That headline captures why the president is so eager to end Vladimir Putin’s war by sacrificing the Ukrainian victim to the Russian aggressor.And it helps explain why Donald Trump’s negotiators are returning home from Moscow empty-handed again.
Without this explanation, it’s hard to grasp how Trump endorsed a 28-point “peace” plan for Ukraine based on direct input from a Kremlin negotiator, without any Ukrainian or European consultation. (Although a “revised” plan still favors Moscow, Putin continues to demand even more than the initial version.)
Yes, Trump’s unending quest for a Nobel Peace Prize and his infatuation with the Russian despot figure into his kowtow to Putin. But I believe the Journal’s call to “follow the money” is right on the ruble.
Trump’s capitulation to the Kremlin shames our country even more than the U.S. killing of civilians clinging to a burned-out Venezuelan boat.
The Journal’s exposé details how Moscow’s representative sold Trump and his team on the idea they could get inside access to immense riches in Russia if the war were stopped quickly on Putin’s terms. Never mind that meant betraying NATO allies as well as Ukraine.
Indeed, the Kremlin has long dangled visions of lucrative deals before the White House in an effort to woo the president. Putin has used wealthy Russian businessmen to develop contacts with the Trump administration, dating back to 2016.
Kirill Dmitriev, the key Russian negotiator in Ukraine talks and head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, is the main salesman for a grandiose future that enhances certain Americans’ wealth.
The Harvard-educated Dmitriev, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, has cleverly played on the greed and naivete of Steve Witkoff and first son-in-law Jared Kushner, real estate moguls turned Trump peace negotiators. He convinced the pair — at a secret meeting at Witkoff’s Miami waterfront mansion in October — to view Russia not as a military threat, but as a cornucopia of investment possibilities to which friendly U.S. investors would have early access.
That vision depends, of course, on the end of the war, the lifting of sanctions against Russia, and the U.S. welcoming Moscow back into the global economy.
It was Dmitriev who provided much of the input into the infamous 28-point Trump plan that read like Russian talking points. The proposal made no demands on the Russian aggressor, but required Ukraine give up key defensive positions and land it still controls while shrinking and disarming its military.
Equally outrageous, however, were the points that called for using much of Russia’s $200 billion-plus of frozen assets in European banks to invest in a U.S.-Russian investment “vehicle” to implement “joint projects” (and much of the rest to facilitate U.S. investment in Ukraine, from which the Americans would take 50% of the profits).
This is the money the European Union still hopes to use as collateral for loans to arm Ukraine against further Russian advances, or to rebuild in peacetime. Yet, the Trumpers and Russians proposed to seize it — with no input from European allies — to feather U.S. and Russian business nests.
In this photo provided by the Ukrainian president’s office, President Volodymyr Zelensky (left) shakes hands with U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll in Kyiv, Ukraine, in November.
As for Witkoff, he is so deep in Russia’s pocket that he was recently heard on a leaked tape tutoring a Russian negotiator on how to win over Trump.
Meantime, the president, indifferent to the public revelation of U.S.-Russian complicity, continues to send Witkoff on repeated trips to Moscow to negotiate with Putin. Witkoff has never once visited Ukraine.
The Journal lays out how Dmitriev dangled before Witkoff and Kushner visions of joint U.S.-Russian exploitation of Arctic mineral wealth, and a potential joint mission to Mars with SpaceX, along with multimillion-dollar rare earth deals.
The Russian money man played brilliantly on Trump’s misguided belief that business deals matter more than sovereignty and can paper over messy and dangerous political disputes — or invasions. Especially if U.S. investors get an inside piece of the action.
Never mind that this crass theory has already been proven false in Gaza, where Trump still can’t grasp that grandiose visions of prosperity won’t come true when underlying political grievances remain unsettled. Although the Israeli hostages were returned, the rest of Trump’s peace plan is near collapse.
As for the Ukraine plan, the idea that U.S. investments in Russia (or in Ukrainian rare earths) would prevent further military action is an ahistorical delusion. U.S. investments in both countries did not prevent Moscow from invading Ukraine in 2014 or 2022.
Putin’s goal is to subordinate Kyiv to Russian domination. If he can’t do it militarily, he will be happy to advance this goal via a peace plan he will surely violate, as he has done with every accord he has previously made with Ukraine. Trump’s dreams of billions in profits will also go down the drain as Putin pursues his dream of conquest.
POTUS and his real estate pals may think they are New York tough, but Moscow is not the Big Apple.
Russia is one of the most corrupt countries in the world (154th out of 180 countries, according to Transparency International). Bribery, seizure of huge sums, or nationalization are employed at will by Putin and his oligarch cronies.
Just consider the experience of William Browder, an American-born British citizen who built up the Heritage Fund into the largest foreign investment portfolio in Russia in the 1990s until he protested government corruption. The Kremlin expelled Browder in 2005 and attempted to assassinate him abroad.
When Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, challenged a Russian attempt to steal $230 million in taxes that the fund had already paid, his offices were raided. Magnitsky was arrested, tortured, and killed in prison in 2009.
I spoke with Browder by phone from London, and he had nothing but scorn for the ignorance of the Trump team. “Steve Witkoff and all his pals are not going to make a penny from the Russians,” he told me. “The Russians have a long history of enticing Americans and foreigners. They will defraud, arrest, cheat, and even murder you to prevent you from making a penny.
“They are masters of expropriation. Every foreign investor has been burned.”
The tragedy is that Trump, Witkoff and Kushner are willing to burn Ukraine in their quest for more wealth.
Trump is ready to press Ukraine to bow to a plan that guarantees further Russian destruction. Let’s hope the backlash to the proposal stiffens the backbone of GOP supporters of Ukraine against the pro-Russian White House crowd.
The drama hasn’t ended yet.
The 28-point plan was cooked up by Trump’s feckless negotiator, Steve Witkoff, and first son-in-law Jared Kushner. Two real estate moguls with zero knowledge of Ukraine wrote a draft plan based heavily on input from Kremlin insider Kirill Dmitriev.
Dmitriev is Putin’s representative for economic cooperation and has wooed Witkoff and Kushner with fantasies of joint U.S.-Russian investment. The three men met for secret talks in October in Miami, at Witkoff’s home.
The resulting document reads like Kremlin talking points; some Russia experts point out that the English syntax sounds as if it were google translated directly from the Russian text.
“Even Neville Chamberlain would blush at this,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), referencing the British prime minister who infamously appeased Adolph Hitler. “It’s embarrassing to our country.”
Painfully true.
The deal demands suicidal concessions from Ukraine, the victim of Russian aggression, but none from the Russia invader. The points echoed a Putin wish list, and green-light Moscow’s complete subordination of Ukraine, by shrinking Kyiv’s army, limiting its alliances and weapons, and leaving it wide-open to future Russian attacks.
Trump was — and still is — ready to sell out Kyiv in pursuit of an imaginary Nobel Peace Prize along with lucrative business deals with Moscow and predatory deals for Ukrainian minerals (both are touted in the plan).
In clear evidence of Russian untrustworthiness, Dmitriev leaked the proposal last week to journalist Barak Ravid of Axios in order to box in the Americans before consultations with Ukraine. Yet Trump quickly endorsed this capitulation document.
Dmitriev’s betrayal alone should disqualify him from further negotiations, but there’s no sign Witkoff will abandon his new Russian pal. As for Witkoff and Kushner, Trump is rewarding their blunders by sending them to meet Putin next week.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev (left) and President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff attend talks in St. Petersburg, Russia, in April.
How do we know for sure that Dmitriev was the leaker? Because Witkoff posted on X, “He [Axios’ Ravid] must have got this from K …,” meaning Kirillov. Apparently, Witkoff thought he was sending a private message, another sign he isn’t up to the job.
Equally egregious, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who does know something about Russia, was kept out of the loop by Witkoff. After the leak, he got a firestorm of complaints from upset European counterparts and GOP supporters of Ukraine. That led him to call Sen. Mike Rounds (R., N.D.), who was at an international security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, along with a bipartisan Senate delegation.
Rounds recounted to journalists that Rubio described Witkoff’s plan as a Russian “wish list” and not an actual U.S. proposal. Under White House pressure, Rubio soon reversed himself and posted online that the senators were mistaken. A State Department spokesperson falsely accused the senators of lying
I spoke to Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), who was with the delegation during the call (although not on the phone). “I heard what [my colleagues] said immediately after the call,” he told me. “They couldn’t have been clearer about what Marco said, and what the complications were. I hope after today we’ll see a proposal which enables Ukraine to remain free and sovereign and defend itself in the future.”
With this White House, don’t hold your breath.
The pushback from GOP backers of Ukraine, as well as from the EU and Kyiv, was so intense, however, that Rubio rushed to “update” the document in weekend negotiations with Ukrainian officials in Geneva.
Very sensitive issues remain unresolved, yet Trump is still pressuring Kyiv to sign on this month. There is an acute danger that he and Vice President JD Vance may try again to bushwhack Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who will probably visit the White House this month.
European allies, who were not consulted on the deal, have been desperately trying to bolster Zelensky and get Trump’s ear.
In this image taken from video provided by Russian Presidential Press Service on Nov. 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks as he visits one of the command posts of the West group of Russian Army in an undisclosed location.
But given the president’s eagerness for a “deal” — any deal, no matter how fatal to Ukraine — Trump is more likely to squeeze Kyiv than press Putin for concessions. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made clear this week that Putin is only interested in the original pro-Russian points, and not any revision that protects Ukraine from future attack.
It’s important for Americans to understand why the Putin-Trump 28-point deal wouldn’t stop Russian aggression and would only encourage Moscow to continue the war.
As former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk pointed out: “Ukraine has never attempted to seize Russian territory. Russia, on the other hand, has repeatedly invaded Ukraine and continues to strike Ukrainian cities daily.”
The bottom line for achieving peace is that any plan must strengthen Ukraine’s defenses and provide concrete U.S. guarantees that Russia won’t destroy the Ukrainian state in the future. The 28-point plan does just the opposite (and the revisions aren’t strong enough.)
The Kirillov proposal shrinks the size of the Ukrainian army by a third while putting no limits on Russia’s army, which is roughly twice the size of Ukraine’s. It prevents Ukraine from ever joining NATO and forbids NATO peacekeepers on its soil.
Imagine if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had endorsed a peace plan between Winston Churchill and Hitler in 1940 that left Hitler free to expand his army while demanding Churchill halve his forces, ground his Spitfires, and promise never to ask the Yanks for help.
Which brings us to the ugliest part of Trump’s fake peace efforts. There is a lot of loose verbiage about “guarantees” against a future Russian invasion in the 28 points, and in a side letter offering Kyiv a “security assurance modeled on the principles of [NATO’s] Article 5.” Note the weasel words.
Let me assure you, I have read and reread the texts, and they offer Ukraine no firm U.S. or allied commitment to intervene if Russia attacks again.
The real hint of the worthlessness of this Kremlin-born document comes with point 16, which proclaims: “Russia will enshrine in law its policy of non-aggression toward Europe and Ukraine.”
Does Trump not know Putin has violated every accord he or his predecessors signed with Kyiv. That includes the 1994 Budapest Memorandum by which Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees of sovereignty from the U.S., the U.K., and Russia? We know how much those paper assurances have been worth.
POTUS refuses to face reality: Putin respects only strength; there will be no peace until the costs of war are more than the Russian economy and military can bear.
Peace negotiations are worthless unless backed by tougher U.S. sanctions and sales of U.S. air defense systems and missiles to Ukraine.
By his continual concessions to Moscow, Trump has convinced the Russian leader that he is a weak pushover. That guarantees that Russia will continue the war.
How do Ukrainians fight on when the front line is so painful, the Russian bombing of civilians so brutal, and pro-Putin President Donald Trump so eager to stab Kyiv in the back?
I put that question to Associated Press journalist and filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, whose 20 Days in Mariupol won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2024. His new masterpiece, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, will premiere on PBS’s Frontline and also begin streaming on Tuesday, Nov. 25.
The film follows a unit of military volunteers in Ukraine’s fabled 3rd Assault Brigade who come from all walks of life, from young to middle-aged. They are trying to advance a little more than a mile along a narrow, mostly destroyed tree line between heavily mined fields,in order to liberate a small village in eastern Ukraine and help cut a Russian supply line to the then-besieged city of Bakhmut.
This is a raw film, shot from the soldiers’ point of view, not only by Chernov and his AP colleague, videographer Alex Babenko, but by the video cameras many fighters wear on their helmets.
“I wanted to be as realistic as possible,” Chernov told me. “Showing courage and sacrifice, but also how horrifying and disgusting war is at the core. We try to keep this paradox in the film.”
What Chernov also achieves, through his voice-over and brief interviews during downtime, is a portrait of why these men won’t stop fighting, no matter the odds, until the Russian aggressor is forced to recognize the sovereignty of the Ukrainian state.
Mstyslav Chernov speaks at the premiere of “2000 Meters to Andriivka” during the Sundance Film Festival at the Ray Theatre in Park City, Utah, in January.
When he started this film in 2023, Chernov said, he wanted to make a documentary “about fighting back.” That was a hopeful year, in which Ukrainians were mounting a large counteroffensive against Russia.
“I searched for hope as much as any Ukrainian,” he recounted. “Raising the flag as a symbol of victory.” He also sought to honor the sacrifice of 3rd Assault Brigade fighters who were liberating the area surrounding his hometown of Kharkiv.
By the time the film was completed, though, the counteroffensive had failed. Bakhmut had fallen, and Ukrainian forces were weary and undermanned.
Today, technology has shifted the battlefront into a war of attrition dominated by drones, which can inflict terrible casualties on anything that moves. The Russians are making small advances, and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky is fending off a corruption scandal.
Yet, says Chernov, what you see in 2023 is similar to now.
The reason Ukrainians keep fighting remains the same, even though many Americans don’t grasp it. “It is a fight for survival, not for a piece of land, but a fight for your life,” he told me. “Stop and you are dead, or fight and you have a chance to survive as a country and with your family.”
These are the basic truths President Trump and real estate mogul-turned-peace negotiator Steve Witkoff are far too blinkered to grasp.
President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff (foreground), Russian President Vladimir Putin’s investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev (second left), and Russian Presidential Aide Yuri Ushakov (left) arrive to attend the talks with Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow in April.
Russia’s war is not about real estate deals or land swaps. VladimirPutin has insisted publicly for years that Ukraine has no right to exist as a state, and that it must be returned to the Russian empire as a subordinate province.
Any peace plan that hands territory to Russia and fails to provide ironclad military guarantees to Ukraine will only encourage Putin to restart the war. Yet, Witkoff secretly devised a 28-point draft plan with Putin pal Kirill Dmitriev, without consulting Kyiv or our European allies — a plan that leaves Ukraine virtually defenseless.
This capitulation plan would hand Russia parts of Ukraine that aren’t occupied, while shrinking and largely disarming Kyiv’s forces — and banning the purchase of new Western weapons. It would also ban Ukraine’s future membership in NATO or any peacekeeping troops from NATO members.
Of course, Putin has endorsed Trump’s plan, which could have and may indeed have been, written in the Kremlin. This shameful document virtually invites the Russian dictator to rebuild his depleted forces and try to end Ukrainian sovereignty for good.
We already know what has happened in Ukrainian territory that Russia has occupied: the Ukrainian language is banned in schools and from official use, and Ukrainian books are burned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is banned, and its priests arrested.
Ukrainian children in areas under Russian rule are taught that Kyiv is the enemy. They are sent to military camps in Crimea or Russia, and then drafted to fight against fellow Ukrainians. Many younger children have been kidnapped and adopted by Russian families.
Kobzar, a Ukrainian serviceman, practices shooting in preparation for the next military operation of the 3rd Assault Brigade. Five months later, he would be killed.
“If Ukrainians lose,” said Chernov, “not only will Ukraine cease to exist, but it means millions of Ukrainian children will be taken, their Ukrainian identities stolen, and they will be trained to fight for Russia against Europeans. It creates the opportunities for Russia to get more people to fight.”
“Many people in the U.S. don’t grasp how destructive the Russian narrative is,” the filmmaker added, “how they say the U.S. is the archenemy. Reality can be seen in the Russian media. They laugh at the United States and love the idea of civil war in your country.
“Russian existence [under Putin] is based on an anti-American narrative. What you see is that they are already at war with the United States and Europe.”
Indeed, if Ukraine ultimately falls to Russian control — with Trump’s help — the Russian border will move westward, and many NATO countries will be in danger.
Trump doesn’t care.
Wooed by visions of U.S.-Russian business deals that have been dangled by Dmitriev, Trump and Witkoff are focused on dollar signs. Like a mafia don, Trump is blackmailing Zelensky to sign this surrender by Thanksgiving, or lose all U.S. support for the war.
Yet, unlike Trump, Ukrainian soldiers on the front don’t have the luxury of denying the harsh realities they face if Russia isn’t pushed back by force.
Every soldier I’ve met knows full well that if Russia wins, they and their families have no future. The Kremlin calls brave Ukrainian fighters “Nazis,” and regularly tortures and murders POWs. Under Kremlin rule, any veteran or army member would almost certainly be targeted for prison or death.
Ukrainian servicemen from the 3rd Assault Brigade at frontline positions near Andriivka, Donetsk region, Ukraine, in 2023.
So, as Chernov explained, the question of future international aid for Ukraine’s defense “is rarely discussed on the battlefield, because there were so many words of support but so little action. They know they have to fight for survival.”
After the first meeting of Zelensky and Trump, when the president scolded the Ukrainian leader before the cameras, all illusions were gone, said the filmmaker. “We know the truth of our situation. The only person you can rely on is right next to you or with your unit.”
The changing nature of the war means the future depends on which country — Ukraine or Russia — can beat the other in the race for technological advantage. “Until Russia feels it can lose they will not want peace, Chernov stated. ”We are bracing for a very long winter.”
And yet, despite his depiction of the brutality of an unending war in a film that left me in tears, Chernov retains a core of optimism. Drawing strength from the men whose steadfastness he captures with his camera.
“Seeing those guys, fellow students, policemen, workers being there, making that choice to fight back against all odds. When I watch them …” He paused. “Whenever I lose hope, I go to the front, and I get my hope back.”
While America has been obsessing over Jeffrey Epstein, Vladimir Putin has been making dangerous headway in Ukraine — and expanding his war into Europe.
Under such circumstances, genuine peace negotiations are impossible because Putin thinks he is winning. America’s top foreign policy priority should be to reverse the Russian leader’s mindset by increasing military sales to Ukraine — which the Europeans will pay for.
Instead, the Trump team and Russian officials together have drawn up a new 28-point “peace” plan, without first consulting Ukraine or European allies. This pro-Russian plan calls for major Ukrainian concessions and would leave the country naked to further Russian aggression.
The White House has already denied Ukraine the weapons that could still stop the Russians, thereby effectively helping Putin slaughter Ukrainian civilians nightly with missiles and drones that target apartment buildings and heating systems.
In pursuit of his mythical Nobel Peace Prize, Trump appears poised, yet again, to sell out Ukraine. If so, he will also be selling out our European allies — and the United States.
Most Americans don’t realize Russia is already at war with Europe. This new mode of hybrid warfare is carried out on land, air, and sea, but without ground troops — yet. Moscow is frequently using drones to shut down airports in Germany, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and Poland. Russian hackers are attacking European networks.
Russian ships are cutting Europe’s underwater cables, its warplanes are invading European airspace and buzzing military planes, and its saboteurs are carrying out assassinations and arson attacks, including failed plans to bring down European airliners.
Because this war is unconventional, and hitting individual countries in Europe, the European Union and its members haven’t yet figured out how to respond.
Putin seeks not only to frighten Europeans but to unnerve Americans, as well. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded last year that failed Russian arson attempts on planes were a “test run” for using similar devices on transatlantic cargo shipments, according to the Washington Post. And Putin frequently hints at nuclear war against the West.
Has Trump denounced such behavior, or warned Putin to stop his attacks on U.S. allies? Nyet. Only occasional grumbling has been heard from the White House.
President Donald Trump shakes the hand of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during a joint press conference at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, in August.
The president probably never even took briefings on Russian sabotage. Anything negative about Putin is rebuffed as the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.”
Instead, Trump has been busy misusing U.S. forces to threaten war on Venezuela (which poses no military threat to America, and contrary to Trump’s claims, ships no fentanyl to U.S. shores). Perhaps this wag-the-dog war is meant to scare a weak Nicolás Maduro.
But Trump has made clear he doesn’t dare (or want to) stand up to Putin.
His new secondary sanctions on Russian oil sales haven’t been seriously pursued against India or China, which buy huge and increasing shares of Russian oil and gas.
Moreover, as Moscow takes advantage of Ukraine’s dire shortage of man power, air defenses, and long-range missiles, Trump refuses to help. Even though Europe has pledged to pay for key weapons systems for Kyiv, Trump won’t sell them.
Although Ukraine makes an array of drones, they can’t shoot down ballistic missiles or cope with Russia’s current mass production of drones, helped by thousands of North Korean workers and endless shipments of parts from China.
Promised U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems, which could take out the ballistic missiles, have never arrived in Ukraine. Only this week, after a nine-month delay, did Washington permit Kyiv to once again fire long-range U.S.-made ATACMS missiles. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had banned their use early this year.
And most cowardly, after hinting for months that he would send desperately needed long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, Trump finally came out with a big “No Tomahawks.”
There’s more. Although Ukraine is a world champion producer of all varieties of drones, and the United States lags far behind in unmanned warfare, Trump has yet to conclude a much-discussed drone deal with Volodymyr Zelensky, whereby Ukraine would swap drones, technology, and testing for U.S. weapons.
Such White House blindness — and weakness — convinces Putin he can get away with destroying Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff (right) shake hands during their meeting in Moscow in August.
And so the Russian leader is doing with a disastrous plan pushed by Trump’s supremely naive negotiator, real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, who has has no grasp of Putin’s history or goals and seems to swallow his lies whole.
Witkoff’s draft plan would reportedly require Ukraine to give up the 14 per cent of the Donbas region it still controls, and cut the size of its armed forces by half. It would require Ukraine to abandon key categories of weapons, endorse a permanent rollback of vital U.S. assistance including long-range weapons, and ban foreign troops from basing on Ukrainian soil.
And the deal provides no U.S. guarantees except lip service to protect against Putin’s certain violations in the future.
Trump might as well say publicly that he endorses Putin’s dream of swallowing Ukraine. He is effectively telling Ukraine and Zelensky: Drop Dead.
Putin isn’t fighting for a piece of land. He wants to absorb Ukraine back into the Russian empire.
Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian traitor and close Putin ally, whom the Russian president wanted to install in Zelensky’s place after the invasion, recently spelled out Kremlin goals to the official TASS newswire. He said that Ukraine will not “survive as a state” in the future, and Moscow considers the reunification of Ukraine with Russia a strategic goal.
Trump clearly doesn’t care.
The administration is pushing to strip language from an annual U.N. General Assembly Human Rights Committee resolution that recognizes Ukraine’s territorial integrity and rights as a sovereign nation. The U.S. delegation will vote against anything that condemns Putin.
Trump has made clear he believes Putin bears no blame for invading Ukraine (it’s all Zelensky’s fault or even Joe Biden’s). He has crossed over totally to the Russian dictator’s camp.
Unless he wakes up from his Putin-induced trance, he is incapable of making peace.
Although things look bleak for Ukraine, I believe its fighters will manage to hold back the Russians this winter, but at a brutal cost to civilians’ and soldiers’ lives. Trump will bear much blame for the suffering to come.
But after the Epstein-induced awakening of GOP members of Congress, I hope some Republican senators will find the courage to denounce Trump’s attempt to hand over Ukraine to Russia.
They should recognize that the retort of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) after Trump called her a traitor also applies to his position on Ukraine.
“Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American [who] serves foreign countries and themselves,” Greene said. With his heedless pursuit of Putin and a peace prize, Trump is serving the Kremlin, in service to his ego, as he attempts to sacrifice Ukraine.
Perhaps we should start calling the Pentagon’s secretary of war “Baghdad Pete.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is trying to block the Pentagon press corps from using any information not explicitly authorized by his staff, even if it is unclassified. Shades of “Baghdad Bob,” the infamous Saddam Hussein mouthpiece who delivered the regime line daily to the international press when I was covering the 1991 Gulf War.
The Hegseth policy even requires an official to accompany accredited journalists visiting Pentagon areas where they were formerly allowed to walk freely. Reminds me of our assigned “minders” in Baghdad, whose job was to bar us from learning anything the regime didn’t want us to know.
Hats off to nearly all the Pentagon press corps — including conservative outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, the Washington Times, and the Daily Caller — who refused to forfeit their First Amendment rights by signing on to the new rules. They thereby lost their accreditation and their access to enter the building. Even more outrageous, they have been replaced with far-right outlets and slander-mongers known for promoting election denial, fake news, Russian propaganda, and deluded conspiracy theories.
Baghdad Pete is striving not only to stop accurate news coverage of the use or abuse of U.S. military operations. In his effort to tightly control Pentagon news, he has also decreed that Pentagon officials can’t interact with members of Congress without prior approval.
Much (though not all) of the news he is trying to hide is already self-evident, and so damaging to U.S. security that he won’t be able to plug future leaks.
Politico and the Washington Post have already published important details on President Donald Trump’s upcoming National Security Strategy, which will assign America’s top priority to “protecting” the U.S. homeland and the Western Hemisphere. This means making war on “the enemy within” in U.S. cities, as well as on immigration and drug cartels. As if those threats overshadow our fraught competition with China, and the very real threat from Russia.
The theatrical U.S. military attacks on alleged drug smugglers in small boats off Venezuela and in the Pacific off Colombia – which could easily be stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard – are clearly illegal.
But even more obvious, while this showy policy of killing a few unknown civilians at sea may be great for the White House video feed, it does nothing to combat America’s drug problem or drub the cartels.
U.S. citizens are dying in enormous numbers from fentanyl, which is neither produced in nor smuggled in from Venezuela or Colombia (most comes in via Mexico, made from Chinese precursors).
Indeed, Colombia has been one of Washington’s closest partners for decades in combating narcotics trafficking, and the U.S. strikes have infuriated Colombian President Gustavo Petro. Yet, Trump has now cut off all aid to Colombia and labeled Petro an “illegal drug leader.”
As for Venezuela, the Pentagon has assembled a force of 10,000 in the Caribbean off its coast for a supposed anti-terrorism mission, which many Latin American experts believe is really aimed at fomenting regime change in Caracas. Despite Trump’s dismal failure in his first term to oust Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, he is apparently trying again.
This upside-down set of priorities has reportedly upset top U.S. military officials.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Hegseth just announced that Adm. Alvin Holsey, a 37-year veteran, will quit his job as head of U.S. Southern Command — where he oversees all operations in Central and South America. (Could the fact that the highly qualified Holsey is African American have accelerated Baghdad Pete’s effort to get rid of him two years early?)
Thus, there is plenty of news for the now-banned Pentagon press to ferret out for the U.S. public, not just about why the armada was dispatched, but why Trump and Hegseth want to prioritize Latin America and drugs.
We know Trump has a thing about the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 message to Congress by President James Monroe that warned off any other would-be colonizers from interfering in Latin America. Some wags now call it the “Donroe Doctrine.”
Trump has interpreted the doctrine to mean the United States’ sphere of influence should extend over Northern, Central and South America, while often seeming to concede Europe to Russia’s sphere of influence, and Asia to China’s.
In other words, a Big Man theory of politics expanding Monroe’s intended meaning, which presumes Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping can split up the world.
However, 2025 is not 1823, and a Donroe Doctrine doesn’t fit the world we live in. Some Latin American countries, such as Brazil, have become major forces in their own right. China, with its large-scale investments in Latin America, and helped by Trump’s tariff policies, is already an ever more powerful presence on the continent.
I see Trump’s Caribbean action as a distraction from his failures in handling China and Russia, as Putin and Xi run rings around him. It is far easier for Trump to carry out performative war off the South American coast — bang-bang on unknown boatmen about which he and Hegseth can chest thump — than to confront the real threats that endanger our country. (And he can still pretend he will tariff Xi into subservience when they meet in Seoul, South Korea, this week.)
Let me give just one example of how the boat bombs serve as a distraction. This week, they have obscured the president’s latest failure with his all-carrots approach to Putin, who stiffed him yet again on a ceasefire in Ukraine.
True, Trump has finally, after months of threats, imposed new sanctions on two big Russian oil producers. But if you read the text of the new sanctions, you will see he let Putin off the hook once more.
The new sanctions — which will not even take effect for four weeks — are levied against any U.S. firms or individuals who deal with Rosneft or Lukoil. But as the indefatigable Phillips P. O’Brien pointed out in his Substack, the U.S. does almost no business with either firm. And secondary sanctions against foreign individuals or companies who keep dealing with the named firms will not be automatically applied.
Indeed, the real issue is whether the president will try to squeeze China and India to halt their enormous purchases of Russian oil. Despite Trump’s claims, full Indian adherence isn’t likely, and forget about China.
And POTUS has already admitted he hopes the new sanctions will be short-lived.
If Trump had really wanted to pressure Putin, he would have sold Kyiv long-range Tomahawk missiles. But that would have been a hard choice, and might have disturbed some of his disciples.
Better to focus on Caribbean boom-boom and change U.S. security doctrine to fight a war against “enemies at home” and supposed threats from drug lords. And to prohibit the Pentagon press from interviewing disaffected military or civilians who would explain how this doctrine endangers the United States.
How much Russian humiliation can Donald Trump swallow before conceding that Vladimir Putin is making him look like a fool?
On Tuesday, the White House was forced to announce the cancellation of a supposed Trump-Putin summit the president had recently stated would take place in Budapest, Hungary, in around two weeks.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov effectively told Secretary of State Marco Rubio by phone that the U.S. president hadn’t kowtowed sufficiently to Moscow to justify a summit. There are “no plans” for Trump to meet Putin “in the immediate future,” the White House admitted.
In past weeks and months, Trump has bowed down so deeply to Russia’s leader it’s a wonder his head hasn’t banged on the ground. Yet, the Kremlin keeps playing him and disrespecting the self-declared champion of global peacemaking.
It won’t be surprising if Trump chooses to blame the summit fiasco on Kyiv’s refusal to surrender to Moscow — rather than recognize Putin’s total disinterest in a peace deal. If he doesn’t want to go down in history as Putin’s lapdog, the president needs to recognize that carrots won’t bring peace if they aren’t backed up by sticks.
Ironically, Trump appeared to have grasped that truth when he finally pressured a reluctant Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire in Gaza in return for Hamas’ release of living and dead Israeli hostages.
But with Putin, Trump’s tactic has been all carrots. So far, the president seems blind to the reasons why his peacemaking efforts with the Kremlin have failed, again and again.
A red-carpet summit in Alaska in August was a dismal disaster, even though POTUS dropped his support for a ceasefire in favor of Putin’s demand to negotiate while fighting.
When Putin rewarded Trump’s faith by massively ratcheting up air attacks on Ukrainian civilians, the president seemed to recognize he was being played. He began hinting he would sell Kyiv long-range Tomahawk missiles that could take out Russian missile bases at the source, and was set to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss the missiles on Friday.
Putin, knowing his man, called the White House on Thursday and said nyet. Trump immediately dropped all talk of delivering Tomahawks.
Instead, the president angrily urged Zelensky to accept Putin’s demands that Ukraine surrender the entire Donetsk region to Russia, including a large chunk that Kyiv still holds, which is a critical “fortress belt” preventing further Russian advances toward major cities. Trump reportedly berated Ukraine’s leader in foul language to accept the Russian demand (on the false presumption it would end the war). Otherwise, he claimed, Putin would “destroy” Ukraine.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to reporters in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House on Friday, following a meeting with President Donald Trump.
Needless to say, Zelensky refused this suicidal proposal. Trump then resurrected a call for Russia to agree to a ceasefire in place in Ukraine. Kyiv and America’s NATO allies supported this idea.
Russia refused, and continued to demand Ukraine’s complete capitulation, including the handover of unoccupied Donetsk, Ukraine’s demilitarization, a change of government (meaning installing a pro-Putin puppet regime), and a cutoff from any NATO member support.
Which brings us to now, and what comes next for Ukraine.
Much depends on whether an egotistical Trump can sense how weak he is being made to look by Putin. It also depends on whether the president has the guts and smarts to pressure Putin sufficiently to convince him the war has become too costly.
It is hard to imagine such a presidential self-awakening. But were it to happen, it would require recognition of certain facts that Trump has failed to grasp until now.
First, the Ukraine war is not about territory. I cringed when Trump told Fox News onSunday he was confident he could end the conflict, but Putin was “going to take something, he’s won certain property.”
That is the equivalent of claiming that American patriots waged the Revolutionary War up and down the Eastern Seaboard over waterfront footage, not for their independence from imperial rule. As former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk told me by phone from Kyiv, “This is not a territorial war, it is an existential war about the existence of the Ukrainian state.”
Nor is Putin fighting for land. He is waging an imperial war to destroy Ukraine’s existence as an independent country, eradicating its religion, culture, language and civic freedoms. Such Russian cruelty is already the norm in Ukrainian territory that Moscow has seized.
Until Trump and his Putin-bedazzled negotiator Steve Witkoff grasp this, they will never understand why Ukrainians continue to fight.
Second, Putin does not want peace, no matter what platitudes he feeds Trump. He is angling to see how many carrots Trump will offer him in return for nothing. That is why it is past time for sticks — including secondary sanctions on Russia, and Tomahawks and Patriot air defenses for Ukraine.
Third, the portion of Donetsk that Ukraine still controls contains key cities and critical fortifications that prevent Russian troops from entering vast flat steppes which would give them open access to major Ukrainian cities such as Dnipro. The Russians have been struggling for three years to take this area, with huge losses of man power, and still haven’t succeeded.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff (right) shake hands during their meeting in Moscow in August.
Nor did they yearn for Kremlin overlordship because they were Russian speakers, a Putin talking point Witkoff keeps repeating. Most Ukrainians were bilingual or Russian speakers before Moscow’s invasion because of the long-term impact of prior Soviet rule.
Fourth, Putin won’t be able to “destroy Ukraine” if Kyiv refuses to capitulate. Contrary to Putin’s lies to Trump and Witkoff, his economy is ailing, and his massive losses of soldiers are being felt. Were it not for aid from Iran, China, and North Korea, Moscow could not keep up.
“Putin won’t be able to destroy us,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “He is selling himself as the leader of a superpower, but he isn’t. He is much weaker than he is perceived. Most of the world sees this, but unfortunately, he still seems able to communicate this message to the United States.”
Fifth, forging peace requires U.S. toughness. If Trump truly wants peace in Ukraine, it’s time to recognize Putin’s weakness and Ukraine’s strength, born from painful knowledge that Putin intends to turn their country into a Soviet-style satellite ruled by terror. Trump’s weakness will only encourage further attacks on Europe and aggression against other U.S. allies by a Chinese-Russian-North Korean entente.
Handing over Donetsk would only feed Putin’s appetite for more. “He would just take the territory and move on,” said Zagorodnyuk, rightly.
If Trump is the tough guy his followers claim, and not Putin’s patsy, it’s past time for more sanctions, Tomahawks, and air defenses for Ukraine.
As Vladimir Putin blocks peace talks, Kyiv wants to share with the U.S. and Europe how to counter the AI-driven weapons of the future.
Betsyk, commander for the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade's special battalion for intercepting enemy drones, sits beside downed Russian reconnaissance drones.3rd Separate Assault Brigade
DIRECTION POKROVSK, Ukraine — In a warren of rooms filled with computers, 3D printers, colorful wires, and drone frames, the atmosphere was casual, but the intentions were deadly.
The young men in their 20s and 30s, dressed in cargo pants and T-shirts, wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Silicon Valley start-up. Except they were fighting for their lives — and their country’s survival.
In the basement command center, three of the soldier-techies stared at multiple screens with dozens of views delivered by Ukrainian-made surveillance drones. They were looking for Russian targets in a war that had lasted for three and a half years.
As I peered over their shoulders during a June visit to the rear of the front lines, a moving car was spotted.
Orders were quickly passed to a frontline drone navigator and pilot in a trench or basement who would make the final call as to whether the target was clearly visible and worth destroying — at which point the pilot’s goggles would let him watch the little exploding drone descend until a flash signaled another kill.
It was a slow day, and everyone’s attention had turned to other screens before I could learn the fate of the car. But there were always more targets to find.
By my side, the 31-year-old commander of an elite drone battalion of the 59th Assault Brigade, call sign Condor, told me there are up to 300 targets a day, which can range from a single fighter in the grass to a moving motorcycle to a small Russian dugout covered with branches or nets.
“The orcs outnumber us, and they don’t care about loss of lives,” Condor said, using the name of the grotesque enemy warriors in the Lord of the Rings series to refer to the Russians. “In this new way of war, infantry and artillery and mortars still matter, but everything is controlled by air. Now, a military is just a way of supporting drones.”
For Ukraine, drones are an essential part of why the country has been able to hold out so long against an army four times its size.
Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project.John Duchneskie/Staff Artist
The technology of unmanned weaponry is advancing at a pace that appears revolutionary — from aerial drones to drones that move by sea, robotic land drones, and long-range drones carrying missiles — all increasingly directed by artificial intelligence.
Sea drones drove Russian ships out of the Black Sea along the Ukrainian coast, and continue to strike at the critical Kerch Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea. In June, Ukrainian security services conducted the amazing Operation Spiderweb, which damaged or destroyed up to 40 Russian warplanes worth billions of dollars, deep inside Russia — all with 117 small drones costing $500 each.
But Russia is catching up. Ukraine needs the funds to massively scale up drone production.
That’s why the most important moment of President Donald Trump’s Monday meeting with Ukraine’s president and top European leaders may have been when Volodymyr Zelensky proposed to share his country’s breakthrough drone technology with the Pentagon.
Kyiv would sell tens of billions of dollars’ worth of advanced Ukrainian-made drones to America, and, in return, would buy double that dollar amount of U.S. weapons systems, financed by Europe. Both countries would then be far better equipped for the challenges of modern conflict.
The success of that proposal could bolster American preparedness for future tech wars, while helping Ukraine survive as a free, sovereign state.
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Why so? Peace talks are going nowhere. Vladimir Putin has no interest in peace. He thinks he’s winning.
The Russian dictator “has no reason to compromise so long as the president refuses to apply any pressure on Moscow,” as former Russian political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza bluntly told MSNBC. “You cannot make peace by placating Russia.”
Despite the effusive red-carpet welcome Trump gave Putin at their recent Alaska summit, the Russian leader has rejected every one of the president’s proposals to end the war.
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No ceasefire. No strong security guarantees for Kyiv, as the naive White House negotiator Steve Witkoff claimed Putin had accepted. The Kremlin has already rebuffed a possible bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelensky that Trump has been touting.
Peace talks will become plausible only if the U.S. joins Europe in putting maximum pressure on Russia, convincing Putin he can’t win and can’t afford to fight any longer.
But that would require Trump to recognize what the Europeans already know: Ukraine has been able to hold off the Russians until now because it has pioneered a revolutionary new way of warfare — the war of drones.
So Zelensky’s proposal is in both countries’ interests. The U.S. is way behind in small drone production, but it has weapons systems crucial to Ukraine. A swap would signal to Putin that Trump is not a pushover.
If Trump wants to be a peacemaker, he must recognize that the Ukraine war is about far more than real estate. It is a battle over freedom, geopolitics — and who will win the tech wars of the future.
As I was told by former Ukrainian Minister of Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin: “This war started like the Second World War with drones. But it will finish as the First World Drone War.”
A pilot with the elite drone unit for HUR, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence service, demonstrates drone control.Trudy Rubin/Staff
In the air
My latest Ukraine visit — my fifth since the fighting began in February 2022 — showed me what it means when unmanned drones take over the battlefield.
Last year, I could still visit artillery emplacements and destroyed villages near the front where army units lived, showered outdoors, and ate outdoors. I could drive on roads to and from towns near the Donetsk front line inside the contested parts of the eastern Donbas region that Ukraine still controls. Military vehicles still sped along those roads.
Those days are over.
The 15 kilometers (roughly nine miles) on each side of the front line have become a kill zone where almost nothing moves on land because it is at risk of being hit by the other side’s drones.
The size of the kill zone keeps expanding.
Tanks are sitting ducks. So are medical evacuation vehicles. Indeed, military vehicles of any kind. No longer are the soldiers who man frontline positions or drone pilots rotated every day or two; they stay in place for days because the roads in and out are so risky.
Supplies are brought in and the wounded taken out by unmanned robotic carts, known as land drones. These robots also lay mines, and some are equipped with machine guns or rockets.
As for Ukraine’s cities, Putin is demonstrating how drones can be used as a cheap, terrifying tool of terror against civilians.
During my stay in Kyiv, the nightly Russian barrage of Shaheds — drones designed in Iran and gifted by the thousands to Putin by the ayatollahs — rained down nightly on civilian targets. I was lucky to be in a hotel with a comfortable basement shelter, but my Ukrainian friends and contacts were up each night huddled in their hallways or bathrooms. They still are.
Natalya Dubchek stands next to a minibus destroyed by a Shahed drone. The fire from the explosion torched her home in Odesa, Ukraine.Trudy Rubin / Staff
In Odesa one morning, I visited a neighborhood where a family of three was incinerated when a Shahed sheared off the top floor of their apartment building in a residential neighborhood. I spoke with a woman whose bungalow burned to its concrete walls, and who barely escaped the flames.
Even after my return to the U.S., I have kept the air raid alerts on my iPhone, which can be set to any city or region. My phone buzzes every time Russia launches another swarm of Shaheds (along with cruise and ballistic missiles) against Kyiv. For hours, the alerts go off every 20 minutes.
Each buzz means Ukrainian civilians, including the elderly and mothers with small children, must decide whether to descend to an underground shelter and spend miserable hours or the entire night there.
The Shaheds, which give off a chilling whine as they fly, are now copied and manufactured inside Russia with Tehran’s technical help. They have been made more lethal with the addition of jet engines, which enable them to fly higher and faster and elude countermeasures. They are meant to terrorize, exhaust, and kill civilians in Ukrainian schools, hospitals, markets, and apartment buildings.
The number of Shaheds in the skies has jumped dramatically since Putin concluded that Trump will never be serious about punishing Russia for its refusal to accept a ceasefire or engage in serious peace talks. And they are affecting morale. If the Russian barrage continues, more Ukrainians may try to leave for abroad.
A Ukrainian officer shows a thermobaric charge from a downed Shahed drone in a research laboratory in an undisclosed location in Ukraine in 2024.Efrem Lukatsky
Yet, despite the daily Shahed carnage and recent Russian gains on long stalemated front lines, Moscow is still not winning this war.
A prime reason is that Ukraine’s war of technology has so far enabled Kyiv to hold its defensive line, but not to take back territory.
Former Ukrainian commander in chief, now ambassador to the U.K., Valerii Zaluzhnyi, told a video forum in Kyiv that the only war Ukraine can wage is a “high-tech war of survival” until it destroys Russia’s military and economic ability to keep fighting over the long run.
The bad news is that Russia is learning from Ukraine and receiving large-scale tech aid, components, and ready-made drones not only from Iran, but from its other allies, China and North Korea.
This alliance of dictators is growing stronger, and its members are watching the Ukraine war for lessons in future drone warfare with the West. Think China and Taiwan.
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To shake up the Kremlin, Kyiv needs to vastly scale up its drone production and race to outdo the Russians with innovation, especially interceptors that can destroy Shaheds and fiber-optic drones.
European governments and private companies are entering agreements to jointly produce drones, both in Ukraine and in Europe. They are studying Kyiv’s technological advances, including on the front lines.
Ukraine wants to share its invaluable battle-tested knowledge with Washington, yet Trump still appears hung up on the vain hope that Putin “wants a peace deal,” which he mistakenly believes would entitle him to a Nobel Peace Prize.
So long as he refuses to recognize Kyiv’s importance as a strategic ally, the president undermines not only Ukraine’s security but ours.
A Ukrainian serviceman of 57th motorised brigade controls an FPV drone at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine in August.Andrii Marienko
Drone expansion
In June 2024, when I first met with then-infantry commander Condor of the 59th Assault Brigade in one of the hottest combat zones in eastern Ukraine, he was struggling to arm his depleted battalion. They were suffering through a terrible “shell hunger,” he told me, after the U.S. Congress had frozen military aid for six months. His men were often reduced to firing one artillery shell for every 10 fired by the Russians.
“Every day of [congressional] delay cost broken lives and deaths,” the former history teacher turned soldier said bitterly, as we sat in a dark, virtually empty cafe in the countryside near Pokrovsk. “So, we had no other choice but to be creative.”
To fend off a brutal Russian adversary with four times their population and massive industrial might, the nation’s techies and grunts turned their front lines and hidden basements into a tech incubator for modern war.
Desperate fighters, like Condor’s unit, were already using simple Chinese-made commercial drones to spy on Russian forces in 2023 and 2024.
Every unit I visited near the front during those years had guys working on benches in abandoned farmhouses or workshops, putting together drones from parts purchased on Amazon with their own salaries, or donated by families, friends, or private charitable foundations.
While Ukraine was well known in peacetime for talented engineers and a deep tech sector, many of those early do-it-yourself builders had no such background, but figured things out as they went.
By the summer of 2024, the men of Condor’s unit had come up with how to turn small commercial or DIY drones into little exploding drones.
Call sign Condor, commander of the UAV Forces Battalion of the 59th Assault Brigade.Trudy Rubin / Staff
“We cut sewage pipes and stuffed them with explosives,” Condor explained. “We did the same with energy drink cans.”
These makeshift mini bombs were then affixed to UAVs, the shorthand for unmanned aerial vehicles, mostly small Chinese DJI MAVIC quadcopters, the kind Americans use to record panoramic overhead views of weddings. The Ukrainians launched them at Russian tanks, artillery positions, and trenches.
“This is the art of war,” Condor said, with a grim smile. “When you have no supplies, you have to innovate.”
The turning point came in 2024, when the U.S.-induced shell hunger spurred a massive expansion of drone use to save Ukraine’s army. The goal was to protect and preserve precious frontline man power in a war in which Russia treats soldiers like cannon fodder — and to do so with weapons far cheaper than what they destroy.
Government and private companies produced two million drones in 2025, and are set to manufacture more than four million next year. They could produce eight million to 10 million, Zelensky has said, if they had enough funds.
Other weaponry still plays an important role, especially air defenses. While drones can hold the defensive line, taking territory still requires infantry. But 80% or more of the Ukrainian strikes on the front line are now made by drones.
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Those early exploding drones have evolved into larger attack drones with bigger payloads, including sea drones that resemble large rowboats filled with electronics and sometimes carrying rockets. Robotic ground drones are now mounted with machine guns, and larger long-distance drones can carry small missiles. All of these drones are unmanned and directed by pilots and navigators using goggles and tablets.
Anything that can be viewed by FPVs — first-person view drones in which pilots wearing special goggles can see exactly what the drone sees — is now vulnerable to drone attacks, including men, artillery, ships, helicopters, and low-flying planes.
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In the process, Ukraine has rewritten the rules of ground, sea, and air conflict.
As the war continues, artificial intelligence is certain to take on more of the piloting responsibilities (although target decisions will still be made by pilots and commanders, for now).
So crucial have drones become to modern warfare that the Ukrainian military has a new branch up and running whose task is coordinating drone warfare, called the Unmanned Systems Forces.
“We are the first country with an unmanned forces command,” I was told by Hanna Gvozdiar, deputy minister for Ukraine’s Ministry for Strategic Industries. She estimated Ukraine now produces 300 different varieties of drones.
Moreover, special drone units within most Ukrainian battalions have become central to every element of the conflict. Not only do many of them design their own drones, but they also provide constant updates to private drone manufacturers so they can stay ahead of Russian defenses.
As for Condor, he moved from commanding infantrymen to leading the UAV Forces Battalion of the same 59th Assault Brigade, one of the top drone units in the country. By the time I saw him in June, he was fighting a totally different war.
A worker inspects a combat drone at Fire Point's secret factory in Ukraine in August.Efrem Lukatsky
Advantage Ukraine
In the “genesis space” of a modern, glass-fronted office building in Kyiv, a group of start-up Ukrainian tech entrepreneurs has come to pitch their products to guests from the European Union — and to anyone who might fund them to scale up.
The program is sponsored by Brave1, a government-supported tech incubator that helps connect drone start-ups with investors and provides seed money for promising new projects.
“We are in a race with the Russian drone ecosystem,” I was told by Artem Moroz, Brave1’s head of international investment. “The Russians don’t need to fundraise for drone production,” he noted, with bitter irony.
“We want to win the war with the help of technology because we can’t compete with man power,” he continued. “Most of the innovation comes from the private sector. We unite 1,500 companies, some in apartments, some operating at a huge scale, providing thousands of drones.”
Before the show-and-tell, I listened to Oleksiy Babenko, one of Ukraine’s best drone producers, make his pitch to foreign investors. Babenko’s company, Vyriy — named for a paradise in pre-Christian Slavic mythology — makes a small FPV drone called Molfar, which can function in swarms and evade Russian electronic jamming.
“Practically every Ukrainian university has a polytech [division] that graduates a lot of talent. We are a technical hub for software development, and young tech entrepreneurs are migrating to the battlefield,” he told the group.
A technician prepares a Shrike drone at the Skyfall military technology company in Ukraine.Andrew Kravchenko
“But this brilliant talent needs investment, domestic or foreign, to scale up production. If we don’t do this, we will die.”
After Babenko came the young entrepreneurs with slide decks and videos: Bravo Dynamics promotes a radio-based mesh network that can connect drones, but could also have civilian uses. Farsight Vision produces software that digests visual data, which could help drone targeting or serve business uses. VMP has a robot model “that will be the main tool for logistics on the front line,” but could be used for civil defense.
There is both pride and a sense of frustration in the room. Ukraine is a start-up nation. These talented innovators, not Ukrainian government bureaucrats, have sparked the drone revolution.
Right now, Ukraine produces 94% of its own drones and is reducing its dependence on Chinese parts. Kyiv is also manufacturing 40% of its other weapons inventory.
But Ukrainian factories are operating at only one-fourth of capacity, according to Kamyshin, the former government minister. “We need $10 billion to $15 billion of necessary capital to produce what is needed,” he told me as we fast-walked through a park near his office so he could work off some of the daily tension. “We are much better innovators than the Russians, but we need to scale up.”
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Private Ukrainian firms lead Europe and the U.S. in producing battle-tested drones, from mass-produced FPVs to highly secret deep strike missile drones. Ukraine seeks not only to intensively scale up its own drone production but to become an international hub for dual-use technology.
However, unlike Russia, which can draw on billions from its (dwindling) sovereign wealth fund, Ukrainians must raise funds to increase government and private drone production to keep up with Russian drone output — which has now expanded to industrial scale.
“Our only chance is to become our own arsenal and the arsenal for Europe,” argued former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk over coffee. “The question is, how to organize that.”
European governments are seriously addressing this question of scaling up Ukrainian production, and some private investors are hovering. The question is whether they can act quickly enough to fund joint projects inside Ukraine or based in Europe. Especially now that Trump has decreed Washington will no longer give military aid to Kyiv, but will let Europeans buy weapons to transfer.
There’s no time to waste, as Russia is scaling up its drone output at a frightening rate.
In this photo taken from a video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service in May, Russian servicemen train to operate military drones in an undisclosed location.Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Advantage Russia
Putin has rallied Russia’s entire state-run industrial machine behind the war effort, and the total drone output of its state-run industrial machine now exceeds Ukraine’s. Long-range drone production more than doubled from 2023 to 2025, and has increased fivefold since then.
Prodded by Ukraine’s success in drone technology, Moscow is rushing to build a drone empire, even introducing school curriculums about the development and operations of drones.
Moreover, while Russia receives support from its ever-tightening alliance with China, North Korea, and Iran, Trump is too transactional to see the broader geopolitical threat this drone quartet poses to the United States.
Tehran was the first to partner with Moscow by sending thousands of its long-range Shaheds to Russia in 2022. Since then, Shaheds have become the go-to UAV for terrorizing Ukrainian cities.
Iran also helped Russia set up its own production facilities in Tatarstan (now spread out over the whole country), which mass-produce the killer drones, along with decoy copies to confuse Ukrainian air defenses.
In this photo taken from a video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service in August, a soldier launches a reconnaissance drone in an undisclosed location in Ukraine.Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Equally dangerous, Russia is giving North Korea the technology and production skills to start producing the Russian variants of Iran’s Shaheds, according to Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov. This will enable the North to strike targets across South Korea, changing the balance of power between the two nations, Budanov warned in an interview with the military news site the War Zone.
Meantime, China, despite its denials, is actively enabling Russia’s drone production, providing basic drones and many critical components. “China uses Russia as a research base,” I was told by Yehor Cherniev, deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s National Security Committee. “China watches aspects of the new warfare. It is about geopolitical vision on both sides.”
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Without Beijing’s aid, Russia would probably be unable to rapidly scale up its production of long-range UAVs.
Moreover, top experts on Russia and China warn that the quartets’ mutual interest in undermining the West should shatter any Trump illusions of splitting Russia from China.
Trump’s coddling of Putin only speeds Russia’s advancement in the new global drone wars, which could boomerang against Washington all too soon.
“The U.S. will be drawn in,” insisted former defense minister Zagorodnyuk. “China and Russia want to destroy Western dominance, starting with Europe and NATO, and leading to a clash with the United States.
“This war is not going to end, but is going to get worse.”
Prime Minister of Denmark Mette Frederiksen lays a wreath during a memorial ceremony, as her husband Bo Tengberg and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, right, stand behind her at the Field of Mars at Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine, in 2024.Mads Claus Rasmussen
What Europe understands
On Aug. 3, as Denmark took over the rotating European Union presidency, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called on Europeans to “change our mindset” about helping Kyiv.
“Instead of thinking we are delivering weapons to Ukraine,” she stated bluntly, “we have to think of it as a part of rearming ourselves — because right now it is the army of Ukraine that is protecting Europe. I see no signs that Putin’s imperial dreams stop with Ukraine.”
The tough-minded Frederiksen, who stood up to Trump when he threatened to seize Greenland, is now echoed by most other European leaders, none of whom harbor illusions about Putin’s aims. They understand that Ukraine’s army is defending the line between Western democracies and Eurasian adversaries, as Europe’s NATO members struggle to beef up their weak defenses.
Russia has been conducting assassinations, sabotage, and cyberwarfare against European nations for the past several years. The Kremlin clearly seeks to militarize and control the Arctic, which impacts the Nordic states, and to exert its power in the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic.
The three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — along with other European nations that suffered under Soviet domination, all worry that Putin’s first move should Ukraine fall would be to move on them, perhaps using drones.
The aim would be to prove NATO was a paper tiger and would not come to its members’ defense, leading to the collapse of the alliance.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, left, shakes hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during their briefing in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday.Efrem Lukatsky
Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister and current secretary-general of NATO, has gone one step further, warning that “Russia is reconstituting itself at an incredible pace, and the U.S. is not secure if the Atlantic, Europe, and the Arctic are not secured.”
Rutte has also cautioned that if China’s Xi Jinping attacks Taiwan, the Chinese leader might ask Putin to open a new front in Europe to distract NATO and the United States.
With Trump favoring Putin, the Europeans are moving to bolster Kyiv’s military production, including drones. They know they need Ukraine’s army as a buffer against Moscow. As Zelensky said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany in February, referring to the Russians: “Right now, Ukraine stops them. If not, who will stop them?”
Good question.
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Europe is far from ready to defend against drones or other Russian mischief now that the United States has turned its back. “The Europeans are really changing. They are buying time for themselves,” said Zagarodnyuk. “They realize they will be next.”
With that in mind, Frederiksen has pioneered the “Danish model,” a framework whereby Europeans fund drone production by private Ukrainian manufacturers, with Copenhagen vetting the contracts and effectiveness.
Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain, and the European Union are following suit, as is a special fund set up by NATO. Private European weapons manufacturers are looking into joint production and sending representatives to Ukraine to test drones and components. Ukraine, meanwhile, has offered its front line for companies to “Test in Ukraine.”
Ukrainian drone units near the front line tell me they often host European military or civilian manufacturers looking to test drones or components. Few Americans come, they said, and U.S. special forces no longer visit. If Europe coordinates its efforts, that may suffice to fund Ukraine’s drone scale-up and block Russia’s push to dominate drone warfare.
But that goal will be Herculean if Trump continues to back Putin over Europe and Ukraine.
President Donald Trump meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on Aug. 18 in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What Trump doesn’t understand
Last fall, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt sounded the alarm over America’s lack of readiness for the wars of the future.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, the two men warned: “Future wars will no longer be about who can mass the most people or field the best jets, ships and tanks. Instead, they will be dominated by increasingly autonomous weapons systems (largely drones) and powerful algorithms. Unfortunately, this is a future for which the United States remains unprepared.”
Five days after Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb garnered huge international publicity, Trump signed an executive order calling for “continued American development, commercialization and export of drones.” He called for American “drone dominance.”
What the president did not do was turn to Ukraine, which has extensive combat experience with drones that the U.S. military and its nascent drone manufacturers lack.
To understand whether that makes sense, I turned to Michael Horowitz, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, who served in the Biden administration as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and emerging capabilities. Translated, that means he is an expert on the new drone warfare, where large masses of relatively cheap unmanned drones can deliver precise and deadly strikes.
“The Ukraine war has been transformative to the U.S. military in a couple of ways,” he told me. “It showed how attack drones are now a ubiquitous part of warfare, and ready to scale up today.”
A Ukrainian serviceman operates a drone on the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine in 2024.Andriy Andriyenko
While the Pentagon has used thousands of drones against militants such as the Yemeni Houthis, the new warfare will demand millions, which “requires the U.S. to find a different model than the war on terrorism … drawing from the lessons from Ukraine,” Horowitz said.
There is another lesson at hand. The Pentagon is a slow-moving bureaucracy that normally deals with only a handful of defense contractors that take years to produce small numbers of very expensive ships, tanks, and planes — most (not all) of which are now vulnerable to cheap drones.
Moreover, the U.S. military structure generally emphasizes a rigid top-down command when it comes to weapons, which can make change difficult.
Ukraine, out of necessity, has cast aside this inflexible model, as small military units now do critical drone R&D and modify drones daily to adjust to changes in battlefield conditions. Moreover, private drone firms and their brilliant techies interact directly with the military and test on the battlefront.
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These are lessons yet to be absorbed by a Pentagon roiled by internal politics and reluctant to commit sufficient funds to scaling up small, inexpensive drones and robots that will be at the forefront of new wars.
Yet, lo and behold, a U.S. change agent has entered the picture.
Schmidt, the former Google CEO, has signed an agreement in Denmark with the Ukrainian government to produce hundreds of thousands of AI-enhanced drones this year, and more next year — particularly the desperately needed Shahed interceptors.
Schmidt’s secretive firm, Swift Beat, has already been supplying Ukraine with drones that have downed many Shaheds. Ukraine will have priority on the interceptors, which will be sold at cost.
This major project by a big name like Schmidt may give other U.S. drone firms — and even U.S. investment funds — the needed encouragement to take advantage of the talent and testing opportunities in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, Trump’s blindness to Putin’s motives will probably deter the U.S. military from making use of Ukrainian expertise in confronting Russia’s strategic army of drones. If he rejects cooperation with Ukraine and Europe — including giving a thumbs-down to any form of Zelensky’s proposed drone deal — it will help Russia surge ahead of the U.S. in drone dominance.
Should this course remain unchanged, sooner rather than later, Americans, Europeans, and Ukraine will pay a very high price.
