Threat Status for Wednesday, October 22, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang.
Russia held major nuclear drills, including practice missile launches, just hours after President Vladimir Putin’s expected meeting with President Trump was shelved.
… The drills included all parts of Moscow’s nuclear triad, including submarine launches and Tu-95 strategic bombers firing long-range cruise missiles.
… The exercises come on the heels of a large-scale Russian attack on Ukraine overnight. Ukrainian officials said six people were killed, including two children.
… In an exclusive interview with Threat Status, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó blamed Europe’s “war psyche” for the lack of progress on peace talks.
… Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country is “not a protectorate of the United States” and will make its own decisions on security.
… Mr. Netanyahu met with Vice President J.D. Vance, who is in Israel to bolster a U.S.-backed ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
… Mr. Trump said Middle East allies are ready to fight Hamas if necessary.
… The eight pieces of French royal jewels stolen from the Louvre museum are worth more than $102 million.
… About 1,400 workers at the federal agency charged with monitoring nuclear weapons will be furloughed.
… And tech billionaire Elon Musk called acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy a “dummy” after he said Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is behind schedule on a key space mission.
White House officials said there are no immediate plans for another meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. It’s an abrupt reversal for the administration after Mr. Trump last week, following a phone call with the Russian president, said the two men would soon meet face to face in Budapest, Hungary, for their second in-person summit this year.
That meeting was expected to be a key moment for Mr. Trump to advance his push to end the Russia-Ukraine war, as he’s often cited his personal rapport with Mr. Putin as one of his key advantages. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he didn’t want the meeting to be a “waste of time,” suggesting he knew there was little room for progress.
Administration officials say the change came after a phone call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a day earlier. Mr. Lavrov reportedly indicated Russia wouldn’t back off its demands in Ukraine, including that it gain control of key provinces in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
A major question now is whether the president will reconsider sending U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine as a way to ramp up pressure on Mr. Putin.
Some current generals and senior officers view Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s style as unprofessional and brash. But there are also serious substantive concerns, as high-ranking military figures fear that Mr. Hegseth is doing lasting damage to the military by forcing out talented leaders across the department.
The exclusive Threat Status report on the loss of faith in Mr. Hegseth’s leadership delves into how, some officers say, the Pentagon is “bleeding talent” amid a wave of firings, early retirements and resignations throughout the ranks of the armed forces and in key offices across the Defense Department. One senior officer said the rampant personnel shake-ups stand in stark contrast to the supposed meritocracy that Mr. Hegseth vowed to implement.
“There are people being held back from promotions, or being fired, or removed for sometimes unknown reasons, often for favoritism, or just simple relationships,” the senior officer told Threat Status.
But other sources tell Threat Status that those issues are mostly confined to the very upper echelons of the military. Recruiting numbers across the services are up under Mr. Hegseth’s leadership, and some sources stress that there is not a massive exodus at the enlisted and junior officer levels.
It’s the latest in a string of structural changes inside the Pentagon. A memo reportedly issued last week by Mr. Hegseth ordered Pentagon officials, all the way up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to get permission from the department’s main legislative affairs office before having any communication with Capitol Hill. A second memo called for a “working group” to develop more guidance on “legislative engagements” between military officials and the House and Senate.
This is a significant shift. Until now, for the most part, agencies inside the Defense Department and the military branches themselves managed their own communications with Congress. It appears to be the latest step in a broad effort to control the flow of information coming out of the Pentagon.
Last week, nearly all journalists covering the Pentagon turned in their credentials rather than sign a new press policy acknowledging they could be considered a security threat for soliciting information from sources. And in August, Mr. Hegseth’s office said all military officials must get permission before speaking at think tank events or other forums.
In a statement to Threat Status Wednesday morning, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the changes are a “pragmatic step” to improve communication with Congress and designed to “improve accuracy and responsiveness in communicating with the Congress to facilitate increased transparency.”
“This review is for processes internal to the department and does not change how or from whom Congress receives information,” Mr. Parnell said.
Mr. Trump, near the end of his first term, envisioned military strikes against drug labs in Mexico as part of a plan to stop the flow of deadly narcotics into the U.S. He was apparently blocked by members of his Cabinet from implementing that plan. Now, in his second term, he is following through with a military-backed war on drugs by targeting alleged cartel boats in the Caribbean and cutting off aid to Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine.
Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler argues that Mr. Trump is aggressively pursuing a key U.S. national security goal: disrupting the networks that funnel drugs into the U.S. And this time, Mr. Trump has the right staff in place to achieve that goal.
“Where Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0 differ is in personnel choices. Mr. Trump is now actualizing policy he was inhibited from doing in his first term by staff who thought they knew better than the commander in chief. Call them yes-men, but Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is not bucking the chain of command; he is carrying out his orders,” Ms. Sadler writes. “Yes, those orders include a 6-week-old military campaign against South American drug gangs and traffickers, which have included six sea strikes against cartel vessels, with at least 27 deaths.”
The planned meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin may be off the table for now, but the American president must still be ready to outmaneuver his Russian counterpart.
In a new piece in The Times, Threat Status opinion contributor Clifford D. May writes his own letter addressed to Mr. Trump and says the Russian president, as his predecessors did, wants to persuade the West to accept Russian “domination of the Eastern and Central European states.” In this case, that means Mr. Putin wants to negotiate a deal in which his country dominates Ukraine.
“Am I suggesting that Mr. Putin now wants to do to you what Stalin did to Roosevelt and Churchill? Yes, Mr. President, because he wants to restore Stalin’s empire,” Mr. May, founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes.
“Given this background, it would be logical for you to do what you’ve done in the past: Achieve peace through strength, in this case by imposing harsh economic sanctions on the imperialist dictator in the Kremlin and providing Ukrainians with the long-range missiles they need to defend themselves from the invading hordes,” Mr. May says. “Doing this would not be an ‘escalation,’ a word that made President Biden shake in his shoes. It would merely begin to level the playing field.”
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