In a statement to Firstpost, Taipei Economic and Cultural Center has clarified that the island nation has not released any official statement confirming its interest in India’s D4 anti-drone system read more

Last week, several media outlets reported that Taiwan has shown interest in purchasing India’s state-of-the-art D4 anti-drone system, developed by the Defence Research and Developed Organisation (DRDO) and manufactured by Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL). The reports suggested that Taiwan’s interest in the D4 system grew following its success in the Operation Sindoor where it jammed and neutralised Pakistani drones, including Turkish-supplied Bayraktar TB2 drones.

Clarification from Taiwan

However, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center (TECC) in India has now clarified that the country’s Ministry of National Defense has not released any official statement corroborating the same. The TECC in a statement to Firstpost stated that the Taiwanese government has not released any statement confirming any such interest.

“While these news reports have circulated, there has been no official corroboration from Taipei. Officials in Taiwan have not publicly commented on any potential defense acquisitions from India, including the D4 anti-drone system,” said Col. Huang Ming Chieh of TECC.

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The statement also added that details regarding D4 anti-drone system’s operational deployment and specific successes were not confirmed by the government of India and were only reported by media outlets.

“Details regarding its operational deployment and specific successes, including those attributed to “Operation Sindoor,” are based on media reporting and have not been officially detailed by the Indian government,” it added.

While the TECC didn’t reject the reports in Indian media, it also refused to confirm them.

“Therefore, based on the current information available from official Taiwanese channels, the reports of an impending purchase of the Indian D4 anti-drone system by Taiwan remain unconfirmed. The TECC’s statement underscores the lack of any official communication or planning regarding such a defense procurement,” said Huang in the statement.

Significance of India-Taiwan defence ties

A successful agreement with Taiwan could foster enhanced defence collaboration, possibly involving joint development of cutting-edge counter-drone systems.

Moreover, amid China’s assertive actions in the Indo-Pacific, India’s strategic engagement with Taiwan could act as a vital counterbalance, transforming the region’s security landscape.

Faced with a volatile security environment in the Indo-Pacific and a burgeoning military threat from China, Japan has decided to invest in an inexpensive and revolutionary technology that is dominating modern combat: drones.

Citing sources, The Mainichi reported that the Japanese Ministry of Defense (MoD) is mulling an allocation of more than 100 billion yen ($670 million) in the fiscal 2026 initial budget for the mass deployment of military drones. The Ministry could submit a budget request for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins in April, by the end of August.

The report stated that the Japanese government could purchase Turkish drones earlier used by Ukraine against Russian forces, so that they could be quickly delivered to the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. However, in the long run, the country wants to manufacture the drones domestically to ensure that there are no issues in the supply chain.

The report did not name the drone in question. However, Tokyo has been open about its admiration for Bayraktar TB2.

Earlier, for instance, a September 2022 report in the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun stated that Tokyo was exploring the possibility of acquiring the Turkish TB2 and deploying them to safeguard the southern Ryukyu Islands, which are the closest to China.

More recently, a Japanese navy officer praised Turkey’s unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), emphasizing their usefulness in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), a mission area he described as crucial for Japan amid current security challenges.

“ISR operations are very critical in Japan. The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force is now conducting ISR missions 24/7, every single day,” Japanese naval officer Iwade Yohei said at the IDEF 2025 defense industry exhibition in Istanbul. “So, I’m very interested in the Bayraktar UAVs made by Türkiye, and I would like to know the details.”

Tokyo has closely monitored Ukraine’s counter-offensive with drones to battle the Russian military. The nation’s defense ministry wants to deploy unmanned vehicles that aren’t simply for surveillance and intelligence gathering but can also be employed in actual warfare. The TB2 can essentially fulfil both these roles.

In addition to the TB2, Baykar has also produced cutting-edge drones like the Bayraktar Akinci and Bayraktar TB3, meant for short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) platforms.

Japan believes swiftly acquiring and deploying such drones is essential to gaining the upper hand during combat while reducing human casualties.

Bayraktar TB-2 shot to fame in the September 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where it wreaked havoc on the Armenian troops. Later, the TB-2 drone’s combat performance in Ukraine also sparked international interest, and buyers quickly lined up to place orders.

The TB2 is a tactical unmanned aerial vehicle capable of performing missions related to armed attack and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). The UAV features an onboard avionic suite with a triple-redundant avionic system, which enables fully autonomous taxiing, takeoff, landing, and cruising.

Baykar has also upgraded the TB2 drone to add more teeth to its combat capability. The manufacturer earlier showed off a new, next-generation variant of the drone, the TB-2T AI, which comes equipped with a turbo engine and advanced artificial intelligence.

Baykar says that the new TB-2T AI drone will shift the balance of power on the battlefield. The drone boasts superior altitude, high speed, and AI-powered smart flight capabilities.

With its turbo engine, the Bayraktar TB2T-AI can reach elevations of over 30,000 feet in less than half an hour. Notably, the next-generation drone broke its altitude record during test flights in Keşan, reaching 30,318 feet, as previously reported in detail by the EurAsian Times.

This is a significant improvement over the previous TB2, which has an operational altitude of 16,000 feet. Japan could opt to buy the upgraded drones.

Besides the Baykar family of drones, Japan has also shown interest in the STM kamikaze UAVs. STM earlier indicated that Japan was showing interest in a quadcopter-type series of loitering munitions.

STM’s General Manager, Özgür Güleryüz, said, “Japan has requested Kargu. We’ve shown Kargu several times at exhibitions in Japan.” He added that the Kargu drone, in service with 10 countries, had proven itself in tests and the field.

The Kargu is a rotary-wing attack drone loitering munition system designed for anti-terrorist operations and asymmetric warfare.

These claims could not be verified, and the EurAsian Times awaits official information from the Japanese Ministry of Defense.

Meanwhile, Japan has also shown interest in another combat drone that has proven its mettle in combat: the Israeli Heron II.

Japan Is Exploring Heron Purchase

The Japanese military has also been considering the purchase of the Israeli-made Heron-2 drone, as reported by The Jerusalem Post.

An Israeli Heron-2 drone was recently photographed in Japan, featuring an Israeli registration number and stickers from Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which has signed a collaboration with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the manufacturer of Heron-2.

The report said that this is the first time that an Israeli drone was tested in the Asian country. The drone was configured for electronic warfare.

If Japan goes ahead with the purchase of this drone, it will become the second country after India to buy the Heron-2 to combat the security threat posed by China.

Earlier, the Indian Air Force (IAF) and the Indian Army (IA) ordered 10 Heron Mk2 drones from IAI in early 2021 under emergency procurement power granted to the armed forces following the PLA’s incursion across the LAC into India-claimed territory starting February 2020.

Heron-2 is a medium-sized drone with a fairly long endurance. Developed for the Israeli Air Force, the Heron-2 is also used for strike and reconnaissance missions. It was recently deployed for operations in Iran.

Fitted with a Rotax 916 iS engine, the Heron-2 can reach an altitude of 35,000 feet, a maximum speed of 140 knots, and remain in the air for 45 consecutive hours. Due to improved manufacturing technologies, this drone has a broader and stronger body structure, allowing quick and easy maintenance without adding weight.

The Heron 2 features better radio, radar, and optical sensors, giving it better stand-off capability than its predecessor. It can look and listen deep into adversary territory without crossing the border or putting itself in harm’s way of adversary air defenses. This should help Japan in potential operations against China, which has a formidable Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) system in place along its coastline.

Should Japan choose to purchase the Heron-2, Kawasaki will likely produce the drones for the domestic market.

However, the EurAsian Times understands that it may be too soon to say whether Japan will choose between the Turkish and Israeli drones, or acquire a combination of both.

Japan Is Turning To Drones For Future Warfare

Japan’s drone acquisition program is a key component of its defense modernization strategy, driven by regional security threats. The country is focusing on acquiring unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to enhance intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), and strike capabilities, particularly for maritime and territorial defense from China.

Japan warned of China’s swift escalation of military operations from its southwestern shores to the Pacific, calling the actions the most strategic challenge in its latest defense report released in July 2025. “The international society is in a new crisis era as it faces the biggest challenges since the end of World War II,” the report said.

The nation’s Defense Buildup Program, drafted in 2022, emphasized the utility of drones in modern warfare. The program stated that the SDF will “expeditiously procure various types of unmanned assets” to “accomplish missions while minimizing human loss.”

The Japanese Defense Ministry established a drone task force in April 2025 to explore the use of drones in future combat.

According to reports, it will likely request the budget for the next fiscal year, starting from April, by the end of this month. The country will follow the policy of “preferring quantity to quality’ and explore a strategy of establishing superiority with the number of drones, a senior government official told Mainichi.

Japan’s acquisitions are motivated by North Korea’s missile advancements, China’s growing maritime assertiveness in the East China Sea, and Russia’s incursions near its airspace. Drones are seen as critical for persistent ISR, maritime domain awareness, and deterrence along Japan’s extensive island chains, particularly the Ryukyu or Nansei Islands.

The current fiscal 2025 budget included 3.2 billion yen for small offensive drones and 41.5 billion yen for the deployment of the US-made large drone MQ-9B SeaGuardian for improved surveillance operations, as also noted by the EurAsian Times earlier.

These acquisitions come as China’s military activities in the airspace and waters surrounding Japan are becoming more intense, with several Japanese lawmakers suggesting that Tokyo use drones to intercept such illegal flights and monitor Chinese military activity in the region.

In 2011, the Government of Canada contracted American tech giant IBM to build a new system to manage its payments to civil servants. Beset by bugs, delays, and cost overruns, the new Phoenix pay system was finally unveiled in 2016. And it was a disaster. Civil servants were overpaid, underpaid, or not paid at all. The boondoggle racked up $3.5 billion in additional costs and forced the government to draw up plans to purchase an entirely new pay system. That, too, has been delayed.

In 2020, Ottawa launched ArriveCAN: a nimble, Swiss Army knife of an app to allow travellers to submit health, contact, and customs information. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, a long chain of contractors, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors worked on the software, to a cost of nearly $60 million. Behind the interface was a mess of bureaucracy and backroom dealings, with some contractors wining and dining with civil servants for a piece of the action in return. The auditor general later found such “glaring disregard for basic management and contracting practices” that pinning down the app’s actual cost proved impossible.

Today, the federal government is gearing up to deploy its newest program, an online system to manage federally provided payments. The Benefits Delivery Modernization program will create nothing less, the government said, than “a world-class service experience.” BDM has already taken over delivery for Old Age Security payments, and soon it will be responsible for Employment Insurance, then finally the Canada Pension Plan. The government budgeted $1.7 billion and promised to have it online by 2030. The auditor general has already warned that the program is at risk of going sideways, and civil servants say it will be the next white elephant.

These blunders have triggered parliamentary investigations, years of media scrutiny, and a cascade of audits and reviews. They’ve also pushed Ottawa to pledge to do better: to invest in more reliable technology, to get smarter about dealing with corporate contractors, and to develop a clearer vision for how to drag the government into the twenty-first century—albeit two and a half decades late.

But those who have to actually deal with Ottawa’s aging IT infrastructure say that the government still hasn’t learned the right lessons at all. In fact, things may be getting worse.

The government’s inability to buy and build technology right was a looming disaster, even before Donald Trump’s election last year. But now, as Prime Minister Mark Carney takes up the urgent task of weaning Canada off the American economy—finding new trading partners and building more things here at home—this has become even more urgent.

Get it right, and we deliver better programs—for less money and quickly. But if we keep getting it wrong, services will continue to worsen, costs will keep going up, and Canadians may start to lose faith that the government can do anything right.

And they would be justified in that cynicism.

When John Ogilvie joined my Zoom call, I was greeted by an anthropomorphic polar bear in a hoodie. “Lemme get rid of that avatar there,” the polar bear told me. “That’s for my son. I wanted him to be computer literate—so when he goes on a call, I put all kinds of avatars on it that he has to take off.”

Suddenly, the polar bear is replaced with a chuckling, bespeckled, white-haired Ogilvie, a long-time technology consultant who works extensively with the Canadian government.

A frustrated civil servant recommended Ogilvie’s name, specifically endorsing his frequent—scathing—LinkedIn posts about the state of government IT. He has taken particular aim at Shared Services Canada, or SSC, the agency ostensibly responsible for managing government technology and innovating new solutions. Except, Ogilvie writes, “SSC has an absolutely atrocious internal reputation for providing IT service.” He has chided the government for having little direction on improving cybersecurity and hampering scientific innovation with its ill-designed systems, and he has called for more data sovereignty in the face of an irredentist America.

“The work that I do, it’s flying around and sketching out: ‘Here’s how you guys can do it. Here’s a product you’ve never heard of,’” he told me. “It’s fun,” he says about his work, “but the job shouldn’t exist.”

A perpetual problem with how Canada acquires technology is counterintuitive. Government technologists—often spurred on by high-priced consultants with different ways of doing things than Ogilvie—have a terrible habit of building new things when existing products will do just fine. Because software can be designed from scratch, technology procurement can often become a form of wish-listing.

Imagine a government department seeking to buy a car. A committee of bureaucrats might hold a series of meetings and consultations to come up with their desired features: four wheels, four doors, a windshield, an AM/FM radio, an electric motor, eight cupholders, and a footprint that fits perfectly into the parking spaces at the Global Affairs Canada building. A number of car companies might respond to that request for proposals to say they have cars on the market that meet nearly every criteria—but they have just two cupholders and are a few inches bigger than the parking spots. But one company comes along and promises to design a car from scratch that meets 100 percent of the government’s requirements. Trouble is, the company has never built a car of this size before, and before long, it is over budget and delayed.

“You do need a group of people wandering around saying: ‘Please do not reinvent any wheels,’” Ogilvie says. These people need to say, as Ogilvie tells his clients: “You describe your problem and I’ll show you how your neighbours in other government buildings solved it last year.”

Often, the novel requirement issued by the government is for the solution to be bilingual. So, faced with the choice of an English-only system that can be available almost immediately for a reasonable price and a bespoke bilingual option that will cost orders of magnitude more and take years longer, as it will need to be built from scratch, Ottawa will opt for the latter. Even if it’s the right thing to do, in order to meet bilingualism requirements, it can be the wrong thing to do in order to get the best product. As it stands, it is already common that many internal systems and processes are unilingual—civil servants may email each other in French or hold meetings entirely in English.

The need for public-facing software that serves both language communities is also clear. But francophone users aren’t well served by bilingual tools that are both expensive and mediocre. It may actually be faster and more cost effective to translate off-the-shelf English software and programs before release rather than mandate full dual-language development from the outset.

Language is a major reason why technology procurement goes off the rails, but it is far from the only one. Federal procurement often rewards the bigger, costlier, more complicated proposal that satisfies all the listed criteria, as opposed to the smaller, cheaper, quicker option that delivers the most important parts of what the government wants.

One former civil servant put it this way: “They lock in decisions before you ever have a chance to talk to people and get feedback,” they said of the early stages of technology procurement. “It’s like: ‘We’ve landed on X product, we’ve landed on X timeline, we’ve landed on X approach.’ And you’re just like: ‘You haven’t talked to any real people about if that’s going to be useful or not.”

The more government can standardize what it wants, the more its various departments and agencies can get on the same systems. And the more it can get actual experts opining on the best way to achieve these results, the more Ottawa can save money, improve services, and create efficiencies. “It’s a shame that there are forty or fifty departments each making these decisions independently,” Ogilvie says. “It’s just great for me. I’m always busy.”

There is a growing movement of Canadians who deal with the ugly side of our government’s technology day in and day out and who have ideas how to fix it. There is the r/CanadaPublicServants Reddit forum, where civil servants—often with the benefit of anonymity—discuss their particular fears and grievances around Ottawa’s pitiful IT. Dozens of users recently vented about the state of the BDM system rollout. “Training was terrible and at this point it’s the seniors who will start to suffer,” one user wrote. “It’s unintuitive and has pretty much doubled the amount of data entry we do,” another chimed in. “It’s a MESS!” another wrote. (Given the forum is anonymous, there is no way to know for sure if every user is actually a civil servant.)

There are others on the front line trying to make things work, like Ogilvie. And there are civil servants like Sean Boots.

Boots has become a well-known name amongst forward-thinking civil servants. In 2017, he joined the newly created Canada Digital Service—then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s initial attempt to modernize the machinery of government. Boots left the service in 2023 and is outspoken, both on his blog and in a wide-ranging academic paper published with his colleagues, on the problems holding Canada back from real change.

“Risk aversion, excessive oversight, reporting burdens and entrenched organizational silos,” Boots and his colleagues wrote last year, “render it incredibly difficult, and in some instances, impossible, for federal public servants to work across disciplines, to iterate and learn from service users, and to keep pace with now broadly accepted best practice in modern service design.”

There is no shortage of ideas on how to start fixing those problems. Let civil servants work remotely instead of shunting them into aging Ottawa offices, for one. Move past Microsoft Outlook and Teams, Boots suggests, in favour of open-source tools with more adaptability. Promote people who understand technology, instead of sticking to the rigid rules of civil servant seniority to dictate who gets to lead tech-oriented projects.

For years, suggestions like these have been treated like nice or marginal concerns. Improving technology has been talked about like the need to hit net-zero emissions or replace the first-past-the-post electoral system—great ideas that you can pledge to work toward and do precious little to achieve. But we are now in a position where our inability to do technology properly isn’t just a lost opportunity but a calamitous risk.

When the auditor general looked at the planned BDM, she raised the alarm at the state of the aging technology—acquired between twenty and sixty years ago—which we used to make sure people get their pension or receive EI payments. “If these systems were to fail,” she wrote in 2023, “it could greatly affect the more than 10 million Canadians who rely on them to meet their daily needs.”

Unfortunately, the system designed to replace those archaic tools already looks broken. A 2022 review by PricewaterhouseCoopers on behalf of the government suggested that the cost would at least double and the program would take an additional four years or more to be ready. By 2022, the government had already spent $2.5 billion on the project—even though not a single piece of government infrastructure had moved over to the new system.

“As time goes on and estimated costs continue to rise, we are concerned that decision makers may scale back or eliminate the transformation component of the 3 benefits, resulting in a final product that does not consider the needs of millions of Canadians who rely on them,” the auditor general wrote.

The simple fact is that there is no good reason why Canada paid to build this system from the ground up. There are a litany of software solutions—used by the United States, European nations, massive multinational corporations—that could have handled this modernization plan. But Ottawa opted to build something bespoke.

What’s so jarring about that warning is how closely it echoes the failures of the Phoenix debacle.

When the federal procurement department first drew up plans for a modernized payroll system, they budgeted a total of $155 million to build and implement the technology. Some three years later, after IBM won the contract, the company provided their new estimate: $274 million.

Rather than go to the Treasury Board and request more funds to pay for what the system actually costs, Public Services and Procurement Canada decided to try and build the system with the reduced budget, the auditor general found. That meant cutting out functionality, reducing testing, speeding up development, and scaling down the number of staff tasked with working on the project. It was the first crystallized example of Canada trying to build a massive piece of software without appreciating just how difficult—and expensive—such a project could be.

The lesson that Ottawa should have learned from the Phoenix disaster is that it does not have the expertise, patience, know-how, or resources to create big new IT infrastructure projects to address its many needs.

If Ottawa focused more on buying off-the-shelf solutions when possible, it could save both time and money, reserving its capacity for building only when truly necessary. That’s the consistent advice from consultants like Ogilvie, innovators like Boots, the auditor general, and even public servants themselves. But the message doesn’t seem to be landing. The same missteps keep repeating.

Between 2017 and 2022, Canada spent about $20 billion on IT services. That is an enormous pile of money. But 40 percent of these contracts went to just thirteen companies, with more than half of those going to three companies alone. These numbers are staggering because Canada is not lacking in firms capable of delivering IT solutions—slightly more than a fifth of these procurement dollars is spread out over more than 7,000 firms.

The single biggest vendor, at nearly $2 billion per year, is IBM Canada: the company responsible for the Phoenix pay debacle. And despite their role in the fiasco, IBM continues to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to manage the plague-ridden system, the Investigative Journalism Foundation reports.

The whole point of the federal procurement system is to make sure that the government gets the best product for the best price—and, to do that, the system is supposed to foster healthy competition. But, in their investigation into the ArriveCAN scandal, the auditor general found that the Canada Border Services Agency showed a total “disregard for policies, controls, and transparency in the contracting process restricted opportunities for competition.” It’s a problem that permeates every department.

Some of this opacity is caused by the dense ecosystem of consultant firms who bid for, and win, many of these contracts—only to subcontract much of the actual work after taking their cut. These “pass-through” firms are good evidence that the procurement process is rewarding the ability to jump through the bureaucratic hoops of the expensive and costly tendering process, not to deliver the best technological project.

But the vast majority of these contracts end up with American firms like IBM and Microsoft—and their Canadian subsidiaries. They win contracts because they can be trusted to deliver and support the software for years to come. These firms are added to privileged lists of trusted suppliers, making it even easier for them to win these contracts, as well as further reducing access to smaller and innovative firms.

This isn’t because those large companies are the best placed to deliver these services. Competitions to buy new technology for the government are, Ogilvie says, “arranged in such a way that the company’s financial track record . . . really matters. So if you have a really good technical solution, but you are only in business for a year, I suspect you won’t even be invited [to apply].”

As Boots et al. found, it was high barriers to entry in the procurement process which ensured these big firms won the contract. “New entrants are at a disadvantage compared to vendors with existing relationships with government departments,” they wrote.

Certainly, the knowledge that IBM will be around in ten years is a great selling point. But in any market, a privileged position breeds complacency and sluggishness. In essence, we have chosen to orient this entire system for stability—with little regard for efficacy, cost, quality of the product, or innovation. But stability and consistency are not the only objectives we should concern ourselves with, particularly not as we find ourselves in a trade war with our closest neighbour.

We have become so accustomed to things going off the rails that we can hardly imagine government procurement being an asset. And yet smart people in this country are positive that the way in which the Government of Canada buys technology could be more than just improved—it could be the single largest driver of innovation in Canada.

When it comes to technology, says Benjamin Bergen, president of the Council of Canadian Innovators, Ottawa “is already the largest needle-mover.” But so much of this money, Bergen notes, is “going to a handful of multinationals that are masquerading as Canadian companies.” Beyond just the need to deliver better technology, we now have a strategic imperative to stand up a purely domestic, made-in-Canada technology sector—one that exists independent of America.

This industry can’t grow if we don’t award them contracts. But we currently refuse to give them contracts because they’re not big enough. It’s a Catch-22.

In 2021, Ukraine adopted the world’s first digital passport.

That milestone didn’t happen in a vacuum. In the past decade, the country overthrew its corrupt Russian-backed government, installed a new democratic system, got invaded by its neighbour, and then faced a full-on onslaught which jeopardized its very existence. Through it all, Kyiv managed to become one of the most seamlessly digitized countries.

When I visited Kyiv last year, I booked all my train travel on an app that puts Via Rail’s online system to shame. I was alerted to incoming air strikes by an app that didn’t just function but was reliable. When I struggled to get some e-payments to go through, Ukrainians gave me bewildered stares, as though I was visiting from another century.

Ukraine didn’t innovate because it wanted to. It reinvented what a modern state could be because it had to. Corruption was rampant, trust in institutions was cratering. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pledged a “state in a smartphone,” one where bureaucracy would be simpler, more transparent. This vision led to the creation of Diia, a platform that now offers over 120 government services through a single app. Over 21 million users interact with it as part of their daily lives—nearly half the country’s population. Everything from registering a business to enrolling children in kindergarten can be done in minutes. By all accounts, Ukraine pulled this off efficiently and cheaply.

Driven by existential necessity, Kyiv has also financed one of the world’s most impressive innovation incubators. While they certainly partnered with, purchased from, and were inspired by large American, Canadian, and European firms, they took risks to build out a domestic industry. They are not only forging the foundations of one of the world’s most impressive digital governments but they now also mass-produce drones and find themselves on the cutting edge of AI.

Ukraine is, of course, far from perfect. And while its economy is significantly smaller than Canada’s, its centralized national government procures a comparable total value in contracts. There is absolutely no reason why we can’t be as good as Ukraine at buying technology.

You can come up with excuses about why its experience doesn’t map onto ours. Or you could try and learn some of those lessons.

We, too, are facing an existential threat. And moments like these require us to take risks and make changes. They require us to challenge the established way of doing things, to demand better, and to slaughter some sacred cows. So let’s get to it.

What is Putin’s new pipeline?

Both during his recent trip to Beijing, and during today’s economic forum in Russia, Vladimir Putin has spoken about the planned Power of Siberia 2 (PS-2) gas pipeline.

The project could one day deliver an additional 50 billion cubic metres of gas per year to China via Mongolia, allowing Beijing to hedge against any future reliance on American gas.

While Xi Jinping’s guest of honour, Russian media announced a “breakthrough” agreement was signed on PS-2, but Gazprom have said that pricing is yet to be agreed.

Speaking on Wednesday, Putin claimed there was “no charity” involved in the pipeline agreement – with Russia reliant upon China’s trade to keep its economy afloat. However, he added Moscow would give Beijing gas at a price lower than Europe.

“The growing Chinese economy has needs, and we have the opportunity to supply these raw materials,” he said.

“Everyone is satisfied, everyone is happy with this result, to be honest, and so am I.”

What is Putin’s new pipeline?

Both during his recent trip to Beijing, and during today’s economic forum in Russia, Vladimir Putin has spoken about the planned Power of Siberia 2 (PS-2) gas pipeline.

The project could one day deliver an additional 50 billion cubic metres of gas per year to China via Mongolia, allowing Beijing to hedge against any future reliance on American gas.

While Xi Jinping’s guest of honour, Russian media announced a “breakthrough” agreement was signed on PS-2, but Gazprom have said that pricing is yet to be agreed.

Speaking on Wednesday, Putin claimed there was “no charity” involved in the pipeline agreement – with Russia reliant upon China’s trade to keep its economy afloat. However, he added Moscow would give Beijing gas at a price lower than Europe.

“The growing Chinese economy has needs, and we have the opportunity to supply these raw materials,” he said.

“Everyone is satisfied, everyone is happy with this result, to be honest, and so am I.”