Conflict-driven posture and energy shocks dominate today's outlook: Poland seals border airspace and crude holds near $92 as the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine wars grind on, while Washington moves to formalize defense-AI rules. Beneath the headlines, structural forces hold — coal's decline resists subsidy, Putin preserves succession ambiguity, and Blackstone's redemption gate is more likely to contain stress than collapse into a full suspension.

The base rate for GRU-linked influence operations targeting European political narratives during negotiation inflection points is genuinely very high — this is the core operational mode of Doppelganger/Storm-1516, repeatedly documented by EUvsDisinfo and national CERTs. Current signals form a near-checklist for activation. The Cybersecurity chain ('State Coordination' / 'Cyberwarfare Intensification', state-sponsored attacks 85%) supports it. The two council members converged (0.72–0.78). Critically, cybersecurity is my single WORST-calibrated sector (Brier 0.44, over-prediction ~41pp, though only n=3), so per protocol I compress toward 50% and defer to the Skeptic's 0.70. The countervailing fact is the genuinely high base rate for this specific activity, which prevents me from compressing into a coin flip. I settle at 0.67 — direction-confident but explicitly humbled by my sector record. What would make me wrong: attribution lag pushing confirmation past 60 days; ops occurring but not publicly traced; talks stalling and reducing the narrative hook.