This two-part analysis is dedicated to my valued reader, Marion W.
Her perceptive and far-reaching question about how Russia and China are responding to the West’s strategic division of labour provided the decisive impetus for these two articles. I am pleased to take up her suggestion to “[…] address the subject and explore it in a Part 10.”
by Michael Hollister
Exclusive published at Michael Hollister on August 16, 2026
5.379 words * about 28 minutes readingtime
You can find an overview of Parts 1 through 9 of the series “The War Prepared in Advance” here:
INTRO – The Prepared War – 9 Parts
Briefing Format of the In-Depth Analysis – 10 minutes readingtime:
Moscow’s Response – What Russia Is Doing to Break the Encirclement
The week’s most important geopolitical developments – independently assessed.
A List of Addresses
On April 15, 2026, the Russian Defense Ministry published two lists on its Telegram channel and via the state-affiliated Max messenger. The first was titled “Branches of Ukrainian Companies in Europe” and listed 11 businesses with locations: London, Munich, Riga, Vilnius, Prague. The second named 10 companies that, according to the ministry, manufacture components – in the Czech Republic, Israel, Turkey, Italy, Spain, and Germany, including cities such as Madrid, Venice, and Haifa. Twenty-one addresses in total. The ministry supplied the rationale as well: the European public should “clearly understand not only the true causes of the threats to its security, but also know the addresses and locations of the ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘joint’ enterprises producing drones and components for Ukraine on the territory of their own countries.”
A reader of the exile outlet Meduza checked the Munich address from the first list. There is a residential building at that address.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and a former president, commented on the publication on his channel. He called it a “list of potential targets” for the Russian armed forces. “When the strikes become reality depends on what happens next. Sleep well, European partners!”
The list did not appear in a vacuum. On the same April 15, Britain announced that it would supply Ukraine with around 120,000 drones over the course of 2026 – long-range systems, reconnaissance drones, logistics drones, and naval drones. Yulia Zhdanova, head of the Russian delegation at the Vienna arms-control talks, had shortly before said that the European Union was moving toward integrating the defense capabilities of European states and Ukraine. The list was Russia’s response that same day.
Anyone familiar with the German locations where Ukrainian drones are entering serial production – Gauting near Munich, where Zelensky received the first Ukrainian drone manufactured on German soil in February 2026, or the planned serial production of autonomous systems with ranges exceeding roughly 620 miles – can see what Medvedev’s sentence is aimed at. The international-law question of whether such a factory can become a military target and what that would mean has been examined in detail elsewhere. This article is about something else. It is not about Berlin, but Moscow. Not about what options Germany is opening to others, but about what Russia is actually doing now that it has recognized the pattern of European rearmament.
One thing is certain: Moscow is not sitting back and watching. The question is what it is doing instead – demonstrably, in the present, and in what direction through 2029 or 2030, the horizon Western planners repeatedly cite.
What Washington Put in Writing
To understand Russia’s actions, one has to read what Russia is reading. And what Russia is reading are two American documents published between November 2025 and January 2026: the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy.
The National Defense Strategy was released on January 23, 2026 – emailed out on a Friday evening during a snowstorm, a 34-page document. On China, it says verbatim that the goal is “not to dominate China; nor is it to strangle or humiliate them.” Protecting American interests, it says, does not require changing China’s government or entering an existential struggle. The heading of the second line of effort is: “Deter China in the Indo-Pacific Through Strength, Not Confrontation.” Taiwan is not mentioned once in the document. A scholar at China’s China Institute of International Studies read the wording as a clear softening of the American tone.
That is noteworthy because it contradicts the common thesis that the United States must contain China at any cost or risk being overtaken. The document meant to operationalize that strategy is more cautious. Yet the same National Defense Strategy provides the clearest evidence for the division of labor at issue here. On Russia, it says the country will “remain a persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members.” And: “Moscow is in no position to make a bid for European hegemony.” The document contrasts the economic scale: non-U.S. NATO Europe has an economy of $26 trillion; Russia, $2 trillion. Germany’s economy alone, it says in substance, dwarfs Russia’s.
The Pentagon draws a consequence from that. European allies are “strongly positioned to take primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense, with critical but more limited U.S. support. This includes taking the lead in supporting Ukraine’s defense.” And the sentence that matters: “we will be clear with our European allies that their efforts and resources are best focused on Europe.”
The Pentagon is telling Europe to focus on Europe. One section is titled “The Simultaneity Problem” and identifies the concern that “one or more potential adversaries” could act “in a coordinated or opportunistic fashion across multiple theaters.”
The November 2025 National Security Strategy is the sharper document. On Europe, it paints a picture of decline: the continent’s share of global GDP has fallen from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today, and in “20 years or less” Europe could be unrecognizable – the document speaks of the prospect of “civilizational erasure.” As a policy objective, it calls for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” and describes the growing influence of “patriotic European parties” as cause for great optimism. It says it is “a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine” and to reestablish strategic stability with Russia. And it sets the goal of “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”
This is where the actual picture emerges. Washington wants to end the war, stop NATO expansion, and openly courts sympathy for political opposition inside Europe. Berlin, meanwhile, is rearming and declaring its ambition to build the continent’s strongest conventional army. These are not two halves of one plan. They are two different plans. The defensible version of the opening thesis is therefore not: the United States is tying Russia down in Europe so that it cannot assist China. It is this: there is a documented division of labor in which Europe assumes the conventional containment of Russia while America frees forces for the Indo-Pacific and its own hemisphere. Whether there is, beyond that, a deliberate intention to keep Russia permanently tied to Europe remains open. What is not open is that Moscow has read both documents.
The Wedge That Did Not Hold
Russia’s first and preferred answer to this constellation was not military but diplomatic. It consisted of trying to negotiate directly with Washington – bypassing Europe.
On August 15, 2025, Putin and Trump met in Anchorage, Alaska. The summit raised expectations in Moscow that a bilateral channel could settle the Ukraine question over the heads of the Europeans. That expectation was not fulfilled. In October 2025, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said the momentum from Anchorage had been exhausted – consumed, in substance, by the efforts of opponents and European advocates of “war to the last Ukrainian.” Foreign-policy adviser Yuri Ushakov was even more explicit on June 21, 2026: “We are not waiting for the implementation of these understandings or agreements; we are waiting for victory. We are waiting for the achievement of our own goals.” Only one of the two sides, he added, was adhering to agreements at all – clearly referring to the United States. Putin himself had said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 4, 2026, that the possibility of a peaceful settlement was embedded in the Anchorage understandings, but Kyiv refused to accept it. What can be established precisely, then, is less what was agreed in Anchorage – the concrete content remains undisclosed to this day – than the fact that Moscow now describes the channel as largely exhausted and openly places military victory ahead of a negotiated outcome.
Why this route was so attractive to Moscow follows from the structure of the National Security Strategy itself. If Washington wants to end the war, stop NATO expansion, and restore strategic stability with Russia, then American and Russian interests run parallel at several points – and cut across the interests of European capitals that rely on permanent American security guarantees. A partial U.S.-Russian compromise on Ukraine, arms control, or a reduction in NATO infrastructure near Russia’s borders could be attractive to Washington and Moscow at the same time, while being read in Europe as a loss of security. That is the leverage: Russia does not need to drive the United States out of Europe. It is enough if Washington and Moscow negotiate bilaterally and the Europeans are then presented with a fait accompli.
The American side interpreted the failed channel differently. Secretary of State Rubio said that if there had been an agreement, “we would have had an end to the war” – from Washington’s perspective, the failure was not caused by European hardening, but by a lack of Russian willingness to compromise. Both readings stand side by side, and this article does not decide between them. The finding is this: Moscow wanted a wedge between Washington and Europe. It has not held – so far. And the European hardening Ryabkov complains about is itself partly a response to Russian actions; the mechanism runs in both directions. Whether Russia can drive that wedge by 2030 depends less on Moscow than on the U.S. administration of the day and the course of the Ukraine war. The possibility remains open – and that is why Moscow never entirely puts the diplomatic card away.
For Moscow, the first option was therefore exhausted for the time being. What followed was a return to the instruments Russia can use independently of American goodwill.
February 5
On February 5, 2026, the New START treaty expired. For the first time since the early 1970s, there are no longer legally binding ceilings on the strategic arsenals of the two powers that together hold roughly 85 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads.
What replaced it is not a treaty, but a state of suspension. In September 2025, Putin had offered to continue observing the treaty’s limits unilaterally for one year after expiration, provided the United States did the same. Trump initially called the idea “good,” then let it sit and said on the day the treaty expired that instead of extending it, the parties should work on a “new, improved, and modernized treaty” – one that, he argued, should also include China, which Beijing rejects. Axios reported on February 5 that American and Russian negotiators had discussed informally observing the limits for at least another 6 months on the sidelines of Ukraine talks in Abu Dhabi. A U.S. official confirmed that the sides had agreed to “act in good faith”; nothing would be formalized. Kremlin spokesman Peskov confirmed an “understanding” from Abu Dhabi the following day – but added that an extension could only be formal and that an informal one was “hard to imagine in this sphere.” The U.S. press secretary had said the day before that she was unaware of any such agreement. On February 11, Lavrov told the Duma that Russia would observe the limits “as long as the United States does not exceed them”; Moscow had reason to believe Washington was in no hurry to abandon them.
That is the situation: since February 5, 2026, the nuclear order between the world’s two largest arsenals has rested on two unilateral statements of intent, a newspaper report, and half a denial. Verification and reciprocal inspections have not existed since 2023 anyway, when Russia suspended its participation.
Russia’s nuclear policy has to be read against that background. In November 2024, Russia changed its official nuclear doctrine and broadened the publicly stated conditions under which Moscow could consider use. The strategic purpose is more precise than headlines about nuclear risk suggest. It becomes clearer if one separates two terms that are often blurred in the debate: deterrence and compellence. Deterrence says: do not do something, or the costs will become unbearable. Compellence says: stop something you are already doing, or we will raise the costs. Russia’s nuclear signaling toward Europe contains both. It is meant to prevent new steps – and at the same time reverse steps already underway. Above all, however, it is meant to make one idea impossible: that a conventional war in Europe could be kept regional and controlled while America shifts its attention to Asia. As long as the risk of nuclear escalation exists in Europe, the American security guarantee remains central – and Europe remains an American problem.
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