Day 1570
Raddison Blu
Kyiv has become a city in which it is no longer possible to distinguish consultants, contractors, intelligence officers, journalists, procurement specialists, venture capitalists, and people merely trying to drink coffee. This may itself be a form of integration into the Western defense-technological ecosystem.
Fifteen minutes ago, three heavily tattooed men in khaki sat outside a café opposite the Radisson Blu on Yaroslaviv Val beneath an awning that read, with touching optimism, “Любов.” They were lounging with the particular stillness of people who have learned, professionally, not to fidget. They may have been discussing drone procurement. They may have been discussing the Knicks comeback in Game 4. The point is that one can no longer tell. The clientel of Tootsie Club has matured.
Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins, which tells you almost everything you need to know about what kind of distinguished professor Hal Brands is. Kissinger, we recall, believed that large countries possess legitimate security interests in rearranging smaller ones, provided the paperwork is in order and the larger country has enough rockets.
He is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins, which tells you almost everything you need to know about what kind of distinguished professor Hal Brands is. Kissinger, we recall, believed that large countries possess legitimate security interests in rearranging smaller ones, provided the paperwork is in order and the larger country has enough rockets.
He is a scholar of American grand strategy and Latin American Cold War history — which is to say, precisely the wrong preparation for writing about Ukraine.
What he has produced is the geopolitical equivalent of a weather report delivered by someone standing inside the building: Ukraine has drones, Russia has losses, the trajectory is encouraging, but optimism can give way to pessimism. This is true in the way that Wednesday follows Tuesday. It is analysis in the sense that a menu is a meal: five analytical dimensions, zero questions about who runs the kitchen. Brands is not an outlier. He is a genre.
The piece never asks — indeed, cannot ask, structurally — why Ukraine’s world-class drone program is being built by a government whose defense procurement network is under National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine investigation, whose president’s chief of staff was staffing ministries according to the celestial calculations of a Kyiv fortuneteller, and whose inner circle was simultaneously constructing a gated residential compound in Kozyn.
The laboratory produces extraordinary weapons. Management invoices separately.
"Ukraine can tie itself into the Western defense-technological ecosystem by selling drone and counter-drone technology." — Hal Brands, Bloomberg Opinion, June 12, 2026
He concludes that a conflict going better for “the good guys” may become more dangerous before it ends.
The good guys.
One appreciates the clarity. It saves time.
The ecosystem has been integrating Ukraine for some time now. So has the media.
My eyes glazed over reading Yermak’s 2,500-word scream for attention featured in Time Magazine.
Perhaps you share my reaction to self-aggrandizing bullshit: as soon as I see it, a filmy layer of distrust and seething hatred gets in the way, and I can’t think of anything other than some unshaven doucherocket receiving accolades for being ‘visionary’ and subsequently feeling on top of the world because he gnarled whatever wit and narrative grace his speechwriter could muster into the successful injection of the Ukraine brand into a media ecosystem that, milliseconds later, does not care.
This kind of jibberish is an ad for metal prongy things to hold up paper rolls. However, the above paragraph has just enough diy dorkiness, and a complete absence of the sort of knowing, winking, preening aspirational slumming with which doucherockets brush their teeth, so: enjoy!
The above callout block is from May 22, 2022, when we wrote about the greasy clown that is Andriy Yermak, then head of the President’s Office. At the time, unbeknownst to Time Magazine, he was building a luxury housing complex in Kozyn for himself, Z and two associates.
Have a great weekend!