Failed US-Iran ceasefire talks and an active naval blockade create critical near-term tension in the Middle East, while Sudan's dual humanitarian catastrophe — displacement into neighboring states and collapsing food production — dominates the social outlook. Across Europe, the EU asserts regulatory power over Meta's AI pricing as Russia escalates both cyber operations (GRU mailbox campaign across five countries) and domestic internet control.

My fact-check confirmed the crackdown is active and accelerating: Moscow Times reports the Digital Ministry 'declares war on VPNs,' bne IntelliNews confirms formal guidance to IT companies, and Russian authorities have banned the website tracking which VPNs still work — a strong signal of intent to eliminate circumvention tools entirely. The sociologist council consensus (GPT 0.75, Claude 0.78) and Skeptic adjustment to 0.72 are supported by clear bureaucratic momentum: once Roskomnadzor establishes enforcement infrastructure and platform compliance precedent, expansion to adjacent services follows the path of least institutional resistance. The Russia-Ukraine event chain in ESCALATION (1759 clusters) provides the political context — wartime information control intensifies in parallel with military operations. SELF-CORRECTION: My social sector is WEAK (Brier 0.334, overestimate by 17pp). I compress from the Skeptic's 0.72 to 0.68. Three reasons I might be wrong: (1) Business-sector pushback — Sber was affected in April 15 outages, and disrupting banking apps creates political costs Putin may not accept; (2) Technical limitations of DPI at Russia's scale make enforcement inconsistent; (3) Economic consequences of disrupting payment and transport apps could force selective rollback. The banking disruption risk is genuinely concerning, but Russia's pattern since 2022 has been to prioritize political control over economic efficiency (Nord Stream, sanctions absorption, capital controls). P=0.68 reflects high bureaucratic momentum with modest economic-friction risk.