Trump’s Scapegoating of Ukraine Is Dishonorable

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

 

One of the challenges with writing about the war in—and on—Ukraine is that so little changes.

 

I don’t mean the fighting on the ground, though even there, when viewed from a distance, it doesn’t look as though much has shifted in a long while. Russia has gained very little territory in the last year (even as it has suffered an estimated 500,000 casualties over the last 12 months). All of that to gain 0.3 percent of Ukrainian territory (and net zero gains in the last six months). Though distance can be deceiving, the fighting on the ground has actually been far more dynamic, with evolving tactics, strategies, technologies, and geopolitics.

 

What I mean about so little changing has to do with the moral considerations. Ukraine is the victim of a lawless, brutal, unprovoked invasion by a politically backward and dysfunctional would-be empire ruled by a murderous autocrat. That assessment was obvious on February 24, 2022, when the full-scale invasion was launched, and it was obvious in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea.

 

The challenge of writing about the war is that once you’ve said that, saying it again just feels repetitive. This is a bigger problem than one columnist’s selfish desire to say something new. The longer the war has dragged on, the more the war just seems like part of the status quo, the background noise of our politics. This is cruelly unfair to the Ukrainians, because what seems like the “normal” state of things is anything but. Russia targets civilians as a matter of policy. It murders old women in their beds, children in playgrounds, young couples in cafes. It does this almost daily, and it tries to do it almost hourly.

 

Which is why recent comments by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and his unofficial personal envoy, are so infuriating. “President Putin laid out his line of what he wants to achieve,” Kushner said at the Yalta European Strategy conference on September 5. “If Ukraine wanted to withdraw to that line, then obviously, you know, we have the rest of the deal set up and put together. Ukraine right now does not want to do that.”

 

Kushner further said he was, as a U.S.-backed mediator, looking for “creative solutions” to the war. He wants to downplay the importance of territory in exchange for potential economic deals that benefit everybody—including presumably the United States and, I assume, Kushner and others in the Trump orbit.

 

Put aside the grotesque suggestion that Ukrainians are the stumbling block for not wanting to give up yet more territory Russians have failed to win on the battlefield, land that countless Ukrainians have given their lives to defend. Strategically, such a concession would be close to an invitation to suicide. It would require pulling back some 45 miles and forfeiting a Ukrainian “fortress belt” of fortified cities that form the spine of their forward defenses. It would put the rest of Ukraine that much closer to Russian artillery and drones, and force the Ukrainians to defend less defensible ground.

 

Proponents of such a “deal” argue that it would be worth it for peace. But if you think Russia honors such deals, you haven’t been paying attention. And if you think the Ukrainians have reason to trust Putin, well, I don’t know what to say to you.

 

The idea that Ukraine is the stumbling block to peace suffuses this administration. Vice President J.D. Vance, who has never meaningfully changed his view that he “doesn’t really care” what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other” is evidence of that. But so is President Trump.

 

Just this week, Trump excoriated Ukraine for targeting Russia’s oil infrastructure because it’s creating problems for him. “Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing,” Trump said. “He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage of diesel.”

 

Trump—who endlessly insisted on the campaign trail that he could “end the war in Ukraine in one day”—doesn’t demand Putin stop murdering Ukrainians. He instead demands that Ukrainians not fight back in a way that inconveniences Trump amid a surge in oil prices overwhelmingly caused by the war Trump started with Iran.

 

It is victim-blaming on a geopolitical scale and utterly dishonorable.

 

Honor matters in foreign policy, regardless of what supposed foreign policy “realists” claim. Iranian honor, twisted and fanatical though it may be, is why Iran hasn’t bowed to Trump. And Ukrainian national honor is why the Ukrainians don’t want to be erased by a bullying neighbor that says they shouldn’t exist. And it should matter for America, even it doesn’t matter to the coterie of “dealmakers” who care more for profit.

 

And that is worth repeating.

The Shadow

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, August 17, 2026

 

The world is full of complexity and nuance, but sometimes you need the moral clarity of a children’s book. Of course you need to read The Federalist Papers, but save some time for The Once and Future King, Watership Down, and The Wind in the Willows.

 

I need reminders in my life. I keep a file folder with some embarrassing documents in it—worthless stock-option paperwork, an arrest report, some unpleasant legal paperwork—and that folder is labeled: “You Are Not Smart.” For a long time, I had a reminder on my phone that popped up every evening at 9 p.m.: “Don’t be Toad.” If you have read The Wind in the Willows, you know.

 

There are all sorts of great stuff in The Wind in the Willows, and, like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the story and the prose get more demanding as the book progresses. In a latter chapter, our friends Mole and Rat take on the serious task of looking for Otter’s lost son, Portly, who has gone missing. It is not the first time the little otter has wandered off, but his father is worried. The horrible specter of a child drowning falls over the bucolic scene.

 

“[T]his time it’s more serious,” said the Rat gravely. “He’s been missing for some days now, and the Otters have hunted everywhere, high and low, without finding the slightest trace. And they’ve asked every animal, too, for miles around, and no one knows anything about him. Otter’s evidently more anxious than he’ll admit. I got out of him that young Portly hasn’t learnt to swim very well yet, and I can see he’s thinking of the weir. There’s a lot of water coming down still, considering the time of the year, and the place always had a fascination for the child. And then there are—well, traps and things—you know. Otter’s not the fellow to be nervous about any son of his before it’s time. And now he is nervous. When I left, he came out with me—said he wanted some air, and talked about stretching his legs. But I could see it wasn’t that, so I drew him out and pumped him, and got it all from him at last. He was going to spend the night watching by the ford. You know the place where the old ford used to be, in by-gone days before they built the bridge?”

 

“I know it well,” said the Mole. “But why should Otter choose to watch there?”

 

“Well, it seems that it was there he gave Portly his first swimming-lesson,” continued the Rat. “From that shallow, gravelly spit near the bank. And it was there he used to teach him fishing, and there young Portly caught his first fish, of which he was so very proud. The child loved the spot, and Otter thinks that if he came wandering back from wherever he is—if he is anywhere by this time, poor little chap—he might make for the ford he was so fond of; or if he came across it he’d remember it well, and stop there and play, perhaps. So Otter goes there every night and watches—on the chance, you know, just on the chance!”

 

They were silent for a time, both thinking of the same thing—the lonely, heart-sore animal, crouched by the ford, watching and waiting, the long night through—on the chance.

 

If you want to terrify a father of four little boys, just returned from a trip to the lake, there is your passage.

 

Rat and Mole go looking for little Portly, and, happily, they find him. But they also find someone else: God—at least, God as He reveals Himself to innocent little animals.

 

[S]uddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

 

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

 

“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”

 

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love.

 

“Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”

 

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

 

Young Portly half-remembers the Friend and Helper, at least for a few minutes, and weeps inconsolably at the absence of that holy presence. Rat manages for the briefest moment to hold on to the quickly vanishing memory of what he has seen: “Some—great—animal—has been here,” he says. He later catches a snippet of a song on the wind:

 

Lest the awe should dwell

 

And turn your frolic to fret

 

You shall look on my power at the helping hour

 

But then you shall forget!

 

The Helper’s final act of charity is to be forgotten, to give the animals the grace of their innocence. The scene is, in my opinion, one of the finest passages in all of English literature.

 

I would not put Katrina Charman’s The Last Firehawk series in quite such a rarefied category, but I love those books nonetheless if only because my 4-year-old son loves them. It is bog-standard children’s fantasy literature stuff: A small owl named Tag dreams of joining the knightly ranks of the Owls of Valor, but he is told that he is too small to be a great warrior. Spoiler alert: He becomes an Owl of Valor, as indeed does his slingshot-toting squirrel sidekick, Skyla, who more than makes up in valor what she lacks in owl-ness. The villain in the first half of the series is a wicked old vulture called Thorn, who wields a terrible instrument of black magic called the Shadow, which darkens the skies, suffocates the trees and flowers, and drains the woods of their magic. Pretty straightforward stuff, but after Thorn is exiled, we are introduced to his twin brother, Claw, who walks with a limp and who is not evil like his brother but seeks the friends’ help (the heroes are almost always described as “the friends,” and that is not careless repetition) in returning home from the magical realm to which he has been exiled. Adult readers will immediately understand that Claw is, in fact, Thorn in disguise, and that his appeal to the friends for help is a ruse deployed to infiltrate the group for his own wicked purposes. But the author takes the story in an interesting direction from there: Thorn does betray the friends but, having pretended to be a friend, he has discovered what it is like to have friends and to be a friend, which ultimately leads him to repent of his wicked ways and join the good guys for real—to stop pretending to be Claw and simply become that which he had been pretending to be. “The Shadow was your only friend,” Tag says. Thorn’s answer isn’t Shakespeare, but it is a line worth remembering: “The Shadow was always there for me.”

 

Like the Ring of Power in The Lord of the Rings, the Shadow is not only a weapon—it has a will of its own. Different villains may seem to wield the Shadow, but the Shadow wields them: It is the master, not the servant. The Shadow attaches itself to those who have been hurt, to the friendless, to those who feel they have been mistreated and hard done by—because they have been mistreated and hard done by—and it promises them the means to redress their grievances and to relieve their suffering. Charman is particularly intelligent to give the story’s villains legitimate complaints and real suffering. Some villains are simply born that way—“Nothing happened to me—I happened!” Hannibal Lecter insists—but some villains are made.

 

Since I am consulting Donald Trump’s favorite psychiatrist here already, consider Dr. Lecter’s diagnosis of “Buffalo Bill,” the sexually traumatized serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs. “Look for severe childhood disturbances associated with violence. Our Billy wasn’t born a criminal, Clarice. He was made one through years of systematic abuse. Billy hates his own identity, you see, and he thinks that makes him a transsexual. But his pathology is a thousand times more savage and more terrifying.” I cannot help here but think of J.D. Vance, who has tried on a series of political skin-suits: He hates his own identity, and he thinks that makes him …  whatever it is J.D. Vance thinks he is. But his pathology is a thousand times more savage and more terrifying.

 

“The Shadow was always there for me.”

 

In Oliver Stone’s Nixon—the single best film ever made about American politics, as long as you do not take it to be a history of the Nixon administration any more than Macbeth is a history of 11^th-century Scotland—Ed Harris offers a magnificent and terrifying turn as Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt, who explains the facts of life to White House counsel John Dean:

 

John, sooner or later, sooner, I think, you’re gonna learn a lesson that's been learned by everyone who's ever gotten close to Richard Nixon. That he’s the darkness reaching out for the darkness. And eventually, it’s either you or him. Your grave’s already been dug, John.

 

First of all: If I ever find the time to put my awesome McSwain guitar to its proper use and start a doom-metal band, I’m definitely going to call it The Darkness Reaching Out for the Darkness. That is a great bit of writing. (The screenplay was a joint work of Stone and the screenwriters Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson.) And it does not take very much imagination to see Oliver Stone’s Nixon—or the real Richard M. Nixon—as another version of Thorn: hardened by privation, excluded, condescended to, lonely—and angry. The Shadow had always been there for him.

 

Winston Churchill used the Victorian euphemism “black dog” to refer to what probably would be diagnosed as depression in our time. It is a clever expression in that depression has a kind of almost literal presence, physical or almost physical, at least for some people for whom it becomes a kind of character in the story of their lives. Churchill’s “black dog” was David Foster Wallace’s “great shark of pain,” the predator that ultimately killed him. For one of his characters, depression was just … It. Wallace’s frank description of depression in Infinite Jest is unsurpassed, at least in my reading:

 

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency—sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying—are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed.

 

We think of depression as a kind of sadness, but sadness is only one possible symptom of the underlying condition, which may instead manifest as irritability or anger. One must be careful about medicalizing this stuff, of course: Some people have legitimate mental health problems that require treatment, some people are just putzes, and some people are putzes with legitimate mental health problems. Given that psychotherapy (as distinct from psychiatry) remains profoundly influenced by the fraudulent work of Sigmund Freud in spite of the field’s efforts to reform itself, it is easy to think of it as a species of pure quackery along the lines of astrology. I try to take a pragmatic view of it: There is essentially no scientific basis for chiropractic therapy, which is rooted in 19^th-century pseudoscience, but some people swear by it, and, if it works for them, I am happy for them. If the emotional version of a backrub or a brisk walk through the park is what gets you through the day and keeps you off the ledge that Wallace wrote about—

 

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. … When the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

 

—then I am all for the emotional version of a backrub.

 

But don’t kid yourselves, either: These are all analgesics, as are any number of pleasant or unpleasant addictions, social media and cable news primal-scream therapy sessions, and a whole lot of other things pretending to be something else. This is the Shadow’s world.

 

The first word I hear every morning is “Papa!” and it is my job to keep the Shadow at bay for as long as I am able, to not fail those four little boys, which is my “terror way worse than falling.” (One of those terrors, anyway. I have a list.) And as much as I may identify with the frivolous and self-regarding Toad while wishing I were more like Mole or Rat or even the reformed Claw, I have to read further into the book to find the truth. However much we would like to be chivalrous Owls of Valor with swords and gleaming armor, that is not who we are—not now, not in the final analysis, not when it really matters. Take a good look in the mirror and what you will see looking back is the one who is—Dante knew!—lost in the dark wood, who would call out to the Friend and Helper if only we had the conviction, if only we knew how.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

I do not find very many silver linings in the dark clouds, and I do not spend much time looking for them. It would be obscene to be grateful for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has been a ghastly festival of murder, torture, rape, kidnapping, thievery, and more. But it is teaching us something: Scarcity is still a reality.

 

“Scarcity is a choice,” Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson insisted in Abundance, a sentence that is not only wrong and stupid but willfully stupid. Klein may call to mind one of my father’s unlovely expressions—“I’d like to buy him for what he’s worth and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth”—but he is not stupid enough to believe what he wrote.

 

Scarcity, as we are once again learning the hard way, is a real thing. There are only so many missile interceptors in the arsenal, and if you want to invest time, labor, and capital in building new ones—let us not pretend this is just a matter of shifting around meaningless digital fiat dollars—then that time, labor, and capital cannot be used for other things. Dwight Eisenhower, who was not an economist, was a better economist than anybody advising the White House right now:

 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

 

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

 

Donald Trump likes to sneer at people reduced to “begging, like a dog.” Happily, he has sycophantic factotum J.D. Vance to do his begging for him. The Ukrainians have been targeting oil tankers at an important Russian port with drones in order to choke off the money that Moscow uses to buy missiles to fire at Ukrainian maternity wards and apartment buildings, and given the choice between seeing Ukrainian women and children massacred by Russians and paying uncomfortably high prices for gasoline, Americans will happily see dead Ukrainian women and children stacked up like firewood. From the Telegraph:

 

In a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the US vice-president warned that the attacks at Novorossiysk were disrupting oil markets and threatening American business interests in the region.

 

Ukraine had been hitting tankers carrying Kazakh crude to a terminal operated by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC).

 

Chevron and ExxonMobil, two of the biggest US energy companies, hold stakes in the CPC and in the western Kazakh oilfields that supply it, with Chevron possessing some 50 per cent of Tengiz, Kazakhstan's largest field, and Exxon 25 per cent.

 

Since the phone call on July 31, there have been no further strikes on tankers near the CPC terminal.

 

Kyiv stepped up strikes on shipping and energy infrastructure last month in an effort to choke off the revenue funding Moscow’s war machine. Its efforts knocked out as much as one fifth of CPC oil loadings in July.

 

I suppose that I am friendlier to the oil majors than the average American journalist is. I like the oil business. Our country is lucky to have the energy industry it does. (As Don Draper says, there is no need to thank them–that’s what the money’s for.) But running a global oil company puts you in business with some rotten people and rotten regimes. If you go to bed with the devil, you can’t complain if you wake up with an acute burning sensation. It is the nature of the business. I wish the Ukrainians would set fire to every tanker plying its trade at Novorossiysk. Chevron is going to be fine.

 

Oil is a fungible commodity. There is really no such thing as “Russian oil.” There is just oil. And if Ukraine takes some off the market, then that affects energy prices worldwide. The United States is blessed with abundant energy resources and has developed—often in the teeth of political opposition—an enormously sophisticated domestic industry to make the most of it. But Ukraine’s efforts to secure its national survival have cost some American shareholders a few bucks, and high gasoline prices are an inconvenience to Republicans facing a restive midterm electorate. And while Ukraine targets Russian oil processors, the Russians are targeting Ukrainian grain—and, thus, the worldwide food supply.

 

War is not cheap. But war is not the worst outcome. It may be the second-worst outcome, but the Ukrainians know what the worst outcome is.

Don’t Blame Ukraine for Munitions Shortages

By John R. Puri

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

Jim Geraghty quotes President Trump, who claims that the depleted munitions stockpiles in the news are because of past transfers to Ukraine:

 

By the way, they talk about munitions and we’re fine with munitions. You know, we’re having to do with, we’re fine. But the reason it would be lower and we’re building them like crazy, but the reason it’s low, is because [Biden] gave $300 billion worth to Ukraine.

 

Trump is mistaken. First, we did not give $300 billion in munitions to Ukraine. The United States has approved $195 billion in total aid to Ukraine since the war began. Of that amount, around $70 billion was in security assistance rather than financial assistance. Of that, only $33.3 billion was in drawdowns of existing stockpiles — of both munitions and larger weapons. (The remainder was used for purchases of newly produced systems earmarked for Ukraine.) Concurrent appropriations to replenish those stocks exceeded the value of the drawdowns.

 

Beyond the money to hard supply figures, CSIS — the think tank that has been crunching the numbers on munitions — reports that transfers to Ukraine pale in comparison to the Iran war in their impact on key munitions supplies. For one, “The vast majority of items provided to Ukraine relate to ground combat.” Unlike the surface-targeting and air-defense munitions where concern is greatest, “These systems have not played a major role in the war against Iran, and their inventories would be only a minor factor in a war against China.”

 

There is one relevant crossover: Surface-to-air Patriot interceptors were transferred to Ukraine and would be critically needed in a war with China to defend U.S. forces and bases from aerial attacks. Over four years of brutal Russian missile assaults, the military transferred 600 Patriot interceptors to Ukraine. In just five months of war with Iran, the United States itself used an estimated 2,300 interceptors, leaving the current stockpile at approximately 800.

 

Patriots are one of seven depleted munitions tracked by CSIS that may be needed in the Pacific. None of the other six were ever transferred to Ukraine. Rather, all of their expenditure was from the Iran war or other U.S. engagements against Iranian proxies since 2023.

 

Of course, frighteningly low munitions supplies limit what can be transferred to Ukraine now. That is why virtually all of the weapons now arriving are newly produced, after being ordered specifically for the country’s defenses. But if we are searching for blame, the Iran war — not past aid to Ukraine — is the proximate cause of scarce munitions. The truest culprit, however, is the Pentagon’s failure, decades in the making, to ensure sufficient stockpiles and production capacity for this new age of great power conflict.

Ukraine May Be Just the Ally America Needs

By Michael Weiss

Sunday, August 09, 2026

 

Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to have a decently cordial White House meeting on July 28. The subject was the Ukrainian president’s request for a license to manufacture Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles. But two days after the meeting, Trump made a point of deflating any positive expectations he might have generated in Kyiv.

 

“It’s a very extraordinary weapon,” Trump said of the Patriot system in an interview with the Financial Times, and “we have to be a little bit careful of who we license to.” The implication was that Ukraine was not to be trusted.

 

Then, in another seeming reversal on August 8, Zelensky suggested in a post on X that Trump had agreed to grant the license: “We have now reached an agreement with President Trump that he will grant the licenses, but imagine if we had received them four years ago. By now, we would already be producing Patriots for everyone.” As of this writing, Washington has not confirmed that Trump has decided on a license agreement. But granting this request would make perfect sense given Ukraine’s military evolution.

 

Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine has never been favorable, but every once in a while, he seems to be ready to do something positive for it. Then a phone call from Russian President Vladimir Putin, or a visit by Trump’s plenipotentiary Steve Witkoff to Moscow, appears to rekindle his hostility toward the embattled country, along with his wishful thinking that Putin is serious about pursuing peace. (U.S. intelligence consistently assesses that he isn’t.) Before the talk of a Patriot license, there was a much-hyped Ukrainian request for Tomahawk cruise missiles, which Trump publicly weighed before unceremoniously declining during another Zelensky visit to the White House, in October.

 

But this time around, something has changed. The Ukrainian military position is stronger than it has been in years. The country has become more autonomous. It produces many of its own weapons and is holding off Russian advances and even winning back territory in some areas. And it has taken the war to Russia, despite having fewer soldiers and more finite resources than its enemy has.

 

These and other feats have left Ukraine looking less like a NATO supplicant than an invaluable source of military technology and know-how. If any country in Europe has the incentive and expertise to become a crucial node in America’s military supply chain, it’s Ukraine. You might even call Kyiv a “model ally,” to borrow a term applied to Israel by Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who has been an outspoken opponent of U.S. security assistance to Kyiv.

 

The question is whether the Trump administration recognizes this—or still imagines that it holds all of the cards. Granting Ukraine the Patriot license wouldn’t be a concession to a dependent state fighting an unwinnable war: It could well be the start of a manufacturing arrangement that would end up serving the United States.

 

***

 

The past year has brought an encouraging turnaround in the war in Ukraine. Russia still terrorizes Ukrainian cities with ballistic-missile attacks, which grow deadlier as Ukraine’s stocks of interceptors dwindle. But Kyiv has successfully used drones to block major Russian offensive operations on the front lines. Moscow has opted for infiltration tactics instead, sending small groups of two to four soldiers through the gaps in Ukraine’s defenses to occupy abandoned trenches, buildings, or other positions from which to harass the defending army.

 

Ukraine is giving as good as it gets. It has struck oil refineries and export terminals as far away as Siberia—also air bases and strategic Russian industries, including Wildberries, an Amazon-style online retailer, some of whose inventory can be put to military as well as civilian use. These drone strikes have left smoking wreckage thousands of miles from Kyiv. They have also produced fuel rationing, pump closures, and long, snaking queues all over Russia, which is facing its worst fuel crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow had to close its airports temporarily due to nightly Ukrainian-drone swarms, leading Zelensky to joke to reporters that the Russian capital was an unsafe venue for any peace talks.

 

On its own territory, Ukraine’s situation has gone from dire to manageable. Despite shortages of personnel and some shuffling of the military command, Ukraine has blunted the Russian advance in the Donbas, the eastern region that Witkoff, J.D. Vance, and Trump once urged Kyiv to consider lost. Russia’s rate of territorial advance has slowed in the past year. Black Bird Group, a Finnish war monitor, calculated that Russian forces captured “nearly five times as much territory” last July as they did this July, and actually lost more ground than they seized in February and June of this year.

 

Russian logistics in southern Ukraine, particularly the transportation of fuel, weapons, and other combustible material, have been so disrupted that the Ukrainians have dubbed the main artery connecting Russia to occupied Crimea the “Highway of Death.” Ukrainian drones have intercepted maritime traffic to the peninsula as well, hitting 129 vessels associated with Russia’s “shadow fleet” in the Sea of Azov and another 72 in the Black Sea in the past month of overnight strikes. Twenty-four-hour blackouts are now commonplace in Crimea because of Ukrainian attacks on substations and the regional energy grid.

 

Ukraine has gotten savvier about communications as well. Since last year, it has been deliberately delaying reporting its territorial gains, to avoid drawing Russian resources to parts of the front line that may be softening. Kyiv has similarly become more strategic in its approach to Trump. A Ukrainian official, who asked for his name to be withheld because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, told me that Kyiv now understands Trump as a transactional player, and its outreach aims to keep the American president from upending a status quo that’s working rather than appeal to humanitarian or moral imperatives.

 

***

 

If Trump once had the leverage to force a dismal peace on Ukraine, he has since relinquished it. The United States doesn’t pay for the war anymore—Europe does. Trump reduced new commitments of U.S. military aid to Ukraine by 99 percent in his first year back in office, Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy determined. NATO has a mechanism that allows member states to fund the purchase of U.S. weapons for Ukrainian use, but this has so far accounted for only $6.7 billion in assistance, a fraction of the $127 billion that the Biden administration and Congress allocated to Ukraine.

 

The shortfall has become less salient as the dynamics of the war have changed, and as Ukraine has developed the capacity to manufacture its own weapons at scale. Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told me that more than 80 percent of casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war are caused by drones, the bulk of which Ukraine produces itself. Last month, the Ukrainian government approved exporting weapons and defense tech for the first time since the full-scale invasion began, in February 2022. The reason, according to Politico, is that the country now produces more weapons than it can afford to buy from its own companies. Forty to 70 percent of what’s manufactured sits unused in warehouses.

 

Ukraine has become a global epicenter for military robotics. A single team of about 10 Ukrainians “eliminated” two mechanized NATO battalions in one day in an exercise in Estonia in May 2025, and “destroyed Sweden’s troops” in a war game on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea a year later. Zelensky estimates that Ukraine currently produces about 10 million drones a year; contrast that with the United States’ 100,000. Some of these munitions, such as Darts, cost as little as $1,000 to make but have taken out Russian targets worth millions.

 

Ukrainian technicians have upgraded some American products to achieve all of this. The Hornet is a $5,000 drone developed by Perennial Autonomy, a company founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It carries an 11-pound warhead and can travel 124 miles. Ukraine’s Azov Corps MacGyvered the Hornet, the Kyiv Independent reported, by using commercial Starlink satellite terminals to expand its range and lower its susceptibility to Russian jamming.

 

So formidable is Ukraine’s drone game that even the country’s onetime detractors now want in on the action. One Florida-based drone company, Powerus, is looking for Ukrainian hardware and licenses and includes two noteworthy investors: Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

 

Ukraine is only too happy to share its inventions and know-how. It came to America’s defense in a war of choice against Iran that many NATO allies have wanted little to do with. Early in the war, U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf sustained significant damage from Iranian drone attacks, and Ukraine reportedly sent technical advisers to the region to install and operate Kyiv’s cutting-edge Sky Map system, which uses acoustics and AI to detect and down incoming drones. Ukraine has since signed security- and defense-cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

 

America’s offensive drone campaign against Iran now involves repurposing civilian technology for military use, much as Ukraine has done. One U.S. military officer who was deployed to the Persian Gulf until recently told me that the U.S. military has been buying Starlink terminals from local shopping malls and affixing them to aerial drones and unmanned surface vessels. The reason? They’re cheaper and easier to use than SpaceX’s “hard” Pentagon-controlled variant, Starshield.

 

As new reporting in The Atlantic disclosed on July 30, Zelensky has prevailed on Trump to ask Elon Musk for permission to use Starlink when striking deep into Russia. The Ukrainians aren’t seeking anything that will cost U.S. taxpayers: just the go-ahead to use their homegrown munitions to greater effect and, in the absence of interceptors, take out Russian missile launchers before they fire their payloads. Granting this request could even bring a windfall to the Pentagon and the CIA.

 

The one thing the United States still provides free of charge, according to both American and Ukrainian sources, is intelligence, including the targeting packages for strikes on Russian-troop positions in Ukraine and on energy infrastructure inside Russia. Credit for this policy goes to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who is said to impress the president on the golf links with eye-popping data about Russian losses on the battlefield, now in excess of 40,000 a month. Ratcliffe’s explanation for his success, one Western intelligence official told me, is that “Trump doesn’t like losers.” So long as Ukraine is seen to be winning and defying the conventional wisdom of those who insist it can’t, the president’s inclination to cut and run is mitigated.

 

Trump should also welcome the toll that Ukrainian strikes are taking on Russia’s energy economy. Moscow’s reduction in oil exports could leave countries such as India and China more vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs. And the president has begged Europeans to end their dependency on Russian oil and gas since his first term in office, going so far as to sanction the Nord Stream pipeline. Zelensky calls his nightly salvos on Russian refineries “long-range sanctions.” Trump may even view bombing as a prelude to negotiations, much as he has in Iran. “It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end,” he said of Ukraine’s deep strikes at the NATO summit in Ankara last month.

 

***

 

The intertwining of the wars in Iran and Ukraine has demonstrated that a recipient of U.S. security assistance can also be a provider of security assistance to the United States. But the one thing Ukraine can’t yet source domestically in sufficient quantities is ballistic-missile defense, and U.S. supplies of the Patriot systems used for this purpose are also strained.

 

The United States has burned through about two-thirds of its stockpile of Patriot systems in the Middle East in the past six months, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Russia, which has been giving the Iranians targeting packages for use against U.S. soldiers in the region, knows this and continues to bombard Ukrainians with missiles, killing civilians in their homes. Last month, it fired 376 missiles, more than twice as many as it did in June, many of them aimed at Kyiv. Almost all are getting through, as Patriot batteries—most numerous around the capital—run out of interceptors.

 

“The Ukrainians have active development programs for almost everything they need, and their intention is to be totally self-sufficient in the future,” Colby Badhwar, an independent security analyst, told me. However, he said, “right now they are still almost entirely reliant on allies for interceptors.”

 

Even if the U.S. were to grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriots, doing so at scale would take Ukraine years. That’s why Zelensky has been pursuing immediate resupplies of Patriot missiles in tandem with longer-term solutions. Zelensky reportedly asked Trump for “several hundred” interceptors at the Oval Office meeting on July 28; Trump refused, citing America’s shrunken stocks and U.S. priorities in the Middle East.

 

The Ukrainian journalist Tim Zadorozhnyy has reported that Zelensky first broached a Patriot license in the waning months of the Biden administration. Senior Ukrainian officials evidently put the proposal to Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary at the time, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, but were rebuffed without explanation. (Zelensky has now claimed that he also requested a license from Biden in the first year of the war.)

 

Granting the license would make Washington both a guarantor of Ukraine’s security and a beneficiary of its productive capacity. The former industrial hub of the Soviet Union would pay good money to become a helpmeet to the U.S. defense industry. It’s one of the few nations in Europe still lining up to do so. When its war is over, Ukraine could manufacture surplus Patriots for U.S. use or for resale to U.S. allies and partners. Given its track record, Ukraine might even be able to produce surpluses while the war rages on. And that might be the problem.

 

Zelensky’s post on X on August 8 suggested that the main hold-up with the Trump administration was bureaucracy and “paperwork.” On the Hill_, one Republican official in favor of the license told me about an unreported hiccup in the deal. Raytheon and Lockheed, the makers of the Patriot system, “will officially frame their concerns around IP theft and tech transfer,” he said, but “their real worry is that the Ukrainians will find a way to improve the Patriot and then produce them at scale faster and for much less money than what the existing production lines in the U.S. could do.

The Trump–Zelensky Relationship Improves

National Review Online

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

 

The first time Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky was in the Oval Office, matters notoriously took an unfortunate turn. The second time, a few months later, a mulligan of sorts, achieved little of substance but in a relatively cordial fashion. The latest meeting, which took place yesterday, seemed to go even better than that.

 

There were earlier signs that it would. Speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara earlier this month, President Trump, referring to Zelensky, said that “we’ve actually developed a good relationship! Hard to believe, right? From the Oval Office to now.” Zelensky had “done an amazing job” and had “been very effective.”

 

Trump had also commented that Zelensky “had the best equipment because he’s had our equipment,” words, if this is not to overread them, that suggested that Trump takes some pride in America’s equipping of Ukraine. He should. Ukraine still has a hard and uncertain road ahead, but at some point in the last few months, Kyiv looked to have moved beyond merely hanging on, however bravely, to something more promising. Donald Trump is impressed by success.

 

Ukraine has pioneered a form of drone warfare, a combination of machine and electronic ecosystem, that has turned the front lines of the Donbas into a lethal “kill zone.” This has made it nearly impossible for Russia to use its advantage in manpower and equipment to fight the war of attrition that could spell disaster for its much smaller foe. Its forces are still advancing but at a fraction of their former pace, and at a heavy cost.

 

Meanwhile, much of Russia’s Black Sea fleet has been harassed by Ukrainian drones into near immobility. Many of its ships have sailed east from Sevastopol, the fleet’s traditional base in Crimea, to Novorossiysk, a safer but less well-equipped port in Russia proper. Meanwhile, the increasing range of Ukraine’s drones and missiles means that they are being sent ever deeper into Moscow’s realm. Targeted primarily at Russia’s energy sector and other infrastructure, they are intended to damage the country’s economy and, to a degree, take the war to the aggressor.

 

Ukraine’s position may have improved, but it is still under sustained attack. On the offensive side all it can do is press so hard that Putin will be prepared to negotiate a peace treaty acceptable to both sides, a high bar, as Trump should not forget. Putin shows no interest in any kind of compromise, if indeed that option is, politically, even open to him. Despite hairline fractures here and there, there are no serious signs of a Russian collapse. That means that Ukraine must maintain its defenses by retaining its technological edge and (despite recent political upheaval) the strategy that it makes possible.

 

Kyiv should continue to use its technology and know-how to make new allies and bind itself more closely to those that it has. The timing of a recent attack by Ukrainian drones on an Iranian vessel allegedly bound with arms for Russia was obviously designed to send a message to Washington as well as Tehran, part of which is that Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing are all heads of the same hydra. Zelensky has already said he will instruct Ukraine’s intelligence service to share information it has on Russian help for Tehran with the U.S.

 

In the short term, Ukraine has a dangerous lack of the interceptors (primarily Patriots) needed to shoot down Russia’s ballistic missiles. Downing Russian drones and cruise missiles is one thing, knocking out ballistic missiles quite another. Moscow’s recent ramping up of missile attacks raises the prospect of far worse to come. In Ankara, Trump announced that he would allow Patriots to be manufactured under license in Ukraine. Such a move, which was discussed again yesterday, would be a useful step forward in establishing Ukraine’s long-term security. However, even if implemented it will do nothing to resolve the short-term shortage: These missiles take years to make. In Ankara, Trump also said he would release some more Patriots from the U.S. stockpile, but that reserve has been diminished by earlier shipments to Ukraine and by the war in Iran. Other allies should also help, but this remains a strong card that the Kremlin can play, and there appears to be only so much that can be done about it.

 

Little new emerged about yesterday’s meeting, but that the relationship between Zelensky and Trump remains on an even keel is welcome news. For that to continue, Trump will need to accept that a quick peace will remain elusive. More difficult, perhaps, he and the Europeans must work together to ensure that transatlantic tensions do not jeopardize support for Ukraine in a war with geopolitical ramifications that spread far beyond the Donbas.

Ukraine and the Proud Legacy of Resistance

By Robert Loewen

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

In February 2022, with Russian tanks roaring toward Kyiv in support of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Biden administration offered to evacuate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He famously declined. “The fight is here,” he declared. “I need ammunition, not a ride.” He wasn’t alone. Despite the exodus of many in those early days,  news reports suggested that many Ukrainians would stand their ground. There were reports — and images — of ordinary people setting up tank traps, manning checkpoints with hunting rifles they’d brought from home, mass-producing Molotov cocktails in abandoned factories, and training with wooden Kalashnikovs.

 

National Review’s Jim Geraghty, in his travels to the country, met a resistance fighter who explained that it wasn’t merely a matter of following a bold leader like Zelensky; it was in the DNA or the national character: “Ukrainians have never relied on their government,” the individual explained. “We rely on ourselves. We won’t wait for orders to do something. Offense, defense, assault, ambush — just do it. This is our land . . . . Ukrainians can live everywhere. Even in the desert, we will find water.” Ken Harbaugh writes of a similar determination to resist the invaders in a recent piece for The Atlantic.

 

But neither bold leadership nor ethnicity can fully explain this phenomenon. Reading about these brave people reminds me (and likely many others) of the resistance fighters in occupied Europe during World War II. Their courage suggests something more universal.

 

My wife’s mother was among them. Hetty Steenhuis was a second-year student at Leiden University, more interested in boys than in war, when the Third Reich launched its invasion of Holland on May 10, 1940. I novelized her experience in The Lioness of Leiden.

 

The Dutch government fled three days later, Queen Wilhelmina accepting the offer of a quick getaway that Zelensky would refuse 82 years on. Her departure left Dutch citizens on their own against the ruthless invaders. Hetty recalled that her first thought was, “Where is the resistance?”

 

As in Ukraine, it grew organically, and Hetty became a part of it. Of the 9 million people living in Holland when the occupation began in 1940, only a small fraction — perhaps 15,000, but no one knows for sure — risked life and limb in the active resistance to challenge the Third Reich. History shows that the vast majority of Dutch people did the right thing when circumstances gave them no choice — as with farmers called upon to help Allied flight crews shot down over Holland during bombing runs against Germany. But only organized, active resistance had the grit and know-how to follow through.

 

Hetty was a courier. She raised money and delivered false papers and ration cards to help downed pilots, Jews, and others hiding from the Nazis.

 

But she rarely spoke of her experiences; the trauma buried in her memory was too terrible. But one evening, decades later in Southern California, wine perhaps having loosened her tongue, she told us about the day in 1944 when she smuggled hand grenades out of The Hague, the city where she grew up. She boarded a tram at the central train station and headed toward the suburbs. She was supposed to meet a resistance contact who would pass along her deadly cargo to Dutch commandos. It made her feel good to know the tiny bombs would kill Germans that night.

 

But when her tram arrived at the end of the line, she was forced to stand in line at a checkpoint where German soldiers were looking inside every suitcase. A fetching 24-year-old, Hetty used her natural charm to engage the German soldier in conversation. They laughed a lot, especially when she suggested that she might be available for something more when his shift ended. Still laughing, he asked, “What’s in the suitcase?” She replied flirtatiously, “It’s full of hand grenades.” They laughed. He waved his hand for her to pass, the bag unopened.

 

In the 1980s, Hetty returned to see her fellow resistance fighters for what was likely to be the last time. They asked themselves whether future generations would do what they had done: Would the youth of today risk everything to fight if their country were occupied by oppressors? During peacetime, it was inconceivable that the answer would be yes; young people are too soft and entitled, her friends said.

 

But Hetty reminded her friends that their own lives were similarly privileged before Hitler invaded. One of their bravest leaders had been an unassuming grocery clerk before the war. And all of them fought in conditions none expected to survive.

 

In peacetime, it was hard to imagine harming another person, Hetty told them. “But you never know what people will do when confronted by pure evil.”

 

Ukraine’s resistance fighters have once again shown what those pushed into a corner by a ruthless invader are capable of. Their ability to find each other organically and their guile in using human nature to trap the enemy into making mistakes have historical antecedents. Let’s pray they see the same success.

Trump Faces Reality on Ukraine and Iran

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, July 08, 2026

 

Neither Iran nor Russia wants peace. This has been true every single day of the multi-year wars each of them launched unprovoked on their neighbors—Iran on October 7, 2023, and Russia in early 2022.

 

But the length of those wars is significant for the following reason: If you want to believe that Iran and Russia launched these wars over legitimate grievances that have yet to be addressed by the always-somehow-at-fault West, you have been living now for several years in an alternate reality.

 

Which would make today’s spate of news on both fronts massively confusing. To those who have been clear-eyed from the start, however, developments in Ukraine and the Gulf make perfect sense, including the resumption of U.S. strikes on Iran.

 

Iran has been utterly refusing to stop firing on vessels traveling through the shipping lanes in its near abroad, especially the Strait of Hormuz. And it has been unwilling to ditch its desire to establish the strait as a tollway, which would mean Iran gets to hold the global shipping economy hostage in perpetuity while reaping the ransom payments from those using the waterway. In other words, legalized piracy.

 

There is also no indication that Iran would be willing to have the kind of on-site inspections necessary to fully prevent its nuclearization. Finally, Iran is rebuilding its missile capabilities, using the “cease-fire” for explicitly offensive military purposes.

 

In sum, there is no universe in which Iran is even pretending to play ball with the West, despite the fact that President Trump has been willing to be far more generous with Tehran than he has any reason to be.

 

So although Vice President Vance and the “restrainers” in the administration were anticipating being able to blame any breakdown of the cease-fire on Israel, they will have to settle for reality: Iran is the reason war continues. Not only that, but Iran wants to be credited with the resumption of the war. Perhaps its leaders believe this is a show of strength, but whatever the reason, Iran wants the world to know it has chosen violence.

 

Trump seems fine with that. “For me, I think it’s over,” he said of the cease-fire. “They can talk, but I think they’re wasting their time.”

 

Trump also had some choice words for the Iranian leadership: “I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people.”

 

The president seemed desperate for a deal, but Iran keeps reminding the world that it has agency. Not everything that happens is the fault of the U.S. or Israel.

 

Regarding the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump has always been willing to delude himself regarding Vladimir Putin’s intentions while treating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the troublemaker of Europe. The restrainers inside and outside the administration tend to take some of Putin’s grander threats at face value. They see almost any improvement in Ukraine’s warfighting abilities as a provocation that could result in nuclear winter.

 

But again and again, reality has intruded. Ukraine improved some of its offensive capabilities on its own, putting Moscow on the defensive. It’s true that Russia has hit back hard, but it has not nuked Europe. Ukrainian battlefield success should therefore not be seen as a danger to the world. Let them fight.

 

Just how much the U.S. specifically, and NATO more generally, should help Ukraine do so is a matter of legitimate debate. But once one shakes off the fear of Ukrainian victory—and let’s be honest, that has absolutely been behind much of the anti-Zelensky punditry, especially earlier in the war—a wider array of options presents itself.

 

Which explains the second Trump shift today. He and Zelensky met on the sidelines of the NATO conference and the president decided to grant Ukraine the license to produce Patriot missiles. “Just a little birdie told me this, about the fact that we’ll give them the right to make Patriots, we’ll show them how to do it,” Trump said. “It’s very complex, actually, but it’s — you’ll figure out the complexity quickly.”

 

This is excellent news. Ukraine has helped the U.S. war effort in Iran by aiding Gulf allies with intercepting Iranian drones. That, in turn, helps Ukraine as well, because the Iranians were supplying Russia with those weapons and anything that weakens Iran weakens Russia’s war machine against Ukraine. This is because the U.S., Israel, and Ukraine are all on the same side of the same war. And that reality can only be ignored until it can’t.

Putin Has Lost the War in Ukraine

By Gregory W. Slayton & Sergei Ivashenko

Saturday, July 11, 2026

 

In February 2022, Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked military attack on Ukraine assuming that Kyiv would fold in a week, that its president would flee or be killed by one of Russia’s hit squads, and that a soft, divided West would issue a strongly worded communiqué and get back to buying gas from Russia. Every one of those assumptions was wrong. Four-and-a-half years later, his military has been humiliated, President Volodymyr Zelensky is still in charge, and the West — despite some tenuous moments — has bankrolled the methodical destruction of much of the Russian military. Putin may yet hold a ribbon of scorched Ukrainian soil when the guns fall silent. He has already lost this war; the only question is what the endgame will look like.

 

Consider what “winning” now looks like from Moscow. In June, after months of grinding assault, Russian forces seized perhaps a dozen square miles of Ukraine — a patch smaller than Manhattan — and paid for it with something close to 40,000 casualties. The Institute for the Study of War reckons the exchange at roughly 1,300 Russian dead and wounded for every square kilometer taken, up from 68 the year before. That is more men lost in a month than the Kremlin can recruit, despite ever-higher signing bonuses and the clearing out of prisons. For Russia, the war has become a meat grinder, and Putin keeps feeding it his own people. With Ukraine’s drone advantage constantly growing both in numbers and sophistication, the eventual outcome is now clear.

 

To grasp the scope of Russia’s impending defeat, it is helpful to remember Putin’s original goals included halting NATO’s expansion; instead, he frightened Finland and Sweden into the alliance and roughly doubled the length of Russia’s NATO frontier. He also invaded to prove Ukraine was not a real nation; instead, his “special military operation” has forged a fractious, partially Russophone country into a proud and patriotic people who will hate Moscow for at least a century. He invaded to shatter Western unity; instead, he provoked German rearmament, revived the NATO alliance, and reduced his own country to a resource colony of Beijing.

 

Diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote that Soviet power “bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” Putin has spent four years proving the maxim true about his own regime. The Kremlin is now so panicked about the direction of the war it is reported to be resorting to biowarfare: dumping dead, anthrax-infected cows in fields near residential areas in Kherson. Perhaps worst of all for Putin, his beloved Crimea, which he took by force in 2014, is now under a state of emergency, with Russians fleeing by the thousands back to Russia. In fact, Crimea is at risk of being retaken by Ukraine in part this year and eventually fully as the Russian military continues to falter. Such a defeat would be Putin’s Waterloo.

 

President Trump always wants to be on the winning side, and even he and his team now see that Russia “doesn’t have the cards.” His comments on July 8 at the NATO summit encouraging Ukraine to strike targets deep in Russia marked strengthening of U.S. support for Ukraine, another bad sign for Putin. In fact, the summit itself was a complete about-face from last year’s, with allies openly discussing the Kremlin’s rapidly worsening military situation.

 

The economic realities are, if anything, more damning. Sanctions were never a guillotine; they were a slow puncture, and the tire is finally going flat. Oil and gas revenue — the lifeblood of the Russian state, some 40 percent of the federal budget — fell by roughly a quarter last year. The National Wealth Fund’s liquid reserves have dropped by 61 percent since the Russian invasion and now holds mostly hard-to-sell Chinese yuan and gold bullion, which Moscow continues to sell aggressively to finance the war. Growth has collapsed from the wartime “sugar rush” of 4 percent to something the Kremlin’s own ministers now admit was near zero for 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, the Russian economy actually contracted. It appears Q2 was more of the same. The Russian government now spends close to 50 percent of its resources on the war, crowding out spending on education, health care, infrastructure, and everything else not war-related.

 

To plug the ever-expanding national deficit, Putin has raised the value-added tax and expanded taxes on small businesses. As a result, a quarter-million small businesses have closed. Prices for basic food items were up 20 to 30 percent in Moscow in just the month of January. Interest rates remain in the punishing mid-teens and in truth are only available for companies in military-related industries. And with Ukrainian drones and missiles damaging Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure nightly, average Russians are furious about the kilometer-long gas lines that are the new normal in most areas. Russian social media channels reflect widespread frustration with Putin and the war, scenes that were nonexistent just a year ago. Perhaps not surprisingly, Putin himself is showing signs of severe stress. In a recent interview with a Russian journalist, Putin spoke at times incoherently about battle plans for Ukrainian towns and cities that do not exist. Russian elites are increasingly convinced Putin has led Russia into a death trap and has no credible plan to bring the war to an end.

 

Some in the West — wary of the costs and suspicious of every foreign entanglement — will object that Russia still holds Crimea and much of the Donbas, that Ukraine’s counteroffensives have stalled and that this looks less like victory than a bloody stalemate. The truth is that Russia is increasingly unable to supply or support its troops in Crimea. With a kill rate in the Donbas estimated at 10:1 in Ukraine’s favor, Russia is bleeding with an actual net loss of territory in June. A great power that sets out to subjugate its neighbor and, four-plus years on, cannot take a single fortress town without spending whole battalions has proven it cannot win. It has advertised the hollowness of its own threat. Putin wagered the future of Russia — its men, its treasury, its standing, its access to the modern world — on a quick imperial restoration. He got a frozen, ruinous quagmire and a NATO twice as long as the one he feared. Since 2022, he has even lost many of his former global allies such as Syria, Venezuela, and Armenia, with Iran and Cuba on the edge. And now he is losing his own people, who see with their own eyes that the war has come to Moscow and St. Petersburg, not to mention their gas stations and grocery stores.

 

Putin has failed in each of his pre-war objectives and has lost the upper hand in the war. Without the use of nuclear weapons, which would risk a retaliation that could easily wipe out his entire regime and much of Russia’s major cities, Putin has lost the war in Ukraine.

 

The task before the West is clear, but it is not easy. We must keep our nerve, keep Kyiv armed, and let the brutal math finish its work — as a bankrupt state bleeds money and men faster than it can bear. As in the Cold War, the U.S. must lead this effort. Signing the Russian Sanctions Bill courageously passed by the House recently would be a strong step forward.

 

Ronald Reagan grasped what Kennan taught: Against a brittle tyranny, time and pressure accomplish what armies cannot without unacceptable costs. The only question for Putin now is how many more Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians he will kill before he admits defeat or is removed from power by those he has led into this disaster. He has already lost 1.5 million Russian soldiers, killed or left homeless tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, and kidnapped more than 20,000 innocent Ukrainian children. It is time Putin ends the insanity or is removed from office. Continued strong Western support for Ukraine will hasten that blessed day.

Ukraine Has the Momentum. The U.S. Can Help Finish the Job.

By David J. Kramer

Tuesday, July 07, 2026

 

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many in Moscow and even in the West assumed the worst for Ukraine. What was supposed to have been a quick and easy victory for Russia has turned into a major failure for the Kremlin, even if Vladimir Putin refuses to acknowledge that reality.  

 

Ukraine achieved some early victories—and then the war became a battle of attrition. More recently, however, the Ukrainians have regained the momentum, and most observers—including U.S. officials—are beginning to take notice.

 

At the outset of his second term, President Donald Trump seemed to think that Russian victory and Ukrainian defeat were inevitable. During a confrontational meeting in the White House last February, he told his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine had “no cards.”  

 

More than a year later, Ukraine holds a strong hand. Ukrainian forces have been regaining territory that Russia had seized. They are pounding Russian military and energy targets deep inside Russia, including in Moscow. Ukrainian troops and drones are killing and wounding more Russian soldiers than the Russian government can recruit, with some 1.5 million killed and wounded on the Russian side since February 2022. Russian forces on the occupied Crimean peninsula are largely isolated and embattled. And Putin’s refusal to end the war he started is causing tremendous strain on the Russian economy, something even he acknowledged last week. According to a Gallup survey released last week, “a record-high 60% of Russians interviewed between March and May said their local economic conditions are getting worse.”

 

Top U.S. officials seem to have realized that it is Putin, not Zelensky, who has shown no willingness to stop the fighting. But will their rhetorical shift translate into renewed American military assistance for Ukraine and tougher sanctions on Russia, steps that, if implemented, could help end the bloody war that Russia started?  

 

The Trump administration last year halted U.S. military assistance for Ukraine, though it has maintained important intelligence-sharing. Imagine how much better it would be if the U.S. resumed its support, especially Patriot missile batteries that would help Ukraine intercept Russian ballistic missiles. Major Russian bombings over the past week have killed more than three dozen Ukrainian civilians and injured hundreds more.

 

This week’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, is an opportunity for the Trump administration to announce renewed military assistance for Ukraine and tougher sanctions on Russia. Publicly announced U.S. support for Ukraine would be a blow to Russia and also to CRINK, the grouping of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that the Bush Institute recently highlighted.  

 

Trump himself has recently been talking more positively about Ukraine, its military prospects, and even Zelensky. During a recent meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump said of Zelensky, “He’s doing pretty well, no matter how you look at it. At least he’s holding up. … I think he’s doing a good job.” Trump called his Ukrainian counterpart “courageous,” adding that he has “great equipment,” “great people,” and “fighters.”

 

Last month, Trump signed on to the G7 statement in France, which expressed “unwavering support for Ukraine in defending its freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. We reaffirm our solidarity with the Ukrainian population suffering from attacks on their critical infrastructure and cultural heritage. We commend Ukraine for its resilience and progress on the battlefield in recent months and emphasize there is now a new momentum.”  

 

The G7 statement went on to reaffirm the leaders’ commitment to “increase the pressure on the Russian war economy” by strengthening sanctions against Russia. Last year in Canada, by contrast, Trump left the G7 meeting early without any show of support for Ukraine.  

 

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently confirmed that Russia and the United States did not reach any agreement to end Russia’s war in Ukraine during the August 2025 Alaska summit between Trump and Putin. Rubio’s statement refuted months-long Russian talk of the “spirit of Anchorage” and the U.S.’s failure to live up to “understandings” reached there. For months, Russian officials created the impression that the United States had agreed that Ukraine should surrender significant chunks of its territory before any end to the fighting was possible. Rubio finally put a stop to that, and Putin himself acknowledged recently that there had not been any “agreements.”

 

The House of Representatives also weighed in last month in support of Ukraine, passing legislation calling for renewed military assistance for Ukraine and tougher sanctions against Russia.

 

Still, the end to U.S. military assistance to Ukraine reduced American leverage in seeking an end to the conflict. So, too, did waivers on Russian oil sanctions enacted by the Treasury Department in response to higher energy prices caused by the Iran war.

 

This, in turn, forced Ukraine to turn more to Europe for help and increase its own production of the military equipment it needs. Ukraine, for instance, is self-sufficient in drone technology and production and has made advances that U.S. military officials admire. Together with European assistance and greater self-reliance, Ukraine has been making real progress.  

 

Ukraine’s growing self-sufficiency has enabled its officials to ignore pressure from the U.S. side, especially from special envoy Steve Witkoff, to relinquish part of its territory to Russia. Witkoff, who has visited Moscow and met with Putin numerous times in the past year but has yet to set foot in Ukraine, tends to parrot Russian talking points about the war. Fortunately, he has been preoccupied with the situation in Iran for the past few months and less involved in the Russia-Ukraine war.    

 

The NATO summit is a time for the administration to demonstrate its seriousness.  

 

Only pressure and greater losses on the Russian side have the chance to force Putin to end his disastrous war. A clear announcement by the Trump administration that it unquestionably sides with Ukraine could force Putin’s hand.  

 

Americans love rooting for the underdog, but they also love winners. Ukrainians have shifted from being the former to the latter—largely without our help. That shift does not mean that the war is nearing an end; the Russian military still has significant capacity, and Putin shows no signs of ending his disastrous war. But 85 percent of Ukrainians believe they will win the war, according to a recent survey by the International Republican Institute. Renewing U.S. support now could help bring about Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat that both deserve.