De-ICEing in Krakow
Plus a Project Battery update.
Good Morning:
To inspire you, a de-ICEing video from the Pope John Paul II airport in Krakow. May it come to pass at home too:
A lot of catch-up today. Let’s start today with a Project Batteries update.
Here are the updated numbers:
Total contributions so far: $79,448.14 (The actual number is higher than this. This is the figure minus PayPal and Venmo transactions fees. I have not tried to calculate the total figure but will do so and break out the transaction fees in future updates so you can see the impact transactions fees are having)
Number of individual contributions so far: 419
Median contribution: $97.01
Average contribution: $189.61
Largest individual contribution: $6,000
Total tax deduction achieved by any of 419 people in exchange for their generosity: $0
Batteries purchased: 22
Batteries delivered to families: 20
Batteries delivered to institutions: 2
Current wait-list of families and institutions: 4
Heated blankets purchased: 9
Heated blankets delivered to families: 7
Cash on hand to spend: Roughly $8,270
Total expended so far: Roughly $64,000 (these numbers are rounded because of fluctuations in exchange rates, transfer fees, and battery prices)
Amount on its way to Anastasiia Lapatina but currently in various stages of wire-transfer purgatory: $15,000.
Current temperature in Kyiv: 16 degrees Fahrenheit/-9 degrees Celsius
Thanks to everyone who has contributed and continues to contribute. If you want to help Nastya and me keep this going, you can Venmo me at @benjaminwittes. This is the preferred way to do it as PayPal is taking a larger cut than Venmo. You can also PayPal me at benjamin.wittes@gmail.com. Keep it coming, folks. We are doing some good.
Time to do a DogShirtTV catchup.
Wednesday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Anastasiia Lapatina and I introduced the Greek Chorus to my guide in Kharkiv, the estimable Jimmy Rushton, a freelance journalist working in Ukraine. Ava was also there. Jimmy is a badass and he’s good company as well.
Friday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher and the estimable Mike Feinberg talked me through everything I’d missed while visiting Ukraine, both personal and political:
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Anna Bower caught me up on Superbowl half-time shows and Olympic doping scandals:
The Situation
The Situation a week ago discussed the weirdness of watching America while traveling abroad and focusing intensively on the security problems of a different country.
Wednesday evening found me in Kharkiv, having coffee at a chic cafe called 1654 with a woman named Kate Bohuslavska. Bohuslavska is a local blogger who writes about life in Ukraine’s second city, which has been under continuous Russian attack for the past four years. I have learned a great deal from following her account over the years, and we had corresponded occasionally but never met before. The cafe itself could have been in any modern European city. It is elegant. There is good coffee, cocktails, and food. The people are fashionable. You feel sitting in 1654 very far from war.
Unless, that is, you look out the window.
Across the street from the cafe is an old pre-Soviet building that has been destroyed. Ukraine offers the dead—including dead buildings—a certain dignity, so the building is dressed up nicely in death. The bombed-out windows have been replaced with painted plywood so as not to look too war-zoney.
Bohuslavska told me she had chosen 1654 for our meeting because this view out the window of a working cafe had a lot to say about her hometown.
“It used to be a beautiful building,” she said ruefully.
My guide in Kharkiv, a British freelance writer named Jimmy Rushton who has lived in Ukraine since 2022, hastened to reassure: “And it will be again,” he said earnestly. But Bohuslavska did not seem confident.
This exchange has particularly haunted me over the past few days, and not just because it is such a poignant account of Kharkiv’s modern reality.
The Situation has made us all, metaphorically speaking, into Kate in Kharkiv. Here we are, sitting in a beautiful cafe. It is comfortable and modern in here. The Dow bounced back nicely from Trump’s threats to invade Greenland. The food here is good. The atmosphere is chic. I hear the Golden Globe awards happened the other day. You really can kid yourself that America chugs along, Situation or no Situation, that we are not destroying ourselves—as long as you don’t look out the window onto the wreckage just outside.
It used to be a beautiful country, one thinks ruefully.
And as Jimmy did with Kate, people rush to reassure me. I was sitting with a distinguished economist the other day in Kyiv—a man who trained at American universities and who has lived in America and admires America and wants to bring a more American free market style of governance to Ukraine. And I mentioned Minnesota, and the fact that federal law enforcement was shooting people in the streets of an American city—the horrific view from out of my cafe window that particular day and week. And he hastened to agree that it was all shocking but, sounding remarkably like Rushton, also promised me that, “That’s not America.”
And like Kate about the maiming of her city being temporary, I am not so easily reassured anymore. Looking out of the window of my cafe, I cannot be confident that this is not America. After all, nobody is doing this to us. It is the Russians who are destroying Kharkiv, but our maiming is entirely self-inflicted.
In this sense, the comparison between Kharkiv and The Situation is quite inapt—offensive even. The destruction outside of 1654 is an ongoing series of war crimes, perpetrated by an external enemy who invaded Kate’s country and has assaulted her city with unspeakable violence for four long years. The destruction outside of my metaphorical cafe is a function of a kind of decadence, wherein Americans have chosen war against their own institutions—and each other—based on grievance politics and made-up nonsense. Rather, we have chosen to pick at scabs instead of addressing issues. We have chosen to destroy the sources of our own greatness, rather than perfect them. We have chosen conflict because conflict is fun. There is no Russian villain in our story. The wrecked building outside our cafe window is ourselves.
The comparison is unfair to Kharkiv in another sense, too. Kharkiv’s damage is rawly physical and unremittingly violent. There is nothing metaphorical about it. It is blown up daycare centers and bombed-out municipal buildings and schools. It is gas stations with sandbags stacked against their windows to prevent a blast from shattering windows and hurting people inside. It is apartment buildings that just aren’t there anymore. It is villages with live mines. It is playground equipment surrounded by buildings with no windows. It is a part of a much larger attempt at genocide against the Ukrainian people by the Putin government. I did a photo essay on the subject the other day for those who want to see what lies outside of 1654’s windows. The morally serious person knows better than to compare in earnest what is happening in Kharkiv to what is happening in The Situation.
And yet there are these little senses in which the comparison works. One of them is that sense of helplessness as one’s country is destroyed before one’s eyes—that sense of madly doing everything one can to protect it but also knowing the forces tearing things apart are just too relentless and are so much stronger than what one person and all that person’s friends and everyone he or she has met in the course of trying to hold things together can possibly do. And so you lose confidence that the building will be beautiful again, or that American democracy will overcome, or that ICE murder of protestors really isn’t America.
And there is rage in that realization. And there is depression. And there is determination to do one’s part anyway. And there is fatalistic humor. And there is defiance. And those emotional responses are actually not so different from what many Americans have felt these last few years. It is all sharper, of course. This is a frontline city in a real war, a war that—as I cannot emphasize enough—is in no sense a metaphor. But it’s a sharper, more all-consuming expression of a similar collection of feelings, the feelings of a free people facing and resisting domination by a violent authoritarian cabal.
It is impossible, as an American marinating in The Situation, not to see in Kharkiv, among many other things, an allegory of our own struggle. There is moral danger in that instinct, of course. To look at the struggles of others and see only oneself is rank narcissism. Not everything is about us, after all. But the inverse fact is true too: To look at Kharkiv and not recognize something connected about its struggle to our own would be a failure of empathy and human connectedness.
As Kierkegaard might have put it, if you compare The Situation and the destruction of Kharkiv, you will regret it. If you don’t compare The Situation and the destruction of Kharkiv you will also regret it. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.
And then there’s the cafe with the window—that place where it’s easy to pretend your city isn’t being destroyed, that everything is normal and fashionable and elegant, and yet which has a view directly onto the destruction. We all have such places. Some people choose to spend all their time in them—and not look out or at the window. We call this denial. Some people use them for shelter yet stare relentlessly at the window. Sometimes, as with 1654, these places are physical. Sometimes they are places we retreat to in our heads—meditation or prayer or deep thought. They are the places we go to mourn what’s outside the window, even as they shield us from what’s outside the window.
One person who—it turns out—does not object to the comparison is Bohuslavska, who texted me this evening moments after I arrived back in Washington:
If power belongs to the people, then the people must defend it, or someone will hijack it like a precious, unguarded chest of gold.
I’ve seen people disregard democracy as it was slowly eroded, bit by bit—thinking things would just settle down, thinking it wasn’t their business, thinking politics was something distant, something for someone else to care about. Those are the very people bombing us now.
I’ve also seen people defend their democracy by force. Over a hundred of us died that winter. And yet here we are—free, still standing, even if the road is hard.
In other words, the building may become beautiful again if people care enough about it.
It’s not up to us in the short term what happens on the other side of that window. We don’t get to decide when the next atrocity will be committed—either against us or by a masked thug acting in our name or maybe both at the same time—and everyone needs a space between engagement and denial.
The Situation continues tomorrow.
Recently On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang
It’s Time to Renew Section 702 of FISA Permanently
Stewart Baker argues that Congress should renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as a permanent tenet of the U.S. homeland security toolbox to protect one of the U.S.’s key resources in tracking belligerent foreign actors. In his assessment, Baker addresses criticisms such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s violations of its own rules for accessing information through 702, the Trump administration’s claims of 702 weaponization against President Trump and his supporters, and more.
The United States needs 702 more than ever. From Venezuela and Syria to Iran, the Trump administration’s approach to hostile regimes has been to achieve its goals with the threat of short raids and stand-off strikes rather than large-scale interventions. When it works, this strategy is usually far better than putting American lives at risk on the ground. But it runs the risk of leaving in place a resentful enemy regime and still-potent terror groups that could decide to strike back—potentially on U.S. soil.
Understanding Global AI Governance Through a Three-Layer Framework
Cedric Sabbah and Moshe Uziel propose a layered framework that intertwines artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, logic and open-source components, and various human-facing AI applications to guide AI governance around the world.
Ultimately, we, the authors, hope that applying the three-layer framework to AI governance and other fields of technological governance can help policymakers, academics, standard-making bodies, civil society organizations, and, of course, industry actors make sense of a fragmented and increasingly complex technology landscape. This, in turn, could contribute to a deeper, more sophisticated dialogue on the global policies that can unlock the potential benefits of these technologies.
Latest NDAA Supports AI Safety, Innovation, and China Decoupling
Jakub Kraus breaks down the latest National Defense Authorization Act and how the bill supports the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in U.S. defense, AI governance, and disentangling the U.S. from Chinese technology supply chains.
Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, most successful federal lawmaking on artificial intelligence (AI) has occurred within the annual defense bill. This year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was no exception. Enacted in December 2025, the bill contains a title devoted to AI and other emerging technologies, as well as numerous AI-related provisions scattered throughout its 1,259 pages of text. Collectively, these provisions will significantly reshape how America approaches AI innovation, AI safety, and U.S.-China competition.
NATO’s Loss Is Russia’s Gain
John Drennan and Ariane Tabatabai explain why NATO’s internal crisis over U.S. threats to takeover Greenland benefits Russia by weakening the alliance’s cohesion and distracting the organization from deterring Russian aggression.
Russia has long viewed NATO as a central threat to its interests. Therefore, the Kremlin sees driving a wedge between the United States and its European allies as critical to undermining the alliance and dulling its efficacy. Russia has probably assessed that it cannot win in a conventional military confrontation with NATO, and thus has prioritized other (mostly, asymmetric) means—including information campaigns—to weaken the alliance. But Moscow likely did not anticipate that it would make progress toward its goal without needing to commit time and resources to it. Nor could Russia have fathomed that progress toward that goal would come from within NATO, with the major ally, the United States, forcing the alliance to a crisis point.
The Hidden Nondelegation Issue Raised by Trump v. Slaughter
Michael R. Dreeben argues that the Supreme Court’s potential overturning of administrative agency independence could reinvigorate the nondelegation doctrine to limit executive regulatory power.
Justice Scalia once wrote that the Constitution envisions that “the basic policy decisions governing society are to be made by the Legislature.” Finding doctrinal ways to reinforce legislative primacy is no easy matter, particularly with unitary executive theory on the rise. But the serious threat to democracy that comes from unchecked power in the hands of the president demands reconsideration of doctrines that will restore the separation of powers to its central constitutional role in preserving liberty. The challenge for contemporary constitutional theory is to find a viable doctrine that could limit that power. A decision overruling Humphrey’s Executor will only increase the stakes of that quest.
Questions Remain About Leadership Failures in the Aftermath of Oct. 7
Barak Ben-Zur highlights the unresolved questions following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel regarding the Israeli prime minister’s role in the intelligence community and structural weaknesses in the division of responsibility between Israel’s intelligence agencies.
Ultimately, the Oct. 7 failure raises a fundamental question: Can a democratic intelligence system function effectively when the leader who holds the greatest authority over it operates without structured oversight?
The gap between formal responsibility and practical engagement—between authority and accountability—lies at the heart of the failure. Until this gap is addressed through institutional reform, clearer division of responsibilities, and stronger mechanisms, the vulnerabilities exposed on Oct. 7 will remain unresolved.
Google’s Cyber Disruption Unit Kicks Its First Goal
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren explores Google’s cyber disruption unit’s successful disruption of the world’s largest residential proxy network, SpaceX’s prevention of Russian forces from using Starlink to control drones in Ukrainian territory, and more.
The IPIDEA disruption appears to be one of the first operations of Google’s new cyber disruption unit we wrote about late last year. It is great to see this unit kicking its first goal. Governments should encourage the private sector to take more of these actions.
The question is, what is the quickest, easiest way to make that happen?
Senior Government Lawyers Are Shirking Ethics Rules With Impunity
Jamie Conrad analyzes several high-profile cases involving senior Trump administration lawyers evading state ethics oversight in the courts. Conrad warns that exempting government lawyers from discipline erodes the rule of law and weakens democratic governance.
But the current administration and its allies have been aggressively pushing against established norms in legal ethics as in other fields—and state supreme courts have largely been acquiescing. The net result is that federal government lawyers are becoming insulated from investigation and discipline regarding their compliance with rules of professional conduct. As a result, they are increasingly free to ignore those rules.
Risks to NATO Food Security in the Age of Hybrid Threats
Erin Sikorsky and Siena Cicarelli examine how the North American Treaty Organization’s (NATO) food systems have become increasingly reliant on digital and biological systems that make agriculture a growing target of coercive cyber threats.
The digital transformation of agriculture has been rapid and uneven. From automated feeding systems and precision agriculture to artificial intelligence-driven yield optimization and real-time logistics data, new technologies promise greater resilience and profitability for farmers across both the Global North and South. Yet as NATO has warned repeatedly in other critical infrastructure sectors, increased connectivity without adequate security creates new vulnerabilities. Agrifood supply chains are no exception.
How Israel’s War in Gaza (Partially) Rehabilitated Counterinsurgency Theory
In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Raphael S. Cohen considers how examining Israel’s tactics in the war against Hamas could provide new insights into counterinsurgency theory.
Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza has prompted another reevaluation of counterinsurgency. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, the Israeli security establishment never embraced the population-centric counterinsurgency model. Indeed, some Israeli analysts were openly disdainful of it, partly because they believed that trying to win hearts and minds among the Palestinian population was impossible. Oct. 7 only reinforced this long-standing belief. Polls taken a couple months after the terrorist attack showed that more than seven in 10 Palestinians surveyed supported the Hamas attack. And so Israel tried a different, far more kinetic, method in Gaza. As the war progressed, Israel learned that there may have been some merit to these ideas and that alternative approaches have their own shortcomings.
Podcasts
On Wednesday’s Lawfare Daily, Michael Feinberg sits down with Matthew Guariglia and Brian Hochman to discuss their new book, “The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State.”
On Thursday’s Lawfare Daily, Natalie Orpett sits down with Scott R. Anderson to discuss the U.S.’s plan to take possession of Venezuelan oil, sell it on the world market, and hold the revenue from those sales in Qatari accounts.
On Rational Security, Molly Roberts, Michael Feinberg, and Troy Edwards join Anderson to discuss the week’s national security news, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s search of an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, the leaked ICE memos that seemingly circumvent Fourth Amendment protections, and the search of a Washington Post reporter’s home.
On Friday’s Lawfare Daily, Ariane Tabatabai sits down with Nate Swanson and Iria Puyosa to discuss new information about the Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on protestors after Iran’s weeks-long internet shutdown.
Videos
On Lawfare Live, Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, Eric Columbus, and Molly Roberts join Natalie Orpett to discuss litigation updates regarding the Department of Government Efficiency, the oral argument on the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy at the 5th Circuit, and more.
Announcements
You can now play the latest edition of Lawfare’s national security crossword puzzle. There is a special bonus question, with a lottery drawing of the correct responders, and one lucky submitter will win some Lawfare swag!
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the seal, seen here saying what we’re all thinking:
In honor of today’s Beast, speak up!
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is not the shopping cart, which is ineligible to be today’s Beast on account of being made of plastic. Nevertheless, this shopping cart is a Beast of distinction and deserves recognition.
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