The thousands of North Korean troops US intelligence says arrived in Russia for training this month have sparked concern they will be deployed to bolster Moscow’s battlefront in Ukraine.

They’ve also turned up alarm from the United States and its allies that growing coordination between anti-West countries is creating a much broader, urgent security threat – one where partnerships of convenience are evolving into more outright military ties.

Hundreds of Iranian drones have also been part of Moscow’s onslaught on Ukraine, and last month the US said Tehran had sent the warring country short-range ballistic missiles as well.

China, meanwhile, has been accused of powering Russia’s war machine with substantial amounts of “dual use” goods like microelectronics and machine tools, which can be used to make weapons. Last week, the US for the first time penalized two Chinese firms for supplying complete weapons systems. All three countries have denied they are providing such support.

Taking stock of the emerging cooperation, a Congress-backed group that evaluates US defense strategy dubbed Russia, China, Iran and North Korea this summer an “axis of growing malign partnerships.”

The fear is that a shared animosity toward the US is increasingly driving these countries to work together – amplifying the threat that any one of them alone poses to Washington or its allies, not just in one region but perhaps in multiple parts of the world at the same time.

“If (North Korea) is a co-belligerent, their intention is to participate in this war on Russia’s behalf, that is a very, very serious issue, and it will have impacts not only on in Europe — it will also impact things in the Indo Pacific as well,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday in the first US confirmation of North Korean troops in Russia.

‘Driven by survival strategy’

Decades after the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan and the strident anti-West coalition of the Cold War era – and years since George W. Bush’s dubbed US enemies Iran, Iraq and North Korea an “axis of evil” – there’s a perception that a new, dangerous alignment is on the rise, with Putin’s war as its catalyst.

Such an alignment would bring together two long-time nuclear-armed powers, a state believed to have assembled a host of illegal nuclear warheads in North Korea, and Iran, which the US says could likely assembly such a weapon in a matter of weeks.

North Korea’s military partnership with Russia now links the grinding, hot conflict in Europe to an especially tense period in the cold conflict on the Korean Peninsula, as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has elevated his threats toward the South, with which it remains technically at war.

Following the intelligence on the North Korean deployment to Russia, South Korea said it could consider supplying weapons to Ukraine, where the US ally has yet to directly provide arms.

For North Korea, where leader Kim has called to ramp up his country’s illicit nuclear weapons program, there’s been little to lose in sending what’s believed to be millions of rounds of artillery, short-range ballistic missiles and, more recently, troops to Russia.

In exchange, cash-strapped and internationally isolated Pyongyang has likely received food and other necessities – and potentially support developing its space capacities, which could also help its sanctioned missile program.

The importance of drone warfare in Ukraine has also seen Russia look to Iran for procurement – deepening a security alignment that dates to 2015 and the war in Syria, when both backed the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

And for Tehran – weighted by hefty Western sanctions and embroiled in the expanding Middle Eastern conflict with US-backed Israel – supplying Russia weapons is thought to potentially boost its defense sector, while its ties with Beijing and Moscow provide it with diplomatic cover.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who declared a “no limits” partnership with Putin weeks before his invasion, has claimed neutrality in the conflict and has largely steered Chinese firms away from supplying direct lethal aid.

Yet it has filled wide gaps in Russian demand of other goods, including products deemed by the US and others to be dual use, and benefited from Russia’s discounted energy. Beijing defends its “normal trade” with Russia. China has also continued to expand joint military drills and diplomatic ties with a country it sees a key partner in pushing back against the West in international fora.

But even as these four countries have their own motivations to cooperate with one another individually, especially within the context of Russia’s war, clear limits exist in any broader coordination, mutual trust, and even interest in working together – at least for now, observers say.

“This is a set of bilateral relationships driven by each country’s survival strategy, or what’s on the menu for geopolitics and what’s the crisis of the day or the decade that they are dealing with,” said Alex Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

“These are authoritative regimes … and they all see the US as a common adversary. That’s the glue that keeps them together, but whether we can talk about a degree of coordination (between all four) … I think we are very far from that,” he said.

That makes the pressing question whether these current alignments can endure beyond the war in Ukraine and evolve into outright coordination between all four nations.

The China factor

A key factor in how any further alignment develops is China, observers say – by far the most powerful player in the grouping, the lead trade partner for Russia, North Korea and Iran, and the nation viewed by the US as its primary adversary.

As its divisions with Washington have deepened, Beijing has ramped up efforts to challenge US global leadership and shape an international order into one that favors China and other autocracies.

Russia’s role in that effort was on show this week in its southwestern city of Kazan, where Xi and Putin hailed their commitment to building a “fairer” world on the sidelines of a summit of the BRICS group whose membership they’d jointly worked to grow this year.

The two have brought Iran into that diplomatic fold and also largely sided with Tehran in the conflict in the Middle East, where its proxies are fighting Israel. China, Russia and Iran have also held four joint naval drills since 2019, and China is by far Iran’s largest energy buyer.

At the same time, heavily sanctioned Iran is no longer the “favorite state for China’s Middle East policy” as Beijing builds relations with wealthier Gulf countries, according to Jean-Loup Samaan, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

Beijing also carefully manages its relationship with North Korea – which is almost wholly economically and diplomatically dependent on China. Chinese leaders are widely seen as being wary of the burgeoning Kim-Putin alignment and the potential for an empowered North Korea to cause trouble and draw more US focus to the region.

When asked about the movement of North Korean troops into Russia at a regular press briefing Thursday, China’s foreign ministry said it “does not have information on that.”

While it practices its own aggressive behavior in the South China Sea and toward Taiwan, the democratic island Beijing claims, China may not want to appear to lean too hard into these partnerships and hinder efforts to portray itself as a responsible, global leader.

“Russia, North Korea, Iran is the type of grouping that China least wants to openly associate itself with,” said Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

China has been “desperate to clarify that it is not a trilateral alliance with Russia and North Korea,” and it also “has more options than these countries … and prefers working with larger number of countries” to compete with the West, he said.

‘A real risk’

Viewed from the West, however, China’s refusal to cut off economic lifelines to a UN sanctions-defiant North Korea and a Russia that has threatened the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine is often seen as an open endorsement of these regimes.

In July, the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, an independent group tasked by Congress with evaluating US defense strategy, said China and Russia’s partnership had “deepened and broadened” to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea.

“This new alignment of nations opposed to US interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multi-theater or global war,” it said.

China has repeatedly insisted that its relationship with Russia is one of “non-alliance, non-confrontation and not targeting any third party.”

NATO has also in recent years moved to ramp up relations with US allies and partners in the Asia-Pacific, with a meeting of defense ministers last week joined for the first time by Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

In the short term, Russia’s weapons partnerships also open the door for Iran and North Korea to potentially obtain and produce Moscow’s sensitive weapons technologies and even ship them around the world, according to Carnegie’s Zhao.

The current dynamics also raise the risk that future conflicts – including one where China is at the center and not Russia – see coordination between the four, some analysts assess.

For example, in a potential conflict in the South China Sea or over Taiwan, there is debate over whether Beijing would want to see North Korea or Russia play a role in creating a distraction in North Asia.

But some experts also warn against seeing this “axis” or such a future as a foregone conclusion – as these relationships remain opportunistic, rather than based on deep ideological alignment or trust.

For one, it’s possible that “some more moderate behavior” could be incentivized on the part of China, which could dial down this potential, according to Sydney Seiler, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But as the optics stand today – “the risk is sufficiently present” that the US could face a future conflagration involves multiple of these countries, he said.

Tropical Cyclone Dana made landfall along the northern coast of Odisha state as the equivalent of a tropical storm in the Atlantic basin with winds of 110 kilometers per hour (70 mph), according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC). The storm was located about 250 kilometers (155 miles) southwest of Kolkata, moving north-northwest at 12 kph (8 mph), as of 9 a.m. local time (11:30 p.m. ET).

Dana brought rainfall between 50-150 millimeters (2-6 inches) across Odisha and West Bengal state, with the highest total of 160 mm (6.2 inches) reported in the town of Chandbali. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.

Ahead of landfall, authorities evacuated hundreds of thousands of people, shut schools and canceled trains and flights in parts of the country. The India Meteorological Department (India MET) issued its highest red rainfall warning for parts of Odisha and West Bengal.

Odisha’s Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi told the Press Trust of India news agency before the storm’s landfall that around 300,000 people had been evacuated from vulnerable areas, adding that three districts were likely to be severely affected.

Authorities planned to evacuate more than 1 million people from 14 districts. Several teams of aid and rescue workers have also been deployed to the state, which is prone to severe cyclones and storms.

“The government is fully prepared to tackle the situation. You are in safe hands,” Majhi said.

India’s eastern coasts have long been prone to cyclones, but the number of intense storms is increasing along the country’s coast. Last year was India’s deadliest cyclone season in recent years, killing 523 people and costing an estimated $2.5 billion in damage.

Dana is forecast to weaken as it drifts west through Odisha, bringing moderate to isolated heavy rainfall along its path over the weekend.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press.

At the Joseph Stalin Museum in Gori, the small Georgian town where the Soviet dictator was born, a line of guides is waiting to tell you the story of the local boy who made it big.

They can list the birthdays of Stalin’s family and recite the poems he wrote as a schoolboy (for Stalin “could have been a poet, but chose to be a great leader”). But on other things, they are less exact. Of the millions killed in the gulag, “mistakes were made.” Of show trials, they have little to say.

So revered is Stalin by some that when the government thought it time to remove his towering statue in 2010, they did so unannounced at night, lest locals protest. But while some older voters in rural towns like Gori might harbor fond memories of life under communism and pine for a Soviet past, they seemed set to be swept away by younger generations who have grown up knowing nothing but democracy, and who are happy to see Stalin consigned to history’s dustbin.

Now, as the Caucasus nation counts down to its October 26 parliamentary election, the specter of authoritarianism looms large once again.

Many observers fear the ruling Georgian Dream party will resort to anything to stay in power. It has buried the liberal values it espoused when it took office 12 years ago and effectively torpedoed Georgia’s bid to join the European Union. Its founder, the secretive oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has threatened to imprison his political rivals after the election and ban the main opposition party.

After spending years in the shadows, Ivanishvili – who made his billions in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and served as Georgia’s prime minister from 2012 to 2013 – returned late last year as the party’s honorary chairman and has since given a string of conspiracy-tinged speeches. He claims Georgia is being controlled by a foreign “pseudo-elite” and that the opposition belongs to a “Global War Party” bent on dragging the country into conflict with Russia. This year, Georgian Dream pushed through a Kremlin-style “foreign agent” law, which critics say aims to shut down watchdogs who call the government to account.

For many, Ivanishvili’s rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of the past from which many Georgians are keen to escape. And the anti-Western posturing of Georgian Dream, along with the country’s controversial foreign agent law, directly mirrors President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on domestic political opposition in neighboring Russia.

In a speech last month in Gori, Ivanishvili also broke a taboo in Georgian society. He said Georgia should apologize for the 2008 war with Russia, for which many Georgians blame Moscow. Russia fought the five-day war in support of pro-Kremlin separatists in Georgia’s South Ossetia region, just north of Gori. Combined with Abkhazia, another breakaway region, Russia today de facto occupies 20% of Georgia’s territory.

Ivanishvili said apologizing to Russia would help preserve “12 years of uninterrupted peace” the country has enjoyed under Georgian Dream’s leadership, which he warned the opposition could jeopardize. The message has some appeal to his rural base but sparked a political firestorm.

Mikheil Saakashvili, who was Georgia’s president during the war but has been imprisoned since 2021 for abuse of power while in office, called the comments a “betrayal.”

Younger, more pro-European Georgians were also outraged. Their earliest memories are not of easier lives under communism, but of Russian tanks rolling into Gori and towards the capital, Tbilisi. Walking out of the Stalin Museum – past his personal railway carriage, past the hut in which he was born – it is easy to find buildings still scarred with bullet holes from the 2008 war. Many buildings still lie in ruins, while Stalin Avenue has been kept pristine.

For these Georgians, Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 rekindled memories of Russian aggression in their own country. They want nothing more than for Georgia to slip from the Kremlin’s orbit and continue its march toward a European future.

But many fear the government is now heading in the opposite direction, and that Georgia could be on the cusp of returning to the one-party rule from which it escaped a generation ago.

At a press conference in Tbilisi on Thursday, Georgia’s President Salome Zourabichvili – a pro-Western but largely ceremonial figure who has urged Georgians to vote against the government – said she “rules out any outcome other than a victory for the pro-European forces,” citing polls which routinely show that only around a third of the public support Georgian Dream.

‘Soviet mentality’

A question puzzling many is why the formerly center-left Georgian Dream has made a sudden authoritarian pivot.

The party’s origin was unusual. It takes its name from a rap song by Ivanishvili’s son, Bera. Although some suspected Ivanishvili – whose net worth is equivalent to about a quarter of the country’s GDP – might pursue a pro-Russian path, during his brief premiership he tacked close to Europe and even promised eventual NATO membership.

“A modern civil society has been a cherished goal of the Georgian people since we regained our independence 20 years ago,” Ivanishvili wrote in an email to then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012, subsequently leaked. “Unfortunately, old habits are hard to overcome.”

Having abandoned its liberal origins, Sabanadze said, the party is now “clearly copying” the model of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest this year, Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze praised Orban as a “role model,” parroting his claims to defend “homeland, language and faith.” The government has also passed legislation curbing LGBTQ+ rights.

But now it is poised to go much further. Ivanishvili has promised a “Nuremberg trial” against members of the opposition, who have been subject to increasing persecution. During street protests in Tbilisi against the foreign agent law, Levan Khabeishvili – chair of the pro-Western United National Movement (UNM) – said he was brutally beaten by police. He appeared the next day in parliament, his face blackened and swollen.

The Georgian government did not respond to a request for comment.

Preparing for the worst

A consequence of Russia’s war in Ukraine was the EU’s decision to offer Georgia candidate status. Brussels, keen to stem Russia’s influence in former Soviet countries, put Georgia – along with Ukraine and Moldova – on an accelerated path to membership.

Many say this was despite Georgian Dream, rather than because of it. During protests against the “foreign agent” law, the images of citizens waving EU flags being buffeted back by water cannons put pressure on Brussels to reward the Georgian people, of whom more than 80% support EU membership, polls show.

Whether Ivanishvili wanted candidate status is not clear. Joining the EU would require cleaning up the country’s judiciary and giving up power if Georgian Dream is voted out on Saturday. His opponents doubt he is willing to do this.

Under the country’s new proportional voting system, Khabeishvili of the UNM says Georgia’s fragmented opposition will have no trouble forming a coalition after the election. But he fears that Ivanishvili will seek to cling to power after an election loss.

If this happens, he predicts huge protests in Tbilisi and throughout the country. Here, things could get ugly. Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said in August that Georgia’s Western allies are plotting a coup to remove Georgian Dream from power. He warned Russia will be on standby to prevent this.

For Sabanadze, the stakes could not be higher: How Georgians vote on Saturday, and how the government responds, will determine whether the country remains on a path to Europe or becomes more like Belarus.

“When I was in Brussels, I thought that Georgia would never become an authoritarian state again, because it’s just something that we find very difficult to accept,” she said. “Georgians will put up a fight. The Belarus scenario will not happen easily.”

Britain’s King Charles has said the Commonwealth should acknowledge its “painful” history and urged the organization to “right inequalities that endure” as he opened a meeting of Commonwealth countries in Samoa on Friday.

“I understand from listening to people across the Commonwealth how the most painful aspects of our past continue to resonate. It is vital therefore that we understand our history, to guide us to make the right choices in the future,” Charles said in his first speech as head of the Commonwealth.

“As we look around the world and consider its many deeply concerning challenges, let us choose within our Commonwealth family the language of community and respect, and reject the language of division,” he said in the speech after the subject of slavery reparations reemerged in recent days.

Charles, who did not directly refer to slavery during his address, also said: “None of us can change the past, but we can commit with all our hearts to learning its lessons and to finding creative ways to right inequalities that endure.”

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, or CHOGM, is held every two years, and brings together delegations from the 56 member states to work together to try and tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues such as climate change, creating opportunities for young people and fostering inclusive and sustainable prosperity for all.

Charles was addressing Commonwealth leaders, foreign ministers and dignitaries during the welcome ceremony on Friday.

Ahead of the gathering, the BBC reported that diplomats were preparing text for the summit’s official communique that would commit to a “meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation” on the issue.

In recent years, the British monarchy has adopted a more conciliatory tone when addressing the past horrors of transatlantic slavery. In Kenya last November, his first trip to a Commonwealth nation as head of the body, Charles said, the “wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.