Developments in Russia-Ukraine War
Despite the visible desperation of the U.S President, Donald Trump, to negotiate a peace agreement and claim credit for bringing an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, all attempts at peace have met with failure. The most recent attempt was an outrageous 28-point draft circulated by the Trump administration, asking Ukraine to accept the draft within a week.
Trump’s proposals, in this initial draft, sought Ukraine’s de facto submission to Russia, with several American Congress members even ridiculing the draft as ‘Russia’s wish list.’ The conditions in the draft sought to give the Donbas region to Russia, allowed Russia to retain Crimea, and most devastatingly, sought partial demilitarization of Ukraine by seeking to cap its military manpower by limiting its army to 600,000 soldiers. It also endorsed the idea that Ukraine will not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and that NATO countries’ forces will not be stationed in Ukraine. In other words, such was the punitive orientation of the initial draft that it revealed how the Trump administration sought to treat Ukraine in the same way as those countries which are war criminals (especially provisions seeking to limit Ukraine’s military, which is a breach of its sovereignty). Worse still, the draft also sought to thwart Europe’s plan to use frozen Russian assets (based at the Euroclear bank in Brussels) to help Ukraine. It did so by stipulating that out of the $300 billion of frozen Russian assets, around $100 billion will be used by the U.S for funding America’s commercial ventures in Ukraine, with 50% of the profits from these investments going to the U.S, and rest will go into funding U.S-Russia investment ventures.
The initial draft has since undergone some hasty revisions in the subsequent Geneva conference between the U.S, Europe and Ukraine representatives. Further negotiations have been on, as evidenced by regular meetings between Ukraine and European leaders in London, as well as, between Ukraine and American officials in the UAE. Russia has also been a part of these ongoing back-channel talks. However, Trump continues to publicly express his desire for a quick conclusion to the war and has been repeatedly calling upon Zelenskyy to initiate the movement towards peace. This puts further pressure on Zelenskyy at a time when he is already facing serious corruption allegations against his administration at home. These corruption allegations are not new. They were levelled few months back as well, and Europe had also issued warnings to Zelenskyy to bring his house in order. But while earlier allegations were met with a successful political purge through the imprisonment of Opposition leaders and some changes in the military administration, the new allegations implicate Zelenskyy’s closest aides, leaving little scope to shift the blame to other political leaders.
On the war front also, Ukraine continues to be embattled. While Russia has not made any major new advances and gains, it continues its offensive targeting Ukraine’s critical infrastructure in a bid to cripple the country as the winter approaches. By doing this, Russia continues its psychological messaging to project that it has an upper hand, even as it desists from making major new advances in Ukraine, as any major territorial breaches will paint Russia as being anti-peace in the current diplomatic stand-off. Further, any major advances or gains by Russia will also result in subsequent diplomatic and political losses if Russia is called upon to give them back to Ukraine in the future peace agreement. Therefore, Russia prefers to confine its territorial offensive to the Donbas region, in a bid to strengthen its political position. At the same time, the consistency of the offensive leaving Ukraine embattled is a bid to project Russia’s military superiority.
This combination of restraint and calibrated offence is being undertaken by Russia, even as it bides its time while the West struggles to break the diplomatic impasse and bring the war to an end. For now, Russia does not seem to have a particularly strong incentive to finish the war, making the end of war conditional upon its core demands. Ukraine too has clearly drawn its red lines. These include not giving up the Donetsk province in the east as Ukraine views it as a buffer against Russia. It also includes Ukraine’s refusal to alter its constitution to state that it will never join NATO. Further, the U.S also wants both sides to drop any legal claims on war crimes and grant general amnesty to both sides – something that Ukraine sees as exoneration of Russia, which is completely unacceptable.
These red lines, on both the sides, reveal once again the political roots of the war and give an idea of why this has been amongst the longest wars in recent times. It cannot be equated to other wars that have erupted and been sorted out with a ceasefire. Here, the war between Russia and Ukraine has transformed into a type of great power conflict fought through proxy means. Proxy wars (such as seen in Sudan and Yemen) are the longest to sort out, and great power wars even more so. Europe (and U.S under Biden) has always viewed Ukraine primarily as a buffer against Russia. Since the inception of the war, the West has played a smart game, using Ukraine to keep Russia entangled, while never authorizing Ukraine to access the West’s full military arsenal to defeat Russia. However, the war also became a cover for Russia to draw closer than ever to China, and after initial collective shock, led to legitimization of Putin in a way that had not been anticipated by the West. After the West’s initial attempt to project that Russia could not defeat a smaller and weaker country like Ukraine, the new discourse that gained ground was that Russia was not only in a war against Ukraine but against proxy warfare of the collective West. With the West’s great power competition with China intensifying along multiple fronts, the situation now appears unpalatable to the U.S, which is why U.S is prioritizing ending the war and reigniting the U.S-Russia cooperation. Right from the beginning, the West has viewed Ukraine instrumentally as a buffer to settle Russia rather than working towards the objective of Ukraine’s victory in the war. When motivations remain shrouded in hypocrisy, any peace deal would remain elusive.
Technology: When AI Takes a Life of Its Own
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become common in recent times, especially as their commercial application and mass uses increase. However, every time AI shakes up the sphere of military, politics or national security, its dangerous consequences once again come to the fore. One such development in recent times becomes of special concern for national security agencies around the world. American AI group, Anthropic, recently revealed the details of a cyberattack precipitated by Chinese hackers (a hacking group labelled ‘GTG-1002’ linked to the Chinese government).
The development stood out because it was for the first time that a largely autonomous cyberattack had been conducted by an AI system. This marks a departure from earlier trends when human agency was a major factor in cyberattacks and instances of cybercrimes. In this attack, the hackers used Anthropic’s agentic coding agent (namely, ‘Claude Code’) to automate almost the whole cyberattack process, making it an agentic AI attack. The AI system’s prompts were operationalized in such a way that the AI was itself able to do everything, from identifying high-value targets (from corporate to government sectors) and picking out the loopholes in those targets which could be exploited. Thus, the AI system was able to conduct nearly 80-90% of the attack operations autonomously without any human intervention. These included operations such as reconnaissance, vulnerability exploitation, harvesting users’ credentials and data analysis. It was also able to marshal other artificial agents. Together the components of the AI system worked to execute the attack at a speed that no human team could ever match. In this attack, humans only devised the strategy, while the AI system was able to handle the tactics and the execution by itself.
There are several immediate consequences which this development may bode:
First, it reveals a new side to the AI systems – that they are not only disruptive, but also manipulative. Disruptive AI attacks can dangerously cripple critical systems and compromise national security, but they are also visible and detectable to an extent. However, manipulative AI attacks, like the one described above, aim at something more dangerous. They seek to alter the system’s behaviour, rather than simply disrupt the system. That means they can infiltrate and control the system in a directive, manipulative manner rather than just causing visible harm. This becomes particularly harmful when the adversary’s AI systems are targeted (in this case, how Anthropic’s AI system was targeted by Chinese hackers). At the time, when AI is being deployed everywhere from wars to businesses to social services, such manipulative attacks make national security particularly vulnerable. For instance, an adversary may use AI-powered cyberattack to compromise another country’s AI systems in a way that the latter identifies its own countrymen as targets.
Second, it also increases the scope of cybercrimes. Cybercrime has always existed as a thriving, dark industry, always eluding law enforcement, but operating in a potent manner. However, in recent times, cyber-slavery has become the focal point of public discourse, especially in countries like Myanmar, Vietnam and Cambodia, revealing the rate at which the previously hidden cybercrime industry is expanding. The rise of AI as well as the rise of people with access to internet and technology has made this possible. As AI advances its manipulative capabilities, the rise in people being targeted by cybercrimes, as well as the likelihood of cybercrimes being autonomously executed by AI systems, is likely to worsen.
Finally, the attack revealed how agentic AI, through autonomous capabilities, will further compound surveillance. Since agentic AI is based on offence rather than defence, AI will be used to, both, mount offensive intrusions into adversary’s territory, while the adversary will also seek to use AI systems to fortify its defence against such offensive intrusions. This means that defensive AI will become increasingly intrusive in monitoring individual citizens, to observe what individual behaviour deviates from ‘normal.’ More intrusive defensive capabilities will likely turn monitoring and detection into widespread surveillance.
White Collar Terrorism
The suicide terror attack, through car bombing, near Delhi’s Red Fort last month, has left more than 13 people dead and more than 30 people injured. The suicide bomber was the driver of the car in which the bombing took place, namely, Dr. Umar Un Nabi, a doctor by profession and an assistant professor at Al Falah University in Faridabad, Haryana. After preliminary investigation of what appeared to be a car blast, the Indian government officially termed it as a terrorist attack. Investigations also revealed that Nabi belonged to Pulwama, Kashmir, thereby linking the attack to Kashmir. While the investigations continue to proceed, with the National Investigation Agency (NIA) having made several arrests, the attack raises the larger issues around terrorism in India. These are:
First, the most visible aspect of this attack is the rise of white-collar terrorism. That the main perpetrators and masterminds of this attack, apart from Nabi, were all doctors and professors, shows the phenomenon of rise of terrorism perpetrated by skilled and educated sections of society. It shows how education instead of giving exposure and perspective, can make the worst fundamentalist instincts subtle and more potent using skills.
In this case, the meticulous planning that went into the attack can be traced to the rise of propaganda and disturbances in Kashmir since October, with anti-India posters being put up. This led to several arrests in Kashmir, including the arrests of a Muslim cleric with links to the Al Falah university in Faridabad, Haryana. Just two days prior to the car blast, the agencies raided several places in Kashmir, Gujarat and Faridabad. In these raids, they managed to uncover a massive tranche of up to 2900 kg of explosives, another 360 kg of ammonium nitrate, and 2 AK series of weapons and ammunition.
Post-attack assessments have arrived at the conclusion that the uncovering of the massive explosives accumulation which would have led to the eventual exposure of the key people involved, led Nabi to flee with the explosives. However, the quantity of explosives in his car were not sufficient to carry out a large-scale attack, thereby leading to the precipitation of a limited, albeit a potent car bombing. The meticulous planning for a massive attack was thwarted as a result of the intelligence raids.
Second, even though a massive terror attack was averted, yet the car bombing once again revealed the vulnerability of our security architecture. That the terrorists were able to accumulate dangerous explosive ingredients in civilian spaces over months and had been preparing meticulously for the attack, reveals the gaps in our intelligence architecture which urgently need to be addressed. This means that instead of only focusing on border security infrastructure, the government now needs to pay attention to civilian security infrastructure, akin to what China started doing after a terror attack that took place few years back. It also calls for the need to establish cyber-security architecture, as both radicalization and planning is happening through the internet. In the case of the present attack, international angle has now been revealed, as the terrorists’ handler was operating from Turkey, while the transfer of money and resources was happening through Pakistani Jaish’s networks. Further, the educated terrorists in this attack even used sophisticated digital tradecraft, like encrypted messaging apps and digital “dead drops” (using unsent email drafts for communication), to evade surveillance. They even conducted multiple reconnaissance missions in Delhi. That all this planning went undetected reveals serious gaps in physical and cyber security infrastructure.
Third, the attack raises questions about the patterns of radicalization among Indian Muslims. This is a point that is being sorely missed. Every time a terrorist attack occurs, it is treated as a part of a securitized discourse on terrorism largely divorced from existing social networks, with the attention being focused on the implicated accused and their terror networks, and how they became radicalized. For political reasons, perhaps, the establishment has shied away from acknowledging the fact that terrorism is not simply a security phenomenon which can be assessed only by analysing behavioural changes and radicalization patterns among some social networks. Rather, in India’s case, it is deeply linked to Islamic religious fundamentalism which is on the rise, and which is a largely society-wide phenomenon rather than a narrow security issue.
This form of fundamentalism often rises when it can access a fertile opening in the form of the weakening of existing cultural and religious foundations of the society, which acts as a vacuum showing the weakness of the existing culture. India has borne the brunt of this phenomenon many times since before Independence. In most recent times, the Israel-Hamas conflict also amply bears out this point. Isreal’s approach has hinged on not surgically treating terrorism as a phenomenon limited to Hamas networks, but as a society-wide phenomenon of which Hamas is merely one expression. This has enabled Israel to launch a full-fledged war in Gaza, targeting not merely Hamas members but even civilian sympathisers of Islamic terrorism. This is how radicalization works, and the only successful response to it lies in cultivating strength. What Sri Aurobindo had said during the time of India’s freedom struggle and in the context of communal riots needs to be applied anew today as well – that the only solution to the Hindu-Muslim problem is for the Hindus to leave their weakness and become strong.
In today’s context, when we deal with the scourge of terrorism it is important to fundamentally change our approach. For this we first need to acknowledge that terrorism, in the Indian context, is rooted in Muslim radicalization and needs wider solutions going beyond narrow security dimensions. Without a deeper cultural change in mindset tending towards strength, terrorism will only look for opportunities to repeatedly rear its head and find ways to subvert our outer security infrastructure.
Bihar Election Results
Bihar election results came out along the expected lines. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) emerged as a decisive force in Bihar, as predicted by the exit polls. Not just a decisive force, the NDA came back with a fourth-fifths majority. Thanks to the incompetence and ill-will espoused by the Opposition constituents under the Maha Gath Bandhan (MGB) coalition, such as the Congress, the RJD and the Left, even the issues associated with anti-incumbency, as well as planks such as unemployment fell flat and failed to dent the NDA.
Seat and Vote Share Distribution:
| Party | Seat share | Vote share (%) |
| BJP | 89 | 20.6 |
| JD(U) | 85 | 20.3 |
| LJP(RV) | 19 | 4.6 |
| Others (NDA) | 9 | 1.2 |
| NDA Total | 202 | 46.7 |
| RJD | 25 | 22 |
| INC | 6 | 8.9 |
| CPI(ML)(L) | 2 | 3.2 |
| Others (MGB) | 2 | 3.4 |
| MGB Total | 35 | 37.5 |
| AIMIM | 5 | 2 |
| JSP | 0 | 3.4 |
| Others | 1 | 10.4 |
Strike Rate (Number of seats a party won relative to the number of seats it contested):
| Party | 2025 (%) | 2020 (%) |
| BJP | 89.1 | 67.3 |
| JD(U) | 83.2 | 37.4 |
| LJP(RV) | 67.9 | 0 |
| RJD | 17.5 | 52.1 |
| INC | 9.8 | 27.1 |
| CPI(ML)(L) | 10 | 63.2 |
The results show the striking gap between the NDA and the MGB, especially in terms of the seat share. In terms of the seat share, while the BJP cornered the highest numbers, in terms of vote share, MGB’s RJD got two percentage points more than the BJP. It is also significant that the gap between the JD(U) and the BJP is not a lot in terms of both seat share and vote share, and within the NDA, all the constituents performed well. This is reflected in their contested seat shares. Within the MGB, it is clear that the Congress dragged down the alliance.
Patterns and Trends:
The election brought to fore specific voting patterns based on gender, region, caste and religion. These are as follows:
Caste and community trends:
| Caste/community | NDA (%) | MGB (%) |
| Yadavs | 19 | 74 |
| Muslims | 7 | 70 |
| Upper castes | 67 | 9 |
| Kurmi and Koeri (dominant OBCs) | 71 | 13 |
| Lower OBCs | 68 | 18 |
| Dalits | 60 | 28 |
Caste and community trends reveal the NDA’s hold across all castes and communities, expect the Yadavs and the Muslims. Of particular significance is how every NDA constituent was able to perform well and cater to their social group. Within the NDA, the BJP attracted the upper caste votes mainly, while the JD(U) became the bastion for its traditional Kurmi votes. Upendra Kushwaha’s Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RSLP) secured significant support among the Koeris, while the LJP and the Hindustaan Awaam Morcha (HAM) secured Dalit votes.
Region-wise trends:
| Region/Party | BJP (%) | JD(U) (%) | RJD (%) | INC (%) |
| Mithila | 49.3 | 46.9 | 41.2 | 37.3 |
| Tirhut | 48.4 | 46.9 | 39.8 | 33.7 |
| Magadh | 51 | 47.2 | 39.6 | 34.6 |
| East | 46.9 | 45.2 | 33.7 | 33.7 |
| Bhojpur | 44.7 | 41.6 | 35.9 | 29 |
Region-wise trends bear out how the NDA routed the MGB in many key regions. Particularly significant is the fact that the RJD was routed in its own bastion, that is, the Bhojpur region, where the BJP managed to secure 44.7% of the vote share. In Muslim-dominated regions like Seemanchal also, the MGB saw votes being divided because of the presence of Owaisi-led AIMIM. In Seemanchal, the AIMIM won 5 seats in constituencies where the Muslim population was more than 40%.
SC-reserved seats trends:
| Party | Seats contested | Strike rate (%) |
| BJP | 11 | 100 |
| JD(U) | 15 | 93.3 |
| LJP(RV) | 8 | 62.5 |
| RJD | 19 | 21.1 |
| INC | 11 | 0 |
| LEFT | 8 | 0 |
Vote share trends in seats with higher share of women voters:
| % of women in total voters | Districts | JD(U) (%) | BJP (%) | INC (%) | RJD (%) |
| 53%-55% | 8 | 24.2 | 19.4 | 8.2 | 22.5 |
| 51%-52% | 8 | 18.9 | 20.3 | 9.2 | 23.5 |
| 50% | 9 | 15.8 | 20.89 | 9.8 | 23 |
| <50% | 13 | 19.3 | 20.9 | 7.6 | 22.7 |
Source: Radhakrishnan, et al. (2025)
The voting patterns displayed by women have worked to the JD(U)’s advantage, as it performed well in seats with a larger share of women voters. This was to be expected as the JD(U), under Nitish Kumar, has created a political record in women’s welfare, from bicycle schemes for schoolgirls to promoting prohibition on alcohol consumption. In the latest election, he executed the Mahila Rozgar Yojana, which directly disbursed 10,000 rupees to women. This scheme has had a significant impact in mobilizing women in favour of the NDA.
Conclusion
The election results once again undergird the changing landscape of political mobilization in India. Three trends particularly become visible:
First, there is a visible disjunct between political messaging and electoral outcomes. This is particularly visible in the campaigning undertaken by the Opposition parties and bring attention to the nature of issues being raised. The Opposition spent a significant part of the campaign building a narrative against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls which was undertaken by the Election Commission. Much before the SIR, the Opposition decided to choose the plank of ‘vote theft’ as a year-round campaign. The SIR was seamlessly linked to that issue. In Bihar, key Opposition figures, such as Rahul Gandhi, also embarked on a ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ to provoke mass reception to this issue. However, the reverse happened. Not only did the voters not connect to the issue and did not object to the SIR, but the Opposition did not perform well in the seats where the Yatra traversed. The MGB led in just one seat out of the multiple constituencies through which the Yatra traversed.
Second, much has been said about how welfare politics and the promise of freebies have taken centre stage in today’s politics. While Bihar election saw its own share of welfare politics, with political parties seeking to outdo each other in promising freebies to the people. Nitish Kumar’s catering to the women voters was also a part of this narrative. However, it is also significant to note that welfare alone is not a key factor that determines electoral outcomes. Surveys show that people voted for the NDA, enabling it to beat anti-incumbency, not because of the welfare promises but because of service delivery and law and order governance. Nearly three-fourths of the voters were satisfied with the NDA government at the centre and in the state, while more than three-fourths of the voters were satisfied with service delivery in terms of better infrastructure, electricity access and social services such as education and healthcare. People also saw tangible improvements in law and order under Nitish Kumar.
Finally, the Bihar elections place ‘coalition’ politics in the right context. They reveal that coalitions cannot simply be opportunistic frontiers even if underlined by an ideologically polarizing narrative, as has been the case with the MGB. Rather, coalitions need to base themselves on the widest possible ideological base while simultaneously being characterised by a natural, deep-rooted understanding among the partners. Such sophisticated coalitions have not been seen in Indian politics, even though from 1989 onwards India underwent its full-fledged coalition phase. This has been more of a feature of western coalition politics. However, in Bihar elections, we see a wide, sophisticated coalition in the form of the NDA. It is interesting that the NDA was characterized by, both, seamless coordination among the constituents, even as no single party tried to assert dominance and every constituent (including smaller parties) retained their individuality.
