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Ukraine - Russia War: Monthly Geopolitical Briefing | September 2026
Something odd happened in September. American envoys sat down with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, then travelled by train to Kyiv for their first visit since the invasion began. Diplomacy restarted after six months of silence. And over the same four weeks, the two sides exchanged the heaviest long-range strikes of the entire war.
Those two facts sit uncomfortably together, and understanding why is the point of the briefing we're publishing today.
What we're doing
From this month, Westbrook Advisory publishes a monthly assessment of each of our four Tier 1 conflicts: Ukraine–Russia, Iran–USA, Israel–Gaza and the Yemen Civil War. Tier 2 and Tier 3 conflicts get a quarterly assessment. All of them are free to read.
Each briefing is built from a standing conflict database we maintain daily, where every event is logged individually with its date, the actors involved, a severity rating and its sources. At the end of the month, we assess what it adds up to.
Three principles govern how we write them. Claims made by a party to the conflict are attributed to that party, never presented as fact. Reporting that rests on a single source, or that the wire services haven't corroborated, is flagged in the text. And where we make a judgement about what happens next, we say how likely we think it is, using the probability yardstick British intelligence assessments use, so that "likely" and "realistic possibility" mean something specific rather than whatever the reader assumes.
We also publish our mistakes. When something we reported as confirmed turns out otherwise, a correction appears in the following edition.
What September looked like
We assess the overall risk arising from the Ukraine–Russia war as High and rising.
Russia subjected Ukraine to almost continuous aerial attack for close to a month. Ukraine answered on the final day of Russia's parliamentary elections with what Moscow's own mayor described as the largest drone attack yet on the Russian capital. Both sides now treat the other's energy system as the primary target, and each escalation invites a larger one in return. With winter approaching and Ukraine short of interceptors, that trajectory is the most consequential thing happening in this war.
The diplomacy is real but thin. Trilateral talks are expected in October, though no date has been agreed and it isn't clear how senior the Russian delegation will be. Nothing suggests either side has moved on the questions that matter: territory and security guarantees.
Meanwhile the war moved closer to the rest of Europe. Germany formally accused Russia of an attempted drone attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport. Poland scrambled fighter jets repeatedly and briefly closed two airports near its border with Ukraine. Poland's prime minister told parliament that Russia is planning attacks on Ukraine's supporters designed to look accidental. That is why we've raised spillover risk into Europe to High.
And Washington enacted a law allowing tariffs of up to 100% on the five largest purchasers of Russian oil and gas. Whether it gets used, or held back as leverage, is one of the things we'll be watching in October.
Read the full briefing
The full assessment runs to fifteen pages and covers the battlefield, the strike campaigns on both sides, diplomacy, sanctions, Russia's elections, the humanitarian situation and what all of it means for energy, shipping, trade and European security. It closes with three scenarios for the next one to three months and the specific signals that would change our assessment.
Our next Ukraine-Russia briefing is published on 23 October. Subscribe to get it in your inbox.