Ukraine

Forged under fire by engineers who refused to wait for permission, Ukraine’s FP-5 Flamingo shows how a nation can build its own long-reach answer to Russian aggression—and hit harder than anyone expected.

Watching a real estate developer freelance foreign policy with a Kremlin insider felt less like statecraft and more like witnessing a slow-motion warning flare for anyone who still expects competence in American diplomacy.

Ukraine is working from a rewritten American peace blueprint that trims the harshest demands from the original plan, but whether this marks the start of a real endgame or another turn in a grinding war will be decided in the fine print and on the battlefield.

I am not interested in abstract “peace plans” drafted in Miami hotel suites; I am interested in whether the people I fought beside in Ukraine are being asked to trade their homes, language, and dead for the illusion of stability.

The Legion was never built to last; it was a stopgap of anger, idealism, and broken men thrown together under fire, and its dissolution only makes official what the front line knew years ago.

Ukraine and Russia are locked in a grinding stalemate where neither can win outright, yet both refuse to accept the cost of defeat as the political ground beneath them steadily erodes.

Estonia’s Frankenberg Technologies is betting that its AI guided, “good enough” Mark 1 mini missile, built cheap and in huge numbers, is the practical way to swat Russian drones out of NATO skies without going bankrupt.

I went to Ukraine thinking I could choose how to help, only to find that on the morning the war began everything I knew—plans, love, even my sense of who I was—was smashed by artillery, paperwork, and the chaotic, makeshift mercy of volunteers who’d been thrown together to survive.

The lens hummed, the mud stilled, and for a heartbeat I couldn’t tell who was hunting who.

In a sunlit Kyiv shop three months after Putin’s invasion, a stranger kissed my hand and thanked America, a small human moment that crystallized why Ukraine’s fight for hearth and home deserves unwavering support even amid the Kremlin’s reckless threats.

Watching Pokrovsk ground to dust meter by meter, I see Washington and Budapest flirting with an alliance of convenience that would codify the stalemate into Western policy and rename exhaustion as realism.

At Saab’s Linköping plant on October 22, 2025, Zelensky and Kristersson unveiled a landmark deal to equip Ukraine with at least 100 Gripen fighters starting in 2026, a rugged highway-strip-capable fleet with long reach and low costs that signals Europe is serious about beating back Russian aggression.