In April I spent a few days with Zryw, a Polish non-profit organization that recruits young people to enter politics and public life. Their aim is to build a new generation of civic leaders in Poland. I’ve followed their evolution from the beginning; my son is one of the founders. (“Zryw” means “impulse” or “burst of speed” in Polish).

Julie Chmielewska, one of Zryw’s leaders, interviewed me at the event. Here is the conversation, lightly edited for grammar and context:

Julia Chmielewska: Assuming that culture shapes institutions, could we conclude that some cultures are more prone to authoritarianism?

Anne Applebaum: I don’t think so. Every culture, every nation, and every country has the potential for change. When we look at history, we can see that nations do change. Poland has changed, for example, from the 1980s to today. There’s a completely different mentality here than the one I encountered when I first visited, in 1988. The current generation sees the world through a different frame. So no, I don’t believe that certain nations are doomed to authoritarianism, or to anything. Of course, there are political and cultural traditions, but they can always be challenged.

JC: So do you think there’s something intrinsic in human nature that pushes people to democracy, freedom?

AA: I think there is something in human nature, a deep instinct, that pushes people towards freedom, yes. People who live in authoritarian countries – and I’ve heard this from them over and over again – sooner or later find themselves angered by a feeling of helplessness. They can see the unfairness of crooked courts, irrational political decisions. They naturally dislike the fact that somebody has all the power while they have none. In those circumstances, people who have no political background at all sometimes are politicized just by that frustration. I’m thinking of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, for example, who was a Belarusian housewife, until the circumstances of her husband’s arrest forced her to become a politician. I met a woman who is a Uyghur from China, and who had come to live in Turkey. After several of her family members were arrested, she too was propelled into a political role. These kinds of experiences make people interested in democracy or political reform, even if they thought they didn’t care.

I also think that the opposite is true: some people instinctively prefer homogeneity, order, hierarchy. They don’t like the confrontation of opinions or the noise of debate, and they lean towards a single leader or a unified regime. I think that most of modern history is shaped by the clash between those two different sides of human nature.

JC: Which force do you find more powerful today?

AA: I think they both have a lot of power and there’s no way of predicting who wins. Even in countries that seem very shut off or stuck in an authoritarian system can change. We’ve seen that happen. And vice versa, I think democracies can also begin to fail and slide into authoritarianism. So it’s very important not to be complacent in either direction.

JC: I want to go into your history and your experiences. You’ve lived in Russia during a time of incredible change in the late 80s, and then you came back to do research in post-Soviet Russia.

AA: I was a student in Russia just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I then traveled and worked there extensively in the 1990s, and I met people who really were full of hope. They hoped that Russia could become a democracy, or at least a place that guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press. These weren’t ideas that came from Washington. Although now the narrative in the Kremlin is different, I met many people who were working towards exactly that kind of transformation. A friend of mine ran a series of seminars – once a year, and then later several times a year, in cities all over Russia – designed to get people to discuss politics in new ways. She invited young politicians and journalists, as well as foreigners. I went to many of them, in Moscow as well as Volgograd and Novosibirsk.

Over two decades, hundreds of people came to these seminars, and all of them wanted Russia to be different. I remain convinced that many Russians still want Russia to be different. It’s just that the old system, in the form of Putin, a representative of that system, returned. The KGB reimposed their power. And this wasn’t because of something to do with culture, this was to do with money and politics, and who was in charge.

JC: You’ve partially answered my question... I wanted to ask whether that excitement of the 1990s was an exception from the Russian historical norm which has been rather authoritarian?

AA: Of course, if you look at the history of Russia since the 18th century, there have always been liberal groups, reformers and revolutionaries. There were the Decembrists, in the early 19th century, and the rural populists later on, who tried to organize the peasantry. A significant group of liberal Russians appeared at the turn of the 20th century, people like the father of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was a Russian politician before the revolution.

These groups were small in number, but sometimes had a broader significance. The Russian dissident movement in the 1950s and 1960s actually invented the modern human rights movement. It was their idea to hold the leaders of the Soviet Union accountable for the language they used, to remind them of the treaties they had signed and the promised they had made. They created the Helsinki group, for example, that held Soviet leadership to the language of the Helsinki Treaty, which formally ended the Second World War and which contained guarantees of human rights, at least on paper. That idea spread to Eastern Europe, and similar tactics were used here in Poland. (Benjamin Nathans recently wrote a great book about the Soviet dissidents, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause)

JC: But seemingly, even if they do ever get power, they could never hold on to it.

AA: We don’t know, because they have never really had power. But in any case, we also don’t know what will happen in the future. There is no reason to assume that Russia will forever be condemned to totalitarianism. Even during the first fifteen years of Putin’s regime there was some form of democratic politics. Only when the full-scale war began did he bring everything to an end: he shut down all remaining independent organizations and killed his most important opponent, Alexi Navalny. But does that mean he is popular, that he enjoys legitimacy? Even now, we don’t really know what Russians think about him, or about the war. There is no way of doing real polling in Russia because nobody will answer an independent pollster over the phone.

JC: Do you think that the flock of young people, especially young men, who fled Russia after the start of the war represent a continuation of liberal movements that refuse to partake in the authoritarian state, or do you think they are moving for the sake of self-preservation – “I don’t want to go to the army, so I leave”?

AA: I’m sure it’s both. I actually know many people who left Russia for political reasons either in the very last years before the war, or else just after the war began.

JC: And do you see a change in the young generation versus the old one that have fled?

AA: It’s hard for me to say because the people who I know were mostly already politicized. I do know some younger people who left, but most of them were already either active in the opposition, or working as journalists. Many of them very self-consciously think of themselves as maintaining Russian culture abroad, just as in the 20th century the Soviet dissidents or the anti-communist White Russians once thought of themselves as people who maintained the true Russian culture, outside of Bolshevik Russia.

JC: Let’s move on to Poland. One of your first experiences with Poland was reporting on Margaret Thatcher’s first state visit, in the autumn of 1988. You followed her around the farmers’ market.

AA: She was making a symbolic gesture. She wanted to welcome free markets, but the only one she could really visit was the farmers’ market at Hala Mirowska.

JC: And I want to talk about this area because today you can look out of any window in that district, Mirów, and see rows and rows of skyscrapers. How does it feel to see a country built from the ground in such a short time, both politically and economically?

AA: You know, when you’re living in a period of dramatic change, it’s always hard to know whether the change is positive or negative. The transformation in Poland created winners and losers, as well as new classes of people, new political movements of different kinds. At the time, it sometimes just felt like turbulence. Now, we can look back at the 1990s and early 2000s in Poland and see in retrospect that the country was headed in towards prosperity and European integration. In around 2009 or 2010, I remember speaking to a woman who worked cleaning government offices, and who asked me if her daughter should study in Amsterdam or in London. This seemed to me to be a real transformation, and it happened very fast: within a few years, Poles stopped feeling like second-class Europeans, and a generation of younger Poles appeared who had no qualms about crossing borders.

JC: We again live in turbulent times. Do you think we’re heading towards positive outcomes?

AA: I can’t make predictions, because everything that happens tomorrow depends on what people do today. Also, history doesn’t have a trajectory. It doesn’t move in a particular direction. You only think it does afterwards. As I said, you can look afterwards at Poland in the 1990s and you could say this was a period of great progress. But not everybody at the time saw that.

Sometimes people are very wrong about a given country’s trajectory. I remember people writing about Ukraine in the 1990s, about how dangerous it was that Ukraine was independent, that this was going to be an anti-semitic state, that Ukrainian nationalism was going to come back... and although you can say many bad things about Ukraine, the country made many bad choices, actually it became a pretty tolerant state which now has a Jewish president and until recently a Muslim defense minister.

JC: In the 1990s Poland’s and Ukraine’s GDP were roughly similar. Ukraine was even a bit richer. So the starting point was similar for both of these countries, but they’ve turned out very, very differently. Even if we stop in 2014. Why do you think Ukraine “chose East”? Was it external influence?

AA: No, I think Ukraine was in a different position. First of all, central and eastern Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union since the 1920s, and had therefore experienced a longer period of occupation, repression, Sovietization and even Russification. Ukraine did not have, as Poland did, an alternative elite: a large cadre of economists and politicians, who already had some experience in opposition politics and in independent thinking. In Poland, the transformative finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, had already thought about how an economy might be decentralized before he took office. We can argue about how successful he was, but at least he was prepared to try something new.

In Ukraine, people weren’t prepared. For one, there hadn’t been much space even for an illegal opposition in the previous couple of decades. Ukraine was also in many ways still emerging from colonial occupation. For the previous couple of centuries, many of the most capable Ukrainians had moved to Russia, and the first generation of leaders in independent Ukraine tended to be former Soviet apparatchiks. They didn’t immediately seek to become closer to western Europe. Instead, they looked for some kind of economic and political “third way” and an accomodation with Russia. Ukraine became stuck in this position, half-in, half-out and became pretty profoundly corrupt.

JC: The Polish alternative elite had a vision of where they wanted the country to go. I think the general perception now is that this vision ends with the next election, right? Is this a natural process of gaining power?

AA: Their vision, and it was shared by the time by politicians who now call themselves both left and right, was that Poland should join the EU and NATO, as fast as possible. My husband (Radek Sikorski) was in the very first government that said it wanted to join NATO. At the time this was taken very badly in Washington: the demand for NATO membership absolutely came from Poland, not from the US. But even then, in the early 1990s, many Poles already understood that the Russian sphere of influence would grow once again, that it was important to become part of the transatlantic alliance and an integrated Europe as fast as possible: NATO, the EU, the Council of Europe, all of the trading and security alliances.

That consensus lasted through several different governments and over many years, even governments containing former communists. For twenty years, right, left and center disagreed about many things, but they all agreed on the direction that the country should go. In retrospect, that consensus created the basis for prosperity in Poland.

JC: And regarding the Polish-Ukrainian relations. We know that antagonisms, e.g. the myth of Wołyń [a massacre of Poles that took place in what is now Western Ukraine, in 1943] are increasingly used in Polish political discourse today. In Ukraine, nationalist historians make heroes out of UPA, the Ukrainian revolutionary army, which is held responsible for this tragedy. Where do you see a start for burying the hatchet? Is the reconciliation of our nations possible?

AA: So here’s a strange thing: For more than a decade after they both gained independence, Poland and Ukraine participated in a number of projects that were designed to solve exactly these kinds of Polish-Ukrainian differences. Books were published that were jointly written by Polish and Ukrainian historians, monuments were built. These projects were successful: If you’d asked me this question in 2010, I would have said that there are no real historical issues between Poland and Ukraine, that the two countries had mostly reconciled.

For a number of reasons, this began to shift. In Poland, children and grandchildren of victims of the Wołyń massacre felt their tragedy hadn’t been fully recognized. In Ukraine, nationalist groups wanted the UPA partisans who had fought against the Soviet Union recognized for their heroism, despite the fact that some in this broad and not well-defined group were also linked to Wołyń. In both eastern Poland and western Ukraine, the memory of the ethnic cleansing that took place there in the late 1940s - Poles were moved West, Ukrainians East - to accomodate new borders has left feelings of displacement and bitterness. The wave of Ukrainian immigration, which started before the war, may have provoked some of this.

But don’t underestimate the role played by Russia, which has always wanted to create discord between Poland and Ukraine, and pumps out propaganda to that effect in both countries. Vandalism on both sides of the border, damage done to cemeteries and monuments, is sometimes carried out by provacateurs working for Russia, just to create bad feelings. The Polish-Ukrainian conflict also hides a different reality: although there are real grievances and bad memories, the truth is that the biggest tragedies both nations experienced in the twentieth century were inflicted by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. That should unite these two countries, not divide them.

JC: This week (19.04.2026 – Ed.) in Hungary we saw that using historical narratives to create grievance has no longer worked. Are you optimistic about the direction after Orban’s loss?

AA: The Hungarian election was really important because it shows that people can actually resist powerful, dominant propaganda. The ruling party Fidesz controlled all of the TV, 90% of the newspapers, the constitutional court, the bureaucracy... and yet people had the nerve to vote against it and resist it. It’s also an important election because Hungary created a huge network of well-funded think tanks and foundations that were funding other far right groups and projects. So that loss is going to have a knock-on effect in other places too, maybe even in Poland.

JC: What you’ve said about resisting propaganda reminds me of one of the interviews you did about talking to Russians in the post-Soviet era who claimed that people knew that the system was lying. Why do people choose to believe in these regimes anyway?

AA: Because it’s useful. Stephen Kotkin, an American historian, once described how people would learn how to “speak Bolshevik”: It was just a language that you needed to use in order to get by in society. If you didn’t talk the way the regime wanted you to talk, then you might have problems, or lose your job, or your kids would not get into university. It was a way of getting along.

Communist Poland was similar, at least in the early years. When I was writing a book about the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after World War II, I met a lot of people who wanted to talk a lot about the war, when many of them had done really heroic things. But almost nobody wanted to talk about the decade afterwards, between 1945 and 1956. This was when you had the short period of terror, violence and Polish Stalinism. To stay safe, people felt the need to just go along with what others were saying, or stay out of politics, or use communist jargon without necessarily believing it. I don’t judge them for it, and I wouldn’t describe all of those people as collaborators. It’s easy to feel moral certainty in retrospect, because we know that communism ended. But if you were living in 1949, it might not have been clear to you that communism was going to end.

In very repressive societies, maybe about 10% of people who are really evil – collaborators, torturers. Maybe 10% of people are really brave and who find ways to resist. And then around 80% of people have kids, they have parents, they have to have jobs and they’ve had to get through it somehow.

Strange though it may sound, I’ve found that the work I did on that book is now very useful in explaining some of what’s going on in the United States today. There are plenty of members of the Republican Party in Congress who know perfectly well that Donald Trump says many things that aren’t true. But they avoid criticizing him because it’s inconvenient, because they would get in trouble, because someone would attack them on the internet. So actually you don’t even need mass terror to get people to conform.

JC: Is Gen Z reinventing agency?

AA: We’ll see. In any generation you can find groups of people who want agency. If you live in a society that’s unfair, for example where a tiny number of people have captured most of the wealth, then at a certain point people rebel. This is always easier for younger people, who have you have less to lose.

The question now is how the internet will affect the relationships between citizens and the state, and how it will change organizations. The “Twitter revolutions” people spoke about as early as 2008-9, mass protests organized online, have often proved to be very superficial. Although you can easily join something just by clicking, the work of creating a real movement requires physical participation. Successful mass movements of the past, for example the Civil Rights movement in the United States, were built by people who had spent many years together. They had participated in non-violent workshops together. They practiced and prepared. Just using the you can get everybody to show up at a certain moment, but then when the protest is broken up, nothing happens.

It’s also true that the repressive regimes have more recently learned how to use the internet to undermine leaders and movements. Most of all, they now understand how to make people cynical. The form of propaganda that most modern authoritarians use - and I think the Russians really pioneered this - deploys sneering cynicism. Instead of praising the rulers, the regime propagandists mock the opposition movement leadership for being supposedly corrupt or sexually degenerate, with the goal of undermining any kind of idealism.

JC: MAGA grew on the internet?

AA: MAGA is a real grassroots movement. They had symbols, red hats, they showed up at rallies. But you’re right that the cynicism, the sarcasm and the distrust that the movement embodies came originally from the internet, and this is different. Fifty years ago, most European political parties had a social base in real organizations, in trade unions for Social Democrats, in church groups for Christian Democrats. As people stopped going to church and as the trade unions became smaller, the social base of these parties disappeared. Now people who wouldn’t have known one another in the past meet on the internet and create new movements, many of which don’t last.

JC: Is history ending? Going in stale circles?

AA: History never ends. In truth, human beings want contradictory things at the same time: order and freedom, stability and change. These things are never resolved, and when a society swings too far in one direction, people always push it the other way. But each time that happens, the result is different.

Certainly it is true that we are now in a period when old philosophers and ideas from the 1930s are undergoing a revival. Carl Schmitt, who was a philosopher who was very influential on the Nazis, is back as an influence on both the far left and the far right, once again inspiring people to think that all politics has to be existential, that all politics is about defining and defeating enemies. In the US, some are also bringing back dominionism, the idea that we need a Christian and not a secular state.

It’s also true that we are living through a more fundamental shift. The old left-right divide, which was mostly about the size of the state, is much less important now. Instead, we are arguing about more fundamental things: what are our rights, what protects our freedom. Or how much power do we want to give small elites, versus how much power to give ordinary people. In America a small group of very wealthy people now control information, because they control the social media platforms and AI, which means they determine what people will read and learn. Finding a way to preserve preserve zones of autonomy and independent thinking, this is going to be the main task for the next generation.

JC: What is the one book that a person interested in Central Europe should read?

AA: You could read my book “Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe” which tells the story of how the Soviet Union imposed its culture on the region. Or read Tim Snyder’s history of the region, “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999.” And everyone should read “The Captive Mind” by Czesław Miłosz, which describes exactly the phenomenon we were talking about: why do people collaborate?

With Scott Galloway and Fiona Hill

I joined Scott Galloway and the brilliant Fiona Hill in a discussion about the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the future of global power, and what these conflicts reveal about America's role in the world.

Scott told us that this was the 400th edition of his podcast, which is quite a number:

A Hill of Books

My friend Francesco Chiamulera runs a brilliant series of literary events, Una Colline di Libri, A Hill of Books, in the Prosecco Hills, a region of vineyards and elegant hill towns in the Veneto, north of Venice. We did an event in Vittorio Veneto and also drove and biked around the countryside.

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Last week I went to Kyiv to attend a security conference, meet friends and also take some time, as I have done in the past, to learn more about the tools the Ukrainians are creating to fight the war (see here for my article about long-range drones, and here for sea drones). This time, I went to see one of the teams who operate drone interceptors, the small defense drones that can knock out attack drones. This is a technology that everyone suddenly needs, not just in Europe but in the Gulf States as well:

In a field outside of Kyiv last weekend, a van was parked discreetly behind some trees. Inside the van there were no passenger seats, just a long desk, two office chairs, two laptops, extra screens. Outside appearances to the contrary, this was a mobile drone-interceptor base, one of hundreds of similar vehicles now scattered around Ukraine. It’s also part of something much bigger: a set of technological advances that have changed the war with Russia, and maybe all wars, forever.

On one of the laptops, a soldier showed me a bird’s-eye view of a part of the Ukrainian countryside more than 100 miles away. His job is to identify the objects flying above it, to distinguish birds and bats from lethal Russian drones. When he sees the latter, the soldier on the laptop beside him can then direct an interceptor—a small drone that looks like a miniature rocket ship—to track and destroy the incoming Russian aerial vehicles before they hit their targets.

At first glance, the images on the screens look simple, like a video game. But this is not a low-tech operation. The AI-powered drone interceptors are made possible by a complicated network of radar systems, acoustic sensors, and other tools that hundreds of large and small Ukrainian tech companies are creating and updating every day, using data they get directly from soldiers like the ones I met. Almost none of these companies existed four years ago. They have emerged from a tech-literate civil society whose members changed their professions or their focus to help defend their country. I have met Ukrainian defense-company CEOs who come from financial services, architecture, politics. I met another one last weekend who had returned just that day from the front line. He told me he finds it useful to learn how soldiers are using his products, and how they might be improved.

Other kinds of teams across the country are connected to this constantly improving information system too, and not just in vans. Last year I was in an underground room in Ukraine where dozens of people were monitoring hundreds of miles of the front line on a series of screens. The Ukrainian defense analyst Andriy Zagorodnyuk calls this system of drones, monitors, AI-powered navigation, battle-tested robots, and interconnected soldiers “networked situational awareness,” and it explains why perceptions of this war have suddenly changed.

The drone interceptors are part of the explanation for a sudden, notable change in international perceptions of Ukraine.

Since 2022, many public arguments about the war, even in Europe and the U.S., have adopted the narrative put out by Russian propaganda, tacitly assuming that Ukraine, outmanned and outgunned, would eventually lose. Helping Ukraine was a way to stave off disaster, nothing more. When the Trump administration stopped sending military and financial aid to Kyiv in 2025, some in Washington expected (and maybe wanted) the end to come quickly.

Instead, Europeans have provided money. Ukrainian society produced networked situational awareness. And when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky toured the Gulf states in late March and signed a series of security agreements, something changed in the international narrative. The leaders of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia were talking to Ukraine, not because they felt sorry for a war victim, but because they wanted to acquire drone interceptors like the ones I saw in action last weekend. Iranians use the same drone technology as the Russians, and the Ukrainians know better than anyone how to fight it.

Look carefully at the three most important theaters of the war. After more than four years of fighting, Russia is not winning any of them:

The ground war. If the story of the past two years was one of slow, grinding forward progress for Russia,the story of this year is very different. Since early spring, at the start of its annual offensive, Russia has lost more territory in Ukraine than it has gained. Right now, it is hard to see how the Russian army can move forward, because the front line is not a line at all, but rather a broad no-go zone, some 20 miles wide. Everything inside this zone is visible to drones, which means that any Russian truck, tank, or infantryman seeking to attack new territory is instantly identified and can easily be hit. Because the Russian commanders keep attacking anyway, the Ukrainians are killing and wounding thousands of enemy soldiers, perhaps as many as 30,000, every month. They say their goal is to remove more Russians from the battlefield than can be recruited to replace them, and they may be close to succeeding.

The long-range war. Although they are unable to move the front line, Russians can still use drones and missiles to kill civilians and destroy civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, as they did once again this week. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appetite for this kind of attack is escalating, as he has no other practical way to damage Ukraine. He also knows that the Ukrainians don’t have enough air defense to stop ballistic missiles, even if they can now stop the majority of drones. Ukraine still relies heavily on air-defense equipment from the United States, especially ammunition for Patriot batteries. A European fund was set up to purchase these interceptor missiles, although some observers fear that there are simply not enough to buy. According to Zelensky, more Patriots were used during the first three days of the U.S.-Iran conflict than have been used during the entire Russia-Ukraine war.

What Putin doesn’t acknowledge is that his side is running out of air defense, too. That has helped Ukraine’s long-range drones more reliably target Russian oil and gas infrastructure, producing spectacular explosions and reducing Russian refining capacity by at least 20 percent. Almost all major oil refineries in central Russia ‌have halted or scaled back production, and some have been hit more than once.

With equal regularity, a new crop of Ukrainian drones with a range of 100 miles can target arms depots, logistical centers, and supply chains far behind the front line in Russian-occupied territories. These strikes are less spectacular than ones deep inside Russia, but they have already created crucial fuel shortages on the Crimean peninsula, and they are making it difficult for the Russians to supply their troops fighting in the East and the South.

The psychological war. For the past four years, the Kremlin has repeatedly told the Russian public that the war is going well, that Ukraine isn’t a real country, that victory is certain. But that’s hard to square with the panic that took hold of Moscow last month, when an annual military parade was shortened for fear it would be interrupted by Ukrainian drones. Nor does it square with the spectacular columns of black smoke that were billowing into the air on Wednesday morning, after Ukrainian drones hit a local refinery on the opening day of the Kremlin’s annual St. Petersburg economic forum. Kyrill Budanov, the former defense-intelligence chief who is now head of the Ukrainian president’s office, told me there is a lot of evidence that Russians are now finally facing the up to the falsehood of state propaganda: “They cannot understand why they have to keep fighting and why they are getting hit now, because they were told they were going to win and Ukraine is nothing.”

This doesn’t mean that the war will end soon. This past week, Zelensky again offered Putin a ceasefire on the current lines, which, again, he refused to accept. As I have been writing since 2002, the war will end when Putin gives up his central aim: the destruction and subjugation of Ukraine, the removal of Ukraine from the map of Europe. Some in Moscow are already pushing him in this direction. All of the evidence shows that Russians are tired of the war, the Russian elite wants to end the wa, which is why some in Kyiv are still hoping that negotiations will produce a ceasefire later this year.

Even without negotiations, the war may be heading in a new direction.

The transparent frontline zone may now be 20 miles wide, but as drone technology improves, it could soon be 30 or even 40 miles wide. At some point the front line will become not just a no-man’s-land but a de facto demilitarized zone, similar to the one that separates North and South Korea, regularly patrolled and maintained by drones.

After that, it could become a border—a temporary border, one that will not be recognized by either side—but a border nevertheless: no different from a river or mountain range, impossible to move, difficult to cross. This would not be a clear victory for Ukraine, but it would be a major defeat for Putin, whose central goal—the destruction of all of Ukraine, the removal of Ukraine from the map—would never be realized.

read the whole article here (gift link)

Ukraine is not Losing

Kleptocracy Tracker

Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)

May 26

• Trump repeatedly promoted Stake, an unregulated online casino operating illegally, on Truth Social after its co-founder donated $1 million to Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc. In its way, this story, which has received little attention, is the epitome of this administration’s corruption: you can simply pay the president to promote your company, however dodgy.

May 27

• The Trump administration is pursuing funding deals with several drone companies, including Unusual Machines—a drone components supplier in which Donald Trump Jr. is both a shareholder and advisory board member.

• A National Park Service analysis found that the Trump administration’s no-bid contract for repairs to the Reflecting Pool approved an inflated profit margin of 20%—far higher than the typical 6–12%.

May 28

• Trump purchased more than $1 million worth of stock in Dell earlier this year, before the company received a $9.7 billion Pentagon contract this week. The contract was also preceded by founder Michael Dell’s early engagement with the administration—including a $6.25 billion gift of Trump Accounts for 25 million American children—followed by White House support that contributed to the company’s best month on Wall Street since its return to the public market in 2018.

• The Commodity Futures Trading Commission asked a judge to vacate a $5 million penalty imposed, at the end of the Biden administration, on a cryptocurrency exchange run by Trump donors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

• The Department of the Treasury has prepared to print $250 bills bearing Trump’s face—the latest in a series of attempts by the administration to use government resources to pay tribute to the president.

• White House adviser Peter Navarro asked the Department of Defense to approve a $620 million loan for a rare-earth magnet company in which Donald Trump Jr. holds a stake.

• Trump refiled his defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting on his birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, continuing his effort to extract $10 billion from the newspaper.

May 29

• The Pentagon awarded SpaceX two contracts totaling $6.45 billion ahead of the company's upcoming IPO, potentially boosting its valuation—and the financial interests of 10 Trump officials with vested stakes in the firm, including Steve Witkoff.

June 2

• After the presiding judge raised questions about the agreement, the SEC defended its $1.5 billion settlement with Elon Musk over his failure to properly disclose when his stake in Twitter surpassed 5% before he acquired the company—a lapse that may have allowed him to underpay for his shares by more than $150 million.

June 3

• The Trump administration has awarded another no-bid contract for a cosmetic Washington, DC project—this time to Gilders’ Studio for gilding statues near the National Mall at a cost of $5.1 million, more than double the $2.4 million the Park Service estimated the project would cost in March.

• A nonprofit founded by Trump donors has raised $36 million to provide legal assistance to allies of the president who claim they were unjustly prosecuted by the government.

Kyiv, an ordinary city

I was in Kyiv on Monday, June 1. That evening the city was hit by another series of drone and missile attacks. Readers may have seen photographs of the destruction. But it’s important to remember that Kyiv is also a normal city. Bars, restaurants, and shops are open. Traffic flows. People continue to live their lives, as they should: The war is now in its fifth year, and no one can put everything on hold for that long.

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Earlier this month, I gave a laudation for Maia Sandu, the President of Moldova. She was receiving an award from Globsec, the central European policy group, at their annual security conference in Prague. I have met Sandu several times, most memorably on a 2022 visit to Moldova, described in the Atlantic, just a few months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the time, her situation looked quite bleak. The war was unfolding on her borders, she had no army to speak of, and no control over what might happen next.

For those whose knowledge of Moldova is shaky, here’s a reminder of the country’s difficult geography and a bit of (very simplified) history. Moldova is sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. The modern nation’s artificial origins lie in Stalin’s invasion of Romania in 1940, and his subsequent decision to split what had been interwar Romania into two parts, with Moldova absorbed into the USSR. The main language is Romanian, although a minority do speak Russian. A narrow eastern strip of the country, called Transnistria, is a mini-breakaway state that declared independence, with Russian assistance, in 1991. Transnistria has existed as a Russian protectorate and “frozen conflict” ever since. It is marked below in light green:

(I visited Transnistria in 1991 and wrote about it in my first book, Between East and West, lately reprinted and available in paperback. A lot has happened since I wrote it, but it’s now a historical account, useful for understanding the weird atmosphere of the Soviet borderlands at the time).

Since independence, Moldova has been under constant Russian pressure. Some Russian troops are stationed in Transnistria. Russian-linked oligarchs have made Moldova and Transnistria into centers of money-laundering and smuggling. Last year, the Russians launched an all-out information war on Moldova’s parliamentary elections, offering money to people to support and vote for pro-Russian candidates. The BBC did a good investigation into the Russian campaign, even sending an undercover reporter inside a group that received instructions on how to post material discrediting the elections, and Sandu, in exchange for money.

Sandu’s pro-European party won anyway, thanks to hard campaigning, to their own counter-messaging and to fast action against those who were breaking the law. This was a really important victory: Imagine the difficulties, for Romania and for Ukraine, if the territory between them was Russian-controlled. Imagine what would happen if a pro-Russian government in Moldova was reinforced by Russian troops.

But because a lot is happening right now, this good-news story went under the radar. I was glad to have the opportunity to reflect on it. Here is my speech, written with a bit of help from Dalibor Rohac, of Globsec:

Mr. President, Madam President, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

In the summer of 2022, the first summer of the Ukrainian war, I visited Maia Sandu in Moldova’s presidential palace, a huge pile of steel and concrete, originally built to house the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Many of the people who have occupied that building, before and after 1991, were heavy-jowled men with clandestine, or not so clandestine, connections to Russia. President Sandu looked nothing like them and talked nothing like them either. The Moldovan president was brought up in a rural region of Moldova by a veterinarian and a schoolteacher, with no connections to the old nomenklatura. She made her way to Harvard and the World Bank by dint of hard work and talent.

At that meeting, Maia Sandu told me that she wanted to increase prosperity in Moldova, and to strengthen democracy. “This was my biggest dream,” she said: “To have the chance to focus on dealing with the internal challenges, not to have any complications around us and in the region.”

President Sandu has never been given that chance. Instead, since she was elected in 2020, Sandu has had to fight Moldova’s internal challenges and Europe’s external challenges at the same time. But she has done so with enviable success.

Let’s remember where Moldova was, before her election. The country was poor, the borders were porous, and the second-largest city — Tiraspol — was, and still is, occupied by Russian troops pretending to be the army of an imaginary country. Moldova was known for corruption, money laundering, targeted propaganda, state-directed organized crime. Since 2022, Moldova is directly on the frontline of Russia’s ugly war in Ukraine.

Against that background, President Sandu has accomplished things no serious expert predicted. When Gazprom cut off Moldova’s gas to freeze a small country into submission, Sandu’s government replaced Russian gas with European supplies. Moldova now has EU candidate status, and negotiations are underway. The prospect of Moldova’s accession in 2028, just two years from now, is ambitious but not unrealistic.

Then, last September, when Russia poured hundreds of millions of euros into the Moldovan election - buying votes, organizing cyberattacks, making bomb threats, deploying trained provocateurs - President Sandu fought back, with public information campaigns and law enforcement. Her party overcame all of that to win an outright parliamentary majority, with fifty percent of the vote.

And that party is one that she and her team built scratch: No oligarchs, no business interests, just small donations and volunteers. Anyone who has tried to run a clean political party in a poor country with a corrupt past will understand the scale of this achievement.

Her success is important, not just for Moldova, but for all of Europe. Like the victory of the new government in Budapest, President Sandu has proven that the onward march of autocracy is not inevitable. The future does not belong to the jowled men who insist that they are speaking on behalf of the “real people” while in reality imposing autocratcy and corruption. There is still space in politics for hard-working, idealistic, morally grounded leaders.

When we met in 2022, President Sandu told me that she wanted to prove that “democracy is not to be blamed for corruption, for poverty.” That is the argument she has been making with her life for the past decade, and she is winning it — in a country smaller than most American states, on the front line of a war, with the Russian army camped on her territory and Russian money sloshing through her country’s political system.

Moldova still has a long way to go. But if a village teacher’s daughter can stare down the Kremlin and walk her country into Europe, then perhaps those of us in bigger, richer and older democracies have less to fear than we think. And perhaps we all have something to learn.

Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in honoring Maia Sandu.

Saving History

Last week, the Justice Department deleted thousands of press releases related to the Jan. 6 insurrection, seeking to shape history (and perhaps the LLMs that describe it) by removing real-time information.

The Lawfare website explains:

The operation started without fanfare or formal announcement and proceeded largely unnoticed. Until, that is, journalists such as the Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield took notice of certain press releases and other materials that had conspicuously disappeared from www.justice.gov.

“The Trump admin is quietly deleting info about the Capitol attack from the DOJ website as it prepares to give funds to J6ers,” Kornfield posted. “This week, DOJ deleted a press release about one man with an ongoing child solicitation case who came to the Capitol with bear spray.”

Then, with typical bombast, the Justice Department responded by taking issue with one particular aspect of Kornfield’s characterization. “Nothing ‘quiet’ about it,” the DOJ Rapid Response account replied. “We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

We are not erasing history quietly, the Justice Department seemed to suggest. We are erasing history loudly and proudly.

Lawfare has archived and posted the missing material. Read their account of what happened, and check out their archive here.

Kleptocracy Tracker

Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)

May 15

• Kash Patel used two Navy SEAL boats to take nine guests snorkeling around the underwater tomb of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, meaning that government resources were deployed for his entertainment.

• Yorkville Advisors—a financial group with ties to the Trump family—set up a special-purpose vehicle to raise $200 million to purchase a company in Venezuela, the latest administration ally to benefit from the removal of Nicolás Maduro.

May 16

• Trump disclosed more than 3,700 stock trades—including in firms with major deals with the administration, such as Boeing, Microsoft, and Nvidia—made in just the first fiscal quarter of 2026 and totaling tens of millions of dollars.

May 18

• After Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns, the Department of Justice announced a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded compensation program for the president's allies, including people arrested for rioting at the Capitol on January 6, who claim the law was weaponized against them during the Biden administration (see above for more)

May 19

• David Schutzenhofer, the general manager of Trump’s Bedminster golf club, helped manage the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation—despite holding no formal government role—advising on multimillion-dollar, no-bid contracts that ultimately went to a contractor from another Trump property.

• The Department of Justice settlement reached with Trump—in exchange for his withdrawal of the $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS—includes terms prohibiting the tax agency from investigating him, his family, trusts, companies, and other affiliates.

May 20

• Trump signed an executive order that could grant cryptocurrency firms access to core US payments systems, potentially allowing them to act more like banks rather than having to operate through a regulated partner for access to central bank infrastructure.

May 21

• Allies of the president—such as former campaign aide Sam Nunberg and former Health and Human Services spokesman Michael Caputo—have already moved to claim portions of the nearly $1.8 billion Department of Justice “weaponization” fund.

• The Trump appointee-filled Commission of Fine Arts approved the president’s plan to build a 250-foot triumphal arch in Washington, bringing the project closer to breaking ground.

May 29

• A federal judge blocked the “weaponization” fund. More lawsuits likely to follow.

Prague Castle

You’ve probably seen pictures from the outside, but this is what the Spanish Hall, the grandest room in Prague Castle, looks like on the inside. Picture is from the Globsec dinner and includes Petr Pavel, the Czech president, and Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament, who also got a prize:

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