Threat Status for Friday, November 21, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Moscow insists the U.S. has not disclosed to Russia details of a 28-point Ukraine peace plan, but it says it hopes negotiations can begin soon.
… The assertion came as ramped-up U.S. sanctions on Russian oil took effect Friday.
… Threat Status reports from Kyiv that President Trump’s new push for peace couldn’t come at a worse time for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
… An Indian pilot died after his HAL Tejas combat plane crashed Friday during a demonstration at the Dubai Air Show.
… Israel says Iran is coordinating with Hamas and Hezbollah in a bid to rebuild its “Axis of Resistance” across the Mideast.
… Tehran’s tensions with the U.N.’s nuclear agency are soaring anew.
… A Syrian Jewish group wants Congress to repeal the Caesar Act sanctions imposed on Damascus during the Assad era.
… Religious freedom advocates told Congress Thursday that China’s crackdown on Christian churches represents a U.S. national security threat.
… Iran’s president says moving the country’s capital from Tehran is “unavoidable” due to a mounting water crisis.
… And a federal judge in the District of Columbia has ruled Mr. Trump’s National Guard deployment broke the law.
The Trump administration’s new Ukraine peace proposal calls for long-opposed concessions by Ukraine, including the ceding of territory. The timing couldn’t be worse for Mr. Zelenskyy, who is struggling with low approval ratings at home and scrambling to contain a burgeoning corruption scandal that threatens to engulf his government.
Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak examines the situation in a dispatch in from Kyiv, noting that while Mr. Zelenskyy is set to meet with Trump representatives to discuss the U.S.-drafted deal, the dual pressure of domestic instability and external demands has pushed his government into its most difficult strategic dilemma of the war so far.
Volodymyr Fesenko, a political scientist and director at the Penta Center for Political Studies in Kyiv, says the release of the proposal “is no coincidence,” suggesting the Trump administration seeks to leverage Mr. Zelenskyy’s weakened position. Mr. Fesenko is also skeptical of the plan’s feasibility, saying some provisions are unacceptable to Ukraine, while others are incompatible with Russia’s objectives. More fundamentally, he says, the Kremlin has no incentive to negotiate seriously.
China’s military has deployed multiple space warfare systems capable of destroying and disrupting U.S. satellites vital for military operations, while the U.S. Space Force remains constrained from developing its own space weapons in response.
That was a key finding in the annual report to Congress from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission released this week. It warns that China is eclipsing the U.S. as the world’s leading space power — and threatening U.S. military and civilian space systems.
Beijing has invested heavily in building space weapons that can destroy or disrupt satellites, which would “incapacitate” U.S. communications, intelligence, missile warning and undermine the military’s ability to conduct joint operations and project power, the report said. The weapons include three types of ground-based anti-satellite missiles, robot satellites that can grab and destroy satellites without causing debris, and electronic and directed energy anti-satellite weapons.
California-based defense technology company Anduril has a new partnership with the United Arab Emirates-based EDGE Group to build an autonomous air vehicle — the “Omen” — for both military and commercial use. The craft is designed for electric vertical takeoff and landing without specialized infrastructure.
Anduril describes Omen as having a “tailsitter” design, meant to vertically take off from its own structure before transitioning to wing-based forward flight. EDGE is expected to produce the first 50 systems in the UAE, with full-scale production scheduled by the end of 2028.
The partnership is meant to build on the “long-standing defense partnership” between the United States and UAE, according to a statement, which said EDGE is providing Anduril with a “regional presence and established trust across the Middle East.”
Sudan’s civil war has opened the door to expanding Iranian influence in Africa and is posing an increasingly dire threat to the new U.S.-backed military and economic order that the Trump administration is trying to build, nation by nation, across the Middle East.
The Trump administration signaled this week that it intends to get involved in ending the fighting in Sudan, where two militaries, the Rapid Support Forces and the rival Sudanese army, have battled for control of the resource-rich country since the two groups worked together to stage a coup in 2023.
The RSF’s October capture of the city of El Fasher has pulled Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Israel into a proxy contest that intelligence officials say could reshape the Red Sea’s balance of power. The RSF is estimated to have 100,000 men. Both sides have been accused of atrocities, but the reports of mass killings, rapes and kidnappings blamed on the RSF that have emerged since the militants took control of El Fasher, the capital of the western Sudanese state of North Darfur, have stunned the world.
China has “resumed normal relations with the military junta in Myanmar and its various ministries, in addition to providing Chinese Y-8 transport planes,” according to Joseph R. DeTrani, a former associate director of national intelligence and opinion contributor to Threat Status.
“Beijing is quite open about its political engagement with the military junta and, working with Russia, resists U.N. efforts to condemn it,” Mr. DeTrani writes in The Washington Times, noting that the “military junta announced this month that phased elections will be held from December through January.
“There is understandable concern that this will be a sham election, designed to legitimize the military junta and its leader, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing,” he writes. “The United Nations, ASEAN and the U.S. should demand that they be permitted to send election monitors to Myanmar to certify that the election was fair and open to all the people.”
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