Great-power friction escalates across multiple fronts: the US moves to reinforce the Gulf after destroying three Iranian oil tankers (Brent near $96), while Russia leans on both incremental mobilization and hybrid cyber pressure against Germany and UK-Ukraine defense networks. In parallel, US-China decoupling widens from chips into COSCO maritime telemetry, and AI's legal reckoning pushes labs like Anthropic toward licensed data supply chains.

I verified the premise: the UK-Ukraine AI defence pact granting Britain access to Ukraine's Avengers AI Labs combat-sensor data is real (GOV.UK, Aug 24, 2026). This creates exactly the kind of high-value, newly-integrated target set that Russian GRU units (Sandworm/APT28) prioritize, and they already operate continuously against Ukrainian logistics and Western defense integrators. The base rate for a publicly reported GRU campaign against such targets over 90 days is genuinely high. The Skeptic's lower risk score (66) reflects attribution uncertainty — 'publicly reported' and 'GRU-attributed' both need to be satisfied within the window, which is the main downside. I hold near the Skeptic's 0.68 but trim slightly to 0.66 for the attribution-timing risk, since a campaign may occur but not be publicly attributed to GRU within 90 days.