Two Wars Move Toward Washington Mediation as AI Race Shifts

The week's two centre-of-gravity wars both moved on May 7, in opposite directions on the battlefield and the same direction in diplomacy. Russian forces have entered the active phase of their spring-summer offensive against Ukraine and the campaign is already at peak intensity, Viktor Trehubov, head of the communications department of Ukraine's Joint Forces, said on the national 24/7 newscast cited by Ukrinform; Russian troops are "not accumulating resources but rather expending them," armoured vehicles are mostly off the field because each new layer of protection just "means one more drone will be used against it," and warm, dry weather is pushing the share of work onto drones and ground robotic systems.

That military picture sat on top of the highest civilian toll of the spring. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported at least 70 civilians killed and more than 500 wounded across the country since May 1, with 28 deaths and 194 wounded on May 5 alone, and Mission Head Danielle Bell called the scale of casualties and the extent of territory affected "particularly alarming." Concrete instances on May 7 included a Russian drone strike on Kharkiv's Novobavarskyi district that wounded nine including three children, 797 Russian strikes on Zaporizhzhia oblast in 24 hours, and a Russian guided-bomb-and-drone attack on Kramatorsk that killed five.

Diplomatically, Volodymyr Zelenskyy dispatched National Security and Defence Council Secretary Rustem Umerov to the United States to meet envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, a top Ukrainian official told POLITICO. Mediated talks between Moscow and Kyiv have stalled on control over the Donbas and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant; Zelenskyy has publicly criticised Witkoff's eight trips to Moscow and zero to Kyiv. Ukrainian deep strikes continued: drones hit the Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez refinery in Perm, more than 1,500 km from Ukrainian territory, for the second time in eight days, and the Institute for the Study of War said Ukraine's strikes on energy infrastructure had largely offset Russia's 917-billion-rouble April oil and gas revenue with 350 billion roubles in subsidies and refinery-repair costs. At the Defence24 Days conference in Warsaw, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said Poland would overlook Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico's planned May 9 Moscow trip if Fico helps unblock a 90-billion-euro EU loan package for Ukraine.

The Middle East war hit its messiest news cycle yet. Two months into the US-Israeli campaign on Iran, a Le Monde editorial argued the campaign has not produced regime change in Tehran or stripped the Iranian government of the means to retaliate — a point Iran-linked forces underscored on May 5 with a strike on the United Arab Emirates. Within a single news cycle the administration's line on the war fractured publicly: Trump announced a military operation on May 4 to force passage through the Strait of Hormuz, abandoned it on May 5, and the same day Marco Rubio called the war "finished" before Trump countered with the threat of "much stronger" bombings if diplomacy did not advance. Brent crude fell 3.5 percent to $97.5 a barrel after reports that the US had sent Iran a one-page memorandum of understanding through Pakistani intermediaries; the price moved through $100 on the same flow. Iran confirmed it was reviewing the proposal and would respond after finalising its views, while Israel struck Beirut's southern suburbs and killed a senior commander of Hezbollah's elite force — the first such Israeli attack since the April truce — and Hezbollah launched 17 retaliatory attacks against Israeli forces inside Lebanon. Iranian state media released a video purporting to show the wreckage of a US reconnaissance drone over the strait. US gasoline at $4.54 a gallon will, by analyst consensus, not return to pre-war levels before early or mid-2027 even if the strait reopens.

Europe's politics ran in the same Iran-war shadow. In Berlin, Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt have publicly cast Iran-linked threats to Germany as "largely hypothetical," while regional state-level intelligence chiefs say the threats are concrete and urgent, the New York Times reported from 11 German intelligence officials, former officials and lawmakers. Confidential Commission figures circulated to capitals and seen by Euractiv showed EU consulates issued more than 620,000 Schengen visas to Russian citizens in 2025, a 10.2 percent rise on 2024 led by France's 23 percent jump — figures France had pressed the Commission to keep out of the internal Schengen Barometer until eight member states forced their reappearance in May. In London, Shell reported a 19 percent rise in first-quarter net profit to $5.69 billion on the war's energy-price spike, with a $3 billion buyback and a 5 percent dividend lift; on the same FTSE 100 day Shell shares fell 2.3 percent on hopes of a US-Iran deal.

The United Kingdom held a double election day. In Scotland, polling stations opened at 07:00 for the 2026 Holyrood vote with a record 4,320,981 voters on the roll and a count deferred to 09:00 Friday. South of the border, Reform UK was forecast to take 1,000 to 1,500 of around 5,000 English council seats, with predominantly white working-class areas of London potentially flipping from Labour red to Reform turquoise; a UCL Policy Lab report drawing on US pollster Stan Greenberg's research warned that Keir Starmer's discomfort with progressive values is pushing left-leaning voters away. In Saxony-Anhalt, a new Infratest dimap poll put the Alternative for Germany at a record 41 percent, 15 points clear of the CDU four months before the September 6 state vote.

In Asia and the global tech race, DeepSeek released version 4 of its model, tuned to run on Huawei GPUs — a launch that threatens the market position of OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are preparing late-2026 IPOs and have separately accused DeepSeek of using "distillation" to train on the responses of ChatGPT and Claude. On the same Thursday, Anthropic itself published a research agenda warning of early signs that AI systems are now contributing to their own research and development; Jack Clark, head of the Anthropic Institute, put the chance that an AI model will fully train its successor autonomously by the end of 2028 at "60 percent or more," and called for new geopolitical crisis infrastructure on the model of Cold War hotlines. Turkiye's defence firm SYS announced first overseas shipments of the helicopter-mounted CANiK M3 FALCON counter-drone gun to Azerbaijan and Pakistan at the SAHA 2026 fair in Istanbul, alongside a $50 million Kosovo armoured-vehicle deal — a reminder that the new battlefield's weapons economy is being built in Eurasia and the Gulf as much as in the United States.