Washington's reply reaches Tehran, Ukraine's grid takes its heaviest strike since spring, and five geopolitical signals for October 1, 2026

Middle East: Washington's answer reaches Tehran as Gulf crude flows recover

• Iran has received an official US response to its latest proposal to end the seven-month war, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said, after Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi presented the reply to President Masoud Pezeshkian at a cabinet meeting and briefed ministers on the conditions Tehran has set for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which were conveyed to Washington through mediators 1. Araghchi returned from New York, where Iranian officials held indirect talks with US officials and met Qatari and Pakistani mediators on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly; two US officials said Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the delegation to leave the city earlier than planned, and it departed in the early hours of Tuesday 1. Araghchi said last week that he had floated reopening the strait within a week if the United States lifted its blockade of Iranian ports, released frozen Iranian assets and waived sanctions on Iranian oil sales 1.
• Oil fell on Thursday as recovering Gulf exports and a surprise build in US inventories eased supply concerns: Brent crude futures were down 1.1% at $96.92 a barrel by 0420 GMT, and West Texas Intermediate was down 1.4% at $89.18, after both benchmarks rose about $1 on Wednesday 2. Brent gained about 14% in September, its biggest monthly rise since July, and WTI about 5%; US crude inventories rose by 922,000 barrels to 427.3 million in the week to September 25, against a Reuters poll that had expected a draw of 264,000 barrels 2. Goldman Sachs estimated that Gulf oil exports, including "dark exports" on ships sailing with their transponders switched off, had recovered to 23.3 million barrels a day over the past week, in line with its 2025 average, after exports doubled during September 2. President Donald Trump denied Axios and CNN reports that he was willing to give Iran sanctions relief and release frozen Iranian funds in return for "concrete" steps on its nuclear programme, and two people said OPEC+ is likely to hold production targets steady for November when it meets on Sunday 2.
• Shipments through Hormuz and the bypass routes were delivering just under 80% of prewar regional flows as of last week, according to the tracker Kpler, and crude exports from major Middle Eastern producers including Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates rose to almost 13 million barrels a day this month, the highest since February, when the region exported nearly 19 million barrels a day, according to the tracker Huax 3. Iran has been unable to move crude through the strait since the United States reinstated its maritime blockade in July, and Kpler expects the crude Iran holds beyond the blockade, most of it destined for China, to be depleted by early to mid-October; the volume of Iranian crude already on vessels outside the blockade has fallen to about 15 million barrels from 29 million in early September, and analysts put what Iran can move overland at no more than 40,000 barrels a day against prewar exports of nearly 2 million 3.

Refined fuels: the pressure moves to Europe's emergency diesel stocks

• The Trump administration is urging Europe to release emergency diesel stocks, putting the spotlight on the EU's reserves and on France and Germany, which together hold more than a third of the bloc's strategic diesel. US officials are especially frustrated with France and Germany, which they believe fell short of commitments made under the International Energy Agency's coordinated emergency release agreed earlier this year to offset war-related supply disruptions; EU countries held about 39 million metric tons of emergency gasoil and diesel in the latest available Eurostat data, for May 2025, with Germany holding 5.6 million tons and France 8.2 million tons, about 35% of the total, against a rule requiring stocks covering at least 90 days of net imports or 61 days of domestic consumption 4. EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen said on Tuesday that the bloc had discussed a possible further release with IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol but had not decided whether to ask member states for one 4.
• US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on September 29 that "while the United States and Japan are delivering on their commitments, several European member countries have released only a fraction of the crude oil and petroleum products they pledged", as Washington announced it would put another 40 million barrels onto the market 5. Jorgensen said the EU had spent more than €100 billion extra on energy this year without receiving additional gas or oil in return, and Birol, speaking in Dublin on September 29, said about two-thirds of emergency oil reserves had been released and hit the market with one-third still to come 5. The IEA coordinated the release of around 400 million barrels in March, with the United States providing 172 million and EU countries committing to about 20% of the total 4.
• Chinese refiners have suspended exports of oil products to destinations beyond Hong Kong and Macau until further notice from Beijing, following the Golden Week holiday that runs to October 7, four people briefed on the matter said. State oil major PetroChina cancelled on Wednesday the majority of its gasoline and jet fuel shipments planned for October, three of the sources said, having committed to most of the cancelled deals in the previous two weeks 6.

Russia-Ukraine: the heaviest strike on the grid since spring

• Russia launched its largest attack on Ukraine's energy infrastructure since the spring, mostly against Kyiv and the surrounding region, Ukraine's prime minister, Serhii Koretskyi, said; at least five people were killed overnight across the country, including a child in the Kyiv region, and 11 regions were attacked, with residential buildings, social infrastructure, civilian enterprises and railways hit as well 8. Russia's defence ministry said one target was the Trypilska power station, the largest supplier of electricity to Kyiv, and its operator Centrenergo confirmed damage to the plant; DTEK said power to 8,000 homes had been restored, and grid operator Ukrenergo advised residents to avoid heavy appliances between 10:00 and 16:00 local time 8. President Volodymyr Zelensky listed strikes on critical infrastructure in the Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad and Rivne regions, and Russia's military said it had intercepted more than 380 Ukrainian drones overnight 8.
• Nationwide the attacks killed seven civilians and wounded 24, Zelensky said; a boy was killed at a private home in Vyshhorod in the wider Kyiv region, where rescuers pulled three other people from the rubble, and three people were killed in the capital, authorities said 9. Air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said Russia fired 2,850 jet-propelled drones at Ukraine in August and had already launched 3,177 this month by Tuesday, with the attacks coming in waves aimed mostly at Kyiv and the surrounding region 9. Russia's defence ministry said the overnight attack hit a hydroelectric and a thermal power plant, an electrical substation, an energy storage facility and a data centre, while Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the campaign had brought "days of almost uninterrupted air raid alerts across Ukraine" 9.
• Russia extended its ban on diesel exports for fuel producers until the end of October, the government said on Wednesday. Moscow had extended a previous ban until the end of September while allowing supplies to countries such as former Soviet republics and Mongolia under intergovernmental agreements; Russia is usually the world's second-largest diesel exporter after the United States, and had already reduced exports over the summer before imposing the overseas supply curb 10. US diesel prices have shot to records above $6.50 a gallon, and pump prices in the United Kingdom hit record highs, the motoring body RAC said on Monday 10.

US-China: the probes run to December 27, and Huawei launches on its own chip

• China's commerce ministry extended two probes into US trade practices that it launched in March by three months, to December 27, saying the complexity of the cases required it; the decisions came in two statements dated September 27, days after the two countries agreed a two-month extension of their trade truce to January 10 and tariff cuts on $60 billion of goods 11. The investigations were launched on March 27 into US measures and practices that China says "disrupt global supply and industrial chains" and "hinder trade in green products", and are counter-probes to US Section 301 investigations into forced labour and excess industrial capacity; they were originally scheduled to conclude within six months 11.
• Huawei unveiled its Mate 90 smartphone series, betting on its in-house HarmonyOS 7 operating system and a redesigned chip architecture. Premium models including the Mate 90 Pro Max run on the Kirin 9050 Pro, a system-on-chip built with a technique Huawei calls "LogicFolding", which restructures a chip's internal wiring in three dimensions instead of a flat layout, allowing denser processing at the cost of more wafers per chip 12. Consumer business chief Richard Yu said that "advanced semiconductor capacity remains very limited in China, and Huawei's Ascend AI chips also draw on that same capacity", that Chinese chipmaking still relies on deep ultraviolet lithography machines, and that rising memory prices had added an average of $200 to the cost of each handset; Huawei did not disclose who manufactures the Kirin 9050 Pro, with SMIC widely believed to make Huawei's Kirin chips 12.
• Chinese AI developer DeepSeek said it had partnered with Huawei to develop programming tools for Huawei's Ascend chips, open-sourcing infrastructure that includes a high-level programming language called TileLang along with related compute and communication libraries 13. DeepSeek said the first priority in building "a new generation of independent, self-controlled GPU software ecosystem" was a universal high-level language that can still reach the hardware's full performance, and described TileLang as offering "a simpler programming model" than Nvidia's CUDA, improving development efficiency and simplifying code logic 13.

Taiwan: invasion seen beyond 2028, and 23 sorties in a day

• US officials believe a Chinese invasion of Taiwan before 2028 is increasingly unlikely despite Xi Jinping's instruction for his military to be ready by 2027 to take the island by force, according to two current US officials, one former US official and a person familiar with the matter. The reasons they gave are delays in military readiness amid the Communist Party's anti-corruption campaign and Beijing's eagerness to see the result of Taiwan's 2028 election, which some Chinese officials hope could produce a government more amenable to Beijing; the same people said Beijing may increasingly look to use force in 2028 and beyond if the Democratic Progressive Party wins a fourth consecutive term, and in particular if President Lai Ching-te is re-elected 14. One of the officials said "if that happens, I think 2028 becomes pretty sporty"; the Pentagon declined to comment, and US intelligence said in its March annual threat assessment that China did not at that point have a plan to invade 14.
• Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Roger Wicker said Washington's security commitments to Taiwan must be upheld, after meeting Taiwan's representative to the United States, Alexander Yui, on Tuesday. Four other Republican senators asked the administration last week to release more than $14 billion in stalled security assistance, and Wicker cited the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act and the "six assurances" precedent that the United States would not consult Beijing on arms sales to Taiwan 15. Defence Minister Wellington Koo said on Tuesday that Taiwan remained in continuous talks with Washington about arms sales and had received reassurances since last week's Trump-Xi summit that US policy on Taiwan had not changed; Trump has held the package of about $14 billion since his May trip to Beijing, describing it as a "negotiating chip" 15.
• Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense counted 23 PLA aircraft sorties in the 24 hours to 6 a.m. on October 1 (UTC+8), 16 of them crossing the median line into northern, central and south-western airspace, plus 7 PLA Navy ships and 7 official Chinese ships operating around the island 16. Its bulletin for the previous day counted 9 sorties, 5 of them in the south-western airspace, with 7 navy ships and 6 official ships 17.