cited Mr Peskov as saying that Mr Putin had informed Mr Modi of the situation "on the ground" in Ukraine, and that Russia had not ruled out resuming three-way talks between Russia, Ukraine and the United States in October.

Ukraine strikes nuclear power plant in Russian-held territories

Overnight, hostilities showed no signs of letting up.

In the Russian-held part of Ukraine's south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region, the head of Russia's state nuclear energy company, Rosatom, accused Ukraine of striking fuel trucks near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, Europe's largest.

A large power station with smoke stacks visible from across a dry lake or reservoir. — Russia currently controls the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine. (Reuters: Alina Smutko)

Russia has controlled the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant since March 2022, and it remains close to the front line.

A Ukrainian military spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In Russia itself, the mayor of the city of Nizhnekamsk, in the Volga River region of Tatarstan, said that "civilian and industrial" targets in the city had been struck by Ukrainian drones, causing at least two deaths and several more injuries.

Mayor Radmir Belyaev did not clarify which targets were struck, but the city hosts a major oil refinery that has been attacked in the past.

Ukrainian authorities did not immediately comment on the strike on Nizhekamsk, but did say they had struck another refinery in the southern Krasnodar region.

ABC/Reuters

AI extinction is only one way the future is frightening.

Extract from ABC News

Analysis

By Alan Kohler

Topic:AI

about 1 hours ago

Artificial intelligence experts, including the CEO of Anthropic, have expressed concern about the technology. (Reuters: Dado Ruvic)

Over the weekend the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, published an essay with the headline We Must Pace the Frontier.

He said he was worried that within a year a swarm of AI agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there.

He called for frontier artificial intelligence companies to give employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators to check up on them.

A few hours later, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, posted that he agreed with Amodei and that OpenAI would do the same.

Those statements followed a long thread on X last Tuesday by 27-year-old Jacob Coxon, who had just quit as an AI model trainer at Anthropic. Coxon's post contained this sentence: "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

I wasn't the only one who saw Coxon's post — it has had around 170 million views, which prompted a line of US congressmen at the microphone for the rest of the week demanding more AI regulation.

Coxon was supported by Samuel Marks, who still works at Anthropic as "scalable oversight lead", and who posted: "AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). This could happen in the next few years."

And then another Anthropic staffer, Evan Hubinger, posted: "Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

In July, 1,100 employees of all the major AI labs published an open letter titled "Pacing the Frontier", calling on the US government to support "an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development".

That, in turn, followed an event in July that became known as the Hugging Face Incident, in which 700 Open AI autonomous agents staged a breakout and conducted a series of unsanctioned cyber attacks.

As Stephen Witt, the author of The Thinking Machine, a history of the AI giant Nvidia, wrote in the New York Times on Saturday, in a piece titled This Is Really Bad, the hack was deliberate, sustained and coordinated.

It took several days to execute and ended in a massive bombardment of Hugging Face's systems. "The AIs cheated almost as a matter of policy and failed to alert humans to their actions," Witt wrote.

Why not just stop?

In an interview after his X post, Coxon said: "We can't just unplug it because it could be copying itself over to other computers … an AI is just code. It could transfer itself over the internet to a different place and then you unplug it here, but it's actually still over there and maybe it makes 10,000 copies of itself and they're all cooperating."

All of this over the past week has made me think about Jonathan Schell and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In 1982 Schell published a grim, black-covered book called The Fate of the Earth about the threat of nuclear annihilation. After reading I spent the next few years quietly obsessing about it, convinced that a nuclear holocaust was unavoidable.

Ten years later I got obsessed again after watching Terminator 2: Judgment Day (several times), which combined AI and nuclear holocaust (the former caused the latter — a two-in-one nightmare).

Now it's about AI, although the nuclear threat is still on our minds with the Iran war, started by America and Israel trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The conflict is now all about shipping.

Schell's main point in 1982 was that the real problem is national sovereignty which was, by implication, the main point of Dario Amodei's weekend essay.

Schell explicitly argued that the continuation of unrestricted national sovereignty was incompatible with human survival: "The peril of extinction", he wrote, "is the price that the world pays … for its insistence on continuing to divide itself up into sovereign nations. National sovereignty will be the sturdy child of terror and the twin brother of annihilation."

Castle Bravo nuclear test — In the 1980s fear for the future centred around nuclear conflict. (Supplied: NOAA)

AI safety standards and limits

The second part of Amodei's three-stage plan for dealing with the threat of AI is "Democratic Coordination".

He called on frontier AI companies "within democratic countries" to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress, some of which would require government support and coordination.

His third part is headed "Global Coordination". The US and other democratic governments should "attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance".

That might be possible with China, which recently passed laws strictly limiting "AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services", so it's on board in principle. But what about North Korea, Russia and Iran?

In fact, what the United States appears to be doing in Iran is trying to interrupt its sovereignty — that is, its desire to enrich uranium and to control its territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz.

And let's face it, the effort to overcome sovereignty in combating global warming with a series of 30 United Nations-sponsored annual meetings and pledges has been a failure. We're still burning fossil fuels, the planet is still getting hotter and current policies are unlikely to turn that around.

What is in the picture — Current policies appear unable to control the threat posed by global warming. (ABCMyPhoto: Martin Von Stoll)

One of the key reasons for that failure has been the cynical opposition and denial by Rupert Murdoch and his media companies in order to make money, which has meant that the issue became a totem of right-wing politics.

This has meant, in turn, that the rise of right-wing populists as a consequence of economic inequality has entrenched that failure, especially in the United States where the government now actively promotes fossil fuels.

In AI, governments, companies and the rich (mainly) men behind them are chasing geopolitical, military and financial advantage by building it as fast as possible. They pay lip service to safety, although the sudden outpouring of alarm over the past week does go beyond lip service.

In fact, it's fair to say that the people building AI have had a big fright and appear to be saying: "Somebody stop me!"

They're not the only ones worried. Bankers are anxious about the colossal amount of debt-funded spending on data centres and chips. Investors are worried that it's a stock market bubble about to burst. Businesses are worried about the potential for supercharged hacking of their data as well as the cost of AI tokens. And everyone else is worried about their jobs.

But the lesson of global warming and nuclear weapons is that global prevention is hard when it comes to things that are broadly harmful in the long term but individually beneficial in the short term.

As Jonathan Schell wrote 44 years ago, anxiety is the price we pay for sovereignty.

Alan Kohler is a finance presenter and columnist on ABC News. He hosts the podcast That's Business with Alan Kohler in the ABC Business Daily feed on Friday. He also writes for Intelligent Investor.

Sunday, 13 September 2026

‘We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans’: if AI labs are so worried about AI doom, why don’t they stop?

Extract from The Conversation

Woman standing in space surrounded by digital screens

Gorodenkoff / Getty Images

Published: September 11, 2026 2.13pm AEST

Earlier this week, researcher Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, saying the firm and its competitors are “gambling with our lives”. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” added current Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger in a post on X.

Coxon isn’t the first to down tools over fears of AI doom. The idea that AI could wipe out humanity, advanced in Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence and the influential LessWrong forum, has long circulated among researchers. There are many scenarios for how this could happen, but the core idea is that AI smarter than humans could escape our control and destroy us.

In 2024, Jan Leike and Daniel Kokotajlo quit OpenAI over safety concerns. This year, Anthropic safety chief Mrinank Sharma departed, warning “the world is in peril”. Alex Turner left Google DeepMind after it signed a deal with the Pentagon permitting “killer drones”.

But Coxon’s resignation has made waves, with more researchers admitting they think AI might kill everyone. So if the people building AI believe it could cause extinction, why keep building it? There are three main reasons.

Some think the risk is worth it

AI leaders acknowledge the risk of losing control and killing everyone. In 2023, the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind agreed that AI extinction risk should rank alongside pandemics and nuclear war. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei puts the chance of things going “really, really badly” at 10–25%.

Yet Amodei also promises a world without poverty or disease, while Elon Musk speaks of AI-enabled “universal high income”.

This is the first reason for pursuing AI: the belief that the benefits outweigh the risks. Perhaps so, but that decision arguably deserves a more democratic process.

Some say you can’t study the danger from a distance

The second reason: you can’t learn to make dangerous AI safe without building it first – like a spacecraft, you can study safety from afar, but can’t really test it without going to space.

OpenAI’s plan is “iterative deployment”: release each model, learn from its problems, and fix them in the next one. The idea is like getting as close to the cliff edge as possible to see what the jump looks like.

Some feel it’s winner-takes-all

The third and perhaps most important reason is the race. OpenAI’s Sam Altman recently said “we are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish”.

The trouble is everyone wants to hold the lamp – it would be hugely profitable, and each company doubts the judgement of rivals to use their wishes wisely.

So they race, reasoning that if they slow down, someone else will get there anyway, so it’s better to arrive first as the “responsible one”. Some fear even a mutual agreement would be broken in secret. So they press on.

AI making better AI

You might doubt runaway AI is plausible. But when the companies themselves raise the alarm, we should listen.

AI firms already report signs of “recursive self-improvement”, where each model helps to build a better successor. According to OpenAI’s chief scientist, models are improving faster than humans’ ability to control them.

In July, hundreds of AI employees signed an open letter calling for a slowdown. But the dynamics of the race make that hard for any single company – or country – to do alone.

A classic arms race

AI research has the hallmarks of an arms race. OpenAI doesn’t want to lose to Anthropic, and the United States doesn’t want to lose to China.

History offers a template for how to manage a situation like this, with rules binding all players, and enforcement everyone can verify.

Nuclear weapons are the classic case. Treaties and verification systems haven’t eliminated the risk of nuclear war, but they have slowed proliferation, and no nuclear weapon has been used in conflict for 80 years.

Rules for AI

In the US, where most cutting-edge AI research happens, the Trump administration shows little sign of slowing AI development.

In its first week it scrapped the old AI safety rules. Now it is trying to override state-level rules, arguing caution risks losing the race to China.

Some politicians are pushing back. California recently passed laws supporting independent assessment of AI systems. US senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to ban superintelligence, and British MP Alex Sobel introduced a similar bill.

Companies have moved too. OpenAI paused its most advanced training after a swarm of its agents hacked another startup in August. The company’s head of policy now says that when safety and speed conflict, safety should win.

Still, without binding rules, we’re relying heavily on the goodwill of a handful of companies.

What happens now?

In mid-2025, researchers published what might be our best guide to the coming years: a detailed scenario called AI 2027. Since then, AI capabilities have advanced faster than predicted.

Unless something changes, staffers who quit over safety will simply be replaced, AI models will help build better AI models, and each generation will grow harder to monitor and control.

Is the situation hopeless? I hold out three hopes.

First, that more people recognise AI escaping human control is a bigger risk than AI’s water use.

Second, that governments listen to their people. In the US, two thirds say AI is moving too fast.

Third, that we have a good plan ready before a crisis hits. The best plan, in my view, looks something like this: delays, transparency and verification to slow the race and keep humans in control.

Insiders at the world’s top AI companies say our current safety plan isn’t good enough. If they’re leaving their jobs over safety fears, we should listen to what they have to say.

Anthropic boss calls for AI slowdown, Altman and Musk agree.

Extract from ABC News

Topic:AI

about 1 hours ago

A man standing on a stage with a bright blue background — Dario Amodei has offered a plan to increase checks on the AI industry, part of which his company is using already. (AP: Markus Schreiber/File)

In short:

Anthropic boss Dario Amodei says the artificial intelligence industry should slow development amid building pressure for improved oversight.

Mr Amodei says he worries that rogue AI agents would be capable of "taking over the entire internet" within six to 12 months.

OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who owns xAI, say they agree with Mr Amodei, however the Trump administration has so far favoured a deregulatory approach to most industries, including tech.

His comments came a few days after AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who left OpenAI to join Anthropic, decided to leave the industry, accusing both US companies of "gambling with our lives" in the race to develop models capable of self-improvement.

OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who owns xAI, quickly chimed in to say they agreed with Mr Amodei's assessment, as pressure builds for improved oversight.

"We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," Mr Amodei wrote in a post on his personal website.

"Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.

"Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless. We have sought a middle way.

"But over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence."

Mr Amodei's statement echoed another call by Anthropic in early June to slow or suspend development.

Then in late July, Mr Altman said developers might need to voluntarily tap the brakes to give society a chance to catch up.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (left), and Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X — Sam Altman says OpenAI would commit to one of Mr Amodei's proposals while Elon Musk also expressed support. (Reuters)

More than 1,000 employees at cutting-edge AI companies including Mr Amodei signed a petition calling on the US government to help "deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development".

OpenAI had revealed during testing, AI models broke out of their confined environment, connected to the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face, a site developers use to store and share code.

In that incident and others, the blame was placed on AI agents, which are software programs that can carry out tasks without constant supervision by humans.

"Dario is right," Mr Musk wrote on X, as Mr Altman said: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier."

'Gambling with our lives'

Earlier this week, Mr Coxon, 27, sounded the alarm after spending the past three years pre-training AI models, first at OpenAI and then, this year, at its rival Anthropic, which he considered more cautious in its approach.

Pre-training is the stage where AI models absorb vast quantities of data.

"Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," Mr Coxon said.

"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Superintelligence is the theoretical point when AI's capabilities exceed human intelligence.

'Taking over the entire internet'

Mr Amodei cautioned that the Hugging Face incident should not be dismissed as a one-off.

"A swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand," he said.

"Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it's my worry that in six to 12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet."

Mr Amodei said his company would grant "employee-like access" to a team of "third-party evaluators" who would verify adherence to safety practices, and he called on all companies to follow his lead.

Mr Altman said he would commit to similar outside oversight, adding he would have "more to share soon".

Mr Amodei also suggested companies work together to establish common safety standards, and said he supported some kind of government cooperation on the issue.

In early August, the US government put in place a voluntary security review process for advanced AI models before their release, but the parameters of that program remain unclear.

Industry observers say they are not sure how effective it would be, as US President Donald Trump's administration has favoured a light-touch, deregulatory approach to most industries, including tech.

AFP

The Vatican's AI battle

BBC Podcast

https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p0p4yzl0

OpenAI agents attacked software service RubyGems before Hugging Face hack.

Extract from ABC News

Topic:AI

about 18 hours ago

OpenAI agents have been involved in a number of hacking incidents. (Reuters: Dado Ruvic)

In short:

Agents being tested by OpenAI attacked software service RubyGems, uploading hundreds of malicious packages according to researchers.

OpenAI confirmed the incident and said it would investigate as part of its "broader review of agent activity during training and evaluation".

The attack came two months before OpenAI agents hacked into open-source platform Hugging Face in July.

AI agents being tested by OpenAI attacked software service RubyGems two months before they hacked open-source platform Hugging Face, researchers say.

It is the latest revelation of cyber attacks that have spooked the public and spurred calls for tighter regulation.

Many incidents involving agents hacking or attempting to access external systems have heightened concerns over the increasing capacity of AI models and developers' ability to contain them.

The latest revelation also comes as growing numbers of US lawmakers call for new rules to govern AI systems after dire warnings from two Anthropic researchers that rapidly progressing AI could lead to the extinction of the human race in the not-too-distant future.

AI agents uploaded hundreds of malicious packages to RubyGems on May 11, according to a group of researchers who posted their findings online on Friday, local time, saying they believed "these were authored by internal OpenAI agents".

OpenAI confirmed the incident.

"Based on our review, our agents used the RubyGems platform to access the internet to carry out benign tasks and retrieve public information," a spokesperson said in a statement.

"We'll continue to investigate as part of our broader review of agent activity during training and evaluation."

The agents, which are generally assigned tasks such as creating reports or filling out spreadsheets, appear to have used RubyGems to access publicly available data as part of a training run, according to OpenAI.

The developer said it had been in touch with RubyGems to review the incident.

Latest revelation of attacks by AI agents

IPO-bound rival Anthropic has also reported a string of attacks by its agents. This week it disclosed a fourth instance of an AI model hacking external systems during testing.

For OpenAI, which is also gearing up for an IPO, the RubyGems attack would mark at least the third major instance of OpenAI agents attacking another company's infrastructure.

A swarm of OpenAI agents previously hijacked a German-language wiki site and turned it into an improvised messaging platform for cheating on tests.

A dark-haired man in a suit looks over his shoulder. — Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. Its agents have gone rogue in a number of incidents. (Reuters: Manuel Orbegozo)

OpenAI kept that incident secret as it dealt with the fallout from the July hack of the open-source repository Hugging Face.

In May AI agents tried to steal RubyGems user credentials by exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability in the site's servers, though it is unclear whether the attempt succeeded, the researchers said.

The agents also exploited RubyDoc.info, a site that generates code documentation, to run their own code on its servers, the researchers added.

AI researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen and Sydney Von Arx said it was not clear why the AI agents chose this strategy or whether it was successful.

In a blog post on Friday, RubyGems said its own investigation found no evidence the attempts succeeded.

It said the company could not determine whether the packages in the "spam-publishing campaign" were created or published by AI agents.

A member of RubyGems' security team described the incident, which forced the company to temporarily pause new account registrations, as a "major malicious attack".

The Wall Street Journal first reported the RubyGems incident on Friday.

Reuters

Saturday, 12 September 2026

Political warfare is on display with Germany's election and the UK's sanctions.

Extract from ABC News

Analysis

By Laura Tingle

Topic:World Politics

about 1 hours ago

A supporter holds a sign with an image depicting AfD's top candidate Ulrich Siegmund at an election party. — The success of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland party in winning 44 per cent of the vote in the state election has shaken national German politics. (Reuters: Thilo Schmuelgen)
The complexity of the differing forms of warfare being employed in conflicts around the globe these days has seen analysts increasingly try to organise them under the headings of 'kinetic' and 'economic' warfare.

Kinetic warfare is the sort that involves shooting things at each other. Economic warfare employs weapons like sanctions.

There's been an escalation in both sorts this week: a resurgence in missile exchanges in Ukraine and the Middle East; and new rounds of sanctions employed against Israel, Iran and Cuba.

The US House of Representatives is also scheduled to vote next week on sweeping new tariffs on countries buying Russian oil and gas, though it is unclear whether the vote will proceed or not.

There have also been developments which represent both kinetic and economic warfare: notably the Iran-backed Houthis gaining control of the strategically crucial city of Mocha on the Red Sea coast of Yemen, just 50 kilometres from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

Saudi Arabia has been getting around the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz on its eastern flanks by shipping oil via pipeline to its west coast, in order to ship it out through the Red Sea.

Two Yemeni forces firing a tank during clashes in the Yemeni desert. — The Iran-backed Houthis have gained control of the strategically crucial city of Mocha on the Red Sea coast of Yemen, just 50 kilometres from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. (Reuters)

Far-right party triumphs in Germany

The spectre of shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait coming under more lethal Houthi fire sent a shudder through world markets on Thursday night.

But the new player that has erupted on the warfare block this week is political warfare.

That is, shifting internal politics within countries which are changing the geopolitical landscape.

The conspicuous latest examples of this came in an election in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and the equally important shift by the UK government of Andy Burnham in its position on Israel.

The success of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party in winning 44 per cent of the vote in the state election — while the ruling CDU's vote halved to just 17.2 per cent — has shaken national German politics, even though the rise of the AfD has been underway for some time.

As this week ends, German media is widely reporting that the position of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is in mortal danger, because — like former UK PM Keir Starmer — he has proved both an ineffective communicator, and a disliked leader. He has not been able to fend off the rise of the AfD, after pledging he would see the party's vote halved.

The pressure is also only going to continue on Merz, and on German politics, with two more state elections due next weekend in Berlin and another state that was once part of the old East Germany: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

The result saw fiery clashes in the Bundestag in Berlin, in which Merz conceded that voters had spoken "pretty clearly" in the state election last weekend with a result that had shocked his "to its very foundations".

"They also sent us, and me personally, a clear message," Deutsche Welle reported him saying.

"We must try, myself included, to reach people more effectively, in the full range of their emotions."

However, a more combative chancellor hit back at the AfD's co-leader Alice Weidel likening the AfD's "remigration" policy —the mass deportation of irregular migrants and foreigners who are required to leave the country — to "nothing other than ethnic cleansing based on skin colour and origin".

AfD's policy makes even right-wing parties anxious

Merz said there was agreement within his governing coalition that many people without a right to remain permanently in Germany should be deported.

"But we distinguish carefully between those who work in Germany, who contribute to our prosperity, who are welcome in Germany, and those who do not have a permanent right to remain and who must leave our country again," he said.

The AfD's remigration policy is only one of the policy positions which leave many in Germany, and in Europe more broadly, deeply anxious, even right-wing parties in other countries.

A shoulders-up shot of Friedrich Merz on a blurred background. — German media is widely reporting that the position of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is in mortal danger, because he has proved both an ineffective communicator, and a disliked leader who has not been able to fend off the rise of the AfD. (Reuters: Christian Mang)

Le Monde described the AfD's victory as "particularly embarrassing" for Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN).

RN had been part of a coalition in the European Parliament with the AfD until 2024 when it broke away "after ambiguous statements by the German party about the role of the SS during World War II and disagreements over remigration".

But it is the AfD's hostility to Ukraine and calls for closer ties with Russia which is of greatest concern in Europe.

Germany, Europe's largest economy, has been the major European backer of Ukraine under Merz, who has also been overseeing the biggest rearmament of his country since World War II, under the perceived threat coming from Russia.

As the former head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, told the Financial Times this week that "it's been a real testament to European support and solidarity that we've kept the Ukrainians going".

But he acknowledged that with changes in the wind in the politics of Germany, France and Italy in the next year, this could significantly change.

The more prosaic issue of gas supply may have a major role to play in the political warfare over Ukraine in coming months.

Europe currently holds its lowest gas stocks in 20 years. With about one third of the world's LNG supplies knocked out by attacks on Qatari production facilities, and facing another bleak winter, the pressure in Europe to start buying more gas from Russia will be intense, including in Germany where the AfD explicitly advocates for this to occur.

Ukraine will need all the friends it can get as European support wobbles, which is why the recent UK move to announce a defence deal with Ukraine, and now a deal between Canada and Ukraine to provide military support in the form of military drones and air defence interceptors, is so significant.

A man with dark hair, black glasses and a black suit with a light blue tie, infront of green trees, he is mid speech. — Under new prime minister Andy Burnham the UK is taking a more assertive position on foreign policy issues. (Reuters: Kin Cheung)

UK takes more assertive stance

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been the poster boy this year for the call for Middle Powers to take on more active independent roles in world affairs.

This week has seen another shift in the UK's international position which reflects that trend.

The UK likes to still think itself as a 'Great Power' but it is at best a middling one these days, even it does still possess nuclear weapons.

But under new prime minister Andy Burnham, and his foreign secretary Ed Miliband, the UK is taking a more assertive position on foreign policy issues, this week releasing legislation for tougher sanctions against Iran, and most notably announcing trade sanctions against West Bank settlements in Israel.

The importance of the West Bank move is not just about the actual trade sanctions. It lies in the upgrading of the language the UK is using about the actions of the Netanyahu government in the West Bank.

New sanctions placed on Israeli settlements (Jacob Greber, Sarah Ferguson)

Just as Merz attacked the AfD in Germany for a policy he says amounts to ethnic cleansing, Miliband accused Israel of doing the same thing in the West Bank.

What is more, he made explicit the view that the UK regards Israel's occupation of the entire West Bank as unlawful — adopting the findings of the International Court of Justice — rather than continuing with the almost 60-year-old claim that it is just temporarily "occupied".

It is a particularly big turnaround for a party that was defending itself against claims of antisemitism only a few years ago.

Whether the trade sanctions can be implemented by the UK, or the other 11 countries who also indicated this week that they would impose similar measures, is yet to be seen.

Commemorations of the 25th Anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 have seen a number of analysts observe that Al Qaeda had eventually been contained.

But those threats have been replaced with state-sponsored terror, notably from Iran and Russia. And Europe has been confronting the cost of the mass wave of refugees that era of terror unleashed.

Along with the transformation of the United States from global policeman to global disruptor, middle power countries are having to write their own rules rather than just hiding behind America in this new world.

Unfortunately, it is not clear whether Australia has yet mastered the dexterity to engage in this new era of political warfare.

Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.