Corporate

As of 18 October 2026. Governments are pulling companies deeper into their conflicts, as tools, as targets and as suppliers they cannot drop at once. On 12 October EU ministers added 1,569 people and entities in Russia's military and industrial complex to the sanctions list, the largest single expansion since the war began. Washington moved the other way on 9 October and exempted Russian diesel already loaded from its sanctions until April 2027. In October Brussels and Beijing reached an understanding on hybrid cars, reported as an annual quota of 350,000 made in China.

Firms are also targets. In September Donald Tusk called a fire at a Polish drone factory arson, and Estonia blamed Russian security services for an arson attack on a defence company in Tallinn. Supply sets the next marker: Beijing's one-year pause on its widened export controls for rare earths is due to end on 10 November.

Ownership draws firms in: a storage site, a rail yard, a network, an app. A contract signed for profit becomes a security matter once a state reads it that way, and the reading can turn. Gazprom was a partner for German energy policy in 2015 and a risk to Germany’s winter by 2022, and in April 2022 its German arm was placed under trusteeship. In Russia the same messenger is a public service to the state and surveillance to its rival. Max, built into official life by a presidential decree of June 2025, stays on the short list of services that still load when mobile internet is cut. WhatsApp, blocked in February 2026, called it “a state-owned surveillance app”.

Firms close to a state carry its purpose. The energy rents of Gazprom and Rosneft pay for the security services, the internet regulator and state broadcasting, DURCHD8’s Russia study argues. The EU names two companies, the Social Design Agency and Struktura, as the operators of the Doppelgänger campaign that copies European newspapers. Defence firms gain from the same contest that makes them targets: under SAFE, 89 per cent of Poland’s 43.7 billion euros is to go to Polish defence firms and their suppliers. A firm’s weight is whatever a state cannot replace in time.

Governments pay for a late reading. Storage left low by its owner can set the terms of a winter, as Germany found before the war began. Firms risk being read as the arm of a state: listed, blocked or attacked. Drivers meet the contest at the pump and in the showroom, where American diesel cost a record in September and one in four hybrids sold in Europe in August was Chinese. Small traders carry it too. In May 2024 a fire at the Marywilska shopping centre in Warsaw destroyed some 1,400 businesses, and DURCHD8's Poland study lists it among the sabotage organised from Russia.

How early can a government tell that a supplier it depends on has begun to act for another state?

Across DURCHD8’s dossiers firms turn up as tools, partners and targets of states. In the China dossier Chinese carmakers took about 12 per cent of Europe’s new-car sales in August, and the EU answers with duties and a planned quota. In the Poland dossier the rail yards at Małaszewicze carry most of the rail freight between China and the EU and the surface supply for Ukraine, and in July China became Poland’s largest source of imports. The EU lends member states 150 billion euros for arms through SAFE and lists the firms of Russia’s arms industry. The Russia pages show state champions and platforms that meet the regulator’s terms or lose the market. By April Apple was still removing VPN apps from its Russian store almost every month at the regulator’s demand.

States set the terms in each case, from a quota to a ban.

DURCHD8 reads companies where a state’s purpose or its exposure runs through them. Poland: Two States, One Republic maps the Chinese side of Poland’s exposure sector by sector. It runs from Huawei in the 4G network and Nuctech scanners at Rzeszów to the Hutchison terminal in Gdynia, battery makers that depend on Chinese inputs and the rail yards at Małaszewicze, and it shows where the SAFE money goes. Russia’s Information Domain as a Governed Power Function follows the energy money of Gazprom and Rosneft into the institutions that govern Russia’s information space, and it sets Russia beside Iran, whose network runs on Chinese hardware from ZTE, Huawei and Hikvision. Zeitenende: Macht ohne Bedeutung ist bedeutungslos dates the break in Germany’s energy bond to the supplier’s side, in the empty storage of the winter of 2021 and 2022. European Defence Autonomy: A Capable Answer, Wrong Layer finds that Europe’s industrial plan needs powers over member states that the Union lacks.

Each finding names a firm, a contract or a site, and each can be followed there.