2026-10-17 01:44:47
Donald Trump thinks Ukraine needs a new president. Vladimir Putin agrees, as does Elon Musk, and the point was once made by that great friend of Ukraine, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. So, let’s imagine that, somehow, fair and free elections with no Russian interference were to be held tomorrow in Ukraine. Who would win?
According to a September 23 public opinion survey conducted by a respected polling outfit, the winner would either be Ukraine’s incumbent president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with 23% or Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the former commander in chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, with 22.9%. Former President Petro Poroshenko comes in third with 10.7%. Fourth place goes to Zelenskyy’s intelligence aide, Kyrylo Budanov, with 9.5%, while fifth goes to the far-right politician and commander of the 3rd Army Corps of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, Andrii Biletsky, with 8.7%. Other polls show similar results.
The important point is not that Zelenskyy would probably stay in office with a renewed mandate and greater legitimacy, but that the alternatives would likely pursue an equally principled, pro-Ukrainian patriotic policy and, like Zelenskyy, reject any Russo-American deal that is tantamount to a capitulation.
A new president would be no less of a hardliner with respect to Russia than the old president.
Here’s Zaluzhny, currently the ambassador to London, on peace with Russia: “Ukraine has been fighting for survival for 11 years. Yet even now, some Western nations call on us to negotiate with those who came to kill us . . . Peace on Russia’s terms is not peace; it’s capitulation . . Calls to rush into a comprehensive peace deal are dangerously premature. True peace cannot be achieved by signing papers while Russian missiles are killing civilians.”
Here’s Poroshenko: “Peace [must be] on Ukraine’s terms. Under no circumstances through the surrender of territories or anything else; peace when Russia becomes weak and demonstrates a lack of success with military operations, along with the effectiveness of international sanctions, will be forced to sign for peace.”
Here’s Budanov about Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian civilians: “Another massive combined strike by the Russians on peaceful Ukrainian cities. Residential buildings hit. Civilians under the rubble . . . I appeal to those who are still calmly observing the Kremlin’s crimes. What other ‘business prospects’ are you trying to see through the dust from destroyed Ukrainian buildings? . . . Thank you to everyone who helps us fight evil.”
And here’s Biletsky about Russia’s mendacious claims of having captured the city of Sviatohirsk: “I want to address the Russian military and military-political leadership. Take off your clown noses and multicolored wigs. Don’t make fools of yourselves. 60 Mechanized Brigade of 3 Army Corps has full control of the city. In fact, this is our rear area.”
Neither in substance nor style are any of Zelensky’s presidential opponents pushovers.
Putin knows this, of course. His insistence on new elections is therefore little more than a blatant attempt to delegitimize Zelenskyy (who, in contrast to Putin, won fair and square), sow divisions within Ukraine, and thereby destabilize the country while making it more vulnerable to Russian aggression.
The pro-election electoral rhetoric is thus a smokescreen. Its adherents want Zelenskyy gone in the belief that it will somehow change the fundamentals of a peace agreement, or because he’s a fearsome opponent.
Fortunately for Ukraine, outside powers will not determine its future. Ukrainians have agency, and their drones are pummeling the Russians on the battlefield, with anything from 1,000-2,000 Russian soldiers being killed or seriously wounded every day.
Europeans have been forced to stand up for Ukraine and have learned that they can affect historical trajectories without the United States.
The US could, of course, return to its demand that Putin end the war, thereby bringing the peace that Ukraine and the rest of the continent so crave.
Alexander Motyl is a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-10-16 23:36:44
Almost two years of protests against corruption and incompetence in Vučić’s government may have forced his hand, but calling an early election (scheduled for October 25) is a trick he has successfully used before. He is gambling on his opponents struggling to convert their support on the streets into comparable success at the ballot box.
It is the first time in Serbia’s multiparty era that the National Assembly has been dissolved at the same time as the president resigning, and as the lead candidate for his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), Vučić aims to return as prime minister. The constitution won’t allow him to run for president a third time.
Snap parliamentary elections in Serbia have occurred so often that they are something of a national tradition. Since 1992, Serbia has held just three scheduled parliamentary elections, compared to 10 snap votes.
Such unscheduled elections have helped Vučić overcome political difficulties before, including unpopular reforms in 2016, the consequences of an opposition boycott in 2022, and protests over the government response to two mass shootings in May 2023.
Until now, Vučić has managed to take full advantage of this electoral approach, retaining control, or even increasing the number of seats in parliament. But this time there’s the chance of a serious overhaul of the National Assembly.
To the surprise of many, the opposition movement associated with students and the university community — once known as Students in Blockade — has not run out of steam like its predecessors. Instead, it has been gaining momentum since its first gatherings (see table below), which followed the collapse of a renovated roof at Novi Sad railway station in November 2024, killing 16 people and becoming an emblem of government incompetence and corruption. Elections in 10 municipalities in March marked the clearest turning point. While Vučić claimed a 10-0 victory, it was far from convincing, with student-backed rosters coming second in all 10 areas, and in some cases only narrowly behind the ruling party’s lists, which explicitly carried Vučić’s name on the ballot.
After the vote, the scheduled 2027 presidential election, with parliamentary elections six months later, promised to become an uphill battle. To avoid potential humiliation during the country’s flagship EXPO 2027 event in Belgrade, which will run from May to August 2027, Vučić opted instead for early votes.
The rosters of the two main rivals: Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia and Student List – Students Win, include professors, economists, artists, and athletes, but with one obvious difference. The Vučić list combines political incumbents with nationally recognizable and established figures, such as internationally respected mathematician Stojan Radenović, Serbian writer and actor Branislav Lečić, and violinist Jovan Kolundžija.
The Student list draws more heavily on respected professionals who are not so well known or favored by the government. Among them are Ilija Srdanović, a physician and university professor who heads the list, playwright Željko Hubač, and former officials such as Dejan Šoškić, who was governor of the National Bank of Serbia between 2010 and 2012. They sit alongside figures from previous opposition movements, such as Zlatko Kokanović, a prominent activist from the Jadar protests against lithium mining.
Paradoxically, the Student list intentionally includes no students, while the Vučić list — essentially the establishment list — excludes many prominent government officials, with the notable exception of Ana Brnabić, the parliamentary speaker and acting President of Serbia.
Vučić can still rely on his personal popularity, a well-aligned bureaucratic system, and his team’s political know-how. Elections require enormous organizational effort, which his side has more experience delivering, along with deep knowledge of the loopholes in the electoral system.
Growing fatigue with both Vučić after almost a decade-long presidency and the current political system may still work against him, despite his declarations of a willingness to change, for instance by promising a compact cabinet of just 12 ministers instead of 31.
Even experts loyal to the ruling party describe the elections as marked by a high degree of uncertainty. On October 25, Serbian voters will say if they are ready to turn the page and welcome a new generation of political leaders in the National Assembly —or whether Vučić’s era is not over yet.
Ekaterina Kurbangaleeva is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), affiliated with the Democratic Resilience Program, and a Visiting Scholar in the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-10-15 21:37:25
Europe’s longest road, the E-40, begins its 5,000-mile journey at the port of Calais, long the gateway to the British Isles, and ends in the Altai Mountains of Kazakhstan.
It’s part of the E-road system, which aims to help unite Europe in trade and to aid development and ties between neighbors; until 2014, it was doing just that. Now, when you drive about 2,000 miles along the route, you come upon strange and otherworldly sights signaling your arrival at a battlefield, the key sector for Ukraine’s desperate fight to repel the Russian invader.
This summer I drove twice from the UK to the fortress belt with volunteers delivering aid to the defenders.
We entered the Channel Tunnel at Folkestone and emerged in Calais to take the E-40 across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine all the way to a crossroads at Slovyansk where the road becomes impassable as it peels off toward Russian-occupied Bakhmut.
Going right at that crossroads leads 13 miles to Kramatorsk, and then it’s 22 miles further to Kostyantynivka, another battlefield frustrating Putin’s plans.
There, Ukrainian and Russian forces have been clashing in close-quarters combat, often fighting for every floor of blasted high-rise residential blocks.
Most of the 100 miles of the E-40 from just south of Kharkiv to Kostyantynivka is covered by netting, which can trap small suicide drones with payloads that can destroy a tank.
But they cannot protect against Russia’s larger drones, missiles, or bombs, such as those that killed at least 30 passengers in a bus in Kramatorsk on October 8.
The route is key to Ukraine’s fortress belt cities of Donetsk, in the country’s east. The Russians have sometimes approached within a few miles of the road connecting Slovyansk to Kramatorsk, and during the interval between my two trips there in August and September that stretch of road was lined with barbed wire, trenches and minefields on its eastward-facing direction.
The route is the vital lifeline for military and civilian supplies.
I joined drivers hurtling along the road, mostly single lanes in each direction, at more than 100 mph to elude Russian drones.
On one of those trips, near Slovyansk, the soldier steering our four-wheel-drive vehicle spotted the distinctive outlines of two Shahed drones, above and to our right, drifting toward the road.
We knew the fishing nets were no shield against them, but with wildly-racing traffic behind us and hemmed in by the netting draped all the way to the ground, we had no choice but to drive on, eyes anxiously fixed upon the devices lurking above.
One of the Shaheds plunged toward the road but missed whatever its target was and exploded in a field of sunflowers.
Then its companion curved towards the road we were, effectively, trapped on.
Ukrainian air defenses, with large-caliber machine guns mounted on pickup trucks concealed in the fields near the road, opened up on it. We watched, mesmerized, as the drone continued its turn toward our portion of Route E-40.
Then the machine gun found its target and the drone, still hundreds of feet above the ground, exploded and descended vertically in a spectacular fireball while we shouted in exhilaration and relief.
In a few moments we passed the field, made tinder-dry by baking summer temperatures, set ablaze by the drone’s flaming remnants.
Russia’s aerial terror attacks against Kyiv’s civilian population understandably claim the headlines at the moment, marked by ever-rising death tolls in Kyiv and other cities. But that has obscured the humiliating setbacks suffered by the Kremlin’s forces on the battlefields.
Nowhere are the battles fiercer and more vital than in Donetsk. Capturing the area has become an obsession for Vladimir Putin.
He has publicly promised to take all of the Donetsk region each year since his 2022 full-blown invasion of Ukraine, and every failure has left him more embittered.
Putin again announced the region would be in his hands by the end of this year, and 2026 has seen his generals lose huge amounts of men and materiel in failed attempts to encircle the fortress belt. Ukraine’s army says Russian losses in dead and wounded are anything from 1,000 to 2,000 daily. Many die here in northwestern Donbas.
For the people of Ukraine, the seemingly endless war has been a brutal and sobering experience after years of listening to Western rhetoric about a Europe “whole and free.” Perhaps Route E-40 was once supposed to emphasize how Europe, stitched together by history and highways, could collectively travel towards a brighter future.
But it has become yet another symbol of shattered blissful post-Cold War dreams of a conflict-free Europe that were revealed to be cruel illusions.
Route E-40 now winds through a still-peaceful, civilized European Union and then onwards to the barbarity and death around Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.
A lieutenant with the nom de guerre “Jackson” from Ukraine’s Lyut (Fury) Brigade fighting in Kostyantynivka said: “We know we have to remain here as long as possible. The Russians massively outnumber us, and their commanders don’t care how many of them die. They may eventually take Kostyantynivka – but not anytime soon.”
And he reflected that if Ukraine’s defenders were overwhelmed and the Russians controlled this part of the E-40, it would not end there. Inevitably, the imperialist urge would lead them westward along Europe’s great road towards the continent’s democracies and all the way back to the English Channel.
Askold Krushelnycky is a freelance journalist who has written about Russia’s war on Ukraine for The Independent, The Sunday Times, The Times, and other publications. He is the author of An Orange Revolution.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-10-15 04:10:16
Artificial intelligence has moved center stage in the upcoming midterm elections, propelled by a backlash against data centers and fears about AI safety. In response, Congress vows to act.
Democratic and Republican Members of Congress opened CEPA’s annual Tech & Security Conference with a rare sign of consensus: AI safety and innovation are not contradictory, insisted Representative Nathaniel Moran (R-TX-01). He compared the need for regulation to the rules that forced automobile companies to make cars safe.
“The brakes allow you to drive faster, not slower,” said Moran. “AI brakes should not slow innovation. They should enable faster movement with a safe backstop.”
This is the logic behind Moran’s proposed AI Kill Switch Act. Co-sponsored with Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu, it would require developers of the most powerful frontier AI models to be able to throttle, suspend, or completely shut models down if they threaten $100 million in economic damages or 10 deaths.
One fellow panelist, Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA-03), introduced the bipartisan FRONTIER Act alongside Republican Rep. Jay Obernolte, both members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The Act would impose a uniform, nationwide standard for catastrophic risk transparency, reporting, and auditing. The federal rules would override individual state laws, such as California’s independent safety audits, and eliminate a conflicting “50-state maze.”
“We need to have catastrophic risk transparency [and] incident reporting that is mandatory and not voluntary, and we need an independent verification model,” said Trahan.
The Frontier Act would establish an Undersecretary for AI Security within the Department of Commerce, and outlines a licensing framework for third-party independent evaluators. “Very large frontier developers” with more than $5 billion in annual revenue would be required to utilize a third-party evaluator to assess the risks of frontier models.
Trahan has also proposed the CLAIM Act to address AI liability. The act would make AI firms liable if their model breaks the law; courts would also assume that models are capable of intent. Similar standards already apply to drugs and cars.
The third panelist, Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA-08), distinguished himself by enrolling in a master’s degree program in machine learning at George Mason University to directly understand the technical foundations of the technology he regulates. He has floated a bill to establish minimum safety standards for advanced AI labs, including the establishment of a Federal Reserve-like structure to mandate testing of advanced models.
“There’s this whole spectrum of p-doom = 100 (the probability that AI will cause an existential catastrophe) and 0, and it’s probably somewhere in between,” Beyer said. “Everyone agrees there’s a real risk.”
All three pushed back against the Trump Administration’s hands-off tech approach. When administration advisers dismissed AI warnings as overly dramatic panic, Beyer countered that tech builders and Nobel Prize laureates have long highlighted AI’s risks to humanity.
All three encouraged engagement with the globe’s other AI power: China. They compared the need for a US-China deal with arms control treaties between the US and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ‘80s. Panelists thought the Administration’s proposal for an AI incident “hotline” seemed insufficient as it is solely based on the “honor system.”
Congress is also concerned with how to regulate recursive self-improvement (RSI), when an AI model trains and improves itself without human prompting. A self-improving system could override a kill switch or cheat on AI safety testing. Congress will have to decide whether RSI is a red line not to be crossed.
Congress remains divided over how far regulation should go. While some are comfortable with taking down a model after a major incident, others prefer requiring a government agency to pre-approve all AI models.
But the three Members of Congress agreed that the US cannot win the technology race alone. European allies provide talent and infrastructure. Rather than competing, Europe and the US should cooperate.
Until recently, AI risks were theoretical, and the idea of snuffing out a promising technology with onerous regulation seemed like a mistake. Today, the “let it rip” approach looks outdated — both as a policy and, as American voters protest, a matter of politics.
William Echikson is a non-resident Senior Fellow at CEPA and editor of the Bandwidth Tech Blog.
Jack Galloway is a Program Assistant on CEPA’s Tech Policy Program.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
2026 CEPA Tech & Security Conference
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2026-10-14 23:34:07
The main Russian security service, the FSB, arrested a foreign reporter on suspicion of espionage — this time a journalist for the Japanese newspaper Hokkaido Shimbun in the Far Eastern Sakhalin region.
The incident is the latest addition to what some journalists-in-exile refer to as the Kremlin’s exchange fund. Others in the West term it a hostage bank of Westerners visiting Russia who are plucked by the FSB as a means to apply duress on their governments.
Thirty-four-year-old Yuki Imai looked bewildered and shocked as several masked FSB operatives stormed his hotel room in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, on the Pacific island of Sakhalin in Russia’s Far East, and threw him half-naked onto the floor. The FSB brazenly advertised its visible brutality with a video showing his arrest.
The Japanese journalist was then put on a plane bound for Moscow, and upon landing immediately taken to a Moscow court, which ruled that he should be sent to Lefortovo — the notorious FSB prison — and kept in a cell until December 12.
The FSB claimed that the journalist had been gathering information about residents of the Kuril Islands recruited to fight in the war in Ukraine, and alleged he was working for Japanese intelligence. Japan claims the southernmost Kuril Islands and has refused to conclude a World War II peace treaty with the Kremlin until the matter is settled.
According to Russian media reports, Yuki Imai studied at Saint Petersburg State University and speaks fluent Russian. He recently travelled across the Russian Far East, interviewing locals and visiting historical sites related to the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and World War II.
Hokkaido Shimbun is a daily newspaper based in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands, located closest to Russia. It is also the only one among Japan’s regional newspapers with its own correspondent in Russia.
To make it clear that this was not just about the journalist, but also a message to the Japanese government, the same day the FSB raided the newspaper’s local offices in the Hokkaido Center in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, a Far Eastern town on Russia’s Sakhalin Island.
The brand-new, six-story office complex was opened with great fanfare in 2015 by the governor of Sakhalin and the head of Japan’s neighboring Hokkaido Prefecture.
At the time, the Russian regional authorities called the Hokkaido Center a symbol of closer future cooperation between Sakhalin and Hokkaido. Indeed, besides the newspaper’s local office, the center also housed Japanese companies and a consulate. The opening ceremony took place despite opposition from local residents, who had accused the regional administration of “selling their land to the Japanese.” But their concerns were brushed aside — the Sakhalin administration badly needed Japanese investment, and the cooperation was supported at the very top in Moscow: the building of the center was partly funded by Gazprombank.
The mood has now changed.
Earlier this year, Japan woke up to the threat of Russian intelligence operations, including the procurement of dual-use technologies and sabotage. In January, Tokyo police referred a former Russian trade representative in Japan to prosecutors, amid suspicions of stealing sensitive trade secrets for the SVR.
This awakening came amid a sharp increase in Russian tourism to Japan. With travel to Europe and the US becoming much more difficult for Russians after 2022, Russian tourists flocked to the country: responding to growing demand, Japan opened two new visa centers — in Moscow and St. Petersburg — early this year.
But increasing Russian espionage clearly set alarms ringing, and in June, Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers, published a three-page story on Russian sabotage.
The following month, major Japanese media picked up a New York Times story in July about a GRU operation in Tokyo allegedly procuring dual-use components for Russian missiles.
The article exposed military intelligence operative Maksim Filchenkov, who was working undercover as an employee of Aeroflot, Russia’s state airline, at its Tokyo office. A few days later, Filchenkov fled Japan — news that was also extensively covered.
None of which went down well in the Kremlin.
In August, Putin himself became involved in the row when he visited the disputed Kuril Islands for the first time in all his years in the Kremlin. The visit provoked protests from Japan at the highest level. Japan’s foreign minister summoned the Russian ambassador, while Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called Putin’s actions “absolutely unacceptable”.
The arrest of the Hokkaido Shimbun reporter is therefore the latest in the chain of events. And it is unlikely to end quickly.
The FSB is likely to follow what it regards as its successful 2023 operation against the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested on bogus charges of spying for the CIA. He was duly sentenced to 16 years in prison and released only in August 2024 as part of a prisoner swap between Russia and the US.
Hostage-taking as a method of applying pressure — whether on its own citizens or on other countries — is becoming increasingly popular in Moscow, and the FSB is clearly warming to the task.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book , Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in 2025.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-10-14 22:49:54
It’s a dispiriting and familiar pattern: Britain comes up with world-class ideas and startups, only to see them sold off, moved abroad, or left without the capital to pursue pilot production, customers, and manufacturing.
Prime Minister Burnham wants to change this cycle. In his first speeches as UK leader, he outlined ambitious plans to reindustrialize, emphasizing artificial intelligence, chips, and drones. The targets are spot on. But the unanswered question is whether Burnham can turn good ideas into concrete outcomes.
Success will require close cooperation with European and American allies, encouraging foreign investment, and linking with Western supply chains. Scarce public funds should be invested in Cambridge and other existing successful tech clusters. Public procurement, particularly defense, should create credible lead customers. Private capital must be mobilized from pension funds and the country’s strong aviation companies.
Famed university city Cambridge will be central to any successful UK industrial revival. It contains a globally leading semiconductor research and design cluster that houses the Cavendish Laboratory’s Semiconductor Physics Group, the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride, and the CASCADE Computer Architecture and Semiconductor Design Centre.
The government should not redistribute activity away from Cambridge in the name of “levelling up.” Instead, it should help Cambridge firms grow into large, independent British companies and connect their success to manufacturing, skills, and supply chains in the Northeast, South Wales, the Midlands, Scotland, and beyond.
The UK has already seen that national powerhouses can leak away. Arm, the designer of chips running almost all the world’s smartphones, became one of Britain’s most important technology companies before Japan’s SoftBank acquired and listed it in New York.
Prime Minister Burnham should distinguish between ordinary acquisitions and strategically important companies. He should impose a tough strategic capability test for semiconductor and AI hardware acquisitions. The goal should be to ensure that the next Arm-level company IPOs in London remains independent long enough to scale, and keeps its core R&D, IP, and decision-making in Britain.
The new national innovation center, Semiconductor Catapult, will be the key delivery mechanism. It gives startups access to supply chain integration, design, system testing, and validation. Success should be judged not by the number of reports published, but by how many British firms cross the difficult gap between a promising design and a qualified, manufacturable, customer-funded product.
The UK must also address its financing gap. Although it has world-class early-stage venture capital and a large private equity industry, neither supplies the capital needed to take semiconductor companies from prototype to volume products.
Pension funds should be mobilized. The parliamentary Science and Technology Committee notes that venture capital represents only 0.007% of assets under management for UK and Irish pension funds. The government should make semiconductor scale-up assets investable: create professionally managed co-investment funds, provide first-loss or risk-sharing structures, and give investors access to credible procurement pipelines.
Early signs of movement are visible. Major pension providers have discussed the creation of a UK scale-up fund of more than £1 billion, while the proposed Future Growth Fund could mobilize up to £50 billion of pension capital.
Large, profitable British defense and aerospace firms should play a role. The Treasury could offer targeted tax credits or enhanced capital allowances when companies such as BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce co-invest in UK scale-ups related to their businesses.
Defense should become an anchor customer. A key reform concerns procurement: small firms need rapid trials, clear pathways from prototype to framework contract, and the ability to sell dual-use products in civilian markets without being trapped by classified restrictions.
A good example concerns the Defense Ministry’s acquisition of Octric Semiconductors, securing the UK’s only facility capable of producing certain gallium-arsenide semiconductors. Octric should now be developed as a defense-secure manufacturing platform with commercial spillovers. But it would be a mistake to present Octric as proof that nationalization works. It is a targeted security intervention. The broad strategy must remain the creation of innovation clusters.
Prime Minister Burnham has talked about breaking “red” lines in engaging with Europe. He’s right. The error of Brexit must be corrected. The UK should also seek a formal, reciprocal semiconductor partnership with the European Union: access to European pilot lines and research infrastructure, joint R&D programs, common technical standards, talent exchanges, coordinated export controls, and two-way access for EU firms to UK chip capabilities
This is not a retreat from sovereignty. It is the only serious version of it for the UK to revive its moribund industry and become a trusted and difficult-to-replace partner in the Western tech economy.
Christopher Cytera CEng MIET is a non-resident senior fellow with the Digital Innovation Initiative at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a technology business executive with over 30 years of experience in semiconductors, electronics, communications, video, and imaging.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
2026 CEPA Tech & Security Conference
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