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.”

Ever since a terror attack by Hamas triggered a war in Israel and Gaza in October, many commentators have presumed that the United States can in some way manage the course of the crisis—either by supporting Israel emphatically or by demanding greater restraint from that country’s leaders. Successive American administrations, including Joe Biden’s, have encouraged this belief in American control of events in the Middle East and around the world. Just days before the Hamas attack, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan boasted in an article in a Foreign Affairs article that the Biden administration had “de-escalated crises in Gaza.” The Middle East, he wrote, is “quieter than it has been for decades,” echoing comments he made at tThe Atlantic Festival in late September. (The online version of the article was subsequently edited to omit those statements.) In essence, the United States had mistaken a temporary lull in the Middle East for a more enduring period of relative peace—and ascribed the apparent boon to American influence.

The lesson the United States should be drawing is that it generally cannot enforce its will—however benevolent Americans believe it to be—in every area of the world. In region after region, the United States engages with movements and governments that are powerful actors themselves. Some will at least outwardly genuflect to the U.S., but all of them will pursue their own interests. In overestimating their own power, American presidents risk worse outcomes, both for the United States and for the causes it is trying to promote.

As I have previously argued, U.S. policy toward Ukraine has been bedeviled by indecision, poor calculation, and the presumption that the war will abide by American plans and expectations. Intimidated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats of nuclear war, the U.S. has delivered mostly short-range battlefield aid to Ukraine, in the hope that such weaponry will be sufficient—while still denying the Ukrainians the ability to make supposedly rash moves, such as liberating Crimea from Russian rule. Although the United States has gradually agreed to provide more modern equipment with greater capabilities, the delays have given Russia time to rebuild its forces and strengthen its defenses against Ukrainian counterattack.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Stop micromanaging the war in Ukraine]

Supposedly great powers are usually anything but, as some of the world’s mightiest, most resource-rich nations have demonstrated in a series of stumbles, failures, and even outright humiliations over the past few years. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is the most obvious example: Even with months to prepare for combat against a supposedly outgunned opponent, the Russians failed in a military operation of enormous interest to Putin. Nearly two years later, Ukraine remains independent. Although the invaders occupy significant territory, they lose personnel and equipment on a daily basis to a Ukrainian military armed with mostly older or limited-range weaponry from its NATO allies.

China—the state that has transformed the global order more than any other in recent decades—is stumbling badly too. Only a few years ago, it seemed fully ascendant as it staked claims around its borders, expanded its influence through its Belt and Road Initiative, built the world’s second-most-advanced military, and seemed poised to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy. Today, the Chinese economy is in a significant slump, and the regime faces hostile and worried neighbors along a crescent that runs for thousands of miles—from India through the South China Sea, to Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. Italy has signaled it will pull out of the Belt and Road Initiative; Sri Lanka, which is struggling to pay back Chinese loans that have yielded precious little economic benefit, is a cautionary tale for other nations about the potential dangers of Beijing’s largess. Recently, the Chinese government has been trying to patch up its relationship with the United States and persuade Americans to once again invest in China, to allow the latter some time to recover.

This rapprochement is not a sign that the U.S. has fared any better in great-power politics. The extraordinary debacle in Afghanistan in 2021 suggests otherwise. After conducting the longest overseas military operation in American history, spending more than $2 trillion to fund the war and military occupation of Afghanistan since 2001, and suffering the deaths of thousands of American service members, the United States pulled out with what looked like little preparation. The U.S.-backed Afghan government collapsed far faster than the regime that the Soviet Union left behind when it pulled out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s; in seemingly no time, the Taliban, the regime that the U.S. had invaded to overthrow in 2001, was back in charge.

After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the U.S. seemed to regain its footing. Putin’s invasion was so ill-considered and bloodthirsty—and Ukrainian resistance so fierce, adept, and determined—that Western nations felt energized and steadfast in their support for the invaded country. Yet in retrospect, the short-term boost to NATO’s effectiveness seems like a lucky accident. American hesitation in the past year has helped make the war bloodier, longer, and potentially more escalatory than if Washington had simply picked a side and given it all the support necessary to win.

Events in the Middle East are demonstrating the limits of Washington’s power in other ways. The Biden administration is seeking to manage the Israeli response to the Hamas terror attacks of October 7. Israel has shown a willingness to conduct an extensive bombing campaign in Gaza because the country’s leaders perceive that to be in their country’s interest, even though the U.S. is publicly urging it to act with greater military restraint.  

To preserve, even maximize, its influence, a major power must understand what it can and cannot do—and, in moments of uncertainty, err on the side of thinking that achieving its goals will be hard, not easy. The more assertive and interventionist a power becomes, the more likely it is to reveal the limits of its influence. The collapse of European colonial empires after World War II, America’s defeat in Vietnam, and the fragmenting of the U.S.S.R. in 1990–91 all show how even powers that seem strong and permanent can wither or disappear in a remarkably short amount of time.

The U.S. should never be isolationist. Nor should it define its global role, as it has so frequently done since the beginning of the Cold War, in terms of simply countering its perceived enemies. Instead, it should proceed cautiously in regions, such as the Middle East, where its record of recent interventions offers ample reason for humility. It should work to strengthen states—such as democracies in the Pacific Rim and in Europe—that emphatically want the U.S. to assist in their defense and security. Ukraine clearly wants to be in this group. American involvement should be seen as a prize, not a threat, and Ukraine’s example helps clarify what kind of countries would most benefit from—and deserve—that help: Are they willing to fight for themselves? And are they governed based on the consent of their residents?

The U.S. can engage in dialogue and seek areas of common interest with a variety of parties around the world. But it should use its power more judiciously than it has. By perpetuating the fiction that Washington can shape other countries’ destiny on its own terms, the U.S. is undercutting its own global position.