Modi told the room in Delhi this weekend that they should be “rule-shapers, not rule-takers.” Good line, delivered to an audience worth actually looking at: China and India, who had soldiers swinging clubs and rocks at each other on a disputed border as recently as 2020. Iran and the UAE, on opposite ends of missiles fired this summer during an active war. Russia, dragging half the group’s oil trade behind it like a trailer hitch. This is what a bloc looks like when the thing holding it together is resentment of the dollar rather than any actual agreement about what comes next: a seating chart engineered so old wounds don’t bump into each other on the way to lunch. A room full of countries who’d rather not depend on Washington is still a room, and that’s not nothing. But “rule-shapers” implies consensus on what the rules should be, and half this table is one border incident away from needing a mediator of its own.

Quieter, and running two years behind: Russian families are still trying to get an honest count of who never came home from Ukraine’s 2024 incursion into Kursk. Officially, a few hundred are still missing. Nobody, apparently including the Kremlin, is confident that’s the real number. A country can lose track of its own soldiers without any chaos at all, just a standing incentive never to quite finish the count. The families keep asking; the lists keep not adding up. Delhi got the group photo and the framing this week. The actual arithmetic of a war, who’s missing, who’s been found, is still sitting in a drawer nobody’s opened since 2024.

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