Welcome to Foreign Policy’s SitRep, on-the-road edition! Bringing you a special SitRep feature at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of world leaders and defense experts with conference-goers such as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi, and more than 60 defense and foreign ministers.

We’ll be reporting on the ground from Munich (since our cheapskate editors wouldn’t pay to have us report from the air in our FP-branded fleet of high-tech spy balloons). Stay tuned for a weekend of news, insidery scoops and nuggets, and interviews from the conference.

If you’re here with us in Munich, drop us a line at robbie.gramer@foreignpolicy.com and jack.detsch@foreignpolicy.com—we’d love to chat or meet up. If you’re following from afar, reach out for questions and ideas you’d like us to cover!

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Security elites gather in Munich as a grim one-year milestone in Ukraine approaches, the race to become NATO’s next secretary-general heats up, and the West tries to chip away at Russia’s lead in the global south.

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“His country is virtually surrounded by Russian troops.”

A year ago almost to the day, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was in Munich giving that warning as Moscow amassed tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s border. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in tow, urging the West for more military assistance and sanctions if, indeed, Russia was about to invade.

Cut scene to a year later, and world leaders are back in Munich (sans Zelensky), still reeling from perhaps the bloodiest single year in Europe since the end of World War II.

A tale of two crises. As foreign dignitaries and defense officials gather by the hundreds for the Munich Security Conference (MSC) again this year, they face big questions over whether the West has the mettle (and resources) to keep supporting Ukraine for what could devolve into a lengthy, drawn-out war of attrition, all while grappling with a bigger long-term challenge in the east with China lurching into the role as the West’s next great superpower rival.

For some top officials, the two threats aren’t separate.

“The war in Ukraine matters also for [Asia] because if Russian President [Vladimir] Putin wins, that will send the clear message to all the leaders also in Asia and in Beijing that when they use military force, they achieve their goals,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told SitRep in an interview before the conference.

“Beijing is watching closely what happens in Ukraine, and the outcome of that … will impact their decisions, their calculations on what to do in their neighborhood,” he said.

Why it matters. At the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in downtown Munich, we’ll be watching closely what these world leaders say and do over the next four days in a flurry of nonstop meetings, panels, and speeches.

Unlike some other big global conferences, MSC isn’t all about surface-level glitz and glamor or bland corporate-sponsored side events. There’s actual news to be had and policies to be made here.

In 2007, Putin gave a seminal speech at MSC warning of unchecked U.S. global power and threats from NATO expansion that, in hindsight, offered the grimmest foreshadowing of what the world saw in Ukraine this past year.

In 2011, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov exchanged ratification documents at MSC for New START—the only major nuclear arms treaty between Washington and Moscow that remains in place today (even if it seems to be hanging by a thread).

In 2017, then-U.S. Vice President Mike Pence used the conference to try to reassure rattled foreign counterparts that, despite President Donald Trump’s bashing of U.S. allies, the United States was still all in on NATO.

So what comes this year? We’re covering it all.

Keynote speeches. Harris is slated to give a keynote speech on U.S. support for Ukraine and European security on Saturday. Other keynote speakers and panelists include Stoltenberg; China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi; and EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell.

It’s all about the bilats. “Bilats” is one of those weird terms everyone in government uses ubiquitously for a private meeting between officials, even though the word “meeting” is way simpler and clearer. But the point is that the real show at Munich happens offstage and at the bilats.

Which lawmakers meet with which defense minister, what’s said behind closed doors, and does one foreign minister snub another? All that can give interesting insights into how foreign policy is being played out in real time in Munich.

There are so many behind-the-scenes bilats at MSC that the organizers have a team coordinating dozens upon dozens of the meetings throughout the conference and a slew of rooms available in three separate buildings, including the main Hotel Bayerischer Hof, the Palais Montgelas, and the HypoVereinsbank—close by and alongside the conference’s tightly held security perimeter.

Logistics nightmare. Then there’s the question of whether all the speakers can actually make it to the conference on time. A German trade union has announced strikes at multiple airports around the country, including in Munich, that will start on Friday, just in time for the start of the conference. Buckle up, everyone.

World Bank chief David Malpass is leaving his job in June, nearly a year before his term was slated to end, he told staff in an emailed resignation letter this week that was obtained by SitRep.

U.S. President Joe Biden has tapped five new ambassador picks: Mike Sfraga to serve as ambassador-at-large for Arctic affairs; Robin Dunnigan—currently the State Department’s top hand for Central and Eastern Europe—to be U.S. ambassador to Georgia; Heather Catherine Variava to serve as U.S. ambassador to Laos; Lisa Johnson to be the next U.S. ambassador to Lebanon; and Nicole Shampaine as U.S. representative to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. All except Sfraga are career foreign service officers.

U.S. National Cyber Director Chris Inglis has announced his immediate resignation.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Next NATO SecGen. It’s the big question on everyone’s minds at MSC: Who will replace Stoltenberg as the next NATO secretary-general? Stoltenberg has been in the job since 2014, and officials in Brussels tell SitRep that he plans to finally call it quits when his term ends in October.

We’ve been asking defense officials and diplomats for weeks, and two things are clear: First, no one really knows who will replace him. And second, it’s really, really, complicated.

Here’s what we’ve gleaned: The Brits are pushing for their defense secretary, Ben Wallace, but the French will probably quietly oppose that. Eastern European countries are pushing for one of their own, such as Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, but some Western European officials may push back on someone seen as too provocative or hawkish on Russia.

The Americans, particularly some top Biden officials at the State Department, are pushing for Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, but some member states may balk at that because she comes from a country that doesn’t meet NATO’s benchmark of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. The same criticism goes for another possible contender, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

All the while, the European Union is busy sorting out how to fill out top EU commissioner jobs, which may take some possible NATO secretary-general contenders out of the race. Many want NATO to get with the times and finally appoint a first-ever female secretary-general. The list of final contenders is still in flux.

Some diplomats have thrown up their hands at this brewing diplomatic headache and floated the idea of Stoltenberg extending his term again, but Stoltenberg’s team has said that won’t happen.

One thing everyone can agree on: They want a candidate by the time NATO holds its next major summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July. Good luck with that, guys.

The global south. Western powers have had to eat a bit of humble pie over the past year when powers across Asia, Latin America, and Africa balked at plans to support international sanctions against Russia in response to the war in Ukraine. It was a wake-up call for policymakers in Washington, Brussels, Paris, and elsewhere in the West that they couldn’t treat powers in the global south as they did during the Cold War.

A case in point: As MSC begins, Russian warships are docking off the coast of South Africa, ready to conduct joint military drills with South Africa and China that coincides with the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine—despite massive efforts by Western powers to get South Africa to alienate Moscow.

By our count, there are more than a dozen African and Latin American heads of state and government or top ministers coming to MSC this year (though the final tally could be in flux). The big question is whether they will be given the type of access, face time, and stage time as their Western counterparts to demonstrate that Western capitals are finally serious about treating them as equals.

Who meets Wang? A lot of people are watching closely who does and doesn’t meet China’s top diplomat when he comes to MSC. Several European officials tell us that Wang is working to set up a meeting with Stoltenberg, which would be significant as the NATO chief is one of Europe’s loudest voices on the need for Western allies to get tough on China. That meeting, however, is not set in stone, and Stoltenberg’s team has not confirmed it or announced details on his schedule.

We also understand from several U.S. officials that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team is working to set up a meeting with Wang while both are here. (Blinken’s long-planned trip to Beijing this month got derailed after the whole balloon scandal.)

License and registration, please. Transcontinental travel is never fun, but it’s even less so when you get harried by customs agents. Biden’s climate envoy, former Secretary of State John Kerry, was spotted being grilled by British airport security in London’s Heathrow Airport as he transferred terminals on his way to MSC this weekend. (Fret not, Kerry fans, he made his connection.)

So long and thanks for all the grain. One of the side events at MSC this year is a big send-off party for David Beasley, the head of the U.N. World Food Program, who has had the unenviable task of scrambling the agency to deal with massive food shortages in crises around the world exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and aftershocks of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Tech giant Palantir is co-hosting a reception for Beasley on the sidelines of MSC on Friday evening that has on the attendee list heavy hitters such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other U.S. lawmakers, Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, and Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Friday, Feb. 17: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speaks on the opening day of the Munich Security Conference. Carnival in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro also begins.

Monday, Feb. 20: U.S. President Joe Biden touches down in Poland for a two-day visit.

“My fear is that by acting like military conflict with China is inevitable, you will ultimately make that reality come true. China has not made the decision to invade Taiwan, but if the United States turns all of China policy into Taiwan policy, then that will potentially affect their decision-making.”

—Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democratic lawmaker on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to Robbie and our colleague Christina Lu. We recommend you take a look at their deep dive on how everyone in Washington became a China hawk.

Fake news. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is jumping on a report by the legendarily controversial investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleging that the U.S. military and Norway conducted an attack on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline last year. (There has been no evidence to support Hersh’s claims, which come from a single unnamed source, and both the White House and CIA called the story false.)

Ice bucket challenge. Meanwhile, in the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk, where the temperature is a cool minus 1 degree Fahrenheit, hundreds of Russians are inviting hypothermia…err…showing support for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine by dousing themselves in buckets of cold water, as a supposed show of strength. What, no saunas were available?