The Men Who Own the War Now Run It

by Thomas S. Karat | Jul 9, 2026 | 

There was a time when the arms dealer waited in the corridor. He financed the campaign, endowed the think tank, took the general to dinner, and hoped the man inside the office would remember him when the contract came up. The wall between the money and the decision was thin, often corrupt, but it was there. Someone held the public trust, and someone else tried to buy it, and you could at least tell the two apart.

That wall is gone. The financier no longer waits in the corridor. He holds the office. He signs the checks. He is the buyer and the seller, the regulator and the regulated, the public interest and the private portfolio, fused into a single man in a single suit, and the arrangement is entirely legal, which is the whole problem.

One of these men may already be familiar from a previous article. His name is Friedrich Merz.

The chancellor was the warm-up act

From 2016 to 2020, Merz chaired the supervisory board of BlackRock’s German arm, the local office of the largest pool of private capital on earth – a fact confirmed, without embarrassment, by his own party’s foundation. Then he climbed back into politics, and in March 2025, as chancellor-in-waiting, he drove through the outgoing Bundestag — deliberatelybefore the newly elected parliament could convene – the constitutional amendment that exempted defense spending from Germany’s debt brake. The borrowing limit Germans had treated as sacred since 2009 was gone. German military spending rose 24 percent in a single year to $114 billion, the largest in NATO Europe, and BlackRock held stakes in the very contractors – Rheinmetall, Hensoldt – that the money would flow toward.

He broke no law. He simply spent four years learning, from the inside, how the machinery paid out, and then went and pulled the lever. The arrangement was a particular kind that no scandal quite captures, because nothing in it is hidden. It sits in plain view, in regulatory filings and procurement requests, and it works precisely because everyone involved can say, truthfully, that they broke no rule.

It reads as a German problem only until you cross the Atlantic. There the same face turns up in an American suit, several of them, installed not adjacent to the war machine but at its controls.

The banker who became the Navy

Consider John Phelan, who until March 2025 had no connection to the military beyond a seat on a charity board. His career was money: he co-founded MSD Capital, the private investment firm that managed the personal fortune of Michael Dell, and later founded his own firm, Rugger Management. He gave Trump’s joint fundraising committee $834,600 in April 2024. Months later he was nominated to run the United States Navy, and in March he was confirmed, handed a $263.5 billion budget and command of nearly a million sailors and Marines.

Before his confirmation, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to him about the obvious. He had recently earned over $5 million in capital gains from Palantir, a defense-software contractor that took in $541 million from the Pentagon in fiscal 2024 alone, and whose relationships Phelan’s own acquisition vehicle had once advertised. She asked him to divest his defense holdings and to recuse himself, for four years, from matters touching his former clients and employers, noting that a dozen Biden appointees had voluntarily gone beyond what the ethics laws required. Phelan declined to make the stronger commitment. He was confirmed anyway, 62 to 30, with eleven Democrats joining every Republican in the room.

The man overseeing the Navy’s shipbuilding budget was, weeks earlier, a private investor with money in the companies the Navy buys from. Nobody hid it. It was printed in his disclosures and read aloud at his hearing, and it changed nothing.

The private-equity takeover of the Pentagon

Phelan is the modest case. The full expression of the thing sits one floor up, in the office of the deputy secretary of defense, where Stephen Feinberg runs the day-to-day of the entire department.

Feinberg co-founded Cerberus Capital Management and led it for thirty-three years; in his own sworn testimony to the Senate he put the firm’s portfolio at over $65 billion. He was a major Trump donor, and by the time he was confirmed in March 2025 he was, at a listed minimum net worth of $2 billion, the wealthiest official in the administration. What he has built since is not influence over the Pentagon. It is ownership of its investment arm.

Feinberg has surrounded himself with a circle of advisers drawn from his old firm. The group includes former Cerberus managing director John Gallagher and a deal team led by Cerberus alumnus George Kollitides – who was, until 2015, chairman and chief executive of Remington, the gunmaker Cerberus owned. Industry executives nicknamed the squad “Deal Team Six,” a joke on the SEAL unit that killed bin Laden, and Kollitides told a Milken Institute audience he found the name both fun and fitting while explaining that economic warfare has been a part of all successful nations for thousands of years. A Stanford professor watching this described it plainly: private equity has just acquired its largest organization.

The organization it acquired writes checks the size of nations. Under Feinberg, the Pentagon stopped merely buying weapons and began buying companies. It took a $400 million preferred-equity stake in the rare-earth miner MP Materials, enough to make the United States government the firm’s largest single shareholder at roughly 15 percent – ahead, as it happens, of BlackRock. It put $1 billion into an L3Harris rocket-motor unit slated to go public in 2026. Stakes in Trilogy Metals, Vulcan Elements, and ReElement Technologies followed, a portfolio that a group of House members warned was locking federal policy to the fortunes of individual firms – picking winners, and by definition creating losers.

Whose companies get the contracts

Here is where the fusion stops being abstract:

Feinberg signed an ethics agreement before confirmation. He would divest from Cerberus and recuse himself from matters involving the firm. But the fine print left the door open: he could transfer his Cerberus holdings into trusts benefiting his adult children, a maneuver legal under conflict-of-interest law but one ethics experts say hollows out its purpose, and he could keep contracting with Cerberus for administrative services. That contract was meant to end in April 2026. In January, he reversed course and extended it with no end date. The financial relationship between the deputy secretary of defense and the private equity firm he used to run now continues indefinitely.

Meanwhile the department began handing out contracts for Golden Dome, Trump’s missile-defense shield, a program that has already ballooned to an estimated $185 billion. The Pentagon at first refused to name the companies winning the work. When it finally released a list, at least four of the winners turned out to be owned or partly owned by Cerberus: North Wind, Stratolaunch, Red River Technology, and NetCentrics. The department still will not disclose what those contracts are worth, and by law is required to announce only those above $9 million.

Does Feinberg personally pick the contractors? The department says he has no direct responsibility for Golden Dome acquisitions. But the general who runs the program, Michael Guetlein, described his own chain of command without ambiguity: I report to the deputy secretary and only to the deputy secretary, he said. He is the only official who can tell me no. The man who can say no to the entire missile-defense program is the man whose old firm owns the companies being paid to build it, and whose family may still profit from that firm’s returns. No single email needs to be produced. The architecture does the work.

The recruiting pitch says it out loud

For anyone wondering how normal this has become, the sales brochure settles it. To staff its new investment operation – an “Economic Defense Unit” meant to deploy up to $200 billion over three years – the Pentagon hired the headhunting firm Heidrick & Struggles, whose recruiting deck went hunting for bankers at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Bank of America.

The pitch promised recruits unmatched access to top-level government officials and privileged information flow — whatever you need, you can get. It offered salaries reaching $600,000 through a government-aligned nonprofit, against a federal average near $100,000. And it described the job not as public service but as a two-year secondment leading to exceptional exit opportunities, including the chance to launch a new fund with members of the team. Come into the government, use the access, leave richer, on the strength of relationships built on the public payroll. This is not a leak of something embarrassing. It is a document written to attract people, on the assumption that the merger of private profit and public office is the perk.

A former assistant director on the White House technology-security staff, reading the same deck, warned that an effort this size has the potential to distort national-security-critical industries in ways he did not think anyone had seriously contemplated. There is, he added, obvious potential for truly egregious corruption. But corruption is almost the smaller point. Corruption implies a rule being broken. What is happening here is a rule being dissolved.

The same men, both shores

Line them up. Merz chaired an asset manager and then commanded the German rearmament that manager profits from. Phelan ran a billionaire’s money and then took command of the Navy that buys from the companies he held. Feinberg ran a private equity empire and then took the Pentagon’s second chair and filled the building with his former partners. Different countries, different uniforms, one profession and one move: from owning the assets of war to commanding the state that pays for them.

The line worth repeating from Merz’s own story turns out not to have been about Germany at all. The buildup manufactures the danger it claims to answer. Every European budget hardens Moscow’s conviction that it is being encircled, which justifies the next budget, around and around, while the men who profit count their dividends and call it security. That was true of one chancellor. It is true of an entire class of men who have stopped seeing daylight between the public interest and their own book, because across their whole careers there never was any.

The old fear, the one Eisenhower named in 1961, was that the military-industrial complex would acquire unwarranted influence over the government. That fear is quaint now. Influence is what you need when you are standing in the corridor. These men are not in the corridor. They are behind the desk, and the desk has a checkbook with no ceiling, and the recruiting brochure is on the table telling the next banker that whatever he needs, he can get.

Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.

East Shield: Poland’s Role In Defending NATO’s Eastern Border – Analysis

July 8, 2026 
 Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute
By Jakub Romaniuk

Key Takeaways

Poland’s Major Defense Investment — Poland is leading European security efforts with the East Shield project — a multi-billion PLN initiative (2024–2028) to fortify its border with Russia and Belarus through barriers, shelters, logistics centers, and advanced anti-drone systems.

Broad International Cooperation — The project involves close collaboration with Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, the UK, and especially Germany (Bundeswehr engineers), and is integrated into EU defense plans (SAFE program) and NATO’s eastern flank strategy.

Strong US Role — The United States supports the project through technology (e.g., Ultimate Building Machines for rapid infrastructure and contributions to the SAN anti-drone system) and high-level visits, while discussions advance toward a permanent US military base in Poland.

Analysis

(FPRI) — Back in February 2025, when US Vice President JD Vance announced at the Munich Security Conference that US assistance would be scaled back and called on Europe to take greater responsibility for its own security, many European leaders reacted with consternation and outrage. The shock was short-lived, and Europe immediately took action. As early as March of that same year, the European Commission unveiled a massive plan called “ReArm Europe / Readiness 2030,” which was intended to serve as the foundation for further joint European efforts aimed at improving the Old Continent’s defense capabilities and boosting Europe’s competitiveness in the defense industry. At the same time, an informal race began for the role of Europe’s new security leader and a valuable partner for the United States. Poland was among the countries that, from the very first days following the Munich Conference, demonstrated initiative in advancing further European security discussions and increased investment in its own defense capabilities. Such action was inevitable for a country bordering Ukraine—which had been attacked by Russia—and which was a potential next target of President Vladimir Putin’s aggression.

That is why Poland has risen to the top of the ranking of countries allocating the largest share of their budget to defense—in line with the 5 percent of GDP targeted by President Donald Trump, Poland reached 4.3 percent as early as 2025 (though the target was 4.7 percent), and in 2026, it currently stands at 4.8 percent. In fact, the proposal adopted at the NATO Summit in The Hague in 2025—committing member states to allocate 5 percent of GDP to defense by 2035—originated in Poland. This approach has not gone unnoticed by the US administration, which today points to Poland as one of its key and reliable partners in the field of defense. Allocating such a large portion of the budget to defense has led to an increase in the size of the army, its modernization, and the launch of several projects crucial not only to Poland’s security but also to the entire eastern flank of NATO—such as East Shield, SAN, PIAST (construction of a satellite constellation), and the Wisła Program (the procurement and integration of the Patriot systems). The implementation of the East Shield program—a flagship initiative for Polish security—entered its decisive phase in 2026. The project, valued at 10 billion PLN ($2.7 billion), is also intended to be one of the key elements of NATO’s eastern border defense. What are the project’s objectives, will it also help other countries in the region, and what is the role of the United States?

About the East Shield

On May 18, 2024, during the celebrations in Kraków marking the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Battle of Monte Cassino, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced investments in fortifications and an air defense system known as the National Security Plan East Shield to strengthen the border with Russia and Belarus, and a satellite component—financed by the European Investment Bank. East Shield is a program planned for 2024–2028 aimed at strengthening Poland’s resilience to attacks and hybrid warfare; it is a key investment in Polish and European security. Importantly, this is not a project intended to supplement the existing barrier on the border with Belarus, which is designed to combat illegal migration—the East Shield will serve solely to deter potential aggressors, limit their mobility, and protect soldiers and civilians in the event of an attack. It is also an innovative component—implemented on an unprecedented scale—of the broad transformation currently underway within the Polish Armed Forces. As part of the program, fortifications will be built and natural terrain barriers (e.g., swamps, slopes, and forests) will be utilized and reinforced. In addition, plans call for the construction of shelters, logistics centers, material warehouses, fortification elements, and a drone detection and tracking system that will operate using thermal imaging, radar, and electronic surveillance. The project involves not only fortifying the border zone but also preparing areas in the border region and supporting facilities up to 50 km from the border.

The Armed Forces are primarily responsible for the development and construction of the project, with a particular focus on the engineering corps; however, due to its complexity, this is an inter-ministerial project that also involves local governments, the Government Agency for Strategic Reserves, and other entities. The East Shield is being built primarily on land owned by the state and local governments. The plan calls for program components to be procured from Polish manufacturers, which is intended to further strengthen the domestic market, and some of the new infrastructure—such as roads and bridges—is designed to be dual-use and serve residents in peacetime. However, this is not only a national project; it also has international significance, as it will contribute to the joint defense of the eastern flank of the European Union and NATO. Poland is consulting with Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland on sharing experiences and combining efforts to protect the borders.


Construction of the first elements of the East Shield began in late October 2024. By the end of 2025, 60 km of the border had been secured (including 10 km of physical barriers), though most of the work to date has been devoted to completing all necessary formalities and preparing for further processes. In addition, 17 border crossings have been secured. 2026 is a pivotal year for the project, during which another 200 km (including 20 km of physical barriers) of the border is to be secured and the anti-drone system is to be expanded.

European Defense

Poland has submitted 26 (out of a total of over 100) projects related to the East Shield, with a total value of €10 billion, under the European SAFE program, which is part of the ReArm Europe / Readiness 2030 plan. Poland was the first EU country to sign an agreement on the SAFE program. The first 15 percent advance payment of €6.5 billion—out of approximately €43.7 billion allocated to Poland (for comparison, Poland’s defense budget for 2026 is approximately €47 billion)—has already been disbursed to Polish defense contractors. The results are already visible. At the end of May, the first contracts worth over 1.4 billion PLN (€330 million) were signed. SAFE will be used to finance, among other things, the Jarzębina-S guided munitions systems—a key component of the East Shield—as well as TM anti-tank mines and ISM cassettes for Baobab-K mine-laying vehicles. Advanced Protection Systems (APS), a private company specializing in anti-drone systems, also has reason to be satisfied, as it will serve as a key subcontractor for the air defense system under the major SAN anti-drone contract, which includes supplies for the implementation of the East Shield program. The SAN system, Europe’s largest and most advanced anti-drone solution, is part of the East Shield and an important addition to the country’s multi-layered, integrated air and missile defense system. It is partially funded by EU SAFE funds. The total value of the program is estimated at approximately 15 billion PLN (€3.5 billion).


The project also involves close international cooperation. In addition to Poland’s already committed neighbors—Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland—discussions are underway with the United Kingdom and Germany, which are also expected to assist in the implementation of the East Shield. A sister project to the Polish one is the joint intergovernmental project of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—the Baltic Defence Line. An agreement on its implementation was signed by the defense ministers of these three Baltic countries in Riga in 2024. Its goal is to strengthen the eastern flank, including protection against incursions by troops from Russia and Belarus. The Baltic Defence Line is to be linked in the future with Poland’s East Shield. Since 2025, both programs have been formally incorporated into the European Union’s defense strategy and treated as a single, cohesive system.

The United Kingdom’s contribution consists primarily of technological support and advice from military engineers and sappers. Cooperation with Poland’s western neighbors, however, is becoming much closer. Since April this year, several dozen Bundeswehr soldiers have been stationed in Poland to assist in the construction of the East Shield. Their mission will consist mainly of engineering tasks, including the construction of anti-tank barriers, and the German soldiers will remain in Poland until the end of 2027. The signing of a new agreement on defense cooperation on the 35th anniversary of the Good-Neighborliness Treaty also confirms the growing rapprochement between Warsaw and Berlin on security issues. On June 17 in Warsaw, the Polish and German defense ministers, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz and Boris Pistorius, signed a new agreement replacing the previous one from 2011. Although Germany was even prepared to enter into a broader agreement providing for security guarantees, Poland opted for a less ambitious solution to avoid a political dispute at home. As Kosiniak-Kamysz said, “The agreement paves the way for new areas of cooperation: in the fields of cybersecurity, shared responsibility, joint command in the Baltic Sea, new technologies—particularly space operations (…), military mobility, and the development of infrastructure to support this mobility between our countries.”

The Role of the United States

In a project so crucial to the security of NATO’s eastern flank, US involvement naturally could not be overlooked. More specifically, this refers to the Ultimate Building Machine (UBM) system for the rapid construction of infrastructure facilities, which can produce shelters, warehouses, and hangars in a very short time. In mid-January 2025, an agreement was signed with the American company M.I.C. Industries for the purchase of UBM machines, which are to be part of the East Shield. Another key element of Polish-American cooperation on this project is the US involvement in the creation of Europe’s largest anti-drone system (the SAN system), as part of which Poland will install up to 700 modern radars along its borders with Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

This May, a special visit was paid by a US delegation led by Thomas G. DiNanno, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, during which he and Deputy Minister Cezary Tomczyk inspected and monitored progress on one of the sections of the East Shield. “The East Shield, together with the Baltic Defence Line, is becoming the foundation of security for Poland, the European Union, and NATO as a whole,” emphasized Tomczyk. DiNanno highlighted the importance of trans-Atlantic cooperation and joint efforts to ensure border security: “The work being done here is an example of the kind of partnership we want to continue developing in the future.” An agreement on a permanent US military presence in Poland is also drawing closer—following a positive response from US authorities, the government in Warsaw adopted a resolution on June 16 launching the formal process of establishing a permanent US military base in Poland. This is an important issue for Poland because, aside from strengthening its security, it is possibly the only topic that could reconcile the president’s administration and the government, which are currently at odds (even if, on this issue as well, there is an ongoing competition over which side deserves more credit).

About the author: Jakub Romaniuk is a Non-Resident Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Programme Director at the Foundation Institute for Eastern Studies.

Source: This article was published by FPRI


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Summit host Turkey eyes major weapons deals with NATO allies

Issued on: 05/07/2026 - RFI
Play - 05:33 INTERNATIONAL REPORT


Next week's NATO Summit in Ankara is expected to showcase Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rising influence within the alliance, as he aims to use the gathering to overcome resistance to crucial arms deals and highlight the rapid growth of Turkey’s defence industry.

Ankara is preparing for the upcoming NATO summit, which it views as a showcase for Turkey's defence industry. © Efekan Akyuz / Reuters

Boasting NATO’s second-largest army and sharing borders with flashpoints from Ukraine to the Middle East, Turkey is at the heart of the alliance’s future amid doubts about the United States' commitment to European defence.

“It is a paradigm shift,” says international relations professor Huseyin Bagci of Ankara’s Middle East Technical University.

With European and North American leaders attending the summit, on 7 and 8 July, Bagci predicts Erdogan will use the opportunity to cement Turkey’s pivotal role.

“The NATO summit will be a good instrument for Erdogan to show Turkish domestic politics, as well as international politics, that he is one of the medium-power leaders in the world with whom you have to deal."

Defence deals

Major arms deals are expected to make headlines at the summit. US President Donald Trump – attending out of what he calls respect for Erdogan – is not likely to come empty-handed.

"The administration is eager to deliver something to Erdogan," says Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a US-based think tank.

Trump and Erdogan are expected to sign a $700 million deal for the sale of around 80 GE F-110 fighter jet engines. The sale would be a major breakthrough for Ankara in its ambitious Fifth Generation fighter jet project.

“The Kaan fighter jet, Turkey's domestic fighter, is powered at least in the first iteration by the F-110. And so getting these engines would be important for the development of that fighter,” explained Stein.

Ankara is investing billions of euros into the Kaan jet, but without enough engines critics have mockingly called it the world’s priciest glider. Congressional roadblocks, fuelled by influential Israeli and Greek lobbies, have stalled the engine deal, but Trump has vowed to use executive power to push it through.

“Turkey has become a domestic political football in the United States, kicked around,” says Stein. “The administration wants to push forward on these agreements and is willing to use leverage to do it."

Ankara is also looking to the NATO summit for a breakthrough in its goal to secure the French-Italian SAMP-T anti-missile system. Until now Paris has blocked the sale, but French media has hinted that an agreement could be within reach.

“That would open maybe a new chapter in European-Turkish relations,” says International relations expert Zaur Gasimov of Istanbul’s Turkish German University.

“That would bring key European members of NATO – France, Italy – closer to Turkey. And would maybe forge a new core group within NATO."
Exclusion from SAFE

Ankara is using the summit to spotlight Turkey’s booming defence industry, showcasing its cutting-edge weaponry and highly coveted drones, used in conflicts from Ukraine to Africa.

“Turkey has quite a developed field of drone production, which is of paramount importance in modern types of warfare,” explains Gasimov. “So all that makes Turkey a very, very special member of NATO from the point of view of European leaders."

However, Turkish arms sales to Europe face a major hurdle: exclusion from the EU’s €150 billion Safety and Assistance for Europe (SAFE) arms procurement programme. EU members Greece and Cyprus continue to block Turkey’s participation in SAFE due to unresolved disputes in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas.

Bagci predicts Erdogan will use his meeting with European leaders to try to break this deadlock.

“SAFE is the grand strategic decision of the European Union, so it cannot be stopped or prevented by such a small country like the southern Republic of Cyprus or Greece. The Greeks and the southern Republic of Cyprus, they have to stop or shut up and not prevent [Turkey’s participation in] SAFE," he says.

Turkey is the only country that recognises the Turkish Cypriot administration in Northern Cyprus, refusing to recognise the Republic of Cyprus as the sole sovereign administrator of the island, as international law does.

By: Dorian Jones

Ukraine’s Deep-Strike Campaign Imposing Rising Costs On Russia Far Beyond The Battlefield – Analysis

Next-generation autonomous interceptors have successfully passed combat testing in the Kharkiv region. Credit: mod.gov.ua


June 26, 2026
By Hudson Institute
By Can Kasapoğlu

Key Takeaways

Battlefield assessment. Russian forces retained the offensive initiative in land warfare, waging at least 200 combat engagements a day. Huliaipole, Pokrovsk, and Kostiantynivka remained the conflict’s primary pressure points, while Ukraine expanded its interceptor drone operations.

Ukraine stress-tests Russia’s occupation of Crimea. Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign began to stress Russia’s rear areas and the systems that sustain the Kremlin’s control over the Crimean Peninsula. Strikes on Kapotnya, near Moscow, and on Crimea’s fuel, rail, power, and air-defense targets presage a likely increase in strategic pressure.

What to look for. TrophyLab, a new Ukrainian effort to share intelligence gathered from captured Russian weapons, could provide Kyiv’s allies with increased access to information about Russian systems, components, vulnerabilities, and test data.

1. Battlefield Assessment

Military activity remained heightened across the Ukrainian battlespace, with Kyiv and Moscow conducting at least 200 combat engagements a day. Huliaipole, Pokrovsk, and Kostiantynivka again bore the brunt of Russia’s offensive push, while Orikhiv, Oleksandrivka, Lyman, Sloviansk, and Kramatorsk also saw combat.

The Russian military continued to maintain its offensive footing in land warfare, and sustained increased drone warfare activity. In return, Ukrainian forces ramped up their interceptor drone operations.

Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign imposed rising costs on Russia far beyond the battlefield. Recent Ukrainian attacks have reached targets in Moscow, including energy infrastructure, factories linked to Russia’s defense industry, logistics nodes, and other industrial sites.

Ukrainian strikes on the Kapotnya Refinery illustrate this development. Drones struck the facility in southeast Moscow on June 18 for the second time in three days, causing large explosions, a major fire, and heavy black smoke over the city. Ukraine’s General Staff later released satellite imageryshowing damage at the site. The refinery lies inside the capital’s ring road, roughly 10 miles from the Kremlin, making the Ukrainian strikes both operationally and politically significant.

2. Ukraine’s Military Stress-Tests the Russian Invasion in Occupied Crimea

Ukraine’s medium-range strike program, initiated under the country’s defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, is increasingly turning occupied Crimea into a logistics nightmare for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kyiv’s campaign in the peninsula has moved beyond episodic strikes on high-value assets and now targets Crimea’s fuel supply, rail access, power grid, air-defense network, and rear-area military movements.

Ukrainian officials describe the concept guiding their Crimea campaign as a “logistics lockdown” involving strikes against Russia’s operational depth, including storage sites, command nodes, equipment, and supply routes. Kyiv has also allocated additional funding for middle-strike assets, a class of unmanned, artificial intelligence–assisted aerial drones optimized to strike targets at operational depth. This concept reflects Ukraine’s effort to institutionalize its attacks rather than treat them as one-off raids.

The campaign’s most visible effect is Crimea’s fuel crisis. On May 22, Russia began fuel rationing in Sevastopol, the peninsula’s largest city, limiting fuel sales to roughly five gallons per vehicle. By June 21, the government had reportedly suspended gasoline sales to civilians.

Ukraine’s strikes have destroyed the routes and the storage architecture that supply Crimea. Ukrainian drones have struck vehicles, including fuel tankers, along the land corridor in occupied southern Ukraine, and have also damaged fuel infrastructure inside Crimea, including the Feodosiia Maritime Oil Terminal, the Semykolodezianska oil depot, and the ATAN fuel depot near Simferopol.

Bridges have become another pressure point. Ukrainian forces previously destroyed the Chonhar Bridge, a road bridge to the peninsula, forcing freight traffic onto longer, more vulnerable routes. On June 22–23, Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces also attacked the railway bridge over the North Crimean Canal near Rozdolne in a two-phase operation. The first strike damaged the rail line, collapsing one span of the bridge. The second strike destroyed repair equipment and the bridge’s remaining spans. Ukrainian forces later asserted that the bridge no longer exists, though independent authorities have not confirmed the claim.

Ukraine’s latest wave of strikes also hit Crimea’s energy system. Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Command reportedly used attack drones to strike fuel reservoirs at the Kerch Thermal Power Plant, the Simferopol gas distribution station, and the West Crimea 330/110 kilovolt electrical substation. Russian occupation authorities later stated that approximately half of Crimea was without electricity and introduced preventive load-shedding measures to manage pressure on the area’s electrical grid.

Local operators also reported blackouts in Yevpatoriia, Saky, Dzhankoi, and Krasnoperekopsk, while monitoring channels reported a major fire at the Kerch plant, where a smoke plume stretched about 29 miles. Some areas of the peninsula reportedly now receive electricity only a few hours each day under scheduled supply arrangements.

Ukraine’s strikes have both highlighted and exacerbated Crimea’s structural energy vulnerabilities. Before Russia’s 2014 occupation, the peninsula relied on mainland Ukraine for more than 80 percent of its electricity. Moscow later reduced this dependency by constructing and modernizing the area’s plants—which are now targets for Ukrainian drones.

The peninsula also faces fuel vulnerabilities. Crimea’s civilian population alone consumes roughly 2,500 tons of fuel a day, while total demand on the peninsula typically reaches about 4,000 tons. Meeting that demand requires 120,000 tons of fuel each month, which is roughly the equivalent of 2,200 railway tank cars. Observers find these volumes difficult to conceal, especially as Ukraine expands medium-range drone coverage across the peninsula’s supply routes.

Ukraine is also increasing the pressure on Russia’s military presence in Crimea. In their June 23 strike package, Ukrainian forces stated they had hit more than 60 Russian military targets across the country’s occupied territories. Reported targets on Crimea included three Orion reconnaissance-strike drone launchers, a Nebo-U radar, a Pantsir-S1 air-defense system, an S-300 launcher, and a ZU-23 anti-aircraft gun. This pattern suggests that Ukraine is coupling interdiction with the suppression of Russia’s local air-defense and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance architecture.

3. What to Look for in the Coming Weeks

Ukraine recently launched its TrophyLab initiative, a controlled-access platform that turns captured Russian weapons into a structured intelligence resource for its allies and partners. The platform provides vetted governments, defense firms, research institutions, and Ukrainian defense manufacturers and military units access to technical data on Russian systems. Resources include documentation, laboratory studies, component analyses, schematics, and vulnerability assessments.

Kyiv says the platform already covers more than 115 captured Russian systems across 79 categories, including assets such as the Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile and the T-90 main battle tank. Verified users of the platform can also request physical access to captured hardware for inspection, disassembly, or destructive testing. This innovation will almost certainly accelerate the development of new countermeasures against Russian weapons.

It will be worth monitoring how the TrophyLab project is received by Ukraine’s partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ahead of the alliance’s July 2026 summit.

About the author: Can Kasapoğlu is a nonresident senior fellow at Hudson Institute. His work at Hudson focuses on political-military affairs in the Middle East, North Africa, and former Soviet regions. He specializes in open-source defense intelligence, geopolitical assessments, international weapons market trends, as well as emerging defense technologies and related concepts of operations.

Source: This article was published by the Hudson Institute

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Why are Ukrainian drones targeting annexed Crimea's infrastructures?


Issued on: 26/06/2026 - FRANCE24

11:50


Kyiv is seeking retribution and one of its targets is Crimea. The peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 now threatens to become Moscow's Achilles' heel, as Ukraine steps up its attacks targeting bridges, ferries and oil storage facilities. The strategy appears to be working: fuel and power shortages are becoming increasingly difficult and have forced Russian-installed leaders to introduce temporary measures and Crimeans now find themselves living under bombardment.

Video by: Eliza HERBERT

Russia’s Oil Bottlenecks Run Deeper Than Refineries And Ports – Analysis

An oil refinery in Kstovo, in Russia's Nizhny Novgorod region, is seen burning after a Ukrainian strike. Photo Credit: Generalstaff.ua, RFE/RL


June 26, 2026 
By Paul Goble

Key Takeaways

Ukraine’s successful drone attacks on Russian refineries and ports have significantly reduced Moscow’s ability to meet domestic needs and sell oil abroad. They highlight serious bottlenecks in Russia’s critically important oil sector.

These chokepoints reflect the fragility of Russia’s oil pipeline network. As a result, damage at a relatively few places has an outsize impact, and their concentration near Russia’s few ports makes them tempting targets for attack.

Beyond these attacks are ever-more pressing causes. Global warming is damaging pipelines, easily accessible oil reserves are being exhausted, and developing more difficult-to-exploit alternative fields entails enormous costs and extreme challenges.

Analysis

Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russian refineries and ports have significantly degraded Moscow’s ability to meet domestic needs and sell oil abroad to fill Russian government coffers. They highlight serious bottlenecks in Russia’s critically important petroleum sector (Svobodnaya Pressa, June 21). These chokepoints reflect the lack of redundancy in Russia’s oil pipeline network in many parts of the country, especially in the north, where natural resources such as oil are most plentiful, yet highways, rail lines, and pipelines are scarce. That situation means that any damage to a relatively small number of the latter has an outsized impact, especially as their high concentration near Russia’s few ports makes them particularly tempting targets for attack (Nakanune.ru, March 30).

Beyond those problems, however, are now two even more serious ones. Pipelines are increasingly damaged by global warming, which undermines political will for such pipes. Existing fields are being exhausted, and finding new fields is difficult. Additionally, using new technologies that were not available earlier to extract oil is challenging (The Moscow Times, April 12, 2024; Yesli Byt’ Tochnym, December 4, 2025; Versia, February 10; Window on Eurasia, May 10; Sibirskiy Ekonomist, June 17). Consequently, these bottlenecks are not the marginal or short-term problems some imagine, but rather ones that will remain critical for Moscow not only as long as its war against Ukraine goes on, but even once that conflict is settled, unless it directs new resources into this sector.

The successful Ukrainian drone attacks on the two largest Russian oil ports on the Baltic Sea, Ust-Luga and Primorsk, and on other ports and refineries elsewhere, highlight the sophistication of Ukrainian military planners and the skills of Ukrainian forces. They also highlight the logistical bottlenecks Moscow has taken remarkably few steps to overcome, leaving itself at risk of such attacks. Despite Russia’s enormous size, the two ports on the Baltic alone had been handling almost half of Russia’s oil exports. This is a reflection not just of the absence of other ports that might do so but of rail, road, and pipeline connections from the point of extraction to these points of export (Nakanune.ru, March 30).


Few other industrialized countries, and none anywhere near as large as the Russian Federation, have so many bottlenecks of this kind and thus, in time of war, are at such enormous risk of serious losses from attacks on a relatively small number of sites. So far, however, instead of working to improve its logistics network, the Kremlin has adopted a short-term approach, focusing on improving its anti-drone systems and waiting for better times to do anything else. Until it makes a denser and more complete logistical network a priority, something that by its very nature will take enormous time and money, however, Russia will remain far more vulnerable to analogous attacks by foreign countries or domestic opponents with consequences far greater than they’d be in the case of other countries.

These bottlenecks and the lack of a concerted effort to overcome them are, in the first instance, inheritances from Soviet times. Central planners sought to address this or that problem with little thought given to redundancy or even survivability. It has also affected and continues to affect Moscow’s thinking not only in the petroleum sector but in many others as well (Kommersant, June 19, 2023). While the Russian economy, especially in extractive industries such as oil, has expanded dramatically since 1991, this approach has remained remarkably unchanged. Moscow has sought to boost production with little thought given to the risks of having so much of its oil flow through such a limited network. These risks have increased exponentially since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his expanded war against Ukraine.

Unfortunately for Moscow, the effects of this failure to build redundancy in the oil sector have been dramatically exacerbated in recent years by two other developments unrelated to any attack. Global warming has led to the damage or even collapse of some pipelines (Yesli Byt’ Tochnym, September 22, 2023). The exhaustion of easily exploited fields has meant that Russia has had to invest far more in exploring for others or in extracting oil using technologies that are far more difficult and expensive (Sibirskiy Ekonomist, June 17). According to official Russian government estimates, more than 60 percent of Russia’s oil reserves are now in the difficult-to-exploit category. Most of these new fields are in the Russian north, where there are few people and even fewer roads, rail lines, and pipelines than in the rest of the country, and where attracting and retaining residents and developing such infrastructure are especially difficult (see EDM, February 18, March 5).


The challenges and costs of increasing redundancy in the oil sector are so great that Russian officials have instead come up with more imaginative proposals rather than focusing directly on these problems. They reflect Moscow’s proclivity for extensive rather than intensive solutions, however problematic some of these ideas are. Among the most problematic of these ideas are calls for developing and using dirigibles to export coal, developing oil fields in the Antarctic, and relying on riverine shipping to move oil and other raw materials even though Russia has a severe shortage of ships equipped to do so (EastRussia, July 9, 2024; seeEDM, August 13, 2024; Sibirskiy Ekonomist, December 11, 2025). Such attitudes and proclivities also help explain proposals for new gigantic infrastructure, such as the Bering Strait tunnel, which would certainly require enormous sums but, because of the absence of rail links on either side, would not have the positive impact its advocates claim (see EDM, June 11).

Bottlenecks are now a characteristic of the Russian economy, not just in the oil sector. (For a useful discussion of such bottlenecks in other parts of Russian economic life, see The Insider, August 13, 2025.) The Putin regime has not taken the steps needed to overcome this general problem or even to convince industry managers that they must do so It is certainly worried, however, about it not only because of the immediate consequences of bottlenecks on the Russian economy and how such chokepoints are limiting Russian growth but also because of the widespread belief that bottlenecks played a key role in the demise of the Soviet state, something the Kremlin is committed to avoiding any repetition of (Profile, December 22, 2022). The results of Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure will only heighten those concerns, and that should lend more attention to bottlenecks in Russia that were routinely given to bottlenecks in the years leading up to the Soviet Union’s collapse. 

This article was published at The Jamestown Foundation

About Paul Goble

Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at paul.goble@gmail.com .
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Moscow-appointed authorities declare state of emergency in Crimea

26.06.2026, 15:01 Uhr

Photo: Ulf Mauder/dpa

The authorities appointed by Moscow on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, have declared a regional state of emergency. 

The move was announced on Friday by the appointed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, and the appointed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev.

The decision was taken primarily to resolve economic issues, Aksyonov wrote on Telegram. The state of emergency would make it possible to swiftly address issues essential to the stable functioning of all sectors on which the population's livelihoods depend.

Kiev has significantly expanded its counteroffensives recently, primarily targeting the Russian oil and gas industry and military installations.

Ukraine aims to disrupt the Russian army's fuel supplies and reduce revenue from the energy sector, which is vital for Moscow in financing its war. 

People in Crimea are feeling the consequences acutely. Private individuals can no longer obtain petrol, and power cuts have been introduced. 

Kiev has announced its intention to cut off supplies to the peninsula.

 

The Iran Fiasco’s Silver Lining: Trump, Bibi, and the Neocons Got Their Clocks Cleaned

by David Stockman | Jun 22, 2026 | 

If you don’t think the Donald inhabits an alternative universe – just set your mandibles loose to chomp on his most recent missive. According to history’s most gifted practitioner of the Art of the Deal, only one thing really counts with respect to his Paperless Invite for Iran to join yet another round of negotiations: Namely, making good on their pledge to “never, ever” get a nuke, which they never, ever, ever actually had or had even pursued:

Trump: “This agreement is about one thing — that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. Never ever ever. The rest of it is irrelevant, frankly.”

And just in case anyone missed the point, he further insisted that the real bad stuff that supposedly provoked the US/Israel attack in the first place – the 420 kilograms of 60% HEUs – and which the Donald had been on the verge sending in ground troops and Caterpillar earth-movers to retrieve, doesn’t matter so much any more, either!

Trump is backing away from getting Iran’s enriched material: “You could make the case, why even bother? It’s not very valuable stuff.”

That’s right. It is plain as day that the Donald is laying the ground work for a final “deal” with Iran that contains nothing more than a notional “No Nukes” pledge, gussied up by some variation of JCPOA Light.

That is, an agreement about:

• the length in months and years of a moratorium on Iran’s fuel grade (3.67%) enrichment operations in support of its civilian nuclear power plant.
• the scale of these civilian enrichment operations in terms of facilities and numbers and types of permitted centrifuges once they restart.
• the intrusiveness of a renewed IAEA inspection regime.
• the “snap-back” mechanisms designed to keep the mullahs on the straight and narrow of the overall Peace Plan.

Needless to say, the Obama folks will be proven to have done a far better job the first time around during their arduous negotiations of 2013-2015 than whatever cockamamie version emerges from a final deal that the Donald must and will sign in the shadows of the upcoming November Congressional elections.

Still, peace is better than war against a faraway nation that has 1% of America’s GDP and which never wanted “nukes” of the explosive type in the first place; and one that has now also discovered that 1,600 kilometers of rocket- and drone-studded shoreline along the Strait of Hormuz to be far more powerful than an implosion device chock-a-block with U-238, anyway.

But when it comes to Iran’s missiles, proxies, evil regime, enriched stockpiles and economic and military strength in the middle east – all the things that the War was allegedly fought over—not so much.

Of course, you might well ask why the Donald spent upwards of $100 billion to date on this misbegotten project. And that’s at least what it is when you count munitions expended (~$41 billion), damaged bases and military assets (~$12 billion), aid to Israel and sundry O&M costs ($7 billion) and needlessly increased domestic fuel costs (~$40 billion).

Indeed, none of that was necessary – to say nothing of pushing the global economy to the edge of collapse – in order to get a NO NUKES PLEDGE from the mullahs. After all, the chief mullah himself – the assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei Sr— had given that pledge long ago (2004) in the form of something far more powerful and binding than a diplomatic post-card addressed to Washington.

We are referring, of course, to the former Ayatollah’s religiously binding Fatwa proscribing Iran from possessing or even working upon nuclear weapons.

And, don’t smirk. The alleged medievalist regime in Tehran did take the instructions of its Supreme Leader deadly serious. For crying out loud, even the war-loving US intelligence agencies have testified to that truth over and again.

So at the end of the day, the Donald’s still secret “peace plan” appears to be all to the good. This last and most pathetic Regime Change War may finally destroy the UniParty consensus which has generated endless Forever Wars since the end of the Cold War in 1991; and set off a civil war in the Republican party that may finally rid the remnant that emerges from the baleful grasp of the Bibi/neocon Fifth Column.

Stated differently, what the neocons will denounce as the Donald’s “surrender” will underscore better than anything else that the war was a gigantic mistake; and that the bellicose loud-mouth who launched it without even consulting the Congress – let alone getting a constitutionally prescribed declaration of war – got his clock cleaned in the process.

Indeed, that Trump actually “lost” the war was starkly confirmed this morning by the careful work of the folks who make a living tracking tankers on the blue water and the movement of 106 mb/d of liquids through the labyrinthine global petroleum supply chains.

To wit, in January Iran was earning about $90 million per day from its oil exports. That figure reflected a $63 per barrel Brent price minus a $10 per barrel discount for Iranian crude, multipled by sales of about 1.7 million barrels per day.

As it happened, the Donald’s mighty Naval blockade wasn’t all its cracked-up to be by his ex-news-reader Secy of Defense. That’s because there was about 130 million barrels of Iranian petroleum on the blue water in transit to market or in floating storage when Hegseth allegedly brought down the hammer of the US Navy blockade on April 13th.

But that was more than enough to support sales during the month of May of about 850,000 barrels per day from this floating stockpile outside the blockade perimeter—augmented by another 250,000barrels per day of workarounds over land routes.

Moreover, while the resulting sales of 1.1 mb/d during May represented a sharp 35% reduction from the January daily rate, that was only half the equation. During May the Brent marker price averaged $107 per barrel or nearly double the January price. Moreover, due to the extreme global scarcity induced by the Donald’s Demolition Derby in the Gulf, the discount fell to just $1 per barrel on Iranian crude.

Hence the math. At $106 per barrel and 1.1 mb/d, Iran earned an estimated $116 million PER DAY in May or nearly 30% more than the January level!

And that was even as Mr. Body-builder at the DOD was regaling the Donald with the wonders of the Naval blockade.

Moreover, for want of doubt the estimated Iranian haul of oil loot during May was $3.6 billion on the month and $43 billion at an annual rate – a figure which happens to exceed 15% of Iran’s pre-war GDP.

So, no, the mullahs didn’t cry UNCLE!

THE DONALD DID. And there is no doubt as to why.

The coming storm of renewed inflation is already baked into the cake and will surge again toward 5-6% or higher in the run-up to the November elections for reasons we amplify below. Still, the Donald is belatedly doing god’s work – that is, making peace – because he apparently finally realized that if the Dems run the tables in November, he’ll be getting a last ride to Mar-a-Logo on the Dick Nixon Memorial Helicopter before next Easter.

In fact, the chart below tells you all you need to know. Most voters do not parse the prices on their grocery bills as between the part that existed on January 19, 2025 and what they paid last week for coffee, hamburger or eggs – and the same with respect to fuel, utilities, rent, health insurance and other daily necessities.

Prices for all of these have been surging since the Donald’s inflationary train-wreck during the pandemic. That was when the lockdowns and supply chain disruptions shrank available supply. At the same time, $4 trillion worth of stimmies and free stuff signed by the Donald – along with an eruption of Trump-supported money-printing at the Fed – turbo charged demand, thereby causing inflation rates to erupt toward 9% and 40-year highs.

That’s the affordability issue, represented in a nutshell by the chart below. The Donald was elected in 2024 because voters desperately hoped that he would not only slow the rate of increase, but would actually roll back the whopping cost-of-living gains that they had already suffered during the previous four years. After all, 108% more for coffee, 64% more for hamburger meat and 52% more to fill the gas tank does make an impression on almost everyone.

Alas, when Bibi convinced the stupid mark in the Oval Office – which he had been hunting for over decades – that the mullahs would roll-over on their backs after the first wave of bombs and missiles, it was all over except the shouting. Any chance to even slow-down this tidal wave of every day cost increases was ended, and the way was paved for a new inflationary surge that is already barreling down the supply chain pike.

Indeed, the Donald is so fundamentally innumerate and impulsive that even now he doesn’t understand that his surrender to the mullahs is already too late. There is so much inflation in the pipeline that even a return to the pre-war status quo ante is not going to slow-down the reported inflation indices in the months just ahead.

For instance, during May the producer price index rose at an incredible 41% annualized rate (blue line) and had been surging higher since the beginning of the year. As a result, the slower moving Y/Y index (dotted red line) is just catching up, rising by a double digit 13.1 % versus prior year during May.

Needless to say, these wholesale level cost increases are now busy filtering their way through the nooks and crannies of America $30 trillion economy in the form of rising energy, materials and labor cost inputs, thereby working their way into end products and the CPI indices to be reported from July through October.

In fact, we have the same story with the consumer price index – just with a few months of lag time. As shown below, the inflationary momentum already in the headline rate will be lifted further on a Y/Y basis right through election time, even if oil prices “drop like a stone” as the Donald apparently expects.

Thus, the Y/Y headline CPI was rising at just 2.37% a year ago, but this May had already rebounded to 4.2% on a Y/Y basis. Of course, it’s the inexorable math of index construction that is already built in. The monthly annualized rate had posted at 5.5% in May and had averaged +6.7% during the four months since February when the war shocks began to hit the US economy.

As we move forward in the months ahead, the low 2.35% average annualized gain of last June to August will drop out, and the higher rates already built into the PPI pipeline will replace them. In turn, that means the headline CPI increase on a Y/Y basis has nowhere to go except up from 4.2% during the balance of summer and early fall.

Meanwhile, rising inflation will not be the only cloud on the horizon as the November bi-elections approach. It should be evident by now that the massive stock market bubble is fixing to have one of its epic decennial crashes.

As of this morning, Space X is now trading at a market cap of $3.0 trillion. That happens to represent 160 times its LTM sales of $18.7 billion, and an infinite ratio to its -$14 billion of free cash flow.

But Space X, of course, is only the canary in the red hot infernal-like coal mine down on Wall Street. As shown below, when you take an average of all the different ways to value stocks – including forward and trailing PEs, EBITDA/Enterprise ratios and aggregate market cap to GDP—we are now at, yes, the 100th percentile of historic performance going back to the 1890s.

To use the Donald’s favorite phrase, the stock market bubble is at nose-bleed level that you have never, ever seen before!

Needless to say, every time the stock market has worked itself into a speculative bubble even approaching this absurd magnitude, it has crashed. And crashed hard.

So come next December, the Donald will be in the countdown to GOODBYE (and good riddance). Inflation will have flared, the stock market will have crashed, the Peace Deal well have given way to renewed Israeli-instigated warfare in the Persian Gulf, and the GOP will have suffered a 1974 scale landslide defeat in November.

You don’t have to be a student of American history to understand what would happen next.

Needless to say, none of this will be good for the unhinged megalomaniacal blowhard now ensconced in the Oval Office. But, ironically, it may well be good for America.

Surely Washington’s ignominious defeat in Iran will put the disciples of Empire on the run. And, hopefully, it may purge the GOP of both the MAGA Hat maniacs and the neocon Bibi First warmongers, too.