Chinese President Xi Jinping received a colorful welcome from the Kim regime Monday as he arrived for his first summit in the North Korean capital in seven years. 

Analysts say the visit is mainly about underscoring ongoing strategic alignment between the Chinese Communist Party and the authoritarian Kim regime in the face of global energy and geopolitical turbulence amid the U.S.-Israel war with Iran and Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine.

While North Korea and Russia remain close, U.S. intelligence analysts generally agree Beijing has eclipsed Moscow over the past quarter century as the Kim regime’s most important backer on the world stage. Mr. Xi on Monday praised the strength of the China-North Korea partnership, saying on arrival in Pyongyang that the two nations are “shouldering new missions.” 

A Russian drone hit a nuclear storage facility near Chernobyl in northern Ukraine on Sunday, a day after Ukrainian forces unleashed a barrage of strikes on the Russian city of St. Petersburg. The back-and-forth strikes came as Western European powers showed new willingness over the weekend to play a more robust role in Ukraine-Russia peace talks.

At the same time, there are fresh signs the war could spread. A NATO jet shot down what was believed to be a Russian drone over eastern Latvia on Monday. Latvian military officials said the drone entered their airspace as part of “Russian electromagnetic warfare.” Russian officials accused Latvia without evidence of helping Ukraine strike Russian targets using drones, and they threatened the Baltic state with military retaliation. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, met with German, French and British leaders over the weekend. With the Trump administration’s push for end-of-war negotiations having failed, there were signs Berlin, Paris and London are poised to take a more active role in pushing for direct Ukraine-Russia talks.

Defense and National Security Correspondent John T. Seward was recently in Narva, Estonia, where he filed an exclusive dispatch on what officials in the country on NATO’s eastern flank describe as KGB-style tactics being used by Russian espionage agencies to threaten and coerce people into spying on Estonia. 

Harrys Puusepp, who serves in Estonia’s Internal Security Service, commonly known as the “Kapo,” says Russia’s Federal Security Service — the primary successor agency of the Soviet KGB in which Russian President Vladimir Putin once served — has gone so far as to outright threaten and coerce Estonian locals into cooperating.

Estonia has responded with its own aggressive campaign to crush the Russian operation. Most notably, authorities are enthusiastically publishing research and investigations on Russian influence and consistently prosecuting anyone found to be cooperating with Moscow. The Kapo is also promoting an open-door “come to us first” policy to counter the Russian initiatives, Mr. Puusepp told Threat Status.

Washington appears to have stalled weapons sales to Taiwan. Stan Kwiatkowski writes that with Chinese military and psychological pressure at record levels and the Trump-Xi summit now concluded, the “questions at the heart of the debate go far beyond budget numbers and the optics of meetings.” Mr. Kwiatkowski, a political commentator, is host of the YouTube channels “Hard News” and “Freedom Is Not Free.”

“How committed is Taiwan to its own defense? How reliable is the U.S. as Taiwan’s key ally?” Mr. Kwiatkowski writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times. “Who is shaping the answers to those questions in the minds of ordinary Taiwanese?

“Beijing,” he writes, “has been watching Taiwan’s democratic process closely, using proxies among politicians and media to nudge public opinion toward closer relationships with the mainland.”

Despite his “reputation as a hard-headed businessman, Mr. Trump seems not to understand that the art of the deal does not work with communists and Islamists,” writes Don Feder, a Times opinion columnist and a consultant and coalitions director of the Ruth Institute.

“As we wait for an illusory peace with Iran — as well as the outcome of indicting Cuban leader Raul Castro and the next chapter of our relationship with Red China, we need to come to terms with this reality: You cannot do business with totalitarian thugs. Their mindsets are alien to the citizens of free societies.” Mr. Feder writes in a Times’ op-ed. 

“British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich mistake was a failure of imagination,” Mr. Feder writes. “He could not conceive of how someone who had witnessed the carnage of World War I could risk another global conflict for territorial gain. He did not understand the ruthless determination of Adolf Hitler.”

• June 9 — 2026 Global Energy Forum, Atlantic Council 

• June 11 — 2026 CNAS Virtual National Security Conference, Center for a New American Security 

• June 11 — The Future of American Airpower, Stimson Center 

• June 11 — The Arab Case for Israel: History, Mythology and Pathways to Peace, Foundation for Defense of Democracies 

• June 12 — Winning the Innovation Competition (Featuring Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael), Hudson Institute

• June 18 — Deterring Russia and China: Securing America’s Nuclear Future, Hudson Institute

• June 24 — IndoPac 2026 | Naval Dominance: Shipbuilding, Autonomy & C2, Threat Status Events