Thousands of North Korean troops are now in Russia, preparing to help Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine. The newly arrived soldiers reportedly come from the Special Operations Force—the most capable part of North Korea’s army—and could be deployed in Russia’s Kursk region, in an effort to take back territory that Ukraine seized in an offensive this past summer. But Western military observers can only guess at how well equipped they are or how well trained they’ll be relative to battle-hardened Ukrainian forces.

What we do know is this: Putin saw an opportunity to improve Russia’s position in the war that he started, and he took it—apparently with little regard to what the West might think.

Counting on the United States to do nothing appears to have been a good bet. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged what Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence had been saying for some time: that Kim Jong Un’s hermit state had joined forces with Russia. When pressed by reporters about what North Koreans’ role might be, Austin responded, “If they’re co-belligerents—[if] their intention is to participate in this war on Russia’s behalf—that is a very, very serious issue.” He is trying to sound tough, but his comment means nothing.

Since the beginning of the current war, in February 2022, the Biden administration has dithered again and again. Should Ukraine be offered high-tech American weaponry, such as HIMARS rocket equipment, Abrams tanks, ATACMS missiles, F-16 fighters, and even long-range JASSM missiles? (In most of these cases, the U.S. relented and provided the requested equipment, but Ukraine missed valuable opportunities to set back Russia’s war machine.) Would the U.S. allow Ukraine to use Western weaponry to attack Russian-occupied Crimea, the Russian-built Kerch Bridge, or military assets being used to attack Ukraine from just across the border in Russia? Could Ukraine attack military targets deeper in Russia? The U.S. is Ukraine’s most important ally—but it has subjected Kyiv to an endless process in which vital aid has been delayed or denied because the U.S. fears what Putin might think of each step.

[Anne Applebaum: The only way the Ukraine War can end]

I don’t mean to sound flippant, but the dynamic reminds me of a classic Gary Larson cartoon that shows, in a split screen, a man and a woman lying awake at night in different homes. He is agonizing about what she thinks about him, whether he should call her, whether she even knows he exists. She is thinking simply, “You know, I think I really like vanilla.” The caption reads, “Same planet, different worlds.” Like the man in the cartoon, the U.S. is full of self-doubt and wrestles endlessly with how Russia might feel. The Biden administration has withheld weapons systems at precisely the moments when they would be most useful, thereby allowing Russia to turn this war into a long-term attritional conflict that it did not need to be.

Putin’s thinking about how to conduct the war isn’t complex at all. He regularly and swiftly escalates whenever he believes that doing so will afford him a strategic advantage. He has bombed Ukrainian hospitals and power supplies, plotted sabotage attacks on military facilities in Europe, hit up Iran for large numbers of drones and missiles, and bargained with North Korea for millions and millions of shells—all to help him in his quest for military success.

A major factor in American vacillation is the Biden administration’s fear that if the West helps Ukraine too much, Putin will escalate by using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. But Putin has shown many times that his nuclear threats are hollow. Following through on them would isolate him from his most important ally—China has repeatedly signaled its opposition to the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict—and would not necessarily provide a clear military benefit that would help Russia defeat the Ukrainian army.

He will, however, use any other means to win the war. And the United States, apparently, will keep overthinking—and finding excuses to do nothing. A few weeks ago, Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence started reporting that North Korean forces were getting involved on Russia’s side. Downplaying the importance of Pyongyang’s involvement, American military and intelligence officials initially suggested to The New York Times that the regime had sent engineers to build and operate North Korean military equipment in Russian hands. Subsequently, a video surfaced that seemed to show North Korean troops in Russia being given Russian military equipment. Earlier this week, the British government asserted that North Korean combat troops were on their way to Russia.

Even when the U.S. government finally acknowledged what was happening, its words showed indecision. “What exactly they’re doing will have to be seen,” Austin said.

[Eliot A. Cohen and Phillips Payson O’Brien: How ]defense experts got Ukraine wrong

That reaction will not deter Putin, who understands that he is in a war, not a negotiation. He appears to doubt the steadfastness of Ukraine’s supporters—and he may be proved right, particularly if U.S. voters return Donald Trump, a Putin admirer, to the White House. The Russian dictator seems intent on bleeding Ukraine to death on the battlefield. Toward that goal, he has tolerated more than 600,000 casualties among his own soldiers, the U.S. estimates. The Russian military under his command has committed innumerable war crimes—against Ukrainians and even its own troops—in pursuit of an advantage. After all this, if Putin believes that using troops from North Korea, a global outcast, will give him an edge, he won’t hesitate to employ them.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, its most important partner isn’t thinking as clearly. We still don’t know, almost three years into the conflict, whether the U.S. wants Ukraine to win or is more concerned that Russia does not collapse. Just a few weeks ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky presented Washington with a considered plan for victory, which involved using longer-range American weaponry to conduct strikes against Russian targets—much as Russia regularly uses Iranian weapons to hit Ukrainian targets.

The Biden administration’s response has been to run out the clock and pass the issue off to its successor. Its excuses have become self-fulfilling: The U.S. has had countless opportunities to step up and help Ukraine promptly, and in every instance, it has prevaricated and wasted time. At some point, Americans should realize that Putin isn’t wondering what the U.S. thinks about him; he is trying relentlessly to win his war. The U.S. should respond to North Korea’s involvement by doing the one thing it always should have done: give Ukraine the means to defeat the Russian invasion.

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In March 2023, when Mark Milley was six months away from retirement as a four-star general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he met Bob Woodward at a reception and said, “We gotta talk.”

Milley went on to describe the grave degree to which former President Donald Trump, under whom Milley had served, was a danger to the nation. Woodward recounts the episode with Milley—who almost certainly believed that he was speaking to Woodward off the record—in his new book, War:

“We have got to stop him!” Milley said. “You have got to stop him!” By “you” he meant the press broadly. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” His eyes darted around the room filled with 200 guests of the Cohen Group, a global business consulting firm headed by former defense secretary William Cohen. Cohen and former defense secretary James Mattis spoke at the reception.

“A fascist to the core!” Milley repeated to me.

I will never forget the intensity of his worry.

For readers of The Atlantic, this will sound familiar: Milley’s warning about Trump as well as the steps Milley took to defend the constitutional order during Trump’s presidency were the subject of a cover story last year by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. As Goldberg put it in that story: “The difficulty of the task before Milley was captured most succinctly by Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster,” who served as the second of Trump’s four national security advisers. “As chairman,” McMaster said to Goldberg, “you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?”

Milley knows well the risks of criticizing Trump. The former president has reportedly expressed a desire to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who have criticized him, and he has even suggested that Milley should be executed. Since Milley retired, Woodward noted, the combat veteran who served three tours in Afghanistan has endured “a nonstop barrage of death threats,” which led him to install bulletproof glass and blast-proof curtains in his home.

I long resisted the use of the word fascist to describe Trump. But almost a year ago, I came to agree with Milley that Trump is through-and-through a fascist. He is not only unhinged in his narcissistic self-obsessions, a problem which itself renders him unfit for office; he is also an aspiring dictator who demands that all political life centers on him. He identifies his fellow Americans as “enemies” because they are of a different race, national origin, or political view. And he has threatened to use the powerful machinery of the state and its military forces to inflict brutality on those fellow citizens.

Of course, it’s one thing to hear such concerns from angry members of the so-called Resistance on social media, from liberal talk-show hosts, or even, say, from curmudgeonly retired political-science professors who write for magazines. It’s another to hear them from a man who once held the nation’s top military office.

Some observers question whether Milley should have said anything at all. I understand those reservations: I taught military officers for decades at the Naval War College, and I am familiar with the tradition—handed down from America’s first commander in chief, George Washington—of the military’s avoidance of entanglement in civilian politics. I, too, am uncomfortable that, while still on active duty, Milley spoke to Woodward about a presidential candidate. He could have waited a few months, until his retirement; he could even have resigned his commission early in order to be able to speak freely.

My own objectivity on the issue of Milley speaking with Woodward is strained by my strong feelings about Trump as an existential danger to the nation, so I checked in with a friend and widely respected scholar of American civil-military relations, Kori Schake, a senior fellow and the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“It’s a legitimately difficult call,” she wrote to me. She noted that resigning and then going public is always an option. She admitted, however, that for a general to throw his stars on the desk might be an honorable exit, but it’s not much use to the people remaining in uniform who must continue to serve the country and the commander in chief, and in general she sees the idea of simply quitting and walking out to be unhelpful.

So when should a general—who’s seen things in the White House that terrify him—raise the alarm if he believes that a president is planning to attack the very Constitution that all federal servants are sworn to protect? Schake thinks that Milley overestimated his importance and was out of his lane as a military officer: “The country didn’t need General Milley to alert them to the danger of Trump, that was evident if people wanted to know, and plenty of civilian officials—including General Milley’s boss, [Mark Esper], the Secretary of Defense—had already been sharing their concern.”

Schake is one of the smartest people I know on this subject, and so I am cautious in my dissent, especially because other scholars of civil-military affairs seem largely to agree with her. And like Schake, I am a traditionalist about American civil-military relations: Trump, as I wrote during his presidency, routinely attacked the military and saw its leaders as his opponents, but that should not tempt anyone in uniform to match his egregious violations of our civil-military norms and traditions.

A comparable situation occurred during the final days of President Richard Nixon’s time in office: Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger told the Joint Chiefs chair at the time, General George Brown, that any “unusual orders” from the president should be cleared through him. (The Constitution, of course, does not have a special provision allowing Cabinet officers to subvert the chain of command at will if they think the president is having a bad day.) Schlesinger’s actions arose from concern about Nixon’s mental state; four years earlier, Admiral Thomas Moorer, one of Milley’s predecessors as Joint Chiefs chair, was so worried about Nixon’s policies that he actually oversaw some internal spying on National Security Council proceedings.

And yet I understand Milley’s alarm and frustration. He was not grousing about a policy disagreement or trying to paper over a temporary crisis regarding the president’s capacity. He was concerned that a former American president could return to office and continue his efforts to destroy the constitutional order of the United States. This was no political pose against a disliked candidate: For Milley and others, especially in the national-security arena, who saw the danger from inside the White House, Trump’s continuing threat to democracy and national stability is not notional.

I also am somewhat heartened that a four-star general, when faced with what he sees as a dire peril to the nation, believes that the sunlight of a free press is the best option. But, more important, are people now listening to what Milley had to say? The revelations about his views seem to have been overwhelmed by yet more of Trump’s gobsmacking antics. As I was writing today’s Daily, news broke that Trump had added Nancy Pelosi and her family to his enemies list. (Paul Pelosi has already suffered a hammer attack from a deranged man stoked by conspiracy theories, a ghastly incident that some Trump supporters have used as a source for jokes; Trump himself has referenced it mockingly.)

All of this raises the question, once again, of what it will take, what will be enough, to rouse the last undecided or less engaged American voters and bring them to the ballot box to defend their own freedoms. Milley and other senior military officers are in a bind when it comes to talking about a former president, but telling the truth about Trump is a duty and a service to the nation.

Related:

How Mark Milley held the line Trump floats the idea of executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The man who’s sure that Harris will win A Trump loyalist on the brink Shoplifters gone wild

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier aired tonight at 6 p.m. ET. Italy passed a law that criminalizes seeking surrogates abroad, including in countries where surrogacy is legal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented the country’s Parliament with a “Victory Plan,” which aims to end the Ukrainian-Russian war by next year and calls for a NATO invitation for Ukraine.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Found Image Holdings / Corbis / Getty.

The Sunshine Staters Aren’t Going Anywhere

By Diane Roberts

Floridians regularly observe that Florida is trying to kill us. Venomous water snakes lie in wait for heedless kayakers paddling down the wrong slough. More people die of lightning strikes in Florida than in any other state. I-4, from Tampa to Daytona Beach, is the deadliest highway in the country. Mosquitoes the size of tire irons carry several sorts of fever and encephalitis, and the guacamole-colored algae infesting our waters can cause severe respiratory distress and liver disease. Despite claims of perpetual sunshine, the weather in Florida is often horrendous: 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 95 percent humidity.

Then there are the storms.

Read the full article.

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On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small, in the “Dear Therapist” newsletter. This month, she is inviting readers to submit questions related to Thanksgiving.

To be featured, email dear.therapist@theatlantic.com by Sunday, October 20.

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Since last October 7, I have averted my eyes from social media at many moments, and not for the obvious reasons—not because a virtual yelling match had reached a painfully high pitch or become a crude display of mental entrenchment. That would be par for the course when it comes to Israel and Palestine. I would turn away, quickly switching tabs, when I was suddenly confronted with a clip from Gaza of a father covered in dust crawling over mounds of rubble and calling out for his buried children, or the sight of a mother kneeling and screaming over a row of tiny, white-shrouded bodies.

The emotional intensity of these videos was overwhelming. The clips never told me anything about these Gazans. They only plunged me for a few excruciating seconds into what was surely the most awful moment of these human beings’ lives. The humanity—the fear, the grief, the physical pain—was so raw and uncut that, in my recognition of it, I recoiled.

The year since Hamas’s brutal massacre and the carnage wrought by Israel’s response has reduced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its most elemental feature: a demand for recognition. What has been revealed in the aftermath is the desperation of this need. When people put up posters with the faces of Israeli grandparents and babies kidnapped to Gaza, that was a plea for recognition; when others tore them down, that was a denial of that recognition. When my otherwise thoughtful young Israeli relative told me, casually, that she doesn’t feel bad about the deaths of Palestinians, because “they are all guilty, all of them,” that was also a denial of recognition. The horrid debates about whether rape occurred on October 7 were an argument over recognition. There were pleas to be seen and then the purposeful, often malicious refusals to see. And I found this interplay—the desire and the withholding—to be one of the most devastating aspects of this awful year.

The grandfather of the Israeli soldier Jordan Bensimon cries over his casket during his funeral on July 22, 2014, in Ashkelon, Israel. (Andrew Burton / Getty)

In Isabella Hammad’s new book, Recognizing the Stranger, which consists mostly of a lecture she gave at Columbia University, the novelist explores what it has meant for the Palestinian people to be endlessly seeking this acknowledgment of their humanity. Hammad recounts a story she heard while visiting a kibbutz. She encountered a skittish young soldier named Daniel—he said he was “a ‘little’ colonel”—who was hiding out after having deserted the Israeli army. He told her that, while guarding the Gaza border, he’d spotted a man, completely naked, walking toward him. The man was holding a photograph of a child. Daniel’s instruction was to shoot him in the legs, but he could not do it. Instead, Daniel dropped his weapon and ran.

Hammad is both heartened and distressed by this story. It does show how a person can suddenly become visible to another, can reveal themselves and thereby cause minds and behavior to change. But she is troubled by what has to happen to bring this about: “It was, after all, on the little colonel’s horizon that that man in Gaza appeared, walking toward him without his clothes on, literally risking his life to undertake this desperate performance of his humanity, saying, look at me naked, I am a human being, holding up a photograph of a child, who we easily imagine was his own child, killed by Israeli missile fire.”

Look at me naked. This performance of humanity, mostly for an outside, adjudicating world, is not just a Palestinian burden—though Hammad presents it as such. Israelis, too, have been desperate to be seen, not as occupiers or settlers, but as people just hoping to live their lives.

Along with Hammad’s book, a few others published around the anniversary of October 7 offer first drafts of the history of that day—drafts that take as their starting point the stories of individuals. These are people who woke up one Saturday morning and were soon dodging bullets and grenades, cradling the dead bodies of their husbands and daughters, kneeling before AK-47s and begging to be spared.

[Michael A. Cohen: The rape denialists]

One Day in October, by Yair Agmon and Oriya Mevorach, is an oral history in the style of the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich. The authors gathered 40 stories, told from the perspective of the survivors about their own experience or that of a killed loved one. The narratives all seem to follow a three-act structure: We meet someone who is wonderfully idiosyncratic; we follow them through the horrors of that day; we learn something of their bravery and decency.

This amounts at times to a performance of humanity as desperate as that of the man in Hammad’s story. The victims are idealized, elevated even in their ordinariness, remembered as the most courageous, the kindest, the most beautiful.

Netta Epstein was a 22-year-old living in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7. His story is told in One Day in October by his fiancée, Irene Shavit, who describes Epstein as “a real goofball, one of the funniest guys you ever met.” They had planned to go to Epstein’s grandmother’s for breakfast on October 7 because she was making the Yemenite pastry jahnun. Like most of the people on the kibbutzim bordering Gaza, Epstein and Shavit’s drama played out in their safe room, as they struggled to keep the Hamas terrorists out—“We heard them opening the safe room and screaming ‘Where are you! Come out!’ in this heavily accented Hebrew. Then they started throwing grenades at us.” The couple managed to survive two grenades, but the third one rolled too close to them, and Epstein instinctively threw himself on top of it, dying instantly and saving his fiancée. Shavit then lay there for hours, hiding under a bed, with Epstein’s body blocking her from the view of other terrorists who entered the room. She described her thoughts as she waited: “I was there for hours facing Netta, watching him lying there with his gorgeous body, with his sculpted buns—I always teased him that he spent far more time toning his behind than I ever did … What an amazing body; he’s really the most gorgeous guy in the world.”

An ideology that recognizes only the pain of Palestinians does not know what to do with this sort of story—painfully sweet in its humanness. There is no room for it. When all one sees is colonized and colonizers, certain experiences register and others do not. The colonized deserve the much-denied recognition of their humanity, especially as they are killed by the tens of thousands. The colonizer, by virtue of his position, is responsible for any terror that might be visited upon him; his suffering, his humanity, can be ignored. The flip side of this thinking can also, of course, be found in Israel, where any loss of an innocent Jewish life is mourned but the deaths of thousands of Palestinian women and children can be dismissed as collateral damage. This parsimoniousness, to characterize it generously, has only heightened the competition for acknowledgment—for proving that “we” are more human than “them.”

I give the Haaretz journalist Lee Yaron a lot of credit for cutting through this sad rivalry. In her book, 10/7, which also catalogs the events of the day through those who became victims, she makes a choice not to depict Palestinians. Their history is not hers to tell, she says—“I wait with all humility to read the books of my Palestinian colleagues, which will surely tell the stories of the innocents of Gaza, who suffered and died from my country’s reaction to their leadership’s violence.” What she does is apply reportorial rigor to her own side. Her subjects are just people on the day that will be their last; this is not hagiography. The most relevant thing about them is the fact of their murder. But they are also not anonymous. They each represent one flicker of humanity in this panoramic account. In an afterword, the novelist Joshua Cohen, Yaron’s husband, even compares this work to the memorial books created after the Holocaust “to reclaim the dead, at least some of them, from numeric anonymity and political exploitation.”

Yaron’s compendium is relentlessly depressing because of the senselessness and brutality, the death after death. But she manages to escape the need to prove anyone’s worth. They just are. And who they are also represents a wide swath of Israeli society: the young French Israeli woman who had left her infant with her husband for the weekend so she could relax at the Nova dance festival; the elderly Soviet Jewish retirees about to board a van to take them to a spa day at the Dead Sea; a pregnant Bedouin woman on her way to the hospital to give birth; the Nepalese and Thai guest workers hiding behind stacked bags of rice. In these stories, the violence of that day is a rupture in reality, indiscriminate and unforgiving.

Humanity reveals itself in the smallest details; it becomes easier to forget the fight to claim the most empathy when the focus is on those qualities of an existence that feel totally familiar and otherwise unremarkable. The work of the Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha is filled with such details. His poems have appeared in many literary publications, including The Atlantic, over the past year, which made his story of being detained by the Israeli army as he and his family were trying to leave Gaza, published in The New Yorker in December, particularly disturbing. Abu Toha’s new book, Forest of Noise, gathers together that recent writing. The best of it describes the everyday experience of a waking nightmare—much of it in Gaza but some from the distance of Egypt, where he is living now. “Under the Rubble” includes some simple exchanges with his young son:

My son asks me whether,
when we return to Gaza,
I could get him a puppy.
I say, “I promise, if we can find any.”

I ask my son if he wishes to become
a pilot when he grows up.
He says he won’t wish
to drop bombs on people and houses.

The more Abu Toha roots his poems in his reality, in those details, the more drawn I am to them. If this was his own performance of humanity, then it was the subtlest of dances, something like butoh, in which the dancer seems to move a millimeter every second, demanding your full concentration to appreciate how slowly a muscle can extend itself in space. In “What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike,” Abu Toha offers nothing more than a list of instructions: “Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear.” It goes on like this, the banal suddenly profound, the abnormal proximity to death suddenly normal.

[Amor Tobin: How my father saved my life on October 7]

Children grieve during the funeral on November 11, 2023, of the Faojo family, killed in an Israeli bombing of Rafah in Gaza. (Said Khatib / AFP / Getty)

This particular poem reminded me of passages from another October 7 book, Amir Tibon’s The Gates of Gaza, an adapted excerpt of which appeared recently in this magazine. Tibon, also a Haaretz reporter, spent the day trapped with his wife and two young daughters in the safe room of their house in Kibbutz Nahal Oz while their neighbors were shot and their houses set on fire. Tibon alternates between the story of the day—while he was hiding, his father, a retired general in his 60s, made his way to the kibbutz to try to save his son and his family—and the history of the community, which sits about a mile from the border with Gaza.

But despite the genuinely heroic story Tibon describes of his father surviving ambushes and gunfights to reach them, my focus kept shifting to the drama of the little girls—Galia, 3 and a half, and Carmel, almost 2—sitting in the darkness of the safe room for 10 hours, the sound of gunfire outside, without food or water or access to a bathroom, and needing to stay absolutely quiet. How did Tibon and his wife keep them busy? Galia wanted an apple; Carmel requested ice cream. At one point after six hours, Carmel toddled around the room in the dark, accidently stepped on something, and started to cry. Tibon and his wife panicked, held her close, and she calmed down, fell asleep; then the parents lost it for the first time that day. “Up until that point, we had both taken pains to maintain our composure, knowing that any signs of distress from either one of us would make the girls even more scared than they already were,” Tibon writes. “But now, all of our carefully restrained emotions came pouring out: the fear, the anger, the remorse.”

I mention these fathers and their children not by way of arriving at some facile point about moral equivalence. I’m not trying to collapse the experiences of people on either side of the Gaza border. They are enormously different. But if you’re searching for humanity, you might find it best here in the granularity of experience and emotion, in the desire for safety, in the agony of trying to protect children from harm.

In her survey of all the ways Palestinians try to have their humanity recognized, Hammad landed on one that felt the least fraught, the least desperate, to her: to forget that anyone is watching or making a wager or rooting from the outside, to forget the need to show the scars, and amputated limbs, and blood. “I like this idea of breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves,” Hammad writes. I like this too, and I felt most moved, while reading the works of Israelis and Palestinians after this year of death, when they stopped performing for anyone else.

It is hard to ever imagine an end to the suffering competition; both groups are too locked into the idea that the recognition they each seek is a scarce commodity, that if one side claims it, the other side loses. But they’re wrong. And this heartbreaking mistake, more than anything else, is what stands in the way of their suffering’s end.

In an underground parking lot beneath an ordinary building in an ordinary Ukrainian city, dozens of what appear to be small, windowless fishing boats are lined up in rows. The noise of machinery echoes from a separate room, where men are working with metal and wires. They didn’t look up when I walked in one recent morning, and no wonder: This is a sea-drone factory, these are among the best engineers in Ukraine, and they are busy producing the unmanned vessels that have altered the trajectory of the war. Packed with explosives and guided by the world’s most sophisticated remote-navigation technology, these new weapons might even change the way that all naval wars are fought in the future.

Certainly, the sea drones are evolving very quickly. A year ago, I visited the small workshop that was then producing the first Ukrainian models. One of the chief engineers described what was at the time the drones’ first major success: a strike that took out a Russian frigate, damaged a submarine, and hit some other boats as well.

Since then, the sea drones, sometimes alone and sometimes in combined attacks with flying drones or missiles, have sunk or damaged more than two dozen warships. This is possibly the most successful example of asymmetric warfare in history. The Ukrainian drones cost perhaps $220,000 apiece; many of the Russian ships are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The military impact is enormous. To avoid Ukrainian strikes, Russian ships have mostly left their former headquarters, in the occupied Crimean port of Sevastopol, and moved farther east. They no longer patrol the Ukrainian coast. They can’t stop Ukrainian cargo ships from carrying grain and other goods to world markets, and Ukrainian trade is returning to prewar levels. This can’t be said often enough: Ukraine, a country without much of a navy, defeated Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

Nor is Ukraine’s talent for asymmetric warfare confined to water. During a recent trip, I visited another basement, where another team of Ukrainians was working to change the course of the war—and, again, maybe the course of all subsequent wars as well. (I was allowed to tour these operations on the condition that I not identify their locations or the people working at them.) This particular facility had no machines, no engines, and no warheads, just a room lined with screens. The men and women sitting at the screens were dressed like civilians, but in fact they were soldiers, members of a special army unit created to deploy experimental communications technology in combination with experimental drones. Both are being developed by Ukrainians, for Ukraine.

[Read: The ‘Gray Zone’ comes to Russia]

This particular team, with links to many parts of the front lines, has been part of both offensive and defensive operations, and even medical evacuations. According to one of the commanders, this unit alone has conducted 2,400 combat missions and destroyed more than 1,000 targets, including tanks, armored personnel vehicles, trucks, and electronic-warfare systems since its creation several months ago. Like the sea-drone factory, the team in the basement is operating on a completely different scale from the frontline drone units whose work I also encountered last year, on several trips around Ukraine. In 2023, I met small groups of men building drones in garages, using what looked like sticks and glue. By contrast, this new unit is able to see images of most of the front line all at once, revise tools and tactics as new situations develop, and even design new drones to fit the army’s changing needs.

More important, another commander told me, the team works “at the horizontal level,” meaning that members coordinate directly with other groups on the ground rather than operating via the army’s chain of command: “Three years of experience tells us that, 100 percent, we will be much more efficient when we are doing it on our own—coordinating with other guys that have assets, motivation, understanding of the processes.” Horizontal is a word that describes many successful Ukrainian projects, both military and civilian. Also, grassroots. In other words, Ukrainians do better when they organize themselves; they do worse when they try to move in lockstep under a single leader. Some argue that this makes them more resilient. Or, as another member of the team put it, Russia will never be able to destroy Ukraine’s decision-making center, “because the center doesn’t make all the decisions.”

Members of Ukraine’s 22nd Mechanized Brigade assemble a Poseidon reconnaissance drone in Sumy province, near the Russian border, in August. (Roman Pilipey / AFP / Getty)

I recognize that this account of the war effort differs dramatically from other, grimmer stories now coming out of Ukraine. In recent weeks, Russian glide bombs and artillery have slowly begun to destroy the city of Pokrovsk, a logistical hub that has been part of Ukraine’s defensive line in Donetsk for a decade. Regular waves of Russian air strikes continue to hit Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure. The repeated attacks on civilians are not an accident; they are a tactic. Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to deprive Ukrainians of heat and light, to demoralize the people as well as the government, and perhaps to provoke a new refugee exodus that will disrupt European politics.

Russia remains the larger and richer country. The Kremlin has more ammunition, more tanks, and a greater willingness to dispose of its citizens. The Russian president is willing to tolerate high human losses, as well as equipment losses, of a kind that almost no other nation could accept. And yet, the Ukrainians still believe they can win—if only their American and European allies will let them.

Two and a half years into the conflict, the idea that we haven’t let Ukraine win may sound strange. Since the beginning of the war, after all, we have been supporting Ukraine with weapons and other aid. Recently, President Joe Biden reiterated his support for Ukraine at the United Nations. “The good news is that Putin’s war has failed in his core aim,” he said. But, he added, “the world now has another choice to make: Will we sustain our support to help Ukraine win this war and preserve its freedom, or walk away and let a nation be destroyed? We cannot grow weary. We cannot look away.” Hoping to rally more Americans to his side, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spent much of last week in the United States. He visited an ammunition factory in Pennsylvania. He met with former President Donald Trump, and with Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Zelensky also presented a victory plan that asked, among other things, for Ukraine to have the right to use American and European long-range missiles to strike military targets deep inside Russia. This kind of request is now familiar. In each stage of the war, the Ukrainians and their allies have waged public campaigns to get new weapons—tanks, F-16s, long-range missiles—that they need to maintain a technological edge. Each time, these requests were eventually granted, although sometimes too late to make a difference.

Each time, officials in the U.S., Germany, and other Western powers argued that this or that weapon risked crossing some kind of red line. The same argument is being made once again, and it sounds hollow. Because at this point, the red lines are entirely in our heads; every one of them has been breached. Using drones, Ukraine already hits targets deep inside Russia, including oil refineries, oil and gas export facilities, even air bases. In the past few weeks, Ukraine’s long-range drones have hit at least three large ammunition depots, one of which was said to have just received a large consignment from North Korea; when attacked, the depot exploded dramatically, producing an eerie mushroom cloud. In a development that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the war, Ukraine has, since early August, even occupied a chunk of Russian territory. Ukrainian troops invaded Kursk province, took control of several towns and villages, set up defenses, repelled Russian troops, and have yet to leave.

But in truth, the imaginary red lines, the slow provision of weapons, and the rules about what can and can’t be hit are not the real problem. On its own, a White House decision to allow the Ukrainians to strike targets in Russia with American or even European missiles will not change the course of the war. The deeper limitation is our lack of imagination. Since this war began, we haven’t been able to imagine that the Ukrainians might defeat Russia, and so we haven’t tried to help those who are trying to do exactly that. We aren’t identifying, funding, and empowering the young Ukrainian engineers who are inventing new forms of asymmetric warfare. With a few exceptions, Ukrainians tell me, many allied armies aren’t in regular contact with the people carrying out cutting-edge military experiments in Ukraine. Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries, says that the Ukrainians have spare capacity in their own drone factories, and could produce more themselves if they just had the money. Meanwhile, $300 billion worth of frozen Russian reserves are still sitting in European clearinghouses, untouched, waiting for a political decision to use that money to win the war. Biden is right to tout the success of the coalition of democracies created to aid Ukraine, but why not let that coalition start defending Ukraine against incoming missiles, as friends of Israel have just done in the Middle East? Why isn’t the coalition focused on enforcing targeted sanctions against the Russian defense industry?     

Worse—much worse—is that, instead of focusing on victory, Americans and Europeans continue to dream of a magic “negotiated solution” that remains far away. Many, many people, some in good faith and some in bad faith, continue to call for an exchange of “land for peace.” Last week, Trump attacked Zelensky for supposedly refusing to negotiate, and the ex-president continues to make unfounded promises to end the war “in 24 hours.” But the obstacle to negotiations is not Zelensky. He probably could be induced to trade at least some land for peace, as long as Ukraine received authentic security guarantees—preferably, though not necessarily, in the form of NATO membership—to protect the rest of the country’s territory, and as long as Ukraine could be put on a path to complete integration with Europe. Even a smaller Ukraine would still need to be a viable country, to attract investment and ensure refugees’ return.   

Right now, the actual obstacle is Putin. Indeed, none of these advocates for “peace,” whether they come from the Quincy Institute, the Trump campaign, the Council on Foreign Relations, or even within the U.S. government, can explain how they will persuade Russia to accept such a deal. It is the Russians who have to be persuaded to stop fighting. It is the Russians who do not want to end the war.

Portraits of Russian service members killed during the invasion of Ukraine are projected onto the State Council building in Simferopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea, in April. The letter Z is a symbol of the Russian invasion. (AFP / Getty)

Look, again, at the situation on the ground. Even now, two and a half years into a war that was supposed to be over in a few days, the Kremlin still seeks to gain more territory. Despite the ongoing Ukrainian occupation of Kursk province, the Russian army is still sending thousands of men to die in the battle for Donetsk province. The Russian army also seems unbothered by losing equipment. In the long battle for Vulhedar, a now-empty town in eastern Ukraine with a prewar population of 14,000, the Russians have sacrificed about 1,000 tanks, armored vehicles, and pieces of artillery —nearly 6 percent of all the vehicles destroyed during the entire war.

Russia has not changed its rhetoric either. On state television, pundits still call for the dismemberment and destruction of Ukraine. Putin continues to call for the “denazification of Ukraine,” by which he means the removal of Ukraine’s language, culture, and identity—as well as “demilitarization, and neutral status,” by which he means a Ukraine that has no army and cannot resist conquest. Nor do Russian economic decisions indicate a desire for peace. The Russian president now plans to spend 40 percent of the national budget on arms production, sacrificing living standards, health care, pensions, broader prosperity, and maybe the stability of the economy itself. The state is still paying larger and larger bonuses to anyone willing to sign up to fight. Labor shortages are rampant, both because the army is eating up eligible men and because so many others have left the country to avoid conscription.

Negotiations can begin only when this rhetoric changes, when the defense machine grinds to a halt, when the attempts to conquer yet another village are abandoned. This war will end, in other words, only when the Russians run out of resources—and their resources are not infinite—or when they finally understand that Ukraine’s alliances are real, that Ukraine will not surrender, and that Russia cannot win. Just as the British decided in the early 20th century that Ireland is not British and the French decided in 1962 that Algeria is not France, so must the Russians come to accept that Ukraine is not Russia. At that point, there can be a cease-fire, a discussion of new borders, negotiations about other things—such as the fate of the more than 19,000 Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped and deported by the Russians, an orchestrated act of cruelty.

We have not yet reached that stage. The Russians are still waiting for the U.S. to get tired, to stop defending Ukraine, and maybe to elect Trump so that they can dictate terms and make Ukraine into a colony again. They are hoping that the “Ukraine fatigue” they promote and the false arguments about Ukrainian corruption (“Zelensky’s yachts”) that they pay American influencers to repeat will eventually overwhelm America’s strategic and political self-interest. Which, of course, might be the case.

But if it is, we are in for a nasty surprise. Should Ukraine finally lose this war, the costs—military, economic, political—for the U.S. and its allies will not go down. On the contrary, they are likely to increase, and not only in Europe. Since 2022, the military and defense-industry links among Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China have strengthened. Iran has delivered drones and missiles to Russia. Russia, in turn, may be providing anti-ship missiles to the Houthis, Iranian proxies who could use them against American and European commercial and military ships in the Red Sea. According to a recent Reuters report, the Russians are now constructing a major drone factory in China. The Chinese stand to benefit, that is, from the huge technological gains that the Russians have made, in many cases by imitating the Ukrainians in drone warfare and other systems, even if Americans aren’t paying close attention.

[Read: Confessions of a Russian propagandist ]

A failure to defeat Russia will be felt not just in Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia. It will be felt in Venezuela, where Putin’s aggressive defiance has surely helped inspire his ally Nicolás Maduro to stay in power despite losing an election in a landslide. It will be felt in Africa, where Russian mercenaries now support a series of ugly regimes. And, of course, this failure will be felt by Ukraine’s neighbors. I doubt very much that Germany and France, let alone Poland, are prepared for the consequences of a truly failed Ukraine, for a collapse of the Ukrainian state, for lawlessness or Russian-Mafia rule at the European Union’s eastern doorstep, as well as for the violence and crime that would result.

The means to prevent that kind of international catastrophe are right in front of us, in the form of Ukraine’s drone factories, the underground sea-drone laboratory, the tools now being designed to enable the Ukrainian army to beat a larger opponent—and also in the form of our own industrial capacity. The democratic world remains wealthier and more dynamic than the autocratic world. To stay that way, Ukraine and its Western allies have to persuade Russia to stop fighting. We have to win this war.