Poland’s remaining MiG-29s now have another NATO suitor. Warsaw: Ukraine still comes first.

MiG-29s are Soviet-designed fighter jets Ukrainian pilots and maintenance teams already know, United24. 1/ Zalewski [Polish deputy DM]: “We received an offer from one of our NATO allies.”

He refused to name the country.

Defense Express: Bulgaria looks like the most plausible candidate because it already operates Soviet-designed aircraft. 2/

Russia is choking Ukraine’s Black Sea export corridor, the sea route that keeps Ukrainian grain moving to world markets.

On Wednesday, for the first time since the corridor opened in 2023, zero ships entered Ukraine’s 3 Odesa ports, Politico. 1/ Sybiha [Ukraine’s FM]: “Russia is holding global food security hostage.”

At peak harvest, he called the shutdown deliberate economic and humanitarian terror that could mean higher prices and hunger for families in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. 2/

Ukraine will make Patriot interceptor missiles with Raytheon, the US producer of the Patriot system.

Patriots are crucial for stopping Russian ballistic and aerial attacks on Ukrainian cities, United24. 1/ Zelenskyy: “Ukraine will jointly produce one of the most important air defense assets — interceptors for Patriots — together with Raytheon.”

The talks followed earlier discussions with Trump in Ankara and focused on non-offensive military hardware. 2/

Browder: Ukraine has created a drone kill zone along the front.

Anyone who enters it can be targeted. One operator can control 100 drones searching for heat and killing anyone inside the zone. 1/ Browder: Putin can draft more men and send them to the front, where they will be killed.

Russia has ten times the personnel and resources, but Ukrainian strikes keep degrading its economy and reducing the resources Putin can use to continue the war. 2/

Zelenskyy: The Soviet Union was the most dangerous enemy for the United States, not only for your democracy or way of life, but for 70 years.

Putin’s global idea is to take everything back: the Soviet Union, former Soviet republics, and Europe too.

1/ Zelenskyy: If Russia becomes the Soviet Union again, this becomes a global war. Then you get China and a restored Soviet empire with the biggest army in the world.

They would be bigger than the United States, and that would be dangerous for America.

2/

Keane: Ukraine can put 10,000 drones in the air in a single day.

The entire US Army does not have 10,000 drones. Ukraine’s defense industry gets new technology into soldiers’ hands at a speed that is nothing short of remarkable. 1/ Keane: Ukraine will manufacture 8 million drones this year — aerial drones and unmanned ground vehicles.

Ukrainian forces pushed Russians off a position defended by troops with no humans in the fight. It was the first time this had happened in warfare. 2/

More than 70% of Crimea's 2.5 million residents have lost power, many now going days with no electricity or running water.

Cheap Ukrainian drones did in one month what Russia swore for 12 years could never happen, handing Kyiv leverage over any peace talks — The Guardian. 1/ Marina runs a guesthouse in Yevpatoria. First the Russian tourists cancelled, then petrol ran short, now power and water vanish for much of the day.

Marina: For 12 years they told us Crimea was 100% protected. Within a month we've been thrown back into the Stone Age. 2/

Musk: Saying Russia should completely withdraw is not realistic. We need to be pragmatic. Another three years of dying at the front would be terrible.

I hope there is a peace deal soon. The border has barely moved for two or three years, while people die every day.

1/ Musk: We never sold Starlink to Russians. They got units through Ukraine, smuggled them into occupied eastern Ukraine, and used them for attacks.

To stop it, we worked with Ukraine on a whitelist of approved terminals. The downside: some innocent users lost access too.

2/

Kasparov: A staged border incident in Belarus targeting Poland or Lithuania isn't just plausible, it's likely.

Putin needs a new narrative given the lack of good news from the front. Nobody knows if NATO states would fire back, and that uncertainty raises the risk. 1/ Kasparov: I suspect Putin is curious to test whether a heavy drone and missile barrage on a European capital would trigger panic.

Not the Balts or Poles, I think — further west, where corrupt politicians already talk about normalizing relations with Moscow. 2X

Kasparov: Putin called the Soviet collapse the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century in a 2005 speech.

Had he broken Ukraine's defenses in 2022, he wouldn't have stopped there. The real goal was rolling NATO back to its 1997 borders, pushing Eastern Europe out. 1/ Kasparov: What looks like bravado is really an understanding of an obvious truth: anything short of victory ends Putin and his regime.

War has become how Russia is governed — it's penetrated every layer of society, from kindergartens to the top of government. 2X

WSJ: Russia is bombing Odesa’s grain silos, port infrastructure, commercial ships, homes and energy sites. Life still goes on.

Resorts open, freight moves, cadets graduate, engineers repair substations, and the city keeps refusing to live on Moscow’s terms. 1/ Odesa keeps Ukraine connected to the world. The city sends billions of dollars in agricultural exports through the Black Sea and the Danube, even after years of Russian attempts to cut that route. 2/

Kellogg: To gain leverage, I would take Kharg Island and Larak Island, the Gulf’s command-and-control center.

Then the president owns something Iran no longer has. We can give it back at the end of the war, or keep it forever.

1/ Kellogg: If you let a weaker team hang around into the ninth inning or fourth quarter, it gets more dangerous.

You should have closed them out early. That is where we are now with Iran. I think Trump will close it out, and he should.

2/

Browder: Trump screamed bloody murder about sending Ukraine military aid in similar dollar amounts, asking why spend money in a faraway place.

The same argument now applies to his own Iran war, and he's backed himself into a corner. 1/ Browder: Most pro-Putin voices in American media aren't doing it out of ideology — it's money.

The DOJ prosecuted people paid by Russia to push Russian talking points on podcasts before the 2024 election. I'd love to see Tucker Carlson spend a day in Ukraine's trenches. 2/

Browder: Russia has been providing Iran with targeted intelligence to track US troops — we've known this for a long time.

The Trump administration is contorting itself trying not to blame Russia, and honestly, that's pretty horrifying. 1/ Browder: A recent Economist/YouGov poll found a majority of Americans in every party support military aid for Ukraine and see Putin as a very bad actor.

Mollycoddling Russia the way this administration is doing just isn't in America's national interest. 2X

Ukraine’s new Commander-in-Chief Drapatyi in 2023: Ukraine is inconvenient for Russia’s history, because without Ukraine there is no Russia or empire.

That is why they still try to control us. Ukraine did not appear in 1991; it has centuries of culture, traditions and army.

1/ Drapatyi: In 7th or 8th grade, I dreamed of becoming a tank officer. After school, I entered the Kharkiv Tank Troops Institute.

That is how my military path began. My rule in life is simple: whatever I do, I do it well and responsibly, so I have nothing to be ashamed of.

2/

Kuleba: Once we ran low on Patriot interceptors and started taking cover for every alert instead of just some, that itself became a signal.

To partners, that we needed help, and to Russians, who already know our air-defense situation through their own intelligence anyway. 1/ Kuleba: My position on our strikes on Russian oil logistics is simple: for every warehouse Russia destroys in Ukraine, two should burn in Russia.

Call it whatever you want morally. If the UN wants us shot at while we sit and stay silent, I have no use for the UN. 2/

Volker: Crimea is everything to Putin — the jewel in his restoration of the Russian empire. If he fails to hold it, he's failed as the new Tsar.

Russia, an energy-rich country, is now rationing gasoline for consumers and, I'd guess, for its military too. 1/ Volker: Putin is going after people once assumed untouchable, like his old St. Petersburg associate Ilya Traber, and that's a signal to everyone else: know your place.

If even Traber is vulnerable, anybody is. 2/

Applebaum: Trump has said, on the record, that if Europe is under attack, the US will never come to help.

That's a direct break from the postwar American commitment to European security. 1/ Applebaum: Trump's early negotiations with Russia were counterproductive — they signaled Americans might pressure Ukraine to surrender territory.

Putin has never seriously entertained a ceasefire. This war ends only once Russia understands it cannot win. 2X

NYT: Ukraine picked the pace of its drone war over a decorated general. Zelenskyy fired commander in chief Oleksandr Syrskyi late Tuesday, closing a four-decade Soviet-era career.

The trigger was a drone-contract fight. He hands the army to younger, tech-first commanders. 1/ The fight ran through Mykhailo Fedorov, the defense minister who built Ukraine's drone program. Fedorov said Syrskyi blocked military contracts for drones.

Zelenskyy fired Fedorov first. Soldiers and crowds then filled Kyiv's streets and demanded that Syrskyi go too. 2/

The L119 howitzer deal is a test run for Patriot production.

If Ukraine can build a BAE-designed gun under license, Kyiv can prove it can protect intellectual property, run wartime factories and manufacture Western weapons at home — the same case it must make for Patriot missiles, — WSJ. 1/ BAE and Zelenskyy first discussed local production in 2023. Now a Ukrainian engineering company will begin with a test model before moving toward full production of the L119. 2/

The Economist: The West keeps falling for the myth of Russian greatness.

Foreigners see power, spirituality, tradition or reform where Russia often shows coercion, corruption, weakness and imperial violence. Ukrainians have spent years breaking that illusion. 1/ Leo Hare, a Texan who moved his family to Russia for its supposed Christian values, later said he was swindled out of $66,000 and admitted, “I believed in the propaganda.” 2/