A Russian Navy intelligence-gathering ship sailed southwest through the Tsushima Strait between Japan and South Korea on Oct. 27 and 28 and headed into the East China Sea, Japan’s Joint Staff Office said. The Joint Staff identified the vessel as a Vishnya-class intelligence collection ship and released a map showing its hull number, 535. That […]
Ethiopia has taken delivery of its first 12 Russian Su-35 fighter jets and will also receive four batteries of the S-400 long-range air defense system, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said on social media on Oct. 28. Abiy said the jets arrived under an earlier agreement with the Russian government and a year ahead of the […]
The Russian Pacific Fleet’s ballistic missile submarine Generalissimo Suvorov fired a Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile from beneath the Sea of Okhotsk on Oct. 28, sending it across the country to the Chizha test range in the Arkhangelsk region, the Russian Defense Ministry said. The ministry said the launch was carried out from a submerged position […]
Two satellites from Russia’s Rassvet broadband constellation, the country’s answer to SpaceX’s Starlink, are expected to fall back into the atmosphere and burn up within the next day or two after failing to raise their orbits, Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell said, while most of the other Rassvet-3 satellites have now settled into […]
Photos have emerged of Russia’s newest version of the Geran-5 light cruise missile, known as the Geran-5 K5-K and often described in the media as a jet-powered drone, lying in a field somewhere in Ukraine’s Odesa region after it came down during an attack, with the serial number ANS-3031 visible on the airframe. It is […]
On October 15, a Vietnamese state-owned tanker, the PVT Azura, departed St. Petersburg with 109,000 barrels of Russian diesel. It is due at Norfolk on November 2, at a facility that the shipping journal gCaptain reports serves the American military, a detail no official has confirmed. It will be the first Russian diesel to reach an American port since 2023. On October 23, Russia's deputy prime minister said three tankers were at sea, that supply contracts were being finalized, and that volumes would rise to 1 million tons in December and could reach 3 million a month. A week earlier, the United States had waived, by executive order, the duties Congress had required to punish Russia's energy customers. Within a week, the waiver became a contract.
Azura's cargo is about 40 minutes of American diesel demand; 3 million tons a month would be a fifth of it, and roughly four times what Russia exported in the third quarter. To deliver that, Russia must repair the refineries Ukraine has spent a year destroying, which Rosneft now says it cannot afford. The contract's first effect is to give Washington an interest in Russian refineries running, even as Ukraine's president says the interceptors it has already paid for "are still not coming."
Diesel is one of four things the arsenal took this autumn from parties it does not control. The second is magnets: China exported 6,165 tons in September, its largest month this year, and they are the magnets in the motors of the drones the new Autonomous Warfare Command is to buy by the hundreds of thousands; Beijing's pause on its licensing rules lapses on November 10, with no notice published. The third is a room: the President said on October 19 that he would meet Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in China next month, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin had proposed a three-way meeting in Shenzhen to settle the war in Ukraine, without Ukraine. The fourth is money: on October 21, the Treasury sold 20-year bonds at a record 5.469 percent with foreign demand well below its average, and the 10-year fell below 5 percent the next day only because investors fled artificial-intelligence debt for the government's.
The one adversary with nothing to sell was squeezed: a third carrier group was ordered toward Iran on October 21, and Brent settled Friday at $116.72, its highest since April, which raised the price of everything the arsenal buys from the adversaries that do sell.
A sanction is the instrument of the party that sells. This autumn, the United States is the party that needs, and each supplier holds a date on which it can change the terms: October 31, when Russia's own fuel-export ban lapses; November 10 for Beijing's licenses; early November for the Treasury's refunding; November 18 for the summit. In economic warfare, the buyer takes the terms.
I write this from the Cipher Brief's Threat Conference at Sea Island, where General Bryan Fenton and I addressed the question of what the Department of War has to do with economic warfare. The week answered it before we spoke: the Department is now, by available reports, a customer of one adversary's refineries, a buyer of another's magnets, the holder of an ally's interceptors, and the owner of the carriers that set the price of oil. No office weighed those instruments against one another; the suppliers did.
For nine weeks in these pages, I have written about what the United States cannot do, from the army it cannot command to the day it cannot choose, and each piece ended at the same place: a decision no one was assigned to make. The diagnosis is complete, and the series turns here from what we cannot do to what we must. The place to start is the Autonomous Warfare Command: its plan is due on October 30, and it will be the government's largest buyer of the parts this piece is about.
Three things must be in that plan, and none of them is money.
First, the authority to decide. The Secretary's memorandum settles who buys. It has not settled who decides: one command-and-control architecture across every Service and domain, including space; who allocates among theaters when two ask for the same drones on the same day; who overrides at tempo; and whether the answer binds the Services. Congress granted those authorities to Special Operations Command in 1986, with its own budget line and acquisition power. The plan should name the same for this command, and add the paragraph Congress left out in 1986: command and control.
Second, the edge. Ukraine computes on the aircraft; we compute in Virginia and wait, and the Pacific cannot fight on a round trip. The plan must put the computing on the platform and the communications on a layer the force controls, so that no one else sets its speed.
Third, supply before the ban. The command's motors turn on Chinese magnets until American plants deliver, and the Pentagon's own ban takes effect on January 1. A Defense Production Act priority rating and a drawdown from the National Defense Stockpile, issued before November 10, stock what we need before we forbid what we depend on. The same plan is the demand signal industry has asked for: an architecture and a date.
The economic front needs the same discipline before the summit. The diesel contract Moscow is drafting can carry an American sunset and condition, or Moscow's; the choice closes when it is signed. The Shenzhen agenda can be published by Washington before Beijing publishes its own. An office beneath the President must hold those terms once set, because the next price of fuel will argue for changing them. A buyer who does these things is still a buyer, but no longer a price-taker. Set the terms before the supplier does. In this war, the suppliers are the parties we set out to pressure, and they hold the dates.—
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
A photo of what is said to be a brand-new Il-78 aerial refueling tanker, freshly painted dark gray, has appeared online, and a marking on its tail that resembles part of the Chinese air force insignia has revived speculation that Russia is building the tankers for China. The image was shared on the Sino Defence […]
A Russian drone unit fired about 100 Lancet loitering munitions over three months and hit only three targets, according to pro-Russian militant Pavel Gubarev, who said Ukrainian air defenses brought down most of the rest. The account points to a sharp drop in the effectiveness of one of Russia’s most widely used strike drones, Ukrainian […]
Russia’s Amur Shipbuilding Plant has launched the multipurpose corvette Grozny, the fifth Project 20380 warship it has built for the Russian Navy’s Pacific Fleet, the fleet’s press service said. The ceremony took place on Oct. 23 in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in Russia’s Far East, more than five years after the ship was laid down on Aug. 23, […]
A7’s OpenAI prompt was six words long: "Translate [name] to [language]. Answer only translated text."
Developer code leaked in 2025 from A7—the Kremlin-linked payment network designated by Treasury on October 1 as “a significant transnational criminal organization”—shows A7 used this prompt with OpenAI's API to create fake invoices, fake stamps, and a complex ledger that made Russian procurement look like ordinary trade.
Our investigative work, as featured originally in the “Big Shor” investigation and in subsequently featured in the New York Times and Financial Times, reveals that between January 2025 and June 2026, A7 laundered over $80 billion through the international financial system and continues to do so today. Zach was the principal researcher and Dawson peer reviewed the report and mentored the research team.
The common story is that sanctions cut Russia off from SWIFT and dollar clearing. In reality, Russia never left the Western financial system; A7 is how it re-entered at state scale. It still needs dollars and euros to buy components, sell oil, and pay intermediaries; China’s CIPS, yuan, crypto, and barter cannot replace them.
How the scheme works
A7 acts for Promsvyazbank, the state bank serving Russia's defense sector. A7 has laundered over $80 billion through roughly 435 financial institutions in at least 83 countries, funding Russia’s war in Ukraine, intelligence operations, election interference, and trade. Its clients have included Iranian oil sellers, which is why Treasury rolled the designation into Operation Economic Outcast.
A7’s shell companies, often run from Russia over VPNs, open accounts at local banks in Bishkek or Dubai’s free trade zones. Those banks rely on larger regional banks, which clear dollars through correspondents in New York or Hong Kong. Each sees only the customer in front of it. Card programs issued under sponsor banks give front companies and Russians access to payment rails without a direct banking relationship.
Fundamental to the scheme were fake invoices, produced at scale using OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A7 also used ChatGPT to forge stamps and automate intake of SWIFT payment confirmations from scanned receipts. Because A7 broke the operation into steps that each looked legitimate, OpenAI’s screening was unlikely to flag it—a gap AI companies must close.
This is where the burden falls on banks, and where the anti-money laundering (AML) framework fails. It was built to catch criminals hiding proceeds, not a state-backed service with intelligence-grade tradecraft. A7’s disposable shell companies are replaced faster than any sanctions list can be updated. To Western correspondent banks, its flows look like normal bilateral trade.
Banks can catch A7 only by tracking behavior over time: new free-zone trading companies moving outsized volumes, product descriptions that do not match the counterparty, and payment routes with no commercial logic. However, banks can only go so far on their own.
The deeper problem is permissive jurisdictions—UAE free zones, Hong Kong, Kyrgyzstan, and Türkiye—that offer fast incorporation, light ownership checks, and access to dollars and euros. Intermediating Russian trade is profitable, and many of these governments frame it as “neutrality” rather than evasion. In Kyrgyzstan, A7 relied on relationships reaching the highest levels of government and the banking sector.
The Macro Threat: Sanctions, SWIFT, and China
As former U.S. Treasury and intelligence officials, we see A7 as a sobering reminder that the first wave of financial sanctions on Russia fell short. The international banking system remains the indispensable engine of Russia’s war effort.
This exposes a broader geopolitical failure: adversary coordination. Russia, Iran, the DPRK, and China increasingly share intermediaries and methods to exploit Western finance rather than build their own. Yet the allied response remains fragmented, targeting networks like A7 one at a time.
This forces hard choices about dollar access. Washington could strip correspondent access from the Chinese and regional banks moving billions for U.S. adversaries. That might disrupt A7, but it raises the question of whether weaponizing dollar access compels compliance or accelerates Beijing and Moscow's push for a closed-loop financial system.
Changing the Equation: Government Actions
Allied governments must close systemic loopholes. Diplomacy with third countries has largely run its course; the leverage now lies in their banks’ access to Western finance. Tools like FinCEN’s Section 311 can force regional banks to choose between servicing networks like A7 and keeping their Western correspondent accounts. Regulators must treat nested correspondent relationships (banks clearing payments for other banks’ customers) and sponsored credit card programs (cards issued by smaller banks and fintechs under a bank’s license) as direct compliance liabilities.
Exams that test only static list-screening teach banks to build to that baseline. Exams should require network analysis, and governments should help scale these costly tools for vulnerable institutions in developing countries. This must be paired with mandatory information sharing: secure channels for client exit data and real-time international exchange of typologies.
Finally, authorities must treat AI and cloud infrastructure with the same scrutiny as traditional finance. Finalizing know-your-customer rules for cloud providers and requiring AI companies to flag behavioral anomalies would deny illicit actors the cheap infrastructure they need to scale.
A7 still moves billions every month. A week after Treasury acted, A7 announced a stablecoin USDT-SWIFT product; the timing was not a coincidence. Even if A7 is degraded, its model is highly portable, and Iran and North Korea are watching. The question for Washington, London, and Brussels is whether they can help industry disrupt these networks through a compliance culture that prioritizes real impact over list-based box-checking.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
China and Russia sent military intelligence aircraft toward Japan on four consecutive days this week, prompting the Japan Air Self-Defense Force to scramble fighters each day, as two Chinese Y-9 aircraft crossed the gap between Okinawa and Miyako-jima into the Pacific on Oct. 20 and 21 and Russian IL-20 aircraft flew over the Sea of […]
A missile strike likely hit the Proton plant in the Russian city of Orel, a manufacturer of optoelectronic equipment whose components are used in Russia’s Iskander-M ballistic missiles, Pantsir-S1 air defense systems and Kh-71 cruise missiles, according to the monitoring channel Exilenova+. Local authorities declared an aviation and missile danger alert in Orel during the […]
A drone strike sank a merchant ship carrying Ukrainian and Azerbaijani sailors off Romania’s Black Sea coast on Oct. 23, 2026, killing one crew member and leaving three missing, prompting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to condemn what she called another Russian escalation in the Black Sea. The Comoros-flagged Khoryv sent a distress […]
Denmark has rushed more than 50,000 rounds of 20 mm ammunition to Ukraine for the cannons on its F-16 fighter jets, and Ukrainian pilots are already firing them at Russia’s jet-powered Shahed-type attack drones, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said on Oct. 23, 2026. The ministry announced the delivery on X, saying Denmark sent the rounds on […]
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency has published a detailed breakdown of Filin, a new Russian ground-launched cruise missile that Moscow began firing at Ukraine in late summer 2026. According to the agency, the missile combines a composite airframe and a Russian jet engine with onboard electronics built largely from American and Chinese parts. The Main Intelligence […]
Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation is looking at artificial intelligence and other new software to speed up the design of future aircraft and cut the cost of developing new versions of existing ones, the state-owned planemaker said in a statement on its social media. UAC, which builds nearly all of Russia’s military and civil aircraft, from […]
Ukrainian drones have destroyed a Russian 9K515 Tornado-S heavy multiple launch rocket system in occupied Kherson Oblast, hitting the launcher with several different kamikaze drones in succession in a strike carried out by the Prymary unit of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR), which released the footage on Oct. 20. OSINT analyst Dominik geolocated the strike to […]
Armored vehicles built by Emirati manufacturer Streit Group have been spotted again in Russian service, this time with Gyurza, the special rapid response unit (SOBR) of Rosgvardia’s Main Directorate for the Moscow region, which was photographed operating a Cobra-LAMV 4×4. The light armored vehicle is built on a Toyota Land Cruiser chassis and marketed by […]
Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force scrambled fighter jets 442 times between April 1 and Sept. 30, about two-thirds more than the 265 scrambles in the same period last year, according to Joint Staff Office figures reported by USNI News. The rise came as Chinese and Russian military aircraft flew near Japan far more often, and the […] 
Login