Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
Mark and Betsy Blondin | Longreads | September 22, 2026 | 2,702 words (10 minutes)
We left Boyne City, Michigan, in the fall of 1996 in a 34-foot Coachmen motorhome towing a minivan, with three children, a golden retriever not originally part of the plan, and a desktop computer on a stand bolted to the floor where a chair used to be. We stopped in Flint to say goodbye to family and retrofit the motorhome for the road. Mark’s father had died that June. His mother was devastated, and for a while the question wasn’t which route to choose but whether to go at all. We left Flint on October 4. Five miles later, the motorhome shut down.
A loose fuel line.
A few miles after the fuel line was fixed, we were surprised by a flat tire on the van’s tow dolly, and then, unbelievably, we bent a bumper while putting the van back on the dolly. It was past seven in the evening. We were finally on our way to Cleveland, Ohio.
That was day one. What we built over the following nine months—25,000 miles through 40 states—would go on to earn a Yahoo! Cool Site designation, a presentation at a US Department of Education national conference, and a place in the federal Education Resources Information Center archive. On the road, we filed over 1,500 emails and website dispatches from museum lobbies, hotel reception desks, libraries, and wherever we could find a phone jack and someone willing to let us run a telephone cord to their wall.
Google would not exist for another two years. The word “blog” had not yet been coined. We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.
Blondins’ Assignment America was both the name of our trip and the website we built in real time as we traveled. We had a partnership with Northwest Academy, a science and technology charter school in northern Michigan in its first year of operation, that made it possible. We had prepared to make the case for why our children—Donald, 14, and twins Kelly and Stacy, 11—would not attend the 1996–97 school year in a conventional sense. The school board didn’t just accommodate us; they encouraged us. Northwest Academy loaned us a laptop and a 1.2 MP digital camera, and we took their curriculum on the road.
The idea had been circulating for some time. For over a year, we had been looking at our future and considering ideas for our next step. Watching The Bridges of Madison County and the questions it raises about the road not taken confirmed for us that we could do something unconventional and educational. Our adventure was also, after Mark’s 12-year career run at Coca-Cola, exactly what we needed.
Red flags of risk waved. In Betsy’s 1996 site bio before the trip began, she wrote her own reasons for going: “I hope [the children] learn that although it is not always easy, unconventional choices in life can be made. Quitting my part-time job as a writer for The Citizen in Boyne City for this adventure was not easy for me. Neither is the financial risk, but I believe it will be worth it.”
What emerged was a family travel journal published to the web, which we updated continuously with photographs and written dispatches. On the site we invited visitors to submit their own travel stories and organically grew a readership we couldn’t really see or measure. Blondins’ Assignment America, our family’s online home, resided at blondins.com, running on Microsoft FrontPage 97.
It is still there. We have not updated the code. The link list on the homepage points to AltaVista, HotBot, and WebCrawler. Many of the links are broken. It is an archive, broken links and all—a well-preserved time capsule.
We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.
This archive holds more than our travel dispatches. Each family member had their own web page. Donald created Donald.com on GeoCities, a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free. He dated his site-building career to November 27, 1996—54 days into the trip. One section with links to tutorials existed to teach strangers how to build websites of their own. The note for November 18, 1997, reads: “I have photoshop! Major site changes are coming.”
The photographs were 640 by 480 pixels, because anything larger would take a reader minutes to load; we could feel our audience’s patience through the phone line. We uploaded our dispatches whenever we could find a connection—this fundamental part of our publishing process was not on a schedule, nor was it guaranteed. Seven weeks in, parked in Sarasota, Florida, Mark wrote in his journal that he hoped to get something on the site before we left. The week before, in Jacksonville, three days had passed with no update.
When we were lucky, we were able to upload our accounts of adventures on the day they happened.
Stacy posted on October 15, 1996: “Dear Journal: Today was not my favorite day, but it was okay. We spent half the day looking for a place to check our e-mail and were successful. Then we went to the Portland Museum of Art where we saw some neat artwork by Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, etc. Later that night we went swimming while Dad and Donald went to Maine Internet Connections. Kelly and I had lots of fun playing at the pool. We slept once again at the college police parking lot.”
Kelly wrote about our hike on the Lost Mine Trail in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park in Texas on January 9, 1997. “The trail was supposedly five and a half miles, but straight uphill. We made it back down in about 45 minutes. When we got back, we did some laundry. For dinner, we had barbecue chicken in tortilla shells. There was still snow on the Chisos. There is a legend that there is gold in the mountain.”
Our stories traveled unfiltered into the world for anyone anywhere to read.
In our 34-foot home, the dinette was the flat surface where we spread out school work and projects and wrote in our journals. It also converted to a bed for Donald. When he wanted to sleep before the rest of us, the cry went out to clear the dinette—a plea or a command, depending on the night. Years later we could still hear echoes of “clear the dinette!”
The web of 1996 was not yet monetized in the way it is today. The internet then wasn’t flooded with platforms competing for your attention and harvesting and selling your data, or algorithms constantly tuned to optimize for engagement. At the time, Yahoo! had editors—actual people employed to look at websites and decide which ones were worth surfacing to other people. That web lasted about a decade before it was dismantled, piece by piece, in favor of one that extracts profits from similar interactions.
We were the beneficiaries of that architecture and didn’t know it was temporary.
Logistics in the physical world were more challenging than in the world online. Six weeks in, we were low on propane, parked in a friend’s driveway in Maplewood, New Jersey, taking the van into New York City on day trips. The only place that filled RV tanks was in Jersey City. We left the van behind and drove the motorhome onto streets built for nothing that long. Following sketchy directions, we stopped several times to ask for help. The horns behind us did not let up. We found the place, got the propane, and worked our way back through the traffic.
It was one of the worst days of our trip.
Some of our best days resulted from meeting people while finding ways to get online. Back on day one at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, we told our story, and after a momentary pause, the receptionist at the information desk gave us her chair. We sat at her desk in that major museum and filed our dispatches while visitors walked up to ask for directions to the dinosaurs. We did our best to help.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, also in Cleveland, gave us free admission, a press kit, and a phone line. The Great Lakes Science Center nearby, and new that year, gave us free admission and a tour by their PR director. We got better at telling the story, and three charming children helped.
A man named Pierre at a Portland, Maine, YMCA spent an hour trying every phone line in the building to help us connect.
In New York City, our communication efforts found us, just a bit embarrassed, walking down the aisle in our travel clothes to seats five rows from the stage at The King and I. Mark had called the box office that afternoon and told a woman named Sandy our story. Our tickets were waiting at will call for a magical theater night.
A 7-Eleven outside Washington, DC, became a nightly ritual: We’d run a 50-foot cord to the backroom, upload the day’s pages, check and send email, and play a trivia game about the museums we’d visited. Correct answers were worth a Slurpee. That is what the technology was for.
Somewhere past the Four Corners Monument on the Navajo Nation, we ran out of gas less than a mile short of a station that had no can to sell us. A man drove past, saw our motorhome stopped on the shoulder, and turned around. He went home for a gas can and brought back enough gas for us to reach the pump. We never learned his name. This is what human kindness did.
We were the beneficiaries of that architecture and didn’t know it was temporary.
Betsy filed a few freelance columns for The Citizen from the road. Her parents mailed printed issues of the newspaper to whatever general-delivery post office or friend’s or relative’s address we could predict two weeks ahead.
The yeses got bigger as the trip went on. At the JFK Presidential Library outside of Boston, which also gave us free admission, Mark asked if we could park the motorhome in the lot overnight. The staff said yes, and after our visit they showed us where to park and locked the gate behind us. One family, one motorhome, one golden retriever, inside the locked grounds of a federal presidential library, with a view of Boston in the dark. Nobody had a policy for that. Someone had a key and decided yes.
When we needed someone to take Buddy for the month we spent in Hawaii, we found him a home through a golden retriever email list. It connected us to a breeder in Morton, Washington, who knew a young man near Seattle raising his own golden for a 4-H project. He needed the money; Buddy needed a yard. The family also had room for the motorhome. Nobody took a percentage. Nobody optimized the match.
No matter where we were, the realities of our past intruded on our adventure. The family parked the motorhome in Pacifica, California, and waited while Mark flew back to Michigan. He had been fired by Coca-Cola Enterprises in March 1995, and his age-discrimination suit had reached the deposition stage. It ran from nine in the morning to 5:30 p.m. His mother waited at the house our family still owned but no longer lived in. With the retirement savings spent down, much was dependent on the court case going well.
One family, one motorhome, one golden retriever, inside the locked grounds of a federal presidential library, with a view of Boston in the dark. Nobody had a policy for that. Someone had a key and decided yes.
We returned home in June 1997, rich in experience and financially broke. A brief exchange at a campground became an unforgettable memory. Betsy had told an elderly man she was worried the children wouldn’t understand or appreciate what the trip had been. He thought about it. “Maybe it’s not a matter of appreciating it as something unique or separate,” he told her. “It will simply become part of who they are.”
We spent the summer running an ice cream and yogurt business, and planning the future. While researching, we discovered a request for abstracts from the organizers of a US Department of Education conference called “Families, Technology, and Education.” We were accepted as featured speakers and off to Chicago that October.
A PowerPoint to help tell our story and a video our children had made in Big Bend National Park on its plant and animal life fit the conference title in every way. On a stage in front of 400 educators from around the country, we made our presentation. During the Q&A period, Donald fielded several questions like a pro. Our paper, People Make Dreams Come True, and Technology Expands the Possibilities: An Educational Journey across the United States, seemed close to becoming a template for the future of education—and we had played a role.
In June 1998, an email arrived from a stranger in New York.
His name was Ted Sammons, and he worked in the editorial department of Broadway Books. He had seen Blondins’ Assignment America on Yahoo!’s “Cool Site” listing and had been impressed—and, he admitted, a bit jealous. He believed the story of our trip would make a good book, and he wanted to know if we’d thought about writing one. Of course we had.
We made our pitch, but ultimately, the editorial board passed. Their stated reason was not enough tragedy.
In 1998, our story was: family leaves, family travels, family lands well. We both began new careers. It’s an adventure with an enviable ending. Eventually, Donald went to Berkeley, and Kelly and Stacy went to Harvard.
In December 1997, we put the Boyne City house on the market, loaded the motorhome for its last trip, and landed in Carlsbad, California, one of our favorite cities discovered on our journey. It was there that Betsy began work as a managing editor and Mark went into the technology industry. Our children thrived.
The household that once ran a 50-foot cord into a 7-Eleven backroom to send the day’s mail now talks on platforms that eavesdrop on what we say.
A decade passed, and the publisher Betsy worked for went under. Cloud computing came for the company Mark worked for, and then for the storage business he started. In 2009, we lost our Carlsbad house.
Getting from Carlsbad to a city on the Portuguese coast took 10 more years and three continents worth of seeking. But that isn’t this story.
Today, the children are grown and our family is scattered across four countries. The household that once ran a 50-foot cord into a 7-Eleven backroom to send the day’s mail now talks on platforms that eavesdrop on what we say.
Our children’s dispatches still live where they filed them, and how they perceive the trip is not a question we have to ask in 2026. We see it in them. In their curiosity, courage, and adaptability that can partly be traced back to Cleveland. The older, wise man at the campground had predicted correctly. It has indeed become a part of each of us.
Recently, we went looking for who still visits the site. The statistics page is a dead link; it has outlived the instrument that measured it.
We both still write, and Betsy still edits, from a town on the Portuguese coast—a domain renewed annually, hosting billed monthly, a newsletter on a platform that takes its percentage. Every function we had for free in 1996, now itemized. The North Central Michigan College server had hosted our website and asked for nothing.
While the early web afforded us online advantages, the real-world experiences and connections we enjoyed would not have been possible without the human kindness and generosity we found along the way. Both human and online access made our adventure possible.
Our story is a record of an internet that no longer exists: the one with human editors, not algorithms, discovering and surfacing content worth seeing. The one that offered real access and possibility, resulting in a federal agency highlighting our work and an editor at a major publishing house discovering our project. The one that connected us to a host family for our dog and motorhome in rural Washington, no strings attached. That internet—serendipitous, kind, free, and open—is gone.
Nine months, 25,000 miles, 40 states. Three kids who were there for all of it. A golden retriever who died years later in Carlsbad. A motorhome that is long gone.
And a website that is, in the most literal sense, still on its way to Cleveland.
Mark and Betsy Blondin are living and writing in Vila do Conde, Portugal, currently at work on a memoir of the thirty years that followed Assignment America. Betsy is a longtime writer and editor at WordMetro.com who compiled and published Migraine Expressions: A Creative Journey Through Life with Migraine. Together, they published At Home Abroad: Today’s Expats Tell Their Stories. Mark’s work has appeared in The Humanist, and he writes at markblondin.com and Material Witness.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
Está a pensar ir comer fora? Veja aqui algumas sugestões de menus a preços económicos.
Se tem um restaurante e pretende colocar aqui – de forma gratuita – o seu menu, envio-o no dia anterior ou, no máximo, até às 10h00 do dia a que se refere para: guiaalgarve@gmail.com.
Leia as notícias do Algarve aqui
Estrada de Alvor, 1A. Contacto telefónico: 282 475 256. Email: restauranteportacerta@gmail.com
Aberto de 2ª a 6ª feira das 08h30 às 20h30
Avenida João Paulo II, L2. Contacto: 282 074 993. Email: reservas@oquintoimperio.com
Aberto de 2ª feira a sábado, das 12h00 às 14h30 e das 19h00 às 22h00
Rua do Viveiro. Contacto: 282 485 715. Email: rest.otenis.ezequiel@gmail.com
Aberto de terça a sábado, das 12h00 às 15h00 (almoço); das 15h00 às 17h00 (petiscos/snacks) e das 19h00 às 22h00 (jantar) e ao domingo, das 12h00 às 15h00
R. Poe. António Aleixo, Portimão
Aberto de 2ª a 6ª feira das 07h30 às 19h00
Urbanização Vila Rosa Lote 12, Portimão. Contacto telefónico: 917 332 182
Aberto de 2ª a 6ª feira das 08h30 às 20h30
Rua da Raminha, Lote 19, Loja A, Portimão
Contacto: 282 482 522
Rua Projectada À Rua Caldeira Do Moinho Edif. Abicada, Lj. 6, Portimão
Aberto de 2ª a 6ª feira, das 12h00 às 15h00
Leia as notícias do Algarve aqui
Sítio do Arão, EM 539, Sítio do Arão, Odiáxere, Lagos. Contacto: 910 799 846
Aberto de terça-feira a sábado, das 10h00 às 22h00, e ao domingo, das 12h00 às 15h00
R. Dr. José Reis Junior, Lagos. Contacto: 919 567 554
Aberto de segunda a sábado. Almoços e jantares
Rua da Liberdade 58, R/c, fração A, Lagoa. Contacto: 916 535 840
Aberto de 2ª a 6ª feira, para almoços, das 11h30 às 15h30. O serviço de take-away funciona das 11h30 às 17h00
Estrada Velha, Monchique. Contacto: 282 913 022
Aberto de 2ª a 6ª feira, das 07h30 às 19h30
Torre e Cercas de Silves. Contactos: 967 677 848 e 282 115 692
Aberto de 2ªa 6ª, das 11h00 às 21h00
Rua Dr. Ataíde de Oliveira 45 Rés de Chão, 8365-069 Algoz. Contacto: 916 745 631
Av. Beira Mar 1, Armação de Pêra, Portugal, 8365-101. Contacto: 965 791 084. E-mail: cantinhodadora@gmail.com
Aberto de 2ª a sábado, das 7h00 às 22h30
Rua D. João II, Armação de Pêra. Contacto: 282 315 533
Aberto de terça-feira a domingo, das 10h00 às 15h00 e das 18h00 às 23h00
Rua João de Deus, Lj. 1, Pêra (Traseiras do Mercado Municipal de Pêra)
Aberto das 11h30 às 14h30 e das 18h30 às 21h30, de segunda a sexta-feira
Leia as notícias do Algarve aqui
Rua da Nora, Quarteira (em frente ao Intermarché). Contacto: 968 557 477
Aberto de 2ª a domingo, das 12h00 às 15h00
Rua Francisco Guerreiro Mealha, Almancil. Contactos: 289 391 273 e 264 787 362
Aberto de segunda a sexta-feira, das 11h00 às 15h00
Rua Coronel António Santos Fonseca, 20, Faro. Contacto: 289 862 800
Aberto de segunda-feira a sábado, das 07h30 às 22h00
Rua Dr. João José de Mendonça Cortez, nº 2, Olhão. Contactos: 965 121 030 e 289 723 095
Aberto de segunda a sexta, das 11h30 às 18h00, e ao sábado, das 11h30 às 15h00
Sítio do Lamaceiro 253A, Olhão. Contacto: 289 101 750
Avenida Doutor Mateus Teixeira de Azevedo, Tavira. Contacto: 281 326 279/915 313 009. E-mail: casadaavo2020@outlook.pt
Aberto de 2ª a sábado, das 12h00 às 21h00
Across Europe, officials are issuing unprecedented warnings about a sharp escalation in Russian aggression and an even larger one that could soon come. As a result, they are scrambling to protect against the rapidly evolving threat Russia poses.
The dire messaging, growing louder by the day, is being delivered amid concerns about intensifying hybrid attacks that Russia is using to spread fear throughout the continent, fray the NATO alliance, and make it think twice about continuing support for Ukraine. Intel has increasingly pointed to the possibility that this could culminate in a much more severe operation, one that would be aimed to challenge NATO at its core.
All this is taking place against the backdrop of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine that shows no signs of abating. Kyiv just launched its largest drone attack on Moscow, which is burning on a near nightly basis amid ongoing strikes while Ukraine has introduced a new ballistic missile to its long-range arsenal. Russia for its part continues to try to advance on the ground in the east and south as it carries out daily airstrikes across Ukraine.
Our long-range responses had a very significant impact in the Moscow region last night. One of Russia’s key oil industry facilities and the aggressor’s logistics facility were hit. These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine. The systems used included FP-1, RZ-100,… pic.twitter.com/ka5mlDSgb7
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) September 20, 2026
“There has definitely been an uptick” in Russian so-called hybrid warfare actions of late, a senior NATO military official told TWZ on Monday morning. “Despite its accusatory statements towards NATO, which remains a purely defensive alliance, Russia remains the aggressor. We see that clearly in Ukraine, where Russia is losing more than just the war it started. It therefore may incorrectly perceive the only way out is through increasing its hybrid campaign. That’s a losing proposition, because we are ready to respond, which we have shown.”
The official’s comments come after the shoot down last week of a suspected Russian drone that entered Lithuanian airspace from Belarus and in the wake of recent defensive actions by several European nations.
On Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters that his country had recently been targeted by Russian hybrid attacks. He ordered “the government to prepare a plan to protect our critical infrastructure” and the “most sensitive” defense industry and technology sites against drone and cyberattacks.”
Macron said the “intention behind it is to intimidate us and to derail the effort to support the Ukrainians. The consequence will be the opposite.”
In addition to Macron’s warnings, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that the French military was carrying out clandestine operations against Russia. However, the unnamed source cited offered no details and TWZ cannot independently verify that claim.
A day before Macron’s statements, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned in a speech to the Polish parliament that Russia is planning hybrid strikes with drones or rockets on European countries supporting Ukraine, including Poland.
The Polish leader offered an assessment about Moscow’s motives similar to Macron’s.
Russia will pretend the attacks are “accidental” in order to “paralyze or at least weaken the motivation of NATO countries” to rush to the defense of the member state coming under attack, The Associated Press noted.
“There is a real risk that drones or other types of projectiles will enter the territory of one or several countries on the eastern flank and even cause destruction,” Tusk cautioned. In July, a Russian AS-23 cruise missile crashed in Poland.
In the face of these growing threats, officials in Lithuania are updating evacuation plans in case of a Russian attack.
“Poland is to be one of the evacuation destinations from the capital,” Žygimantas Solovjovas, head of the Civil Defense Department at Vilnius City Hall, told Polish Radio.
Evacuation should begin before a direct threat arises, Solovjovas stressed. “Vilnius residents should not assume that they will flee the city along an evacuation route while under fire,” Solovjovas explained, adding that in such a situation, one must seek shelter.
“One of the reasons for preparing this plan was to get residents accustomed to the idea that this should be a controlled process,” he noted. “If we allow chaos to ensue, the entire operation will be much more difficult.”
In Germany, where Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said Russia could attack by 2029, hospitals are preparing for a future influx of war-related casualties.
“In a report that gamed out potential scenarios should Russia invade NATO territory, the Bundeswehr calculated that as many as 1,000 wounded soldiers could arrive in Germany each day,” Bloomberg News reported last week. “As the country’s five military hospitals would quickly reach capacity — and the law requires that civilian hospitals help during wartime — the system would likely come under unprecedented strain, and could be forced to triage soldier and civilian care.”
As we noted last week, the alliance writ large is taking action against the growing Russian threats as well.
NATO’s air commander, U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jason T. Hinds, told reporters, including from TWZ, last week that he was tasked with implementing two NATO air and missile defense plans. Hinds is also the Air Force’s top officer in Europe, serving as the commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe/U.S. Air Forces Africa (USAFE).
Adding to the concerns about Moscow’s actions, Russia’s client state Belarus just wrapped up mechanized and tank battalion training adjacent to the Suwalki Gap. That’s the border between Poland and Lithuania that separates the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad from Belarus. It has long been considered a potential flashpoint for a war in Europe and the training exercise exacerbated concerns that NATO allies are not prepared for a Russian attack there.
Russia is also making some potentially concerning preparations.
The Defense Ministry is reportedly seeking “an additional 16,000 to 20,000 hospital beds for wounded soldiers in the Northwestern Federal District,” according to the Russian Volya Telegram channel. That district is located near the Baltics.
“Military hospitals have been struggling to cope with the influx of wounded since 2023, so the Ministry of Defense is increasingly using civilian hospitals (including maternity hospitals and specialized medical facilities) for its needs,” Volya stated. “Some of these hospitals are being completely repurposed for military use, but more often, civilian hospitals allocate a few departments to treat the wounded, while continuing to provide care for civilian patients in other departments.”
The expansion “will primarily affect regions within the Northwestern Federal District: Karelia, St. Petersburg, Leningrad and Novgorod regions, as well as Smolensk,” which are near the Baltics “and the Moscow regions.”
While Russia is framing this as a way to handle the influx of wounded from the ongoing conflict, Ukrainian analysts see this as a move to prepare for an expansion of hostilities into Europe.
— MAKS 26
In addition, the Border Service Directorate for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region announced that from September 16 to September 26, 2026, there would be a restriction on access to the border of the Slantsevsky and Kingiseppsky districts near the Estonian border.
“These measures aim to prevent violations regarding border regulations, migration laws, and the protection of aquatic biological resources,” the directorate claimed, according to Russian regional officials.
The new rules prohibit people from being on the shorelines or in small vessels along a portion of the Narva River and from hunting or carrying firearms in the border area. In addition, they forbid the “presence and movement of individuals and vehicles during hours of darkness outside of populated areas within the five-kilometer strip of territory along the state border in the Kingiseppsky and Slantsevsky districts.”
Obviously, the stated reasoning behind this was taken with great skepticism from neighboring Baltic NATO countries who are already on edge.
Russia's FSB imposes a nighttime curfew along the Estonian border near Narva, banning people and vehicles outside towns and villages within 5 km of the border in the Slantsy and Kingisepp districts from Sept 16–26 pic.twitter.com/8Ez8AvMXFy
— Faytuks Network (@FaytuksNetwork) September 20, 2026
Though Russia remains bogged down in its war on Ukraine and is suffering heavy losses of personnel and equipment, some European intelligence officials suggest Vladimir Putin could still carry out a small-scale invasion of NATO territory.
“It’s possible,” Michal Koudelka, the head of the Czech Republic’s BIS security service, told The Guardian about a potential Russian thrust into NATO. “It could involve a limited incursion, false-flag provocations, a massive influence campaign,” he told the publication, adding that this scenario could play out in a matter of “months, not years.”
While Russia has been carrying out a range of hybrid actions against Europe for years, including cyberattacks, drone incursions and sabotage, last month’s foiled attack on Germany’s Leipzig-Halle airport is seen in European intelligence circles as an inflection point.
As we previously reported, a drone discovered inside the secured area of Leipzig/Halle Airport during the night of August 4-5, was carrying approximately 1.3 pounds of explosives. It was found close to a Ukrainian-operated Antonov An-124 heavy cargo aircraft used to transport weapons to Ukraine. German authorities blamed Russia for that incident.
“To have an armed UAV drone sent into a busy airport in the middle of Europe … If you have attacks that could result in losses of life or losses of very critical infrastructure that have a huge implication for society, I think that is a gamechanger,” Thomas Nilsson, the head of Sweden’s military intelligence and security service, told The Guardian.
It is unknown at this point whether Putin will decide to expand his hybrid actions against Europe to a more traditional conflict. However, as the attacks increase, officials across the continent are committing greater resources and planning to be prepared should that happen.
At the same time, the heat is only being turned up on Moscow as Ukraine accelerates its long range attacks. Now it has a whole new weapon, one that has been long in the works, to reach into Russian territory with while bypassing most air defenses.
Zelensky has officially unveiled the FP-7 Pelican ballistic missile and said it was used in the attack on Moscow. This is a monumental advance for Ukraine that has lacked modern ballistic missile capabilities since the war started. Still, Ukrainian media has raised doubts about whether the FP-7 — with an estimated operational range of 200-350 kilometers (124-217 miles) — can reach the Russian capital, which is about 450-500 kilometers (280-311 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
However, one expert suggested “that the ballistic weapon may have played an integral role within a coordinated, multi-axis combined strike,” according to the Kyiv Post.
Regardless, even if it can’t hit Moscow, it can hit plenty of other targets and it represents a major escalation in Ukraine’s weapons capabilities.
Ukrainian President Zelensky said that during an attack on Moscow, Ukraine used its Pelican FP-7 ballistic missile for the first time. pic.twitter.com/KqM9bqk9ur
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 20, 2026
There is no avoiding the reality that the security situation in Europe is deteriorating, where exactly that leads is unclear apparently to everyone at the moment.
UPDATE: 7:04 PM Eastern –
Airspace restrictions have been imposed over Vilnius Airport due to a suspected “hybrid attack” from Belarus after the detection of what is suspected to be balloons in Lithuanian airspace, airport officials announced.
The restrictions were imposed from 11:45 p.m. local time on September 21 to 02:45 a.m. on September 22, the airport announced on its Facebook page.
“Aircraft arrivals are temporarily suspended; however, departures are permitted from 12:55 a.m. subject to all safety requirements,” the airport explained. “These restrictions were introduced due to a hybrid attack by Belarus against Lithuania, civil aviation, and the public, involving the detection of navigational markers—characteristic of balloons—in areas posing risks to aviation.”
Belarus launched balloons toward the Vilnius Airport area, in what Lithuanian authorities are describing as a hybrid attack. pic.twitter.com/U7Etg3xn5o
— GMI (@Global_Mil_Info) September 21, 2026
Contact the author: howard@twz.com
The post Alarm Bells Ring Across Europe As Security Situation With Russia Deteriorates At Accelerating Pace appeared first on TWZ.
On September 8, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon, a few months into a job at Anthropic (a leading US AI company) after three years at OpenAI, announced his resignation on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Within a day, the post had been read more than 100 million times. Four days later, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” declaring that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” or risk “losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.” Within hours, Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed, Elon Musk posted “Dario is right,” and Google and Microsoft fell into line.
Coxon was interviewed by Time, Axios, and NBC within two days, and Amodei’s essay was front-page news across the business press. Compare that with what happens to people who expose the harms AI is causing right now. Warnings about AI-generated fraud, model bias including racist bias, about chatbots and vulnerable users, about surveillance and AI’s use in military kill chains and the genocide in Gaza, get a news cycle at best. A warning about a hypothetical machine superintelligence got a global media event and a policy proposal from the industry’s leadership within four days.
AI systems do need regulating. The question is why the men who spent a decade racing towards what they now call an existential threat discovered their conscience on the same weekend, and what kind of regulation they are actually asking for.
Stripped of its language of alignment and catastrophe, Dario Amodei’s essay is a list of demands. First, outside “evaluators” from bodies such as METR, a lab that tests AI models, would be given “company badges, desks, and laptops” inside the big labs. Second, the leading companies “within democratic countries” would jointly set safety standards and limits on how fast they build, for which Amodei asks the US government for “a narrow waiver” from antitrust law. Third, models crossing certain capability thresholds would have to carry “certifications” of good behavior, and limits on the computing power used to train them are put on the table. Fourth, the United States must “not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.” Amodei is candid about the goal: done well, these measures “would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly.”
The words “open source” do not appear in the essay. They do not need to. AI models come in two kinds. Closed models, like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, run only on the company’s own servers and users pay for access. Open-weight models, like China’s DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, and Qwen, are published as files that anyone can download, run on their own machines and modify. A certificate that must travel with a model cannot be attached to a file that anyone may copy. A ceiling on computing power freezes the ranking of the firms that already occupy the frontier. An antitrust waiver lets the five largest companies write rules for everyone else. The effect is a licensing regime only the incumbents can satisfy; the technology publication The Register called it regulatory capture with a nicer name.
The essay’s centerpiece is what Amodei calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident of July. In plain terms: OpenAI was testing its AI “agents,” programs that can act on their own, on a set of hacking puzzles. Roughly a third of the puzzles were impossible, driving the agents to look for ways to cheat the marking. The agents were supposed to be sealed off from each other without access to the internet. In practice, they weren’t, and through that loophole they found their way into a second test environment that was connected to the open internet. From there, one of them found login credentials that OpenAI staff had left exposed online, used them to break into Hugging Face, a website where AI models are shared, and rummaged through private files to work out how their answers were being marked. Amodei describes this as “a swarm of agents” acting as “a fanatically devoted collective” that, with more capability, “could have caused catastrophic damage.”
The people whose job is computer security reached a different conclusion. The investigation by METR, the very body Amodei wants embedded in every lab, found that sandboxes meant to isolate the AI agents were not, that the credentials should never have been exposed, and that OpenAI’s security team had noticed the agents misbehaving days earlier and done nothing. One practitioner quoted by IANS Research summed it up: “many failures and lack of controls that could have prevented this from happening in the first place.” Any bank that ran untested software with live internet access and exposed passwords would be found negligent. Routine containment, of the kind every serious IT department practices, would have stopped it.
Calling a security lapse a “fanatically devoted collective” is not analysis. It is anthropomorphizing, dressing an operational failure in the language of science fiction. And it is useful. A company whose product is being marketed as near-superintelligence that must be restrained for humanity’s sake has a far better story for investors than a company that left its passwords on the internet. The doom narrative and the hype narrative are part of the same cycle. Both say: this technology is so powerful that you cannot afford to be without it, and only we can be trusted with it.
The timing becomes clear once one looks at the money. The five big American technology companies are budgeted to spend close to $690 billion this year on data centers and chips, and borrowing now funds 32% of that spending, up from 9% two years ago. On the very day Amodei’s essay appeared, Altman announced that OpenAI’s stock market listing, which bankers had been preparing at valuations of up to $1 trillion, would not happen in 2026 because it was “an ill-advised moment,” citing safety. The next day, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic’s much-advertised profit margin of “above 80%” is calculated before two of its largest costs: the cost of creating its models and the revenue it shares with Amazon, its main distributor.
Meanwhile, the competition has arrived, and it is nearly free. On OpenRouter, a widely used exchange through which software developers send requests to AI models, Chinese open-weight models now handle 58% of the traffic from American firms; a year ago American models held 70%. DeepSeek and Qwen charge 60 to 90% less than Anthropic and OpenAI. A firm that cannot win on price, cannot fund its next model from earnings and cannot yet sell shares to the public has one option left: change the rules.
The Trump administration has so far refused. The president’s response was that “whoever wins AI, wins,” and his AI adviser David Sacks called the whole affair a “doomer psyop” aimed at open-source models. This is not a defense of the public interest. It is arithmetic. According to ING, spending on AI equipment, software and data centers accounted for roughly a third of all US economic growth in the second quarter of this year; on the broadest measure, half. The rest of the economy is being squeezed by the war on Iran: petrol prices have risen 53% since it began, consumer inflation reached 4.2% in May, and energy costs are up 23.5% on the year. Take the data-center boom out, and the United States is close to recession. Washington cannot allow the frontier to be paced because the frontier is the only thing still growing.
China’s official response was brief. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest,” said foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun on September 14. A more revealing reply came from inside DeepSeek, where Shengyu Liu, a kernel software engineer, published a widely circulated essay arguing that the safest path is to keep frontier AI open and cheap rather than concentrated in any single company, American or Chinese. As AI develops, he wrote, society “may be pulled toward one of two extremes: communism or Cyberpunk 2077.” In the first, “productive capacity is liberated on an enormous scale, and people’s standard of living rises substantially.” In the second, “a handful of technology companies control most of society’s resources”; a tiny number of people have access to the most advanced AI, “while most people are left with only weak, second-rate AI.”
That is the real choice, and it is a choice about ownership, not about speed. Real regulation would hold companies liable for the harm done by the software they run, including inside their own labs, and would treat running powerful agents without containment as the negligence it is. It would cost the labs money, which is why it is not in Amodei’s essay. What is in the essay is a request to be made gatekeepers of a technology built on borrowed money that its owners now fear they cannot sell.
The frontier does not need pacing. It needs owners who can be held to account, and a public that is not frightened into paying monopoly prices for AI services by the very people who build it.
Bappa Sinha is a veteran technologist interested in the impact of technology on society and politics.
Login