Ukraine’s armed forces say they now control some 500 square miles of Russian territory and more than 100 localities in the Kursk oblast. If true, it means Kyiv has seized more land in two weeks inside Russia than Russian forces have claimed over the past year in Ukraine.

The development has major implications. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his aides say they are now preparing a proposal to end the war, but Ukraine’s surprise offensive has also focused attention on the uncertainties of Kyiv’s long-term objectives.

Threat Status Special Ukraine Correspondent Guillaume Ptak offers an in-depth look at what Kyiv can realistically achieve on the battlefield and how Russia may adjust and respond.

“The offensive has dealt a humiliating blow to the Kremlin’s narrative that its ‘special military operation’ was going according to plan, as a foreign army occupies Russian land for the first time since World War II,” writes Mr. Ptak, although he adds that “it’s not clear what the Ukrainian forces are planning inside Russia or how long they will stay.”

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan sought in Beijing this week to assure China’s top leaders of U.S. policy continuity if Vice President Kamala Harris is elected president.

Mr. Sullivan met with Mr. Xi on Thursday, hours after talks with a key Chinese general and in advance of a phone call between the Chinese president and Mr. Biden. The call, expected in the coming weeks, would be the first direct conversation between the two leaders in more than four months.

The coming U.S. presidential election is recognized by Chinese leaders as a “sensitive period” and transitions to a new administration also are delicate and require “responsible management” of U.S.-China relations, Mr. Sullivan told reporters upon wrapping up his three-day visit on Thursday.

Austal USA, an Alabama-based shipbuilder for the Navy and the Coast Guard, will pay a $24 million fine to settle a Justice Department investigation into an accounting fraud case stemming from last year’s indictment of three company officials.

The company, a subsidiary of Australian shipbuilder and defense contractor Austal, also will pay $24 million restitution to its shareholders. Threat Status is tracking how the case may impact AUKUS, the joint U.S., U.K. and Australian project to create a cutting-edge fleet of nuclear-powered submarines aimed at countering China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific.

Austal USA engaged in a “years-long scheme to illegally inflate its profits on ships the company was building for the U.S. Navy, reporting false financial results to investors, lenders and its auditors,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement this week.

Politicization of intelligence at the CIA has reached new levels of activism under Mr. Biden, according to John A. Gentry, a former analyst for the agency.

Mr. Gentry writes in the current issue of the journal Comparative Strategy that the problem accelerated during the Trump administration, when current and former intelligence officials worked to undermine then-President Trump and his presidency through leaks and public statements. He compares current politicization at the CIA to three past periods: the debate over the Vietnam War, the Reagan administration in the 1980s and the George W. Bush administration in 2003 and 2004.

But the recent wave under Mr. Biden has been “much larger, lasted longer, and differed qualitatively in important ways from earlier episodes,” Mr. Gentry writes. “The overt activism of the Trump years receded soon after President Biden, … but the re-engineered CIA culture remains untouched. It simply is now quiet. Indeed, Biden’s actions seem to have strengthened it appreciably.”

While electoral fraud is common under despotic regimes, proving it is almost impossible, according to Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, who writes that “regimes typically control the electoral system and the official voting documents.”

Mr. Vargas Llosa homes in on Venezuela, writing that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has successfully “organized a large part of her country of 28 million.”

“With the help of some 600,000 volunteers, she proved conclusively that dictator Nicolás Maduro stole the recent presidential election,” he writes. “The United States and many other countries have refused to recognize Mr. Maduro’s illegitimate victory. The fight is far from over.”

Former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich notes that the “disaster at Abbey Gate” three years ago at Kabul International Airport was the “largest loss of U.S. military personnel in one event in Afghanistan in 10 years.”

“Americans should demand that Congress and the Biden administration have the courage to seriously examine what went wrong in the immediate disaster and the long-term failure to win a war we prosecuted for 20 years at great cost in lives, wounded and funding,” Mr. Gingrich writes. “First, we must look at the immediate failure to safely and securely evacuate Afghanistan.”

• Sept. 3-6 — Billington CyberSecurity Summit

• Sept. 4 — The American Dream Lecture Series: Walter Russell Mead on American Foreign Policy in the Next Presidency, American Enterprise Institute

• Sept. 9 — The Role of China in Africa’s Just Energy Transition, Wilson Center

• Sept. 9 — Voices for Peace and Human Rights in Israel/Palestine, Stimson Center

• Sept. 9-11 — Quantum World Congress, Potomac Quantum Innovation Center

• Oct. 5-8 — 2024 Threat Conference, The Cipher Brief