Supertankers turn away from Hormuz, Riyadh's airport stays shut all week, and five geopolitical signals for October 13, 2026

Middle East: Iran calls Washington's Hormuz reply insufficient as the oil shuttle comes under attack

• Iran's Supreme National Security Council secretary, Mohsen Rezaei, said on Sunday that the United States' reply to Tehran's seven conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz was "insufficient", and that Washington needs to clarify the points that remain unclear to Iran. Foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said on Monday that Iran is still reviewing the reply and will answer through intermediaries once that review ends; Qatar and Pakistan have carried messages between the two sides. The two governments remain split on sequence: Washington wants Iran's nuclear programme addressed from the outset, while Tehran wants the talks to begin with reopening the strait, which carried about a fifth of world oil and liquefied natural gas trade before the war 12.
• Rezaei named the workaround Tehran intends to break: a shuttle in which smaller vessels move crude to larger tankers with US and Emirati military assistance, using the southern corridor past Oman's coast. He said Iran has struck five or six participating vessels a night for weeks, and he threatened US-linked cables, data centres and artificial-intelligence facilities in the United Arab Emirates and around the strait. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said a crude supertanker struck a naval mine and caught fire on an unapproved route late on Saturday, and warned that tankers ignoring the waterway's rules will meet the same fate; UK Maritime Trade Operations reported an unidentified projectile hitting a tanker outbound through the strait on Sunday 34.
• Ships keep taking hits. India's foreign ministry said two Indian seafarers are missing after a drone struck the tanker MT Petro Dolphin in the Hormuz area on Sunday, with 11 Indian sailors aboard, and that a second vessel, the Marshall Islands-flagged MT Valthera, was hit by an unknown projectile and caught fire. The Emirati coast guard rescued 22 crew members from a tanker fire near its shores, and the cause of that blaze was not identified 45.

Middle East: Riyadh's airport stays shut to Saturday as Saudi Arabia investigates its air defences

• Saudi authorities extended the closure of King Khalid International Airport until 2100 GMT on October 17, and the civil aviation authority said operations were suspended so that staff could complete checks on the airport's safety and operational readiness. Aviation analytics firm Cirium counted 99.7% of King Khalid's scheduled flights cancelled on Sunday and about 60% cancelled on Monday, with cancellations across all Saudi airports reaching 46.4% 1011.
• Attacks on the airport over the past week killed 18 people, Saudi Arabia's energy minister said. Saturday's strike was the deadliest, killing 13 people and wounding more than 300, with four killed in strikes on Wednesday and Thursday and one more killed on Sunday. Dammam airport in the east was struck on Sunday evening, and the Saudi-led coalition said on Monday that it had intercepted a Houthi ballistic missile aimed at the southern city of Khamis Mushait 12.
• Saudi Arabia is investigating why its air defences failed to intercept Saturday's missiles and why no public warning preceded them; the kingdom's mobile alert system had been silent since September 29, and the civil defence authority issued fresh alerts for Riyadh and southern cities on Monday. Two regional officials told the Associated Press that an initial probe found the Houthis first fired several drones to clear the way for a mix of cruise and ballistic missiles, and that investigators are asking why missiles flying more than 1,000 kilometres drew no earlier warning 513.

Russia-Ukraine: the energy ceasefire frays as the EU adds its largest listings package since 2022

• President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday that an "ENERGY CEASEFIRE" was in force between Russia and Ukraine and that "Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!" President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia hit six energy facilities in Ukraine on Monday, among them a gas production site struck around midnight by a jet-powered Shahed drone, and put the number of injured at 33. Zelensky told the Warsaw Security Forum that Russia launched a targeted strike immediately after Trump's post: "It was clear that Putin does not read Truth Social" 916.
• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to confirm that any agreement existed, and later said Russia would hold strikes only on election day itself rather than accept Zelensky's proposed 60-day ceasefire; foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Kyiv does not deserve the "respite" a truce would bring. BBC Verify counts Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure this year at 2.4 times the number over the same period of 2025 1718.
• EU foreign ministers added 1,569 names to the bloc's sanctions list on Monday, covering individuals and businesses, the largest single package of listings since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. Foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Brussels wants evidence that Moscow will respect an energy truce, and warned that a narrowly drawn truce would favour Russia because Russia holds far more refining capacity 18. In the Black Sea, two ships were struck by drones off Bulgaria's coast on Tuesday; Prime Minister Rumen Radev said the Malta-flagged cargo ship Chelsea 3 was hit by three aerial drones with all 15 crew members rescued, seven Ukrainians and eight Azerbaijanis, and that a second vessel was struck and sank with one crew member rescued 19. Ukraine also struck three Yandex data centres at Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir, halting operations at Sasovo completely, taking the Vladimir site offline on Sunday and injuring nine people in the Kaluga region; digital development minister Maksut Shadayev called the scale of the attacks "unprecedented" 20.

US-China: Nvidia's share of China's AI-chip market falls to 34%

• Nvidia's share of China's market for data-centre AI chips fell to 34% in the first half of 2026, and the company shipped 678,000 AI accelerators in China from January through June, down 44% from a year earlier, according to IDC data seen by Reuters. Washington restricts China's access to Nvidia's most powerful AI chips, and Beijing requires Chinese companies to seek approval before importing the compliant models they are allowed to buy 21.
• Huawei shipped 572,000 AI accelerators, up from more than 300,000 a year earlier, for a 28% share of the overall market. Alibaba's chip-design unit T-Head held 7%, followed by Cambricon with 5%, Baidu's Kunlunxin with 4% and Hygon with 3%, and nine of the 11 Chinese chipmakers tracked by IDC raised shipments year on year 21.
• Total AI accelerator shipments reached 2.008 million units in the half. Shipments of GPUs, the chips most used to train models, fell 26% to 991,000 units, while other accelerators rose nearly 80% to 1.016 million units and overtook GPUs by volume; Huawei, T-Head, Kunlunxin and Cambricon together took 95% of that non-GPU segment 21.

Taiwan Strait: China posts no-sail notices for five coastal areas

• China's Maritime Safety Administration has published no-sail notices for five areas running from the South China Sea up to the north-eastern province of Liaoning, with the drills scheduled to last all week. All five areas lie along China's own coast, and the closest sits off the eastern province of Zhejiang, which leaves Taiwan's waters outside them. Defence Minister Wellington Koo told legislators the preliminary assessment is that the activity is coastal artillery firing drills, and that Taiwan will keep monitoring it 22.
• Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense counted five PLA aircraft in the 24 hours to 6 a.m. on October 13 Taipei time, four of them crossing the median line into central and south-western airspace, along with six PLA Navy ships and four official Chinese ships. The window to October 12 recorded four aircraft, all entering northern, central and south-western airspace, six naval ships and three official ships; the window to October 11 recorded 12 aircraft, five of them in the south-western airspace, six naval ships and three official ships 232425.
• Beijing answered the week's criticism on Sunday, when China's Ministry of National Defense said President Lai Ching-te was exaggerating the threat from China and trying to "seek independence through force", and that PLA training around Taiwan is meant to deter independence moves. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Monday that the waters belong to China and that its activities there are "beyond reproach" 22.