NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg says organisation is 'monitoring the situation' as Poland says it has confirmed incident.

The last Nordic country to join the alliance is still waiting for Turkey and Hungary to clear its path.

Over the past year, the writers on The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health desk have learned about the dynamics of the cosmos and tiny microbes, the nature of the human brain and artificial intelligence. We’ve also covered some of the most pressing issues facing the planet: the climate crisis, infectious-disease outbreaks, a new wave of transformative weight-loss drugs. Along the way, our reporting has revealed some fascinating, sobering, and unusual facts. We wanted to share some of the most intriguing tidbits we’ve stumbled across, and we hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

Mars has seasons, and in the winter, it snows. Bats are arguably the healthiest mammals on Earth. Mammal milk changes depending on the time of day, a baby’s age and sex, the mom’s diet, and more. The genetic mutation behind “Asian glow” might help protect people against certain pathogens—including tuberculosis. The overwhelming majority of sweaters available on the American mass market are made at least partly of plastic. In 2003, a NASA Investigation Board blamed the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in part on PowerPoint. As much as 36 percent of the world’s annual carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are sequestered, at least temporarily, in fungi. Mice and rats can’t vomit. In the 1930s, the U.S. Army considered distributing daily rations of yerba mate to soldiers. You have two noses, and you can control them separately via your armpits. It’s possible to lactate without ever having been pregnant. But if you are pregnant, your feet might grow roughly half a shoe size and lengthen by about 0.4 inches. Gender-neutral baby names are more popular in conservative states than in liberal ones. By 2051, North America may run out of three-digit area codes. Today’s average NBA athlete is 4 to 7 percent better than the average player from more than 10 years ago. Hawaii’s feral chickens are out of control. When you look at a tattoo, you’re seeing ink shining in the “belly” of an immune cell that has gobbled up the ink and failed to digest it. The technology behind the first rice cookers, sold in 1955, is still widely used today—because it’s perfect. Meanwhile, the corrugated pizza box used by basically every pizzeria has not changed since its invention in 1966, and it does a bad job of maintaining a take-out pizza. A database of nearly 200,000 pirated books is powering many generative-AI models. Americans are suffering from cockroach amnesia. The hippopotamuses released from Pablo Escobar’s personal zoo in Colombia are engineering the local ecosystem. Compostable plastic bags buried in soil for three years can still hold a full load of groceries. Allergy season really is getting worse. Last month, for two consecutive days, the Earth reached global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels for the first time. There are Lord of the Rings–style hobbit-house Airbnbs, an Airbnb in the shape of a spaceship, and an Airbnb inside a freestanding harbor crane. Cat owners in Cyprus are giving leftover COVID drugs to their pets, but not for COVID. The same molecule that makes cat urine smell like cat urine is, in lower concentrations, commonly used in air fresheners and household cleaners. The Sphere, in Las Vegas, can transform its 366-foot-tall exterior into a gargantuan emoji that astronauts can reportedly see from space. Within eight seconds of flushing, a toilet bowl can shoot a plume of aerosols nearly five feet into the air—and straight into your face. Until the 1800s, merchants, lawyers, and aristocrats each wrote in their own distinctive script. The English words flow, mother, fire, and ash come from Ice Age peoples. By hacking a Tesla’s rear heated seats, German researchers inadvertently accessed private user data. Many eye creams are functionally identical to facial moisturizers but are far more expensive. A Dutch man and his family have a perplexing brain condition called “color agnosia”: They can see colors, but they cannot name them. Hurricane Otis confounded extreme-weather warning systems by gaining more than 100 miles per hour of wind speed in 24 hours. Foxes have committed mass murder against flamingos at least three times during the past 30 years. Despite nearly half a century of trying, we don’t have any medication that effectively treats anorexia. There are no established clinical guidelines for diagnosing and treating adult ADHD. Elephant seals sleep only two hours a day, for many months at a time, via a series of super-short naps, taken as they dive deep beneath the ocean’s surface. UPS handles so many packages every year that its workers put their hands on roughly 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. One of Saturn’s moons likely has a habitable ocean. AI avatars led a church service in Germany this summer. There’s a lifeguard shortage in America. It’s been going on for a century. A pill may be easier to swallow if you turn your head as it goes down. During the original run of Seinfeld, the show’s costumers had a hard time sourcing the clothing for Kramer’s wardrobe because his quirky style had become so popular with the general public that they were buying up all of the vintage clothing that made up his look. AI models can analyze the brain scans of somebody listening to a story and then reproduce the gist of every sentence. A new idea to curb emissions takes inspiration from the Cold War: a fossil-fuel-nonproliferation treaty. During a 2018 war game in which the president had been cut off from his nuclear forces, many participants—including former heads of state, foreign ministers, and senior NATO officers—recommended leaving the decision of whether to enter a nuclear exchange to an AI. Decades of research suggest that hypnosis might be an effective treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, at least in the short term. Rest is not necessarily the best treatment for a concussion. People have been living on the Galápagos Islands since the early 1800s. Bird chicks aren’t innately able to recognize their mother’s calls—they learn to do so while in their eggs and can be manipulated to respond to another species’ voice. People are likely spending billions of dollars tipping creators on TikTok Live. Before Tesla and Meta, Palo Alto’s biggest tech giant was a farm that bred racehorses. Reports of pediatric melatonin overdoses have increased by 530 percent over the past decade. iPhone cameras can perform trillions of operations to optimize a single photo. Modern flip phones stink because they’re just made of recycled scraps from the smartphone-manufacturing process. If you think all phones are passé, you can buy a pair of screen eyes from Apple for $3,499. Some people loop playlists in their sleep to help them game the Spotify algorithm and get more impressive Spotify Wrapped results. An index ranking the transparency of flagship AI models from 10 major companies gave every single one a resounding F.

Lemon-lime isn’t a flavor so much as a sensibility that defines soft drinks. The Italian government provides gluten-free-food vouchers for people with celiac disease. Some people taking Ozempic to lose weight are also effortlessly quitting smoking, drinking, and online shopping. Scantron tests, a defining feature of American education, are dying. Fifteen percent of daily Google searches have never been searched before, according to the company. American cars hit more than 1 million large animals and as many as 340 million birds every year. Animals at watering holes in South Africa’s Greater Kruger National Park were twice as likely to flee when they heard a human voice as when they heard lions. Hundreds of craters on the moon never receive direct sunlight. The total surface area of the Antarctic’s sea ice in July was more than four standard deviations smaller than the average for that time of year, shattering records. Oxygen might actually be bad for multicellular evolution. Last year, the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles was on time for just 19 percent of trips, making it the tardiest train in the country. About a third of pregnancies in women 40 and older are unplanned. MSG stays on the tongue long after food is swallowed, resulting in a lingering savory sensation. Podiatrists have seen a spike in plantar-fasciitis cases since the coronavirus pandemic began, partly because so many people who work from home shuffle around barefoot on hard floors. OpenAI’s chief scientist commissioned a wooden effigy intended to represent an AI that does not meet a human’s objectives. He set it on fire at a leadership meeting this year, according to two people familiar with the event. A luxury trip to Antarctica can cost upwards of $65,000. Many football fans punch, shoot, run over, or otherwise destroy their TV when things don’t go well for their team. Checked-bag fees may feel like they’ve been a scourge since the birth of aviation, but they were only introduced in 2008.

Dolphins have their own version of baby talk. Gravity-wise, the Earth doesn’t resemble a blue marble so much as a potato.

Approval clears another hurdle in Sweden's accession process to the bloc in wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The Turkish Parliament’s foreign affairs committee gave its consent to Sweden’s bid to join NATO on Tuesday, drawing the previously non-aligned Nordic country closer to membership in the Western military alliance.

The reaction to the events of October 7 has made the growing radicalization of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—and, in particular, its indulgence of anti-Semitism—more clear than ever. And it has highlighted President Joe Biden’s role in resisting the leftward pull of those progressives, a stand of increasing importance not just for his party, but for the country as a whole.

In the early-morning hours of a Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah, the terrorist group Hamas launched an unprovoked attack, committing the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Civilians were intentionally targeted, and constituted the overwhelming majority of casualties. Israeli families were burned alive while hiding in their homes. People were decapitated. The bodies of babies were riddled with bullets. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking at a Senate hearing, told of a boy, 6, and a girl, 8, and their parents around the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast was cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed. “And then their executioners sat down and had a meal,” Blinken said. “That is what this society is dealing with.”

One survivor of Hamas’s attack on a music festival told PBS’s Nick Schifrin that the terrorists raped girls and then murdered them with knives. And after they did that, “they laughed. They always laughed … I can’t forget how they laughed.”

[Read: Why these progressives stopped helping Biden]

A video posted online showed a young woman, 22-year-old Shani Louk, “facedown in the bed of the truck with four militants, apparently being paraded through Gaza,” The Washington Post reported, as “one holds her hair while another raises a gun in the air and shouts, ‘Allahu akbar!’ A crowd follows the truck cheering. A boy spits in her hair.”

Shani Louk was later declared dead after forensic examiners found a bone fragment from her skull.

All told, the estimated Israeli death toll is nearly 1,200 in a country of less than 10 million; about 240 hostages, including dozens of children and the elderly, were taken. (About 110 have been released in exchange for nearly 250 Palestinian prisoners.)

The actions by Hamas were so vicious and so cruel that they defy human imagination. “The depravity of it is haunting,” an Israeli military official told CBS News of the scene in the Kfar Aza kibbutz. And yet sympathy for Israel began to fade in just a matter of days in some quarters in the U.S. It gave way to anti-Semitic ugliness, most of it found on the American left and yet only a slice of the spreading anti-Semitism we’re seeing across the globe.

We saw anti-Semitism in Philadelphia, where a restaurant, Goldie, was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli (the crowd chanted “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide”); in Queens, where hundreds of high-school students protested against a teacher who is Jewish and whose social-media profile photo showed her holding up an I Stand With Israel sign, forcing her to be moved to another part of the school; in Brooklyn, where a trio of young men beat up three Jewish strangers in separate attacks during a 40-minute “spree of hate crimes”; and in Times Square, where protesters cheered Israeli fatalities, made throat-slitting gestures, and flashed victory signs with their hands, a show of solidarity with Hamas.

Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a speech, “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on October 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land that they were not allowed to walk in.”

“And yes,” he continued, “the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves; and, yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.” (He insists that these remarks have been taken out of context.)

CNN posted a story on anti-Semitic vandalism rattling Jewish communities: “An antisemitic phrase scrawled on a Holocaust survivor’s home in California. A display supporting Israeli hostages kicked over in Minnesota. Palestinian nationalist messaging spray-painted on a non-profit’s building in Rhode Island.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a Senate testimony that anti-Semitism in the U.S. is “a threat that is reaching, in some way, sort of historic levels.” He said that while Jews represent less than 3 percent of the population, they account for about 60 percent of all religious-based hate crimes.

On college campuses, a haven for progressives, anti-Semitic speech has skyrocketed. At Harvard, several student groups issued a statement after the attacks by Hamas saying that Israeli policies are “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” An Israeli Columbia student who confronted a woman ripping down posters of hostages was assaulted. A Cornell University student was charged with making threats against Jewish students on the campus.

A display outside the University of Minnesota’s Jewish student center showing the faces of several Israelis taken hostage by Hamas was reportedly kicked over and damaged. At Cooper Union in New York, pro-Palestinian protesters pounded on windows as Jewish students took shelter in a locked library. During a demonstration of solidarity for hostages held by Hamas, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst student was accused of punching a Jewish student holding an Israeli flag and then spitting on it. And at George Washington University, pro-Palestinian demonstrators projected slogans on to the side of a library, including Glory to our martyrs and Free Palestine from the river to the sea, a call for eliminating the Jewish state. Similar things have happened at other universities.

John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that rising anti-Semitism on college campuses is a “deep concern.”

Two weeks ago, in a moment that reverberated well beyond the academic world, the presidents of three of the most prestigious universities in America—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—were asked during a congressional hearing whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates these school’s rules on bullying and harassment. The answers by the presidents were lawyerly and evasive. One said it depended on “context.”

When University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill was pressed, she responded, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”

“‘Conduct’ meaning committing the act of genocide?” Republican Representative Elise Stefanik asked. “The speech is not harassment? This is unacceptable.” The comments by these three college presidents caused a firestorm of criticism that subsequent clarifications and apologies failed to dispel.

Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told Fox News that all three presidents should leave their posts. “You cannot call for the genocide of Jews, the genocide of any group of people, and not say that that’s harassment,” she said. Two days after the hearing, Magill resigned.

Jonathan Haidt, an NYU professor who has written strongly in favor of free speech on campus, says that he was most troubled by the double standard of the college presidents:

“What offends me is that since 2015, universities have been so quick to punish ‘microaggressions,’ including statements intended to be kind, if even one person from a favored group took offense,” Haidt wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “The presidents are now saying: ‘Jews are not a favored group, so offending or threatening Jews is not so bad. For Jews, it all depends on context.’ We might call this double standard ‘institutional anti-semitism.’” Yes, we might.

Many liberal Jews who considered themselves part of the progressive movement have felt betrayed by their left-wing allies—including Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Socialists of America—since the October 7 massacre.

In Los Angeles, Rabbi Sharon Brous, whom The New York Times describes as “a well-known progressive activist who regularly criticizes the Israeli government,” told her congregants about the “existential loneliness” she and other Jews have felt since the Hamas attacks.

“The clear message from many people in the world, especially from our world—those who claim to care the most about justice and human dignity—is that these Israeli victims somehow deserved this terrible fate,” she said.

Rabbi Brous’s sentiments are shared by others. Joanna Ware, the executive director of the Jewish Liberation Fund, a philanthropic group created in 2020, put it this way to the Times: “It has been painful to see some people I consider friends or comrades seeming to have a hard time empathizing with Israelis and, by extension, Jews in the United States.” And Daniel Sokatch, the CEO of the New Israel Fund, told the Times that it “felt like betrayal, not of us as allies, but of the values we all stand for.”

Last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, America’s highest-ranking Jewish elected official, delivered a deeply personal, 40-minute speech from the floor of the Senate explaining and condemning the wave of anti-Semitism we have witnessed since the attacks by Hamas. Schumer’s anguished words were primarily aimed at progressives and young people. The rising anti-Semitism, he said, isn’t coming from the far right but from “people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.”

“Not long ago, many of us marched together for Black and brown lives, we stood against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all,” Schumer said. “But apparently, in the eyes of some, that principle does not extend to the Jewish people.”

So how did we get to the point where progressives—those who define themselves as committed to social justice—would find themselves either reluctant to criticize, or in many cases expressing support for, Hamas? Hamas, after all, is a designated terrorist organization with a militant ideology and a charter endorsing genocide against the Jews. It persecutes LGBTQ people, systematically denies rights to women, and denies other basic political and legal rights to Gazans. But that doesn’t seem to bother many progressives.

For them, everything is understood through power differentials and identity politics. Israel is powerful and therefore an oppressor, which by definition makes the Jewish state evil; Palestinians are powerless and oppressed, which by definition makes their cause good. Israel can never be in the right, and Hamas can never be in the wrong.

One example: Knowing that a military response from Israeli was inevitable in the wake of savage attacks, Hamas encouraged Palestinian civilian casualties by using civilians as human shields. Hamas intentionally positions its military assets in civilian areas such as schoolyards and hospitals; it uses civilian infrastructure for its military purposes.

Yet the narrative of the left is that Israel, not Hamas, is guilty of “genocide.” And in their Orwellian world, Israel is itself responsible for the attacks it suffered.

Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, in describing the thinking of what he calls the “illiberal left,” put it this way: “The legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed.” In his construct, murdering children or raping women isn’t intrinsically bad; its morality depends on who is doing the murdering and the raping. And those who are “privileged” are in no position to criticize those who are not. In addition, criticizing Hamas can only help the Zionist project, which is indefensible.

What this all means in practice is that, in the name of social justice, progressives are betraying social justice. They are imposing an ideological prism on life and events that leads to dehumanization, a hardness of heart, cruelty, and a lack of conscience. It also distorts history, including distorting the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which I wrote about last year.

One can of course criticize the policies of various Israeli governments and military tactics without being anti-Semitic. People who love Israel can be critical of policies of Israel. One can also have deep compassion for the suffering that the Palestinian people have endured for generations and sympathize with their longing for a homeland. But a fair reading of the historical record—or at least my own reading of the historical record—shows that the obstacle to a Palestinian homeland lies much more with a militant and corrupt Palestinian leadership, which has created a malignant political culture, than with Israel, which has frequently shown a willingness to surrender land for genuine peace.

Israel did so with Egypt in 1978 and Jordan in 1994, and has tried to do so with Palestine, including in 1967 when Israel offered to return the land it had captured during the war that year in exchange for peace and normal relations, an offer that was summarily rejected by Arab leaders meeting in Khartoum; and 2000, when Yasir Arafat rejected Israel’s offer of Palestinian statehood with east Jerusalem as its capital, the return of all of Gaza and virtually all the land in the West Bank, and the readmission of refugees to the new Palestinian state.

What is happening on the American left is a cautionary tale. Like MAGA world, it has been deformed by a toxic ideology that not only rejects inconvenient truths; it inverts morality in order to confirm its presuppositions. In the case of the left, its ideology—a mix of postmodernism, post-colonialism, and critical race theory, what my Atlantic colleague Yascha Mounk calls the “identity synthesis”—has played a role in aligning itself with one of the most malevolent groups on the planet, whose savagery was on full display on October 7.

Unlike those progressives who sided with Hamas after October 7, President Biden has offered extraordinary support for Israel. Just hours after the attack, Biden said what Hamas did was an “appalling assault.” He went on to say that his “support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.” Biden was true to his word.

The president traveled to Tel Aviv—and within range of Hamas rockets—just weeks after the attack. It was a remarkable gesture of solidarity; so was his request for more than $14 billion in additional assistance for Israel. Virtually every public comment about Israel by Biden and his advisers has been supportive of the Jewish state, even as he has taken steps to provide $100 million in humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. (Differences have surfaced, though, between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over what happens in Gaza after the war ends, and the intensity with which the conflict is being waged.) Biden has spoken out forcefully against rising anti-Semitism in America. He said at a White House Hanukkah reception, “I am a Zionist.” No one who is familiar with Biden’s 50-year public career is surprised by his stance.

Shalom Lipner, who was an adviser to more than a half dozen Israeli prime ministers, said Biden was now more popular in Israel than the country’s own leaders. “This isn’t just from today; we’re looking at a history here,” Lipner told Peter Baker of The New York Times. “He’s always been there.” (One senator referred to Biden as “the only Catholic Jew.”)

Not surprisingly, Biden has been criticized within his own party for being too pro-Israel. Nearly half of Democrats disapprove of how Biden is handling the Israel-Hamas conflict, according to one recent poll, while another poll found that the percent of Democrats under 35 who believe that the Biden administration is too pro-Israel has doubled to 41 percent. These findings highlight the deep, intense divisions within his party over the war. (At anti-war protests young progressives chanted, “Biden, Biden, you can’t hide; you signed off on genocide.”) Yet Biden shows no signs of wavering.

During the 2020 campaign, Donald Trump said Joe Biden was “a helpless puppet of the radical left.” In fact he has mostly proved to be a bulwark against it. Many of the radical ideas being championed by the left prior to the 2020 election—the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, increasing the marginal tax rate to 70 percent, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, packing the Supreme Court, putting an end to the Electoral College, reparations for Black Americans—have not been embraced by Biden. Neither has defunding the police. Biden has asked for and received increases in defense spending, which is at a record level. Under Biden, domestic oil production is at an all-time high. He’s been a fierce advocate for Ukraine in its war against Russia. He strengthened NATO and played an essential role in adding Finland and Sweden to it.

[Read: Is Biden toast?]

For many years Joe Biden was seen as an “amiable lightweight.” His political career seemed over when, as vice president, he was passed over by his party, which nominated Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. But history had other things in mind. Biden looks to be the only person standing between Donald Trump and a second term that would pose a catastrophic threat to the republic. At the same time, he is also the key person resisting the pull of the progressive left on the Democratic Party. A person who was thought to be a transitional president is turning out to be a consequential one. An awful lot hinges on the man from Scranton.

The year 2023 has been a grinding one for Ukraine. Battlefield wins have been fewer and less definitive than during the first 10 months of the war, and Russia has gained ground. Now the United States—Ukraine’s biggest military backer—may stop providing assistance. Without that aid, Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, recently said in Washington, Ukraine stands a “big risk” of losing the war.

From the moment Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, Kyiv has relied on external help to defend itself. Most of its military needs are funded by outside states, even though the government also spends all taxpayer money on the military. Foreign countries and institutions finance most (and according to some experts, all) of the nondefense parts of Ukraine’s government. Together, Kyiv’s partners have given the country roughly $100 billion in defense aid—about half of it donated by the United States.

[George Packer: ‘We only need some metal things’]

That Ukraine requires outside help is not surprising. With a third as many people as Russia and an economy roughly a tenth as big, Kyiv could have the most sophisticated military in the world, and it would still need external assistance to defeat the Kremlin. But relative size is not the only reason Ukraine has trouble filling its military demands. Kyiv has wrestled with two problems, on and off, for decades: defense corruption and a struggling industrial base. Since well before the Russian invasion, Ukraine has bought military goods at inflated prices and used shady middlemen in its weapons trade. Meanwhile, its domestic defense manufacturers lack the capacity to meet more than a fraction of the country’s requirements.

“Our military is not being properly equipped,” Daria Kaleniuk, a co-founder and the executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Centre, told me. “The challenge to the country was huge, and our state, particularly our Ministry of Defense, was not able to provide the army with everything it needed.”

Activists, entrepreneurs, and committed government officials across Ukraine are working to expand and clean up the country’s defense sector. They want the country to reform how it buys military supplies, and they’re building companies that can help amp up defense production. Some of Ukraine’s domestic manufacturers dream not only of helping their country defeat Russia, but also of selling weapons to Europe and the United States.

This work is an investment in the country’s future, reformers and entrepreneurs explained to me. Ukraine’s defense sector has long been fundamental to the country’s identity. Making the industry more productive and functional is not only necessary to meet Kyiv’s immediate battle needs, but central to the larger ambition to make Ukraine integral to the West. To secure sustained NATO backing, Ukraine is going to need to demonstrate a cleaner defense sector and, likely, a bigger one. More than that, many Ukrainians suspect that to be fully accepted as a Western nation, their country may have to prove that it can give to NATO states, especially after all it has taken.

During the Cold War, when it was part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was one of the world’s top defense manufacturers. The republic was home to 750 military factories, including the shipyards that made every Soviet aircraft carrier, as well as plants that produced helicopter engines, ballistic missiles, tanks, and radio-communications systems. On the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Ukraine accounted for a whopping 30 percent of the country’s defense manufacturing.

For Moscow, loading Ukraine up with military factories made sense. Ukraine was on the Soviet Union’s southeastern flank, so it was integral to the Communist bloc’s efforts to contain the West. To that end, Moscow had Ukraine hold—as well as make—large quantities of weapons. When the country gained independence, it inherited a big defense industry and a big military, including more than 6,000 tanks, 1,000 combat aircraft, 500 ships, and 170 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Almost immediately, Ukraine began shedding these assets. The United States—concerned about Ukraine’s ability to control such a large arsenal—pushed Kyiv to sign a deal to rid itself of long-range missiles and strategic bombers. Ukraine then transferred many of these weapons to Russia and demolished virtually all of the rest. (Only four bombers were spared: Two were converted into environmental-reconnaissance aircraft, and two were put in a museum.) When the country destroyed its final Tu-95 aircraft in 2001, Kyiv even held a ceremony. U.S. defense officials attended.

In retrospect, Ukrainians deeply regret the dismantlement—especially given that Russia has used these very weapons in its invasion. But at the time, the transfer wasn’t so controversial.

“Ukraine wasn’t planning to be a superpower,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, the country’s defense minister from 2019 to 2020, told me. “We certainly weren’t planning on waging any wars.”

What Ukraine needed, so it seemed, was not a large military but money, particularly for gas. And Russia forgave large chunks of Kyiv’s energy debts in exchange for the stockpiles. Ukraine made even more money by selling many of the arms it kept: Over the course of the early 2000s, Ukraine exported tanks, guns, and other types of weapons all over the globe. From 2009 to 2013, it was the world’s eighth-largest arms exporter. In 2012, it was the fourth. The country’s two biggest customers were China and Pakistan. Russia came in third.

International sales helped keep some of Ukraine’s factories alive. The country’s aircraft- and helicopter-engine manufacturer, for example, stayed afloat by selling motors to the Russian military. But Ukrainian plants specialized in making Soviet-era gear, and international demand for such products nose-dived after the Cold War ended. Kyiv allowed many of its factories to close—and the defense sector to shrivel.

“It had nothing to do with the safety of our country,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “And then it did.”

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and, via proxies, invaded Ukraine’s east. So Kyiv drastically shifted course, more than doubling its defense budget: The share of government spending on the military went up 106 percent. Private capital, largely absent from Ukraine’s defense industry, began flowing in.

Yet even as the state ramped up spending, corruption bedeviled its military. The problem went back to Soviet times, when manufacturers routinely bribed officials to purchase overpriced gear, and graft was deeply ingrained in the operation of the defense ministry. In independent Ukraine, too, military officials bought goods at inflated prices in exchange for kickbacks. According to a 2012 analysis by Leonid Polyakov, a former senior Ukrainian defense official, officers took military supplies and used them to build homes. Some officials even auctioned off defense-ministry land.

When Ukrainians drove the country’s corrupt, pro-Russian president from power in the 2014 Maidan revolution, they ushered in a new era of civil-society activism to root out graft. But these efforts did not put an immediate end to the problem. Serhiy Pashinsky, who chaired the Ukrainian Parliament’s defense committee during the back half of the 2010s, controlled a major private arms supplier. His company’s pricing and his cozy relations with state officials came under repeated investigation. In 2019, the son of a senior defense official was caught bribing military factories to purchase overpriced goods he smuggled in from Russia. Pashinsky, Oleh Gladkovsky—the senior official—and Gladkovsky’s son denied wrongdoing.

Western officials paid attention to Ukraine’s struggles. “You also have a battle, a historic battle against corruption,” then–Vice President Joe Biden declared in 2015, while speaking before the Ukrainian Parliament. “You cannot name a single democracy in the world where the cancer of corruption is prevalent.” The vice president called for a major reform effort: “Anything else will jeopardize Ukraine’s hard-won progress and drive down support for Ukraine from the international community,” Biden said. “It’s always tenuous.”

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the country’s defense spending took another leap. Military expenditures went up by a factor of seven from 2021 to 2022. The share of GDP spent on defense multiplied by 10. Kyiv does not say what percentage of that figure goes to military manufacturing, but it is doubtless significant. In a November 2023 interview with the Associated Press, Oleksandr Kamyshin—the minister in charge of defense production—said that artillery-ammunition manufacturing had gone up 20 times in the previous 10 months, and that armored-vehicle production had quintupled. The private sector produced 70 percent of the country’s military purchases in 2022.

Still, the defense industry is struggling. New firms have had trouble raising capital. Russia regularly bombs defense factories. And one complaint comes up again and again: corruption.

Viktor Lokotkov, the chief marketing officer for the drone maker Skyassist, told me that corruption bollixed his supply chain. His company imports necessary components from other countries—but when the firm’s goods hit Ukrainian borders, customs officials held them for ransom. His company is not the only one that had this problem: In early 2023, one of Ukraine’s top legislators estimated that the state lost $271 million a month on customs graft, an amount that was roughly the same before the war.

Procurement scandals, too, have repeatedly hit the defense ministry since the start of the full-scale invasion. In January 2023, for example, an investigative journalist found that the ministry was purchasing eggs at 47 cents apiece—more than twice what they cost in Ukrainian supermarkets. Oleskii Reznikov, the country’s defense minister, denied wrongdoing, saying that the higher prices were the product of “technical mistakes” and not an attempt to skim money off contracts. But the country’s deputy defense minister, who oversaw military procurement, resigned and was arrested for his purchases. Government investigators later accused him, along with another senior government official, of embezzling millions of dollars allocated for buying body armor. In August 2023, journalists discovered that the ministry was overpaying for military jackets from a Turkish company co-founded by the nephew of a legislator. Also this year, the Ukrainian Parliament reported that nearly $1 billion worth of weapons contracts had missed their delivery dates, and some of the funds used to buy them had disappeared into overseas accounts.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: People forgot how war actually works]

Anti-corruption activists believe that many more scandals lurk where these were found. Defense corruption is particularly difficult to unveil, Kaleniuk, of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, told me: “It’s hard to do watchdog activities and civil oversight over a sector which is naturally supersecret and super complicated.” And the task is further complicated, she said, by the lack of interest many government officials show in fighting graft. Kaleniuk and other activists point in particular to high-level officials in the presidential office (although not to the president himself). In October 2022, the deputy head of that office, for example, was caught driving a Chevrolet truck donated to the state’s emergency services. At the beginning of December, journalists reported that he was driving a Porsche owned by a wealthy businessman and cheaply renting a mansion from a well-connected construction magnate. Almost two months passed before the deputy stepped down.

Ukrainian activists have used these controversies to apply more pressure to their government. The journalist who uncovered the high egg prices declared that the Ministry of Defense “seems to have increased its appetite for embezzlement” and called for change. In the weeks and months after that story broke, many Ukrainians blasted Reznikov for the waste. A meme circulated, showing Reznikov’s face superimposed on an egg. Some activists, including Kaleniuk, demanded that he step down. Activists also insisted that the government take military procurement out of the hands of the defense ministry.

The pressure resulted in important changes. In September, Zelensky replaced Reznikov with an official who has a track record of eliminating graft. He also replaced the minister in charge of military manufacturing and the person managing the state-run defense company. In June, the government reorganized that company, which has a long history of scandals, in an effort to make it more transparent. The state also began investigating and arresting customs officials, and it fired the top management of its customs service. Finally, Kyiv has created specialized agencies to procure nonlethal and lethal goods for the Ministry of Defense. Together, the new agencies will bring Ukraine’s military purchasing system closer to those of NATO countries.

I spoke with Arsen Zhumadilov, the man appointed to run the nonlethal agency, in October. The job is not his first in government. From June 2019 to August 2023, he led the Ministry of Health’s procurement agency and won plaudits from activists for cleaning up what had been a famously corrupt process. He explained to me why creating a separate purchasing body helps reduce graft: “When the ministry is the one that sets the rules and the one that executes them, there is a temptation to set the rules to favor certain suppliers,” he told me. Having an independent agency in charge of making the actual purchases, Zhumadilov said, adds a check: If the ministry issues a suspiciously restrictive rule governing what can be purchased and from whom, the agency can fight back.

Zhumadilov told me that he would not be intimidated from doing that if needed. Defense corruption, he said to me, went against not just his ethics, but his personal mission. “I am from Crimea,” Zhumadilov said. “I am a Crimean Tatar. And I have a clear interest in making sure our country is strong enough to regain control of my motherland, because I want to go back home.”

Ukraine seems a long way from retaking Crimea—or the many miles of Russian-occupied territory along the way. The much-vaunted counteroffensive has stalled, and in many parts of the country, Kyiv is playing defense. Relations with the West, once unwavering, have weakened. Anti-Ukrainian politicians are gaining prominence in Europe; the new prime minister of Slovakia, for instance, vowed during his campaign not to send “another bullet” to Kyiv. In the United States, Republicans are blocking a new aid package in Congress.

Ukraine has no easy solutions for problems that stem from political dynamics abroad. But one thing it can still do to both strengthen its military and shore up Western support is to expand and clean up its defense sector. Isolationist-minded pro-Trump Republican legislators are using Ukraine's supposed weakness and reputation for corruption as arguments against providing any help at all to Ukraine: “This is a stalemate,” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said in September. “Are we just going to spend hundreds of billions indefinitely?” Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio declared that by helping Ukraine, the United States was sending “tax dollars to corrupt governments overseas.” House Speaker Mike Johnson told U.S. Defense Department officials that Ukraine “has a documented history of corruption and government waste.”

There remains a segment of the GOP’s congressional caucus that wants continued aid packages for Ukraine. If Ukraine makes more weapons—and if Washington is confident, as Johnson put it, that “the Ukrainian government is being entirely forthcoming and transparent about the use of this massive sum of taxpayer resources”—these Republicans might have a chance at winning sustained support. The same efforts would stand Ukraine in good stead with the Biden administration—and they would strengthen Ukraine’s bid for accession to the European Union, which has made clear that Kyiv needs to tackle its problem with graft if it wants to be a serious candidate.

[Anne Applebaum: The West must defeat Russia]

For Ukraine, then, ending defense corruption may be essential to defeating the Kremlin. And the payoff could be tremendous. Over the past six months, Ukrainian officials have indicated that they see a vibrant defense industry as a means not just to win the war but, after it, to juice the country’s economy and link it with the West. Ukraine is creating “the arsenal of the free world,” Zelensky boasted at a defense-industries forum in September. Kamyshin told the Associated Press that his country hoped to export its products to its friends, almost as a way of giving back.

Many of the entrepreneurs I interviewed were optimistic about one day selling their products to foreign countries. Ukrainians have developed some creative weapons technology, they told me, and NATO states have been watching the battlefield to decide what kinds of arms to purchase. One Ukrainian drone maker showed me emails indicating that a large American defense contractor had agreed to set up a partnership with his firm.

Becoming a major arms exporter to the West would be a transformative achievement for Ukraine—and would make NATO and EU membership look that much more attainable. Such exports would also carry an unmistakable symbolism: The country that, as a Soviet republic, once made weapons for Moscow would instead become the supplier of the democratic West.

But Kyiv isn’t there yet. Its anti-corruption activists and defense entrepreneurs hope that the West will be patient—and have faith. When Ukrainian corruption scandals make the international news, Kaleniuk told me, she worries that outsiders will conclude that they’re looking at “a super-corrupt country that cannot be helped. But my message is that all these cleanups and scandals are signs that we are changing. There are forces inside the country that are pushing and driving for change.”

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