Today’s briefing:
— Is Putin running out of gas?
— The US might ban this from China
— Check your bottom drawer NOW
Your Insider’s briefing:
— Is Putin running out of gas?
— The US might ban this from China
— Check your bottom drawer NOW
Good morning {{first_name | Intriguer}}. I think crossing a border is always a little nerve-wracking. Even when you know your papers are in ordnung, the heart beats a little faster. Except crossing from Vermont into Quebec, where chatting with a border officer in rural Canada is like catching up with an old friend who's just genuinely delighted to see another human being, authorised or otherwise.
By far the most nerve-wracking crossing I've ever done was from Mongolia into Russia, miles from the nearest town, in the middle of the night. I was on a train from Ulaanbaatar to Irkutsk, and while I never assumed Russian immigration would be the highlight of my day, I didn't quite expect a thorough search and interrogation by fully uniformed military.
And it certainly didn't help matters that I'd been over-served Russia's traditional adult beverage and was trying to concentrate on not answering questions in a suspicious way. It is an immutable law of the universe that the harder you try not to look suspicious, the more suspicious you become.
Anyway, the midnight muster went okay and, a fitful sleep and restorative bowl of borscht later, I arrived safely into Lake Baikal (one of the most beautiful places I've ever been btw).
But as today's main story about the worsening situation for Putin shows, far better to be crossing into Russia than trying to leave it right before a predicted mass mobilisation.
 | Co-Founder John Fowler |
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🍹 Heads-up we’ll take a brief break this Friday!
Number of the day
6-3
That’s how the US Supreme Court just voted to uphold America’s birthright citizenship. Fun fact (at least to us?): children born to foreign diplomats in the US don’t get US citizenship, though kids born to foreign consular officers are subject to US jurisdiction and may qualify.
Fuel to the fire.
He tightly controls his image, so here’s Putin falling over on ice.
Russia rationing gas is a little like Colonel Sanders rationing Original Recipe®, but that’s what’s now happening, barely a week into Ukraine’s 40-day pressure campaign.
So here are the four key numbers you need to know, starting with...
⛔ 82
That's how many of Russia's 83 recognised regions are now facing fuel shortages, via official rationing or just empty pumps. The sole hold-out is ultra-remote Chukotka (pop. 50,000) where reindeer outnumber people four-to-one. But to put it another way, we're watching an energy superpower struggle with energy across all 11 of its timezones.
The result? Everything from queues, queue-brawls, and jump-a-queue black-markets, through to surging bicycle demand and even halting services (ambulance, fire, trash).
⛽ 30 litres
That's the max (~8 gallons) most folks can now buy in Moscow, after giants like Rosneft, Gazprom, and Lukoil all announced daily limits this week. There are even reported gas queues in ritzy Rublyovka, where Putin's elites live.
Meanwhile, Moscow’s smaller outlets are selling fuel above the symbolic 100 rubles mark ($4.50 per gallon) — even Muscovites, rich and poor, are feeling the burn of Putin's war.
📈 30%
Depends who (and when) you ask, but that's how much of Russia's oil refining capacity is now offline. It's fluctuating amid a nightly see-saw between Ukrainian hits and Russian repairs, but the trajectory is spiking as Ukraine's annual drone output pushes towards seven million, while its monthly batch of bus-sized Flamingo cruise missiles hits ~200.
🔥 40%
Depends again who you ask, but that's roughly the offline refining threshold at which point it becomes impossible for Putin to reliably supply his own civilian and military needs.
And that means potential tough choices ahead for Putin: do you sustain your frontline, your occupied territories, your impending harvest season, or your Rublyovka elites?
For now, he's still ticking 'all of the above' at 30% offline, through a mix of emergency rationing, redirecting, export restrictions, and even fuel imports. But the pain is visible enough that even Putin himself is now publicly acknowledging the shortages — a rarity.
If Ukraine manages to force ~40% of his refining capacity offline, however, that’s really when he faces critical logistical breakdown, and tougher, more imminent choices.
But don't worry everyone, the mayor of Irkutsk has just announced he'll install porta-potties along the growing gas queues.
Intrigue’s Take
Putin won't — and likely believes he can't — stop his war, plus there's no sign of anyone slipping polonium into his pekoe. That means…
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Intrigue’s Take
Putin won't — and likely believes he can't — stop his war, plus there's no sign of anyone slipping polonium into his pekoe. That means more escalation ahead: louder rhetoric, more random city strikes, but also Ukraine hitting deeper. It's again just hit Putin's Dubna satellite hub, but the wish-list will also include symbolic chokepoints like the Kerch bridge (Crimea) and the Yamal Cross (gas), particularly as temps drop from August.
But in the meantime, Putin’s more intriguing response overnight has been to close seven rail crossings with NATO neighbours like Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Why? The most plausible (though still problematic) theories include…
Mobilisation control: He needs more men, so blocking the exits before another conscription wave makes grim sense, even if those neighbours already halted most rail passenger traffic. But a full mobilisation still feels a political gamble.
Narrative control? Closing crossings might also let him paint NATO neighbours as the aggressors, test Western reactions, and feed the domestic line that Russia is under siege. It also feeds simmering provocation fears — what’s he up to? Or…
Gauge control? There are nerdier theories that Putin is just pre-empting a Latvia/Estonia/Finland move to ditch the Soviet-era tracks over gauge differences.
Whatever the answer, the common thread is still control. And right now, Putin looks like he’s losing it.
Sound even smarter:
Herman Gref, head of Russia’s largest bank (Sberbank), just made two spicy comments to shareholders: first, he repeated calls for lower rates (a tension we’ve long highlighted); and second, he noted “I don't think there's a single person in the country who's concerned about anything other than a speedy end to military action; that's obvious".
But lest anyone think censorship is breaking, Alexander Lunin — the ex-soldier who made headlines last week by publicly demanding a meeting with Putin or risk a mutiny — is now in jail.
Today’s briefing is sponsored by:
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Meanwhile, elsewhere…
🇺🇸 UNITED STATES — Green light for Fable.
Days after DC re-authorised Anthropic to sell its Mythos 5 cybersecurity model to 100 select US clients, the US commerce department has now authorised the US AI pioneer to sell its frontier Fable 5 model, including abroad. It eases months of natsec restrictions, giving Anthropic more room to compete globally. (Anthropic)
Comment: These last few weeks of your-model-is-so-hot-we-have-to-ban-it have been a dream in terms of free Anthropic coverage and maximum FOMO. But what’s actually changed? Partly the product itself: it turns out new safeguards mean Fable now diverts certain requests (like coding!) back to the slower Opus 4.8. Partly the competition, too — Anthropic says it demonstrated that lesser models could now identify the same cyber weaknesses. But also, weeks of intense lobbying seem to have pushed US economic and innovation arguments back to the forefront, embodied in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen scoring a key Pentagon board seat. One way or another, it’s a reminder how rapidly the AI regulatory environment is (d)evolving.
🇹🇼 TAIWAN — Raid-bait.
Authorities have raided the local offices of US server-maker Super Micro amid allegations someone used its servers to smuggle advanced Nvidia chips to China. (Yahoo)
Comment: We wonder if Taiwan here is responding to pressure to mirror US bans on chip smuggling to China — not always technically illegal on the island, which is still picking its battles carefully.
🇰🇷 SOUTH KOREA — Football is political.
President Lee Jae Myung has demanded an investigation into South Korea’s men’s football team after it failed to advance to the World Cup’s knockout stage. (BBC)
Comment: We love football, but also… it’s football?
🇪🇨 ECUADOR — Will there be a third?
A second bomb targeting Ecuador’s mining regulator exploded on Monday, blowing out the windows of several floors. Authorities believe it’s an intimidation tactic linked to a crackdown on illegal gold mining, dominated by organised crime. (mining.com)
🇬🇧 UNITED KINGDOM — New defence budget.
As one of his last acts as British PM, Keir Starmer has unveiled a $20B defence investment boost that’ll take spending to 2.7% of GDP by 2029. (AP)
Comment: Legacy polishing or not, the most striking detail is how heavily tilted the package is towards drones and AI — Western leaders finally seem to be learning lessons from Ukraine’s own bitter experience. Or at least giving that vibe on their way out the door.
🇲🇽 MEXICO — NAFTA 2.0 on the chopping block?
The United States is reportedly preparing to officially declare its intention not to extend the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement. (Reuters)
Comment: USMCA won’t disappear overnight, for three reasons: first, because any notice just triggers a decade-long sunset period; second, while this looks like a negotiation tactic to pressure Mexico and Canada (both highly US-dependent), DC itself will also be swamped with lobbyists from every US industry facing terminal decline if USMCA ends; and third, any future US government can always just hit ctrl-z.
🇲🇦 MOROCCO — Bring the clocks back.
Rabat has rolled back a controversial 2018 law that established permanent daylight-savings time, returning to its old-school GMT timezone from September. (MoroccoWorldNews)
Comment: The original switch had a “modern European alignment” angle to it, while this new switch-back has a “reducing electricity costs” angle, but it’s really just the political reality of angry workers, farmers, and parents (kids off to school in the dark).
Extra Intrigue
Intrigue’s commodities corner
Gold: Prices have dropped back below $4,000/troy ounce as Iran war-linked inflation concerns erase all the precious metal’s gains this year.
Energy: The US is reportedly working to ban China-made power inverters over security concerns.
Agriculture: France’s huge heatwave is threatening the country’s agricultural sector, amid hundreds of thousands of poultry deaths.
Discovery of the day
Credits: Barrett et al. 2026
People keep all sorts of things in drawers. Keys to unknown doors, empty eyeglass cases, that stressball they gave out at that corporate event last week. Even the odd elastic band.
But if you’re the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge, you keep much cooler things in your catch-all drawer.
It turns out they just found the first-ever dinosaur fossil discovered in Antarctica, lying peacefully at the bottom of an unassuming drawer a casual 40 years after the expedition.
The lesson here is that organisation is key. But maybe also check your messy drawers in case you too find an 82-million-year-old bone.
Today’s poll
When do you think Putin's reign will end?
Yesterday’s poll: Who do you think is behind the Monaco parcel bomb?
🇺🇦 Ukraine (30%)
🇷🇺 Russia (47%)
🎩 Rival oligarchs (23%)
✍️ Other (write in!) (2%)
Your two cents:
🇷🇺 Y: “Putin is paranoid and vengeful. This is his M.O.”
🇺🇦 E.K.H: “The Ukrainians have proven to have a long reach, and an expansive view of acceptable targets that includes defectors. Imposing costs and risks on elites is a big part of their strategy now.”
✍️ J.L: “Could be like Nord Stream – Ukraine-aligned, but technically independent operators.”
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