A Lot of Meetings in Kyiv
And an important scheduling note
Good Morning:
A note on scheduling: Today’s show will not take place at the usual time. Neither will tomorrow’s.
Today’s show will take place at 10:00 am Eastern time—and may be a touch abbreviated.
Tomorrow’s show may be canceled entirely or may take place at a highly irregular time.
The last two days has been a blur of meetings. I haven’t done any of the things one is supposed to do in Kyiv. I have seen sights only in passing while walking by them or while breezing past them in taxis. On the other hand, I have been to electronics dealerships to buy batteries. I have driven to neighborhoods on the Left Bank to housing complexes with no heat or electricity. I have met with journalists, soldiers, war crimes investigators, even one American embedded with Ukrainian forces for the last several years. Some initial impressions appear below in my The Situation column, and I have arranged some podcast recordings for the coming days and weeks.
Mostly, however, I’ve tried not to think about things too much. One has periods of information acquisition and periods of information processing. This is definitely one of the former for me.
Today’s meetings: think tank scholars who work on Ukrainian-American relations, a specialist on the Ukrainian economy, and a large social group of young people who work in government, journalism, and the ideas sector.
Tuesday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher and the estimable Mike Feinberg joined me to discuss DHS, Greenland, and whether one should wear dog shirts in a war zone:
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, Mike Feinberg—still estimable—requested that we please not talk about authoritarianism for once. We talked about pizza instead:
The Situation
The Situation on Thursday took a look at the way our closest ally in the world now talks about the United States of America in public.
On Saturday I got on an airplane, and on then another airplane, then on a train, and then an overnight train, to come to a country whose situation depends pervasively on The Situation.
I arrived in Ukraine on Monday morning and will be here for a couple of weeks: meeting with people, learning about the war, visiting friends, and getting a window on a society which I have only seen through a series of keyholes.
The Situation here is very far away—and yet very close.
Far away in the sense that ICE raids are far less salient than the air raids that regularly knock out power and heating to millions of people; in the sense that the buffoonery the President gets up to in Davos operates as a kind of distant dark comedy playing in the background, not an up-close horror show transfixing people. There is a very different horror show playing close up.
And yet close in the sense that few countries’ fates are more indelibly tied up with The Situation than Ukraine’s. Ever since Trump’s perfect phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky during Trump’s first term in office, Ukraine’s ability to defend itself—and I mean that in the most literal, physical, existential, day-to-day sense of the phrase—has been tied to Trump’s political fortunes and whims. Whether the country receives robust American support, whether and to what extent America embraces the foe that is trying to destroy Ukraine, whether Ukraine is subject to extortion from its patron over mineral rights or capitulative peace plans, whether the United States blows up the larger alliances Ukraine aspires to join to secure its future are all functions of The Situation, after all. And Ukrainians watch American developments not merely with the horrified fascination of the rest of the world but with the immediate sense that these developments may directly affect their lives.
And thus The Situation lurks in the background—critically important yet weirdly incomprehensible.
Because understanding America’s political self-immolation is impossible even when it’s one’s full-time job, and it all moves so fast all the time on the way to getting nowhere—ever.
And who has time for that when one’s power is out and one has no heat and when it’s really cold, and when there are air raids—multiple times per day—that one has to decide whether to take shelter from or to ignore? And who has time for that when it’s another country’s internal affairs and one has so little ability to affect it anyway? And who has time for that when it’s the ultimate moving target and nothing Trump says today, positive or negative, will govern tomorrow?
And let’s face it, it’s all so profoundly dumb.
There is something humbling—one might even say humiliating—about showing one’s face in a country whose problems are mostly externally inflicted and which struggles daily in a military sense to defend its right to determine its own fate, coming from a country which indisputably holds its own fate in its own hands yet which inflicts needless harms upon itself seemingly for fun.
There is something embarrassing about driving by a children’s hospital bombed recently by Russia—about being in a country that every day stares in the face such signs of Russian malign intent and activity—having just come from a country that regularly denies the reality of Russia’s behavior.
At the highest level of altitude, one feels ridiculous, coming from a society that is busily, proudly endeavoring to destroy itself, spending time in a society that is working under the toughest of circumstances to preserve itself.
It is a common trope among Westerners visiting Kyiv that life in the city goes on as normal despite the war. And this is true in some limited sense. Restaurants and cafes are open and blithely turn on generators and light candles when the power goes out. There are really nice book stores. The food stores are reasonably well-supplied—better so, actually, than the stores in Washington were in advance of this weekend’s storm. And the metro runs regularly, even if people use stations as bomb shelters even as others walk through them to get to the streets where the air strikes might land. One can walk through Kyiv and pretend that it’s just a normal European capital going about its day despite the stresses of a war that is never far away and sometimes comes very close.
Westerners like this vantage point on life here because it meshes well with our own political prejudices, whatever those happen to be. If you’re pro-Ukrainain, the observation about life continuing as normal inevitably leads to some admiring remark about the country’s resilience, about those plucky Ukrainians going about their daily lives in the face of the war—with London-during-the-Blitz reference to follow.
If you’re a Ukraine skeptic, a MAGA type or a more general foe of American engagement overseas, the observation leads to some disparagement of the Ukrainian need for Western help: look at those Kyivans partying at night clubs while American money, taken from the pockets of real heartland Amuricans, funds the war.
The truth is that the premise is wrong: the normality is skin deep.
I have been here for 72 hours, and I have already had repeated conversations with people who are stretched incredibly thin: a woman whose apartment on the 16th floor of an old Soviet era apartment block has had neither heat nor electricity nor running water for days; a prominent Kyiv intellectual, currently serving in government, who told me fiercely that it was important never to accept the environment here as an acceptable way to live; a media liaison for a military unit who observed while stepping over piles of crushed ice in the street that this is a stressful time to be in Kyiv—very different even from other winters; and Lawfare’s own Kyiv fellow, Anastasiia Lapatina, who feels a certain unnatural urgency about going out at night to deliver batteries to strangers to help power people’s heaters because it’s really cold out.
You can fool yourself with bromides about “normality” because there’s a chic hipster vibe in a lot of Kyiv offices and eateries, and the place is a fashionable combination of old and modern and Soviet and run-down and brand, spanking new.
But the resilience is one of necessity. It’s a brave face on a profoundly non-normal way to live. People go on as normal-ish because what the heck else are they going to do? But they are really tired, and they have to do their jobs—like everyone else—and then go home and pick up kids and figure out how to keep apartments warm and phones charged. And they’re constantly sleep deprived because of air attacks at night.
I visited a media organization here on Monday, where the offices were about half empty. A staffer explained to me that some people were present because the office had power and many of their homes did not, while other were absent because the office had no heat—while many of their homes did. He shrugged.
What does The Situation mean for any of this? It means that Ukrainians never know whether America is part of the solution or part of the problem—or a bit of both at the same time. And it means that Americans are so distracted by our own troubles that many of them don’t even know there’s a man-made energy crisis in Kyiv that means that millions of people are cut off from heat and power during a serious cold snap.
And even as the cold weather and power outages continue here, the Situation continues tomorrow.
Recently On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang
Minnesota v. Noem: A Hearing Diary for Jan. 26
Roger Parloff blogs live from the hearing where U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez decided on whether to issue an extraordinary order that would pause the Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
In Minnesota v. Noem, the state and both cities asked Menendez to issue a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction against the operation, alleging that it violates state sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment. They would like Menendez to order the government to reduce its immigration law enforcement presence in the city to where it stood on Nov. 30. It alleges that it violates constitutional principles forbidding the federal government from “commandeering” state resources to pursue federal interests, and that it is attempting to coerce state and local authorities into changing policies that are within their constitutional authority.
The government contends that the suit is an “absurdity” that asks a court to block federal law enforcement from enforcing federal law, which would violate separation of powers.
The Inevitable Presidential AI Model
Jason R. DiNapoli posits that the most consequential use of artificial intelligence (AI) in government will be a centralized “presidential model” used by the executive as a decision-making tool. Drawing on analogies to CEO AI use and growing AI adoption across the executive branch and military, DiNapoli contends that such a model is unavoidable given its potential to manage complexity and information overload.
Would President Kennedy have consulted the Presidential Model after receiving initial recommendations from the ExComm? Would a future president consult a model in a future conflict—say, for courses of action to counter Russian aggression in Ukraine or to wargame a Chinese invasion of Taiwan? It is not hard to imagine.
The Nexperia Crisis Shows Why Export Controls Need Allied Coordination
Noah Tan warns that the Nexperia chip crisis exposes the limits and dangers of unilateral U.S. export controls. Tan argues that these export controls are only effective if the U.S. and its allies coordinate; otherwise, U.S. policy will continue to harm its allies while failing to curb China’s leverage.
The breakdown in trade relations over a Dutch legacy chip company might seem like a minor skirmish against the larger backdrop of U.S.-China competition, but it illustrates where China is placing its bets and how it can exploit Western supply chain dependencies. Attempts to tackle this issue unilaterally did little more than catch Europe in the crosshairs.
The State of FARA
Brandon L. Van Grack, Haydn Forrest, and Emilee Karr explain how states are rapidly expanding their own versions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in ways that increase compliance risks for companies and nonprofits with overseas ties. The authors posit that these “baby FARA” laws signal states’ growing willingness to assert foreign affairs powers and create new, uneven regulatory burdens beyond traditional federal oversight.
Many of the “baby FARA” laws adopted by state governments mirror the core structure of their federal analogue: Persons who attempt to influence state politics on behalf of a foreign entity, especially a foreign government, must register and make certain disclosures. But the state laws often depart from the federal statute in ways that illuminate the states’ unique concerns.
Trump’s Illegal AI Chip Export Controls, and Who Can Challenge Them
Vivian Dong argues that President Trump’s demand that Nvidia and other chipmakers pay a percentage of its sales in China in exchange for export licenses without congressional approval is illegal and possibly unconstitutional. Dong highlights how a wide range of actors—chip competitors, cloud providers, AI firms, customers, and even U.S. states—could have standing to sue.
Granting export licenses in exchange for revenue sharing agreements violates ECRA and the Constitution. Well-established standing doctrine shows that a wide range of potential plaintiffs— competitors, U.S.-based customers, OEMs, cloud providers, AI companies, and state governments—can challenge the administration’s actions, and they should. Whatever the geopolitical merits of exporting the licensed chips to China are, export license decisions must be made based on those merits, not to raise revenue. The path to the courthouse is clear. Now someone needs to take it.
Podcasts
On Tuesday’s Lawfare Daily, Andrew J. Grotto and Jim Dempsey join Justin Sherman to discuss their recent study on the U.S. military’s domestic cybersecurity risks and how adversaries could exploit those flaws. The trio also discuss the Pentagon’s Energy Resilience Program, the myth of the “air gap,” and what the threat landscape could look like in the coming years.
On Wednesday’s Lawfare Daily, I speak with Elizabeth Tsurkov about her 903 days of captivity in Iraq under Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia. Tsurkov shares the realities of her life in detention, the sociological observations she took of her captors while imprisoned, and how countries responded to efforts to secure her release.
On Scaling Laws, Kevin Frazier sits down with Brett Orrell to answer weighty questions on how AI will change our economy, the nature of our work, the labor market, and how best Americans can navigate the AI transition.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the wolf, seen here taking a roll call:
In honor of today’s Beast, check in on your friends.
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