Mr. Lavrov said Tuesday that Washington and Moscow have yet to hold talks regarding START, which sets clear limits on the number of deployed nuclear warheads that the U.S. and Russia can maintain and is slated to expire on Feb. 5.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated his country would be willing to uphold the terms of the new START treaty for one year if the U.S. would make a similar commitment. But the U.S. has not initiated discussions and has not formally accepted Mr. Putin’s deal. Defense and National Security Correspondent John T. Seward recently examined the situation in an exclusive video analysis, following Mr. Trump’s threat in November to resume nuclear weapons tests on the grounds that Russian and Chinese nuclear stockpiles are approaching U.S. levels and because other nations are already involved in some degree of testing.

The first START treaty was signed in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union. The new START treaty was finalized in 2010 and added further limits to the number of strategic nuclear warheads that each country can deploy. Mike Pompeo, who headed the CIA and then the State Department in the first Trump administration, told Threat Status in November that the “need to include China in any future version of START, with its growing arsenal, is critical.”

Leaders from Israel, Russia and other countries have been told they can purchase $1 billion permanent seats on Mr. Trump’s recently announced Gaza Strip “board of peace.” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday Mr. Putin had received an offer to join the board, saying plans to discuss details of the membership with Washington before responding.

Those discussions are likely playing out behind the scenes between U.S. and Russian delegations attending this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos. The White House has not confirmed the offer to sell a seat to Russia, which has been engaged in a bloody military campaign against neighboring Ukraine since 2022.

International observers say Russian forces have killed hundreds of thousands, including civilians, since the invasion began. Kyiv and its allies have repeatedly accused Moscow of targeting civilian infrastructure with long-range missile strikes. NATO and other European Union leaders accuse Russia of flagrantly violating European sovereignty, with fighter jet incursions and other provocations over European airspace.

Threat Status partnered with Obviant, a Virginia-based company that uses artificial intelligence to track U.S. defense spending, for a collaboration examining how Pentagon spending on small drones has quadrupled since the war in Ukraine demonstrated the devastating capabilities of the remote systems.

The money is being spent with dozens of American companies, with the vast majority going toward small unmanned aerial systems, or sUAS, through contracts under U.S. Army programs. The spending is slated only to increase. The recently passed defense authorization earmarked some $1.7 billion for sUAS in 2026, a significant jump from the $398 million spent back in 2022.

U.S. companies have scrambled to compete for a total of $4.7 billion that the Pentagon has spent on drones since 2022. At the same time, the Pentagon has launched a new, forward-leading Drone Dominance Initiative, with a formal request for solutions from private industry. Approved solutions will be tested and will compete for an order of 30,000 new sUAS during 2026.

China released its first official Arctic white paper in January 2018 and introduced one of the most audacious branding moves in modern geopolitics: describing itself as a “near-Arctic state,’” according to Miles Yu, who writes that the label is “not a geographic fact; it is a political claim, an argument that China’s interests justify participation in governance and privileged access to resources far from its shores.

“The goal for China, roughly 900 miles south of the Arctic Circle, is to become a ‘polar great power’ by 2030. The purpose is familiar: normalize Chinese presence now so influence and control feel inevitable later,” writes Mr. Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute and an opinion contributor to Threat Status.

“The question for Washington,” he writes in a Washington Times op-ed, “is not whether China will become an Arctic power (Beijing has already decided it will), but whether the United States and its allies will deny China the quiet ‘dual-use’ footholds that have become a hallmark of the [Chinese Communist Party’s] global playbook.”

Eurasia has undergone a “series of tectonic shifts” over the past several months, as countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus have “recalibrated their respective foreign policies and expanded ties with the West,” writes Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington.

“America’s principal geopolitical competitors have long coveted the region,” Mr. Berman writes in an op-ed for The Times. “Russia sees it as its natural patrimony and geopolitical backyard, while China increasingly treats it as an extension of the global dependency network it is erecting through its sprawling Belt and Road Initiative.”

Noting that the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy is “conspicuously silent on American interests in Eurasia,” Mr. Berman argues that expanded U.S. engagement is needed to “counter an Iranian nuclear breakout (or, these days, instability) while maximizing opportunities for U.S. investment, effective competition with China and Russia and opportunities to address the persistent threat of Islamic terrorism.”

• Jan. 21 — Artificial General Intelligence: America’s Next National Security Frontier, Institute of World Politics

• Jan. 21 — What Happens in Geostationary Orbit Doesn’t Stay There, Royal United Services Institute

• Jan. 21 — Power, Perception and Priorities: How Americans View U.S. Global Influence, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

• Jan. 21 — Discovery Series: Space Force 2040 and the Future Fight, Johns Hopkins University

• Jan. 22 — Assessing the China-Russia Threat Nexus in Technology and Information Warfare, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Jan. 22 — The Arsenal of Freedom Tour and What it Means, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Jan. 27-28 — Qubits26: Quantum Realized, D-Wave

• Jan. 29 — The World, Rewired – A Geopolitical Outlook for 2026 and Beyond, Stimson Center