Hours later, at around 2:30 a.m., Russia launched another ballistic missile attack on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. Several explosions. As of this writing, civilians are reported dead, dozens wounded. The usual.

Later, on the mat, moving through a set of propulsion exercises before heading downtown, I found myself thinking about Vance and what he represents: a small, thick cloud of black smoke blocking what could have been a very nice sunrise. Exactly the image in this video—looking east from Pechersky, down Lesi Ukrainky Boulevard toward the Motherland Monument and the museum of local wars. A clear morning, interrupted.

Earlier this week, Vice President Vance sat before a scattering of students in Georgia and described ending weapons transfers to Ukraine as one of the proudest achievements of his administration. It is worth noting—gently—that the transfers had already ended months earlier. That Europe had already assumed the burden. That the war, inattentive to these pronouncements, continues into its fifth year, despite promises to end it in twenty-four hours.

This is the achievement: not doing something, and doing it loudly enough that it registers as action.

A familiar form. The man who arrives late to the harvest and takes credit for the empty field. There is a certain cleanliness to it. Nothing touches you.

From this position of careful distance, Vance has also found time to advise the pope to concern himself with matters of morality and leave politics to others. An interesting division of labor, especially from a man for whom the safest moral act is abstention—provided it is announced with sufficient conviction.

By the end of 2025, Congress had already approved more than $188 billion in Ukraine-related spending. The shipments had gone out; the consequences were already unfolding far from Georgia lecture halls. Vance now celebrates the moment he chose not to continue. It is like congratulating oneself for not boarding a train that has already left the station.

The room, on this particular evening, did not quite cooperate. Too many empty seats. Too much space for the words to travel without resistance. This is a performance that depends on proximity—the warmth of bodies, the reassurance of applause. Without it, the claim has to stand on its own.

It doesn’t.

This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires tension between what is said and what is known. This is something looser, more accommodating. When a voice from the depleted crowd shouted that he was killing children, Vance replied that conservatives should stay engaged and take the country back. He did not specify from whom.

This, too, is part of the achievement: to mansplain in a half-empty auditorium, in a country your party fully controls, and speak of liberation1.

The problem:

The last piece I published this week began with a surgeon and ended with a general in Russia. In between, I tried to trace what happens when the instrument of knowledge loses contact with the thing it claims to know — and what it costs when no one in the room notices, or cares.

Borges and Kundera arrived in that piece not as decoration but as diagnosis. They are part of the same tradition — Central European and Latin American literary thought — that took epistemological humility as its central moral commitment. The idea that the gap between what we know and what is actually there is not a technical problem to be solved but a condition to be honored. Both wrote from positions of political precarity. Both understood, from direct experience, what happens when power decides it has closed that gap.

The filiation between them is not often traced explicitly, but it runs deep. Borges came first. His fable of the map that becomes the territory appeared in 1946, in a story barely longer than a paragraph. The empire that builds the perfect map is not made wiser by it. It is made helpless. The map rots in the desert alongside the territory it claimed to describe.

Kundera, writing three decades later from the ruins of the Prague Spring, was working a related seam. His great theme — lightness versus weight, the irreversibility of the real against the consoling fiction that things might have been otherwise — is in some sense an extension of the Borgesian problem into lived political history. For Borges, the danger was the map that replaced the territory. For Kundera, the danger was the ideological certainty that replaced the ambiguous, irreducible particular — the individual life, the specific body, the child in the dialysis ward.

Kundera had another word for it: kitsch. The aesthetic of certainty. The refusal of ambiguity. The brass band that plays over the graves. Kitsch, he wrote, is the absolute denial of shit — by which he meant the irreducible remainder, the thing that does not fit the picture, the dialysis machine in the rubble, the sports field that appeared on the satellite image too late. The briefing room is a kitsch environment. It is designed to be. The maps are clean, the arrows are decisive, the adjectives are superlative. Most-lethal. Most-precise. Picture perfect.

I should have included Vasyl Bykov in the piece, and I didn’t. I knew him in Belarus — the last of the great Soviet-era writers who refused the Soviet consolation, who kept returning to the particular weight of the particular man in the particular frozen field. Bykov’s soldiers do not die for abstractions. They die in the mud, in the dark, having made a wrong turn or trusted the wrong person or simply run out of time. Sign of Misfortune (1982) and To Live Till Sunrise (1973) are not war novels in the heroic sense. They are novels about the catastrophic distance between the map — the order, the objective, the ideological justification — and the territory, which is cold and does not care about justifications.

Bykov belongs in the same line of filiation as Borges and Kundera, though the three never occupied the same literary conversation and would have made awkward dinner companions. What they share is the insistence that the irreducible particular — the body, the face, the specific moment of dying — cannot be abstracted away without moral catastrophe. For Borges the catastrophe is epistemological. For Kundera it is political. For Bykov it is military, and the mud is real, and he knew because he was in it, along with Valentyn Taras, whose recollections of the underground, documented by Alexander rounded out my understanding of the mess. Alexander, as I recall, got the boot right after me.

Had my favorite philosopher Daniel Dennett still been alive, I would have brought him in as well. His framework of physical, design, and intentional stances maps cleanly onto the problem. A targeting system takes the intentional stance toward a building: it treats the structure as having a function, a purpose, a place in a military design. That stance is what makes it targetable. What it cannot do, by definition, is take the physical stance toward the children inside — to see them as particular bodies, with particular weights, in particular seats, on a particular Saturday morning. The targeting system is not evil. It is something more dangerous: correct within its own framework and blind outside it.

I thought about all of this talking to an old friend from Minsk this week — Sergei Grits, the AP photographer, who materialized in Kyiv recently. We talked about the briefings, about the satellite imagery, about picture-perfect strikes. He told me about Basrah in 2003, shooting on streets so hot the air bent. His local fixer kept fifty meters of distance from him at all times. Not because he didn’t trust Sergei. Because he understood, with a precision that no targeting system has yet replicated, that the man with the AP camera was a different kind of coordinate — one that attracted a different kind of attention — and that fifty meters might be the difference between the map and the territory, between the picture and the thing.

That fixer was doing applied epistemology in real time. He understood, with the clarity that comes only from skin in the game, the difference between the picture and the thing.

Between the picture and the thing: a bullet between his eyes.

Which brings me to Russia’s strikes on Ukrainian cities, and the difference — important, clarifying, and finally irrelevant to the dead — between the American precision I wrote about this week and what I have watched from Kyiv’s streets.

The American strikes on Minab were, in the technical sense, precise. The school was hit because the instrument said it was a target. The instrument was wrong, but the aim was accurate. That is the Borgesian pathology: the map was perfect; the territory had moved on.

Russia’s strikes on Ukrainian cities are not precise. They are deliberately, programmatically, almost aesthetically imprecise. I know this because I have watched them from what locals call the mystic triangle — a stretch of Kyiv that has absorbed more than its share of incoming, for reasons that remain, to put it generously, unclear. The Kh-101 that hit Okhmatdyt did not go astray. The Shahed drones that circle in the dark over residential blocks are not malfunctioning. The pattern, observed over months and years, is not the pattern of a military force trying to hit military targets and occasionally missing. It is the pattern of a force that has decided the civilian is the target, and is working outward from there.

This is the inversion of the American problem. Hegseth’s instrument is too confident in an outdated picture. Kuvaldin’s instrument knows exactly what it is looking at and strikes anyway.

Bykov understood both failure modes. His officers are sometimes incompetent and sometimes malicious, and the men under them die either way. What he never allowed his readers was the comfort of clean categories — this death was a mistake, that one was a crime. The mud does not organize itself into legal distinctions. The mothers of Minab and the mothers of Kyiv are not waiting for the relevant jurisdiction to reach a finding.

Vasyl Bykov died in June 2003 — the same year Sergei Grits’s fixer was keeping his careful fifty meters on the streets of Basrah.

The mud, as always, did not care about the timing.

I subjected myself to considerable C-SPAN, Fox News, and Trey Yingst this week in the service of understanding the current grammar of American military jingoism. It is a specific dialect — confident, present-tense, passive when convenient. Mistakes are investigated. Responsibility is pending. The throttle is always going up.

Next week I will turn back to Ukraine’s ruling elites, who have their own complicated relationship with the gap between the map and the territory — less bellicose than Tampa, more Byzantine, and in some ways more dispiriting for being so close to home.

The audio and video summaries are above. NotebookLM did its best.

We continue to enchant old photos in order to see what AI spits out.

Have a great weekend!

Ukraine@War (February 7–12, 2026) highlights the widening chasm between high-level diplomatic “talk” and the freezing, kinetic reality for three million residents in Kyiv.

The “Good Talks” vs. Kinetic Reality

The week began and ended with massive Russian air strikes that stood in stark contrast to political rhetoric. On February 7, shortly after President Trump mentioned “very, very good talks” between Russia and Ukraine, cruise missiles targeted the Rivne atomic power station, aiming to sever Kyiv’s remaining energy supplies. By February 12, despite ongoing talks in Abu Dhabi, Russia unleashed one of its largest barrages yet, including 219 strike drones and 24 ballistic missiles.

The Infrastructure Crisis & “Nine Megawatts of Victory”

While leadership celebrated the restoration of nine megawatts of power—an amount worth less than a Tesla Model 3 per hour—Kyiv remained crippled by a lack of central heating. The sources suggest this vulnerability is not just due to Russian strikes, but also systematic corruption within agencies like Energoatom, where top officials were allegedly caught dividing kickbacks.

The government’s response has been criticized as “crisis management calibrated to the news cycle” rather than the thermometer. This included:

• The Pope’s Solidarity: Sending 80 generators for a country of 37 million.

• Heat Packages: Distributing wool socks, blankets, and energy efficiency pamphlets to citizens just as the worst of the winter frost began to break.

The Narrative War and Media Critique

The week also saw a sharp critique of international media coverage. Reports from the New York Times and The Atlantic were slammed for focusing on “defiant ingenuity” and laser-cannon “tech-optimism” while ignoring structural failures. A key point of contention is the staffing of critical defense roles with former TV producers and “comedy troupe” associates of the President, such as Pavlo Yelizarov, who now runs air defense.

Diplomatic Illusions

As the Munich Security Conference (dubbed the “Insecurity Conference” by the sources) approached, reports surfaced of a potential June 2026 election and peace referendum. However, the sources dismiss these as a “dog-and-pony show,” noting that the will to negotiate is a “black cat in a dark room” that simply isn’t there on either side.

For reasons that should have been glaringly obvious four years ago, we remain touchingly optimistic about Z and Trump, both of whom continue to believe that talking with Putin is the best prophylactic against gruesome death. Evidence to the contrary accumulates hourly, but why let reality spoil a good diplomatic photo-op?

“I think we’re doing very well with Ukraine and Russia. For the first time, I’m saying that,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “I think we’re going to, maybe, have some good news.” - Trump (Oval Office, February 2, 2026)

Hours earlier, Z also sounded ebullient.

“The de-escalation measures ... are helping to build public trust in the negotiation process and its possible outcome.” - Z (pep talk, February 2, 2026)

As of this writing, Russia has hit a high-rise residential building in the middle of Kyiv. Five districts of the capital reported strikes. Two districts, more than 1,100 high-rise residential buildings, are without heat. The temperature is -25°C. De-escalation is going splendidly.

De-escalation map (February 3, 2026)

OUTLOOK (AUSBLICK) 2026

• In 2026, it is to be feared (zu befürchten) that modified armament and guidance systems for Russian drones will lead to a greater threat (größeren Bedrohung). This can be countered by financing the production of defense systems in Ukraine. Financing them being, naturally, entirely distinct from actually financing them.

• According to the British think tank RUSI, Russia will attempt to escalate the war in hybrid fashion. This could particularly affect the population in front-line regions and in the port city of Odesa. De-escalation (Deeskalation) continues apace.

• A strategically sensible and effective response (sinnvolle und effektive Antwort) to the Russian threat is the targeted disruption of modernization and production of Russian air defense systems. Furthermore, European NATO states should supply Ukraine with highly effective long-range precision weapons and thus enable far-reaching airstrikes on Russian state territory (deep precision strikes). This recommendation has been filed under “things everyone agrees make perfect sense but will not happen” (Dinge, die perfekt sinnvoll sind, aber nicht passieren werden).

IN POSSIBLY RELATED NEWS:

Iuliia Mendel, a journalist, public figure and former press secretary to Z, has written that the president’s axed right-hand man, Andriy Yermak, was enthusiastically practicing witchcraft.

According to her account: In 2019, a journalist chased Yermak after a briefing asking what he was doing at a cemetery with [NAME]. In 2020, a terrified minister informed her that Yermak was practicing magic. In 2023, a source from an important service described how Yermak imported mages from Israel, Georgia, and some Latin American country for magical rituals. By 2024, someone from esoteric circles reported that Yermak’s mages were burning herbs, collecting water from corpses, and making dolls stored in a special chest—”a chest of the dead.”

“[Yermak] tried to block or use the energies of other people, as he imagined it.” - Iullia (January 31, 2026)

Today, as the country sits without heat, light, or basic needs, we can all laugh at this magical “politics”—if we have the strength.

Bumped into a gang of icebreakers yesterday. They were very cheerful. The large woman with her back to the camera was supervising.

Zero canines present. Humans, however, abundant.

Team USA’s burgomaster obvi is pumped for the Davos beano1.

Yesterday we talked about Greenland and the ideology declaring itself. Today brings Gregory Bovino stepping from a Chicago courthouse in a Nazi uniform.

Bovino’s agents used chemical rounds and pepper balls near a children’s Halloween parade, breaking a 67-year-old citizen’s ribs. The judge sharply questioned why officers treated children at a parade as threats. Heinrich, dressed in livery, is shining the brass fittings on the cast iron door. Old man dragon had a cow, e-i-e-i-o.

An old social media post attributed to Bovino: “Serve your country! Defend your culture!” The uniform grants special status. The brass fittings must shine. One widely shared response quoted Auschwitz survivor Karl Stojka: “It was not Hitler or Himmler who abducted me, beat me, shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor, who received a uniform and then believed they were the master race.”

Meanwhile, Trump announces his “Board of Peace”—planning to invite Putin and Lukashenko to serve on it. You couldn’t parody this if you tried. The man who wrote “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace” because Norway didn’t give him a Nobel Prize now wants the architects of Europe’s largest land war since 1945 to advise him on peace. It’s like asking doctors to take lifesaving medicines, reconstitute them as poisonous isomers, and administer them to patients.

Lancelot: How many heads does he have?

Mr. Cat: Three.

Lancelot: That’s a troika. And paws?

Mr. Cat: Four.

Lancelot: I expected that. What about claws?

Mr. Cat: He has five on each paw.

Lancelot: Are they sharp?

Mr. Cat: As knives.

Lancelot: And does he breathe fire?

Mr. Cat: He certainly does.

Lancelot: You mean real flames?

Mr. Cat: They burn down forests.

Lancelot: I see. Is he covered with scales?

Mr. Cat: He is.

Lancelot: Thick ones?

Mr. Cat: Absolutely.

Lancelot: How thick?

Mr. Cat: You can’t scratch ‘em with a diamond. Not that I ever tried.

Lancelot: How big is he?

Mr. Cat: As big as a church2.

American military officers are being asked to plan invasions of NATO allies. Men and women who served with the Danes in Afghanistan, who watched Danish soldiers bleed and die on the same battlefields, now tasked with drawing up war plans against Copenhagen. Their training will have to be shattered and reassembled into a destructive version of itself—everything they’ve prepared to do for years applied backwards, against the people they trained to protect.

The dragon crippled them exactly as required: souls with no hands, souls with no legs, mute souls, chained souls, dead souls.

In Kyiv, the “patriotic consensus” exhausts itself. In Europe, capitals grasp that capitulation leads dragons to demand more. The transatlantic alliance transforms into a relationship on the dragon’s terms alone.

What happens when your protector becomes your threat? When mid-level functionaries in shining livery believe their uniforms make them masters? When the Board of Peace seats war criminals?

The dragon thinks he’s simply changing heads—swapping the diplomatic one for the military one, the reasonable face for the howling beast. But each transformation just reveals more of what he already is. The town watches, learns, adapts. Some put on uniforms and shine brass. Others write “L” on walls.

Is the endless still unbound, or are we just different now?

The brass fittings won’t shine themselves.

What? No, sorry. That’s impossible.

This is Charap arguing that Team USA should not guarantee Ukraine much, as if guarantees from Team USA would be reliable.

This is what I see on my phone.

to be continued…

As of this writing—that is, now—another nationwide Russian air attack is underway, targeting cities in western regions. The alarm for Kyiv just went off again. Hits have been reported in Ternopil and the national power company is turning off the lights.

It looks like a cruise missile creamed a residential building there.

Kharkiv was also smashed last night.

The 6-minute read over at The Economist about back-office shenanigans on in Kyiv understates the tedium of following political developments presaged by the cardboard kids this summer.

No one is very happy with Z, who has been jetsetting around Europe looking for weapons and hashing out peace plans. This morning he arrived in Ankara.

Calls for the president’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak to resign are getting louder, but that’s a small fix. A little dark cloud is also hanging over the head of National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov, who greets Z in this vid. The future of Deputy PM Oleksiy Kuleba is also in the balance.

Very yellow and “Reconstitution of Events,” the name given to an installation by Mykhailo from Zarkapattia.

We have been asked (Mykhailo asked) to enter the middle of the sculpture and walk through it, in order to enhance the drama of the image.

I traversed the sculpture’s interior. The experience was neither immersive nor unsettling.