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/

Washington Post: Ukraine is handing the US a free lesson in modern war. Its drones and rockets drove Russia's Black Sea Fleet from Crimea and pushed Russian warplanes back from the front.

Washington can see what works without losing a single ship or pilot of its own. 1/ Russia left costly assets in the open, and in August 2022 Ukrainian rockets hit Saki air base in Crimea and damaged at least 9 aircraft.

Russia kept far fewer hardened shelters than it had planes, so much of its air force sat exposed on the ground. 2/

I told CNN Fedorov knows how tech can isolate Crimea and hit Russia’s rear. Russia should worry.

Moscow cheered his removal, now Drapatyi is back. Ukraine showed it is still a vivid democracy that wants innovation and younger leaders.

1/ Me: Zelenskyy first removed Fedorov, but hedged: in an ideal world, he said, he would also remove Syrskyi, yet could not do it then because it would disrupt military operations.

A week later, after protests continued and grew, he fired Syrskyi too.

2/

Caine: A Ukrainian F-16 recently achieved its first air-to-air kill against a Russian fighter, showing how far its layered defense has advanced.

Ukraine’s defense industry has made remarkable progress, scaling capabilities from surface-to-air to air-to-air systems. 1/ Caine: Cheap, widely available drones give states, terrorists, and other actors lethal technology at scale.
Ukraine shows we must adapt these lessons. Modern war spans land, sea, air, space, cyber, and the information domain at once. 2X

Applebaum: Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner negotiated with Russia over Ukraine while discussing mineral, oil and gas deals for connected US companies. They were not bargaining for Ukrainian security or America's European allies. That is a profound abuse of American power. 1/ Applebaum: The Trump administration is not withdrawing from the world. In Ukraine, it is trying to broker an end to Russia's war while negotiators seek business gains. US power is being used for the clique controlling Washington, not for alliances or peace. 2X

Applebaum: Russian occupation in Crimea and eastern Ukraine immediately changed the laws, arrested Ukrainian speakers, expelled opponents and rewrote schools, curricula and language. That is how freedom can disappear overnight under invasion. 1/ Applebaum: Russia's 2014 seizure of Crimea repeated the Soviet occupation playbook. Disguised troops arrived, local criminal groups were put in charge, institutions were captured and a disinformation campaign concealed the invasion until Moscow admitted it. 2X

Applebaum: Russia could not continue its war against Ukraine without Chinese components, North Korean troops and Iranian drones. These states exchange military technology, improve it and send it back. They are not close friends, but their cooperation is real. 1/ Applebaum: Russia undermines European democracies because their freedom offers Russians a threatening alternative. China applies the same logic to democratic Taiwan through political pressure, economic coercion, military threats and disinformation. 2X

Ukraine’s new Commander-in-Chief is Mykhailo Drapatyi, 43.

In 2014, his BMP smashed through a pro-Russian barricade in Mariupol.

That year, he also led 260 soldiers and 30+ vehicles out of the Izvaryne pocket, driving 160 km under Russian artillery fire.

1/ He later commanded the 58th Motorized Infantry Brigade and fought in Avdiivka and along the Bakhmut highway.

In 2021, Drapatyi received the Queen’s Sword of the United Kingdom as the best graduate of the operational-strategic level at Ukraine’s National Defense University.

2/

McFaul: Putin is finally realizing he will not take Donbas. He has tried since 2014.

His soldiers cannot take it, and Trump will not hand it to him. If that is off the table, Putin may accept the current lines. Tragically but necessarily, Zelenskyy would take that deal.

1/ McFaul: Putin will fight through winter because he thinks Ukrainian society is exhausted.

He hit energy infrastructure, and this will be Ukraine’s hardest winter by far. But he is wrong if he thinks Ukrainians will protest Zelenskyy and force him to end the war.

2/

McFaul: I know these oligarchs. Do not put Melnichenko on a cover as some dissident.

My friends like Navalny and Boris Nemtsov were killed by the man Melnichenko still makes money with every day. He is not an insider, not a split in the regime, and not a path to change.

1/ McFaul: That interview oversold Melnichenko’s message. But if he says those things, Putin wants us to hear them.

In that system, no interview happens unless Putin and the Kremlin approve every word. Russia is more totalitarian than the late Soviet Union I lived in.

2X

McFaul: People thought time was on Putin’s side: more soldiers, more money, the West losing interest.

The Trump administration cut U.S. aid to Ukraine nearly to zero. But today, I don’t know anyone who still thinks time favors Putin. Momentum has shifted to Ukraine.

1/ McFaul: Ukraine may not have the capability to liberate all its territory now. But Russia loses about 1,000 soldiers a day and makes no real gains in the green season.

Ukraine holds the line and uses new drones for deep strikes inside Russia. Momentum has shifted to Ukraine.

2X