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A former Australian political leader’s son convicted of supplying narcotics and prescription drugs helped an offshore company to operate in several jurisdictions and to establish a bank account in Cyprus.

Mark Chikarovski sold huge quantities of cocaine and other drugs on the dark web under the alias “AusCokeKing” in exchange for cryptocurrency.

Chikarovski, from Sydney, is the son of former New South Wales Liberal Party leader Kerry Chikarovski. Sydney is the capital of the state of New South Wales.

Mark Chikarovski pleaded guilty to charges over his multimillion-dollar dark web narcotics supply operation, using the marketplace Abacus.

On Dec. 6, he was sentenced at a Sydney District Court to a 35-month intensive corrections order that must be served in the community, following a finding of special circumstances, including risk of self-harm.

The sentence included 18 months of home detention, 500 hours of community service and continued engagement with mental health treatment.

In sentencing, Judge Jane Culver said Chikarovski never had to physically meet his customers, making his “sophisticated” operation “far more serious than the average street dealer.”

Prosecution documents reportedly showed Chikarovski sold drugs to undercover police across 18 different transactions between February and May 2023.

He advertised the drugs online as being “premium European imports” and offered cocaine at a “spring sale” price of about $200 (AU$299) and “limited edition meth.”

Chikarovski’s defense said that he turned to using illicit drugs to cope with a childhood marked by dysfunction and the pressure of living in the public eye.

Police say Chikarovski had been selling MDMA, crystal methamphetamine and prescription drugs, as well as cocaine, on the dark web.

Chikarovski was caught wearing blue latex gloves stuffing drugs into an Australia Post envelope at an apartment in Sydney’s Bondi Junction suburb when detectives arrested him in May 2023.

Detectives discovered large quantities of drugs, two Porsche SUVs, about $20,000 (AU$30,000) in cash and $178,000 (AU$269,000) worth of cryptocurrency during raids on the apartment and a home in the Vaucluse area.

A ‘sophisticated’ operation

Australian police say Chikarovski and his wife, Hannah, led a lavish lifestyle despite him having no discernible income.

Chikarovski’s defense barrister Phillip Boulten SC later denied in court that his client’s drug trafficking operation was “particularly sophisticated.”

Now, documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reveal that Chikarovski was a client of the Geneva, Switzerland, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, offices of SFM Corporate Services.

Chikarovski is identified in the SFM documents as the contact for a shell company called ​​Aquay Holdings Ltd.

The records show that Chikarovski paid fees over several years to SFM for the provision of a UAE address and nominee director and shareholder services for Aquay Holdings.

SFM Corporate Services is a global firm that markets itself as a one-stop shop for those seeking to form offshore companies quickly. It featured widely in ICIJ’s Pandora Papers investigation.

Chikarovski was billed by SFM after it established Aquay’s position in the UAE and Seychelles using nominee director and shareholder services, the ICIJ documents show.

SFM billed Chikarovski for Aquay employing a registered agent in Ras al-Khaimah in the UAE, a confederation with a thriving trade in financial secrecy, shell companies and opaque free zones.

SFM also billed Chikarovski when the shell company established a second bank account in Cyprus.

SFM did not respond to requests for comment from ICIJ and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Chikarovski, via his lawyer, Philip Boulten SC, did not respond to a separate request for comment for this story from the ABC.

Australian police say they know that Chikarovski was involved in the international drug business from at least 2017. Aquay was operating from at least 2015 until at least 2019, SFM documents show.

Police say the 38-year-old received cryptocurrency in exchange for prohibited drugs on thousands of occasions since 2017.

Chikarovski provided SFM with a copy of his passport, and a phone bill and a water bill with a Paddington, Sydney, address.

The UAE is now home to several international drug dealers, many considered high-value targets by police.

Chikarovski, who was remanded to prison before his sentencing, recently sold a $10 million (AU$15 million) home with harbor views in the Sydney suburb of Vaucluse to a businessman from China.

In a letter of apology to the court, Chikarovski said he started selling drugs online because he “lacked the liquidity” to clear his own drug debts and had faced threats of violence.

That was disputed by the prosecutor, who said that at the time of the offending, Chikarovski had two Porsche Cayennes, about $40,000 (AU$60,000) in private school fees, and a $1.4 million (AU$2.2 million) mortgage.

Contributor: Ben Schneiders (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

By the time I arrived in northwestern Kazakhstan, three of my interviews had been canceled, one of my interpreters had quit, and I had run out of cash (to the dismay of a hotel employee who was weighing whether to give me my room key or wait until I scurried back from an ATM).

I had been traveling through Kazakhstan for eight days, reporting on the oil and gas fields that feed the Caspian pipeline, a 939-mile oil transport route stretching from Kazakhstan to Russia. My research was part of a new ICIJ investigation, dubbed Caspian Cabals, which traces the role of the Western oil companies that own the pipeline and operate the fields in environmental devastation and alleged financial corruption.

Before I landed in Kazakhstan, I spent five months reading about the toll the oil and gas industry had taken on a small community in the northwest. Nearly a decade ago, the village, called Berezovka, had ceased to exist after a mysterious health crisis in the local school. On a single day, about 20 children and a handful of teachers became dizzy, lost consciousness or suffered seizures. Villagers blamed toxic emissions from Karachaganak, a nearby oil and gas field operated by Shell, Eni, Chevron, Russia’s Lukoil and Kazakhstan’s state oil company KazMunayGas.

In response to questions, a spokesperson from the joint venture of oil companies, Karachaganak Petroleum Operating (KPO), said that Kazakh authorities had “excluded any involvement of the KPO consortium into the intoxications of children and adults in the former Berezovka village.”

But residents and activists doubted those findings. By 2017, the Kazakh government had relocated all of Berezovka’s roughly 1,300 residents to surrounding communities, and by 2022, the oil companies had begun to bulldoze the village itself, with all its homes, farmland, and school and community buildings. But reading old news reports and parsing Russian- and Kazakh-language videos in my office in ICIJ’s Washington headquarters 5,000 miles away could only take me so far. To really understand how the Berezovites were affected, I needed to go there.

When I finally got to the hotel in Uralsk, the closest major city to Berezovka and the last stop on my three-legged tour of the country, very little was going according to plan. I needed a new approach: I had to scrap my itinerary and do some good old-fashioned door-knocking and cross my fingers that someone would answer. So I — along with a reporter and videographer from ICIJ’s media partner Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a local driver and a (new) interpreter — piled into a small minivan headed toward what remained of Berezovka and the surrounding communities, armed with our notebooks, a camera and the hope that we could land a powerful story on the final days of our trip.

Araltal

Our first stop was Araltal, a small town where many former Berezovites were resettled. The road to Araltal was a bumpy one. For three hours, we zigged and zagged to avoid massive potholes and to dodge wild cattle and horses, past swaths of the Kazakh steppe. When we got to town, we hobbled out of the car, our heads throbbing from the trip, and were greeted by a row of identical red-brick houses.

We didn’t have any interviews scheduled; we didn’t even know if anyone would be home, so we just knocked on the first door we found. A woman answered and told us that she used to live in Berezovka but, startled by our camera and notebooks, refused to talk with us for more than a few minutes. She told us to try her friend, Vera Voskoboy, and waved us in her direction. But we were met with another disappointment: Vera didn’t answer her door … that is, not until we asked her neighbor to give her a call. Soon enough, a woman in a frayed dress and green headscarf opened the door and excitedly invited us in. She had a warm countenance, gold teeth and was missing a finger on her right hand. Flanked by potato plants, she agreed to an interview in her backyard garden.

Vera quickly dove into memories of her granddaughter, who first fainted at the village school 10 years ago and has had regular fainting episodes since then. Vera believed her illness was a result of Karachaganak’s emissions. “She was shaking so much,” she said with tears in her eyes, describing the first time her granddaughter had a seizure. “God forbid you should see it.” The story was distressing, but I was also overcome by a different feeling: that Vera had been waiting for someone to knock on her door and ask her to tell it.

Berezovka

Heartened by Vera’s willingness to chat with us, we hopped back into the car and moved on to Berezovka to see the abandoned community. We spent nearly an hour there, snapping photos of eerie scenes: A pile of wood that used to be a home. A horse’s corpse. A set of animal’s teeth.

As we wormed our way through the abandoned village, we were stopped by a KPO employee. He wore a hard hat, sunglasses and a bandana around his mouth. The outfit made him nearly incognito. “You’re not allowed to be here,” he said in Russian. “The land belongs to KPO.”

My Kazakhstani colleague, well-versed in the local laws, challenged him, saying it was perfectly legal for people to drive through the area.

But he persisted. “Just leave.”

After a five-minute back and forth, we departed so as not to escalate an already tense situation. But as we drove away, the worker tailed us in a white sedan. We pulled over, and my Russian-speaking colleagues confronted him with a microphone and camera. He vehemently swatted the camera away, refusing to explain why he had followed us. It was clear that the oil consortium wasn’t interested in having journalists poke around.

Eventually, he drove away and left us alone.

Zhanatalap

It was a trip of many firsts: my first time in Central Asia, my first time standing on the edge of an oil and gas field, and my first time having a traditional Kazakh meal.

Our final visit that day was about an hour from Berezovka, where we stumbled upon an elderly couple eager to explain how emissions from Karachaganak had affected them. After the interview, they insisted we join them for lunch, so we took off our shoes at the door and followed them to a red rug in their living room, where they served us sheep’s fat, apples and eggs; homemade sour cream, a popular Kazakh grain called talkan and several cups of tea. While we ate, they told us about their struggles, not the least of which is that they don’t receive enough assistance from the foreign oil companies that have damaged their environment. At times, they said, their water is oily and their air is unbreathable.

Our stomachs full, we said our goodbyes. I was glad I had scrapped my itinerary that day. That’s not to say everything went perfectly after that. We still had to endure a traffic stop for speeding, an uncomfortably long passport inspection and one too many glasses of sour camel’s milk.

But I felt a sense of relief. As I shook the couple’s hands, the Kazakh way — my second hand on top — they told me to visit again.

“We’re so excited a journalist from Washington came to see us,” the woman said.

With generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) on the frontlines of information security, red teams play an essential role in identifying vulnerabilities that others can overlook.

With the average cost of a data breach reaching an all-time high of $4.88 million in 2024, businesses need to know exactly where their vulnerabilities lie. Given the remarkable pace at which they’re adopting gen AI, there’s a good chance that some of those vulnerabilities lie in AI models themselves — or the data used to train them.

That’s where AI-specific red teaming comes in. It’s a way to test the resilience of AI systems against dynamic threat scenarios. This involves simulating real-world attack scenarios to stress-test AI systems before and after they’re deployed in a production environment. Red teaming has become vitally important in ensuring that organizations can enjoy the benefits of gen AI without adding risk.

IBM’s X-Force Red Offensive Security service follows an iterative process with continuous testing to address vulnerabilities across four key areas:

1. Model safety and security testing
2. Gen AI application testing
3. AI platform security testing
4. MLSecOps pipeline security testing

In this article, we’ll focus on three types of adversarial attacks that target AI models and training data.

Prompt injection

Most mainstream gen AI models have safeguards built in to mitigate the risk of them producing harmful content. For example, under normal circumstances, you can’t ask ChatGPT or Copilot to write malicious code. However, methods such as prompt injection attacks and jailbreaking can make it possible to work around these safeguards.

One of the goals of AI red teaming is to deliberately make AI “misbehave” — just as attackers do. Jailbreaking is one such method that involves creative prompting to get a model to subvert its safety filters. However, while jailbreaking can theoretically help a user carry out an actual crime, most malicious actors use other attack vectors — simply because they’re far more effective.

Prompt injection attacks are much more severe. Rather than targeting the models themselves, they target the entire software supply chain by obfuscating malicious instructions in prompts that otherwise appear harmless. For instance, an attacker might use prompt injection to get an AI model to reveal sensitive information like an API key, potentially giving them back-door access to any other systems that are connected to it.

Red teams can also simulate evasion attacks, a type of adversarial attack whereby an attacker subtly modifies inputs to trick a model into classifying or misinterpreting an instruction. These modifications are usually imperceptible to humans. However, they can still manipulate an AI model into taking an undesired action. For example, this might include changing a single pixel in an input image to fool the classifier of a computer vision model, such as one intended for use in a self-driving vehicle.

Explore X-Force Red Offensive Security Services

Data poisoning

Attackers also target AI models during training and development, hence it’s essential that red teams simulate the same attacks to identify risks that could compromise the whole project. A data poisoning attack happens when an adversary introduces malicious data into the training set, thereby corrupting the learning process and embedding vulnerabilities into the model itself. The result is that the entire model becomes a potential entry point for further attacks. If training data is compromised, it’s usually necessary to retrain the model from scratch. That’s a highly resource-intensive and time-consuming operation.

Red team involvement is vital from the very beginning of the AI model development process to mitigate the risk of data poisoning. Red teams simulate real-world data poisoning attacks in a secure sandbox environment air-gapped from existing production systems. Doing so provides insights into how vulnerable the model is to data poisoning and how real threat actors might infiltrate or compromise the training process.

AI red teams can proactively identify weaknesses in data collection pipelines, too. Large language models (LLMs) often draw data from a huge number of different sources. ChatGPT, for example, was trained on a vast corpus of text data from millions of websites, books and other sources. When building a proprietary LLM, it’s crucial that organizations know exactly where they’re getting their training data from and how it’s vetted for quality. While that’s more of a job for security auditors and process reviewers, red teams can use penetration testing to assess a model’s ability to resist flaws in its data collection pipeline.

Model inversion

Proprietary AI models are usually trained, at least partially, on the organization’s own data. For instance, an LLM deployed in customer service might use the company’s customer data for training so that it can provide the most relevant outputs. Ideally, models should only be trained based on anonymized data that everyone is allowed to see. Even then, however, privacy breaches may still be a risk due to model inversion attacks and membership inference attacks.

Even after deployment, gen AI models can retain traces of the data that they were trained on. For instance, the team at Google’s DeepMind AI research laboratory successfully managed to trick ChatGPT into leaking training data using a simple prompt. Model inversion attacks can, therefore, allow malicious actors to reconstruct training data, potentially revealing confidential information in the process.

Membership inference attacks work in a similar way. In this case, an adversary tries to predict whether a particular data point was used to train the model through inference with the help of another model. This is a more sophisticated method in which an attacker first trains a separate model – known as a membership inference model — based on the output of the model they’re attacking.

For example, let’s say a model has been trained on customer purchase histories to provide personalized product recommendations. An attacker may then create a membership inference model and compare its outputs with those of the target model to infer potentially sensitive information that they might use in a targeted attack.

In either case, red teams can evaluate AI models for their ability to inadvertently leak sensitive information directly or indirectly through inference. This can help identify vulnerabilities in training data workflows themselves, such as data that hasn’t been sufficiently anonymized in accordance with the organization’s privacy policies.

Building trust in AI

Building trust in AI requires a proactive strategy, and AI red teaming plays a fundamental role. By using methods like adversarial training and simulated model inversion attacks, red teams can identify vulnerabilities that other security analysts are likely to miss.

These findings can then help AI developers prioritize and implement proactive safeguards to prevent real threat actors from exploiting the very same vulnerabilities. For businesses, the result is reduced security risk and increased trust in AI models, which are fast becoming deeply ingrained across many business-critical systems.

The post Testing the limits of generative AI: How red teaming exposes vulnerabilities in AI models appeared first on Security Intelligence.

Macron called Biden’s decision to free Ukraine’s hand with US missiles “good.” But German’Scholz said it would not follow suit.

Developing nations seek over $1 trillion to adapt to climate change and transition to greener energy 

Stefan Korshak, Kyiv Post’s military correspondent, shares his perspective on the developments in Russia’s war in Ukraine

After a challenging year that almost forced it to close entirely, Reaching-Out Community Services reopened its food pantry at a new location in Bensonhurst last week.

Earlier this year, the organization — which has been providing food assistance and other programs to low-income Brooklynites for three decades — announced it was struggling. Demand for its services had skyrocketed, but so had operating costs and rent at the program’s old facility on New Utrecht Avenue, and financial support was dwindling. 

In August, RCS’ founder and executive director said on Instagram that the org had been forced to reduce its staff and “cut off” thousands of families who had been receiving help. He reached out to local elected officials for support, according to News12, but by mid-September, the org had vacated its old headquarters, and things were looking dire. Neve put out a call for donations online, saying RCS was looking for a new home, but would need funds to support the move, “since we have drained out our budget.”

That support came together just in time, and RCS unveiled its new facility on 18th Avenue on Nov. 13 – just in time for the holidays. 

“The 30-year-old program, once again, is continuing its mission, regardless of some challenges that we had to endure,” Neve told Brooklyn Paper. “The reason why we moved here is so we could help the community members. Thousands of people are going through hard times with food insecurity, and that’s the purpose of this mission, to help those who are suffering with food insecurity, and they need a helping hand.”

Neve thanked Council Member Susan Zhuang, Assembly Member William Colton, and U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, and local orgs including the Rotary Club of Verrazano and the Ben-Bay Kiwanis Club for their support.  

“RCS does such good work for people who are struggling to feed themselves and their families,” Zhuang said in a statement. “They are literally a lifeline for people in the community struggling with food insecurity. That is why I was proud to allocate funding for their vital food pantry program. Low-income residents deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, no matter their financial circumstances.”

The organization’s “innovative” program eases the burden and stigma of going to a food pantry, Zhuang said. Per RCS’ website, its “Digital Client Choice Food Pantry System” is “one-of-a-kind.” 

Clients select their items, including fresh produce, on a bilingual touch screen computer — unlike at other pantries, where visitors might pick up pre-made bags of food. RCS workers receive the orders, find each item within the facility, and bring them to the client. 

On opening day, the new facility was fully stocked and had plenty of visitors. RCS mostly serves locals in South Brooklyn and asks prospective clients to provide proof of address and some explanation of their financial situation. 

Neve said he appreciated the support from the community and local orgs who came together to support RCS and southern Brooklynites in need of food assistance.

“It’s so needed, especially at this time, more than ever before,” he said. “Hopefully, we can see the good … we can keep that good going, and we’ll hopefully be successful in the mission we are trying to accomplish here.” 

More than a million people in New York City are struggling with food insecurity, according to CityHarvest, and one in four children don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Food pantry visits in the city up 80% compared to 2019, as families grapple with higher grocery prices and general cost of living increases. 

In Community District 11, which includes Bensonhurst, the median household income is around $60,000, according to the city’s Equitable Development Data Explorer. That’s considered “low-income” in New York City, and 25% of households in the district earn less than 30% of the Area Median Income — or $41,940 for a family of three — and are considered “very low-income.” 

With Thanksgiving on the horizon, RCS is preparing for its annual Thanksgiving giveaway, but it needs donations to make the event successful. 

“Hopefully, we can see the food that’s going to go, we can keep that good going, and we’ll hopefully be successful in the mission we are trying to accomplish here,” reads a post on RCS’ website. “We can continue to help as we did last year, but not without support from our caring friends. So please, let’s give thanks for what we have and just share a little back for those who are not so fortunate. Support and help feed a family or two for this Thanksgiving.”

Additional reporting by Arthur de Gaeta

As the COP29 climate summit enters the final stretch in Azerbaijan, there are growing frustrations over the apparent lack of progress toward securing a deal on climate finance – seen as a crucial step in reducing emissions and limiting global warming. Henry Ridgwell reports.

The Biden administration is making a final push during its last weeks in office to put Ukraine in the “strongest possible position” in preparation for negotiations. Their latest move, according to press reports and confirmed privately by administration sources (though not yet confirmed by U.S. announcements), is to authorize Ukraine to use its U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to hit targets inside Russia in defense of Ukrainian forces fighting in Russia’s Kursk Province. The United States previously limited the weapons to be used only against Russian forces and installations inside Ukraine, such as in Crimea. The Ukrainians now may have mounted strikes inside Russia today using ATACMS, amid angry complaints from Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

The shift is a good move and may lead the French and British to lift some comparable restrictions on their own long-range weapons. But it’s late in coming, like other Biden administration decisions to supply advanced weapons systems to Ukraine. And the Biden administration won’t be around long enough to manage any end game to the war. The incoming Trump administration is apparently pushing fast-track negotiations to end this phase of the conflict on terms that risk favoring Russian President Vladimir Putin. All the outgoing Biden team can do at this point is push weapons out the door and ramp up economic pressure on Russia (they do have good options for the latter) and hope for the best.

The Biden administration did a lot to support Ukraine’s defense, rallying European and other nations to do the same. I don’t share the cynical view that the Biden team was stingy with assistance to stymie Ukrainian victory. But the administration’s decisions were often slow, made at a deliberate pace not always commensurate with need. Mixed messages about lifting ATACMS restrictions created the impression of hesitation, even dithering. Similar cycles of hesitation and long deliberation accompanied earlier decisions about sending Ukraine F-16s, certain armored vehicles, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) missiles, and other weapons systems.

According to administration sources, the reason the restriction on use of ATACMS was finally lifted was the appearance of North Korean forces in Russia, apparently making preparations to join Russian troops against Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk region; that gave administration proponents of lifting the restrictions an argument that it was Putin who had escalated the conflict by bringing in those forces and that lifting the ATACMS restrictions was only a response.

Failure to Press Advantages

An internal administration dynamic that lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of weapons required some rationale other than helping Ukraine defend itself speaks to a lack of determination to push potential advantages and an overthinking about “escalation.” Administration officials make the case that no one weapons system would change the course of the war. That may be true, but the cumulative impact of many slow decisions about weapons systems might have had impact at the margins, and it is at the margins that some wars are decided. Indeed, Putin sought to escalate at least rhetorically again today by announcing the formal signing of a revised nuclear doctrine that already had been announced in September.

President-elect Donald Trump’s team is setting the stage for rapid moves on Ukraine, apparently planning a big push to end the conflict. That may include a ceasefire along current lines, and some sort of security support for Ukraine. That is not necessarily a radical approach. The Biden team had privately acknowledged that Ukraine might not regain all its territory for some time and that, in the interim, a ceasefire might be needed, supported by serious security guarantees. The Biden version of security guarantees for Ukraine has started out with a set of parallel, bilateral memoranda of understandings between Ukraine and NATO and other nations, including the United States. However, again privately, some in the Biden administration acknowledged that this was inadequate and, with reluctance, recognized that Ukrainian membership in NATO, with only “free” or “unoccupied” Ukraine covered by the alliance, could be the most viable way to end the war. Senior European officials at NATO privately say that they have come to that conclusion as well.

The Risk of a Phased Conquest

But rather than striving for Ukraine’s NATO membership, which is currently the stated NATO-accepted goal, the Trump plan seems to involve some sort of forced neutrality for Ukraine or a moratorium (perhaps for 20 years) on any moves toward Ukraine’s NATO membership. This reported sketch of a Trump plan raises one fatal problem up front: without serious security support for Ukraine, this could set the stage for a phased Russian conquest of the entire country — first, Western acquiescence to Russian conquests up to the ceasefire line, and second, a signal that there would not be much response to another, subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine, probably after an interval for Russia to refit its forces. For decades, analysts have used (and sometimes misapplied) the lesson of the 1938 Peace Conference in Munich in which the British and French acquiesced to German occupation of a portion of Czechoslovakia in exchange for Hitler’s promises of subsequent peace. Within months of that ill-conceived concession, Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and Hitler started planning the invasion of Poland, assuming that Britain and France would never stand up to him.

A Trump “peace plan” that essentially abandons Ukraine would mirror the bad deal at Munich, which has served for generations as an example of Western fecklessness in the face of a dictator’s will. Like the Munich deal, it could encourage Putin or other aggressive leaders to launch new wars, perhaps in Asia against Taiwan.

Some in Trump World appear to be well aware of the dangers of a bad deal on Ukraine. They privately acknowledge that the Trump administration might own the terrible images of Ukraine falling to a subsequent Russian attack made possible by a bad deal, a sort of giant version of the images of Kabul falling to the Taliban in 2021 with millions of refugees, a new wave of atrocities, and indications of U.S. weakness.

During the presidential campaign, Senator J.D. Vance, now Trump’s vice president-elect, offered a plan that would include freezing the conflict on the current ceasefire line but also heavily fortifying that line to prevent further Russian aggression. Vance did not specify what that meant, but his formula opens the door to continued U.S. military assistance to Ukraine and, potentially, foreign forces on Ukrainian soil to back up a ceasefire. The possibility of European and other countries’ forces on the ground in Ukraine to support a ceasefire is a longshot but not fanciful: at the Berlin Koerber Conference on Nov. 12, where I was present, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock raised such a possibility. Potential contributor nations would likely demand, understandably, contingency U.S. air, intelligence, and logistic support.

In short, a Trump administration push for a rapid settlement in Ukraine need not be worst case if — but only if — it includes serious security provisions for Ukraine. NATO membership would provide the best security for Ukraine and for Europe, and any gap between NATO’s security provisions and what Ukraine gets would be temptation for Putin to exploit. But a Trump plan for Ukraine that includes something stronger than the Biden administration’s bundle of bilateral MOUs could hold some promise.

Putin, however, gets a vote. So far, Kremlin-tied Russians have treated early signals of the Trump plan for Ukraine with scorn, demanding Ukraine’s surrender. Should the Kremlin maintain a maximalist line, the Trump team will have to decide whether to cave to it or push back, the latter possibly by increasing support for Ukraine and pressure on Russia.

After many months of stasis, events in Ukraine could move quickly. The Biden team will do what it can as it prepares to leave; the Trump team will have challenges putting its ambitions to end the war to the test. All the while, the stakes will be high.

IMAGE: Pro-Ukrainian activists demonstrate in front of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 17, 2024. US President Joe Biden has cleared Kyiv to use long-range American missiles against military targets inside Russia, a US official told AFP on Sunday, hours after Russia targeted Ukraine’s power grid in a deadly barrage. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has long pushed for authorization from Washington to use the powerful Army Tactical Missile System, known by its initials ATACMS, to hit targets inside Russia. (Photo by DANIEL SLIM/AFP via Getty Images)

The post Biden’s Final Efforts on Ukraine — and Trump’s First Moves appeared first on Just Security.

Aslan Bzhania, Moscow’s ruler of occupied Georgian territory, made the resignation conditional on protestors agreeing to cease their four-day occupation of government buildings in Sokhumi by Tuesday.