Author: Maciej Dachowski, Ewa Polak

On 1 September 2026 Bishkek hosted seventeen heads of state and government at the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the twenty-sixth in its history, convened on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the organisation’s founding [1]. The host, Kyrgyzstan, which had just ended its year-long chairmanship, had a few weeks earlier been elected a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for 2027 and 2028, while in the same election Germany lost the seat reserved for the Western group [2]. Yet this is not the only platform on which this Central Asian state is active today, because in 2024 it signed an enhanced partnership and cooperation agreement with the European Union, and a year later it was one of the beneficiaries of the financial commitments announced at the Samarkand summit. A country that chairs the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, enters the UN Security Council and deepens its partnership with the European Union is therefore not choosing any of these platforms at the expense of the others, but using each of them in parallel, at the very moment when one of Europe’s largest states is dropping out of one of them.

This picture says more about the world than many a communiqué. The West has grown used to judging the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation by its weaknesses, namely internal rivalries, the absence of shared interests and the rarity of concrete decisions, and to concluding from this that it is not dangerous. That view overlooks the most important thing. The real strength of this organisation is not a community of goals, which is often lacking, but the ability to hold within one structure states that are in conflict with one another elsewhere. And it is growing at the very moment when the West is quietly dismantling its own order. The point is therefore not that the Global South is building a single order against the West. It is a world in which more and more states have learnt to use several orders at once, while the West itself weakens the one it was until recently the chief guarantor of.

Without a Community

The best proof of this binding force is India and Pakistan. Two nuclear-armed states that have fought three wars and still exchange fire along the line of control in Kashmir have been full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation since 2017, and as early as 2018, during the Peace Mission exercises in Chebarkul, military personnel of both countries took part in the same drill [3]. It was the first time since the two states gained independence in 1947 that their soldiers had found themselves at joint manoeuvres [4]. Three years later, at the Peace Mission 2021 exercises in Russia, this was repeated among eight members. No Western structure can seat contingents of these two armies side by side. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation can.

A similar mechanism operates between the organisation’s two pillars. China and Russia compete for influence in Central Asia, which Moscow still regards as its own backyard and which Beijing is quietly taking over economically, since Chinese trade with the organisation’s member states exceeded five hundred billion dollars in 2024 [5]. Despite this rivalry, both capitals coordinate their positions on the most important global matters within the organisation and jointly build a language of a multipolar world. This is not an alliance in the Western sense, with hard commitments and common defence, but a platform on which rivals can coexist, not because something unites them, but because nothing has to unite them beyond agreement that no one from outside should impose common rules on them.

This flexibility, however, serves different ends depending on who is using the platform. At the level of China and Russia, the two permanent members of the Security Council and the chief architects of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, we are dealing with the deliberate construction of an alternative architecture meant in time to compete with the Western order institutionally and normatively. At the level of medium-sized and smaller states, such as Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, something else is happening, namely multi-vectorism, in which membership of the organisation is only one of several courses pursued in parallel, alongside partnership with the European Union or contacts with the United States and Turkey. These states are not building their own order in opposition to the West, but maximising their autonomy by using every available platform at once. The strength of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation therefore lies not in the Global South collectively choosing its order instead of the Western one, but in the ability of its two leaders to use this multi-vectorism of the periphery as building material for their own alternative, without demanding exclusive loyalty from anyone. This difference has to be stated plainly, because otherwise it is easy to confuse the strategy of Beijing and Moscow with the strategy of Bishkek or Tashkent.

This is precisely the advantage the West underrates. Its own alliances rest on a community of values and interests, so they weaken when that community begins to fail, as the tensions within the North Atlantic Alliance and the European Union show well. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation needs neither, because its binding agent is participation itself and a shared conviction that the rules should not be set by the West. It is held together by the so-called Shanghai spirit, namely the principle of mutual respect, non-interference in internal affairs and not requiring anyone to become like the others. That is why even deep conflicts between its members do not lead to the organisation’s collapse. Paradoxically, the absence of a requirement of political cohesion may be one of the sources of its resilience.

That the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation can hold quarrelling states within one structure does not make it a better alternative to the international order, but a different one, and more dangerous for states whose security rests on the rule of law, predictable rules and accountability for breaking them, rather than on the mere ability of great powers to coexist at their neighbours’ expense. The organisation’s strength comes precisely from the absence of what for Poland is a fundamental value, namely accountability for how a strong state treats a weaker neighbour, because here the principle of non-interference protects not the sovereignty of the weaker but the impunity of the stronger. Poland needs a world in which there are rules constraining stronger states, namely the inviolability of borders, the prohibition of aggression and accountability for breaking the law. The model of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, by contrast, places greater weight on sovereignty and non-interference, understood as an absence of accountability. If this way of thinking becomes more attractive to more states, political support diminishes for enforcing the rules that for Poland are of existential importance.

Cooperation Without Conditions

The same thing that binds the organisation makes it attractive to the Global South, namely the absence of conditions. It does not rest on the principles the West regards as universal, namely the Charter of the United Nations read through the prism of human rights, democracy and the rule of law, but places alongside them the assumption that cooperation must not be encumbered with any requirements concerning a state’s political system. For a state that does not want anyone judging its way of governing, this is an offer hard to refuse, and that regardless of whether it wants, like Beijing, to build an alternative, or only, like the capitals of Central Asia, to widen its own room for manoeuvre.

The scale of this pull is best seen in the numbers and in the queue of applicants. There are ten full members today, namely the six founders of 2001, that is China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, joined by India and Pakistan in 2017, Iran in 2023 and Belarus in 2024. Mongolia and Afghanistan hold observer status, and more than a dozen states are dialogue partners, among them Turkey, the Gulf states, namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, as well as Egypt, Azerbaijan, Armenia and further countries of Asia. Together the organisation covers more than forty per cent of the world’s population and close to a quarter of the world’s output [6]. More importantly, the queue is growing. Among those seeking full membership are Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Alliance, and Myanmar, while further countries, from Azerbaijan and Armenia to Cambodia and Sri Lanka, are seeking to move up the organisation’s hierarchy. To the summit in Bishkek itself came guests from places as distant as Togo and Vietnam, and the organisation’s family, counting members, observers and partners, now comprises twenty-seven states, which shows that its gravitational pull reaches far beyond Eurasia.

This is best seen in plans to create the organisation’s own financial instruments. At the Tianjin summit in 2025 the interested member states took a political decision to establish a development bank of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which would finance, among other things, infrastructure and joint development projects [7]. The bank does not yet exist, but the project has already entered the phase of concrete negotiations over its structure and rules of operation.

The significance of this initiative goes beyond merely creating another source of capital. Its political appeal lies in the possibility of building a model of financing different from the institutions dominated by the West. The International Monetary Fund ties its programmes to conditions concerning, among other things, economic reforms, governance, transparency and the fight against corruption. The projected SCO bank, by contrast, is presented as an element of the organisation’s own financial architecture, less dependent on Western institutions and their rules. Hence the slogan that has appeared around the project, of financing without lectures on democracy. For now, however, this is a political promise rather than the bank’s operative lending policy.

The Bishkek summit likewise did not formally settle its establishment. The leaders agreed to speed up further consultations on the founding document, leaving the project at the stage of negotiation [8].

While the SCO bank remains for now a project, the parallel economic infrastructure in the region is already taking shape. The flagship example is the railway of more than five hundred kilometres linking China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, worth about 4.7 billion dollars and built after decades of talks and delays, in which a Chinese company holds fifty-one per cent of the shares and half the cost is covered by a thirty-five-year Chinese loan [9]. Financing began only recently, earthworks and tunnelling are at an early stage, and the line is planned to open around the turn of the decade. The day before the summit Xi Jinping personally visited the construction site, calling for high-quality delivery, a gesture that says more about the project’s political weight than about its progress. It is meant to be a new artery linking Asia with Europe, an order built literally, in concrete and rails, and not only in declarations.

The Chinese railway is not, however, the only route being built in the region. In parallel the Middle Corridor is taking shape, a route from China to Europe through Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus and Turkey, bypassing Russia, financed and promoted by the European Union and Western development banks, the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Asian Development Bank, precisely as an alternative to routes controlled by Moscow and Beijing [10]. The states of Central Asia lie along both these corridors and use both. Multi-vectorism is therefore visible not only in politics but in the infrastructure itself, because through the same region two orders run in parallel, one built with Beijing’s money, the other with the West’s.

It looks different where a Western alternative is practically absent. For Iran, cut off from a large part of Western markets by sanctions, the organisation is an economic window onto Asia. China remains the main buyer of Iranian oil, showing that the alternative order is not confined to political declarations. It also creates real economic ties that allow states under Western restrictions to reduce their effectiveness and to function increasingly independently of the West.

The same message is carried by the Global Governance Initiative, announced by China in Tianjin, a proposal to reshape the rules of global governance in a way that limits the West’s hitherto dominant role in defining them [11]. Beijing presents it deftly as a strengthening of the United Nations system rather than an attempt to undermine it, but the direction is clear. It is about an order in which sovereignty and the principle of non-interference are to weigh more than the norms promoted by the West concerning the exercise of power or the protection of the individual. In such a model the scope of what the international community may treat as its own business becomes considerably narrower. For Poland this is not an abstract dispute about global governance, but the undermining of part of the rules of the international order on which medium-sized and smaller states rest their security.

The European Offer

The same Central Asia that draws on Chinese credit to develop its railway infrastructure has in parallel opened a second channel of financing, this time with the European Union. In April 2025, still before the Tianjin summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the first summit of the European Union with five states of the region was held in Samarkand at the level of leaders. It was the fruit of several years of rapprochement between the Union and Central Asia, which had begun before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine but clearly accelerated after 2022. Relations were formally raised to the rank of a strategic partnership, and the Union declared twelve billion euros under Global Gateway [12]. Three of the region’s five states now have enhanced partnership and cooperation agreements with the Union, Kazakhstan since 2020, Kyrgyzstan since 2024 and Uzbekistan since 2025.

The essence of the Union’s offer is not the size of the declared sums, but the character of the cooperation, which does not build long-term structural dependence but gives access to the market, institutional quality and partnership free of clientelist relations. For the region’s capitals, aware of the risk of dependence on Chinese supply chains or the Russian security umbrella, a proposal based on transparent rules and free of geopolitical coercion may be a real alternative rather than merely a declared one. Whether it remains so will be decided largely by the choices around the Multiannual Financial Framework for 2028 to 2034, namely whether the Union maintains the scale of engagement from Samarkand or lets a one-off impulse expire with the current budget perspective.

The states of Central Asia are therefore not choosing between the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the European Union, but deliberately pursuing a policy in which both offers are played off against each other to maximise their own autonomy and bargaining power. Medium-sized and small states reconcile within a single foreign policy formats that the West still treats as mutually exclusive blocs.

The West Dismantles Its Own Order

The change does not, however, stem solely from the growing attractiveness of alternative centres and the ability of states such as Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan to use several of them at once. In parallel, the West’s own determination to sustain the institutions of the order it co-created for decades is weakening. This is most visible in the policy of the United States. During Donald Trump’s second term the United States left the UN Human Rights Council, permanently ended funding for the agency for Palestinian refugees, quit UNESCO, formally withdrew from the World Health Organisation and from the Paris agreement, and in early 2026 pulled out of further institutions, including the Peacebuilding Commission and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development [13]. On top of this it moved to selective payment of its dues, a method the administration itself calls an à la carte approach. The crisis of the order based on UN institutions is therefore not solely the result of pressure from states that want to change it. It is also weakened by the withdrawal of one of its chief creators.

The most telling fact, however, is that the United States, the largest contributor to the UN, responsible for twenty-two per cent of the budget, did not pay its dues in full, whereas the other four permanent members of the Security Council, including China and Russia, paid in full, and Beijing alone put up more than six hundred and eighty-five million dollars [14]. The states we have been used to seeing as undermining the international order are today financing it, while its creator refuses to pay. It is hard to find a clearer sign of who is leaving this order and who is settling into it. This is not, moreover, only an American story. Europe, and Germany in particular, believed for a generation in Wandel durch Handel, change through trade, in the conviction that economic entanglement would remake Russia and China in the Western mould. The opposite happened, because that entanglement strengthened precisely the powers now building an alternative order. That Germany, once the largest European trading partner of those powers, recently failed to keep a seat on the Security Council is separate testimony to the weakness of the West itself.

Poland knows this mechanism from its own experience. In 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it was Poland that chaired the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the largest regional security organisation on the continent [15]. Russia, while remaining a member, turned against it the very rules on which the organisation had been built. The consensus requirement allowed Moscow to block the budget, missions and decisions, limiting the OSCE’s ability to act at the very moment when the European security system faced its gravest crisis in decades. Russia did not have to leave the organisation. It proved more effective to stay in it and block it from within. The same problem, on an even larger scale, is visible today in the UN Security Council, where a state that breaks the rules of the system retains at the same time the tools to paralyse its response.

A Second Address, Not an Exit

It would, however, be a mistake to see in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation a cohesive bloc. India boycotts exercises held in Pakistan, the border dispute between China and India remains unresolved, and the large Peace Mission manoeuvres have all but ceased since Russia’s assault on Ukraine. The organisation itself avoids bilateral disputes, which is why it also did not take up the latest round of the India-Pakistan conflict. At the Bishkek summit Narendra Modi and Shehbaz Sharif openly quarrelled over terrorism and double standards, and yet both states signed the joint declaration. It is therefore not an alliance capable of joint military action, but a platform that endures despite deep divisions and still attracts new participants.

Nor is it true that the Global South is abandoning the UN in favour of its own structures. Rather it is adding further ones, using several orders at once. This was visible at the Bishkek summit, attended by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, part of which was devoted to strengthening the central role of the United Nations and international law. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation itself has held observer status at the General Assembly since 2004, and in 2023 a resolution on cooperation between the UN and the SCO was adopted, opposed only by the United States and Israel [16]. Russian authors, too, have for years presented the SCO’s ever deeper embedding in the United Nations system as a success [17].

Here, however, the most important paradox appears. China and Russia, the two chief architects of the SCO, are at the same time permanent members of the UN Security Council with the right of veto. They are therefore not building an alternative order outside the existing system. They are doing it from within, retaining full influence in its most important institution while developing their own formats of cooperation in parallel. They are not leaving the UN, but increasing the number of institutions in which they can pursue their own interests.

This does not mean, however, that the West is a party doomed to lose, but that it has lost the monopoly it took for granted for decades. Where it offers something more than conditionality, namely access to the market, institutional quality and partnership that does not build structural dependence, it remains an attractive choice, as shown by the European Union’s summit with the states of Central Asia in Samarkand or by the fact that for Kazakhstan it is still the Union, not China, that remains its first trading partner [18]. The question is therefore whether the West will remain a partner important enough in this portfolio to weigh genuinely on the region’s decisions, or will become in it an option of second choice.

The best proof of this is the Bishkek Declaration itself. In it the leaders condemned the strikes on Iran, carried out by the United States and Israel, as a violation of the principles of international law and the Charter of the United Nations, expressed condolences on the death of Iran’s supreme leader, backed Tehran’s right to a peaceful nuclear programme under the non-proliferation treaty, and opposed unilateral coercive measures, namely Western sanctions, as contrary to the rules of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation [19]. An ostensibly anti-Western organisation thus reached for the language of the UN Charter in order to condemn the West, which shows that it is not building an alternative outside the international order, but appropriating its language and turning it against its creators. For Poland this is more dangerous than an open rejection of that order, because it undermines it from within, in its own terms.

Conclusions for Poland

The significance of these new ties is not abstract for Poland. One of the main overland trade routes between China and Europe runs through Małaszewicze. In September 2025 Poland closed the border crossings with Belarus in connection with Russian-Belarusian manoeuvres and security threats, thereby halting the movement of Chinese trains [20]. This case showed two things. First, part of the new Eurasian economic links runs through Poland, which gives Warsaw greater significance than the role of a passive observer of the changes taking place in Asia would suggest. Second, the same infrastructure creates a dependence between trade and security, because a decision taken for military reasons can immediately strike the economic flows between China and Europe. Małaszewicze is therefore not only a terminal on the map of the New Silk Road, but one of the places where Poland comes into direct contact with the rebuilding of global ties.

And here lies the difference that has to be stated plainly. Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan can play several orders at once, because it is precisely in this balancing that they find the source of their own security. No great power guarantees them durable rules, and excessive dependence on any one of them would itself become a source of risk. Kazakhstan condemned Russia’s assault on Ukraine and itself fears a similar scenario, but has no alliance behind it that would guarantee its security. It must therefore manoeuvre between stronger players and use its relations with each of them to strengthen its own position.

Poland is in the opposite situation. Its security rests not on balancing between competing centres of influence, but on the durability of Western institutions and commitments, above all NATO and the European Union, and more broadly the order based on international law. Poland cannot offset a weakening of these rules by a turn towards another order, because that would mean undermining the foundations of its own security. That is why it does not need a spare anchor beyond the West. Its room for manoeuvre is narrower than that of the Central Asian states not because it has fewer opportunities to conduct a multi-vector policy, but because it has far more to lose from the erosion of the system to which it belongs.

A narrower room for manoeuvre does not, however, mean passivity or a withdrawal from presence. Since more and more states do not want to belong to a single order, Poland must learn to act in a world in which others manoeuvre between several systems at once. In practice this means conducting its own, systematic policy towards the Global South, and not only towards the West, as well as seeking channels of dialogue with those members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation that are not Russia. The point is not to join this structure or to change alliances, but not to cede this whole field to Moscow, and to ensure that in the dispute over the interpretation of Russian aggression, which is being settled today in the General Assembly and in forums such as this organisation, Poland is present at all.

From this follows a concrete conclusion for Poland. The threat is not the emergence of a single alternative order that would replace the Western one. More likely is a world in which several competing systems of rules, institutions and economic ties function side by side, and more and more states choose among them according to their own interest. For Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan such plurality widens their room for manoeuvre. For Poland it means the opposite, because it diminishes the weight of the rules and institutions on which its security rests. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation therefore matters not because it can replace NATO, the European Union or the United Nations system. Rather it shows that for a growing part of the world the West is no longer the only point of reference.

Notes

[1] Summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Bishkek, 1 September 2026, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the organisation’s founding, under the chairmanship of Kyrgyzstan.

[2] “Kyrgyzstan wins seat on UN Security Council for first time ever”, UN News, 3 June 2026, https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167636; “Five New Countries Elected to the UN Security Council’s 2027-28 Term”, PassBlue, 3 June 2026, https://passblue.com/2026/06/03/five-new-countries-elected-to-the-un-security-councils-2027-28-term/.

[3] “Indian, Pakistani troops take part in SCO military drill for first time”, Gulf News, August 2018, https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/indian-pakistani-troops-take-part-in-sco-military-drill-for-first-time-1.2269799.

[4] “SCO can de-escalate India-Pakistan tensions”, Observer Research Foundation, https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/sco-de-escalate-india-pakistan-tensions-48661.

[5] “Why the SCO Reset Matters for India, China, and the Global South”, CounterPunch, 11 September 2025, https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/11/why-the-sco-reset-matters-for-india-china-and-the-global-south/.

[6] “General information”, The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, https://eng.sectsco.org; “SCO summit 2025: a showcase of how far the bloc has come”, South China Morning Post, 2 September 2025.

[7] “How an SCO development bank could shift the global financial order”, South China Morning Post, 4 September 2025, https://www.scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3324123/how-sco-development-bank-could-shift-global-financial-order; “SCO 2025: A curtain raised on the changing world order”, Pakistan Observer, 9 September 2025, https://pakobserver.net/sco-2025-a-curtain-raised-on-the-changing-world-order/.

[8] Bishkek Declaration, 1 September 2026, economic and trade provisions; “SCO slams attacks, sanctions on Iran. Key takeaways from Bishkek summit”, Al Jazeera, 1 September 2026; “SCO condemns strikes on Iran, backs Palestine settlement, opposes unilateral sanctions”, ANI via The Tribune, 2 September 2026.

[9] “Kyrgyzstan Hosts SCO Summit as Bloc Marks 25 Years”, The Times of Central Asia, August 2026, https://timesca.com/kyrgyzstan-hosts-sco-summit-as-bloc-marks-25-years/; “SCO Bishkek Summit 2026 and India as a Valuable Stakeholder”, Centre for Peace Studies, August 2026, https://www.icpsnet.org/comments/sco-bishkek-summit-2026-and-india-valuable-stakeholder.

[10] “EU Readies New Trade Routes and a Challenge to Beijing and Moscow”, RFE/RL, 2025, https://www.rferl.org/a/eu-china-central-asia-caucasus-russia-middle-corridor-global-gateway/33562604.html; “Brussels Opens New Chapter in Europe-Central Asia Connectivity”, News Central Asia, 26 June 2026, https://www.newscentralasia.net/2026/06/26/brussels-opens-new-chapter-in-europe-central-asia-connectivity/.

[11] “Xi launches Global Governance Initiative at SCO Summit in Tianjin”, Helsinki Times, 10 September 2025, https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int/27885-xi-launches-global-governance-initiative-at-sco-summit-in-tianjin.html.

[12] “Joint press release following the first EU-Central Asia summit”, European Council, 4 April 2025, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025/04/04/joint-press-release-following-the-first-eu-central-asia-summit/.

[13] “Trump withdraws U.S. from dozens of international and UN entities”, CNBC, 8 January 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/08/trump-withdraws-us-from-dozens-of-international-organizations-white-house-says.html.

[14] “UN chief says the U.S. has ‘legal obligation’ to fund agencies after Trump’s withdrawal order”, PBS News, January 2026, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/un-chief-says-the-u-s-has-legal-obligation-to-fund-agencies-after-trumps-withdrawal-order.

[15] Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Poland’s chairmanship in 2022, https://www.osce.org.

[16] United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, “Shanghai Cooperation Organization”, https://dppa.un.org/en/shanghai-cooperation-organization; United Nations General Assembly resolution on cooperation with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, 2023.

[17] S. Bokeriya, “The Interconnection of Global and Regional Security Systems: the Case of the United Nations, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation”, International Organisations Research Journal, vol. 14, no. 1 (2019), Russian source.

[18] European Commission, Directorate-General for Trade, “Kazakhstan”, https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-country-and-region/countries-and-regions/kazakhstan_en; European External Action Service, “The European Union and Kazakhstan”.

[19] Bishkek Declaration, 1 September 2026, position on Iran, without naming the United States and Israel; “SCO slams attacks, sanctions on Iran”, Al Jazeera, 1 September 2026; “With Xi, Putin, and Modi in attendance, SCO condemns US economic warfare”, Breakthrough News, 1 September 2026; “India on board, SCO reiterates condemnation of Iran attacks”, 2 September 2026.

[20] “Poland border closure choking China-EU rail trade”, Asia Times, September 2025, https://asiatimes.com/2025/09/poland-border-closure-choking-china-eu-rail-trade/; RailFreight.com and South China Morning Post, September 2025.