Latest reports
Everything we have published, newest first.
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Energy and shipping, news analysis
Kapotnya’s refinery fire: smoke is not a unit of measurement
A refinery reported to supply some 40% of Moscow’s fuel market was hit overnight. That figure says what the plant was worth before the drones came, not what it lost after.
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Situation, opinion
Coming soon: a decision. Available now: the suspense.
The New York Post reports Trump's latest Iran remarks. A media commentary on the gap between an announcement and a trailer for one.
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Situation, report
Brussels and Helsinki say 72 hours. Berlin's guide is reported to say ten days.
The European Commission asks the public for a minimum of 72 hours of supplies. Finland asks the same and, alone among the sources read here, says what the three days are for. Germany's new civil-protection guide is reported to ask for ten days.
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Situation, opinion
The Kremlin wants a mandate. It has arranged the answer.
An election can count the votes it permits. That does not entitle a government to claim the consent it has made difficult to withhold.
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Situation, report
Moscow says it shot down 450 drones on election day. Some reached the refinery anyway.
Russian officials report three dead in the Moscow region and damage at the capital's oil refinery after what the mayor called the largest drone attack ever on the city. Zelenskyy claims the strike, and every drone count comes from Moscow.
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Situation, news analysis
The Russia sanctions law does not ask the President. It tells him, by 18 October.
The White House called it a law that "authorizes" sanctions. The text Trump signed says the President "shall" impose them within 30 days, names four Russian financial institutions and reaches well past them, and makes declining to act a written statement to Congress that a waiver serves the national interest.
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Situation, report
The Houthis say they hit Riyadh. Saudi Arabia says it shot the missile down.
The Saudi-led coalition confirmed a ballistic missile was fired at the capital on Saturday and says it was intercepted. A fuel tank burned near the airport the same day, and no source read here establishes why.
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Situation, editorial roundtable
The false report was caught. That is not yet evidence of a safeguard.
A roundtable on the difference between a designed safeguard and a fortunate intervention, drawing on two accounts of mistaken intelligence.
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Situation, report
South Korea rules out joining the Iran war, keeps shipping protection under review
Lee Jae Myung ruled out deployments involving participation in the Iran war. A stronger role protecting South Korean shipping remains under consideration.
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Situation, news analysis
The report was false. The military preparations were real.
CNN reports a Chinese-vessel interception was planned on faulty AI-assisted intelligence. The disclosure raises concrete questions about verification.
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Situation, news analysis
Greenland has a deal. The signatures are still to come.
Trump announces expanded military access. Denmark says sovereignty is protected. The agreement still faces signature and parliamentary procedures.
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Situation, situation report
The strikes have stopped. Nothing has been signed.
Iran and the United States have gone more than a week without hitting each other. Both governments arrive in New York this week with the next phase of the war undecided.
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Nuclear file, report
Nobody has seen Iran's enriched uranium for more than a year
More than 9,000 kilograms of enriched uranium sit somewhere under three bombed sites. The agency whose job is to count it has been locked out since June 2025, and the body meant to enforce the rules stops functioning on 27 September.
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Inside Iran, report
Rifles for volunteers, executions for protesters, and a currency in free fall
The Iranian government filled the streets of Tehran on Friday. In the same month, two rights organisations documented an execution campaign, and the rial passed 2.3 million to the dollar.
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Energy and shipping, report
The Strait of Hormuz is open, at about a quarter of normal
Oil-product flows through the world's most important oil chokepoint are running at roughly one million barrels a day against four million before the war. Brent is near $104, and Saudi Arabia is moving crude the long way round.
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Investigations, investigation
The UN body policing Iran's nuclear sanctions has no chair, no experts and, from 27 September, no mandate
A year-long procedural dispute has quietly disabled the machinery that is supposed to enforce UN sanctions on Iran. The record of how it happened is public, and it reads as a sequence of individually minor blocking moves.