Finally, we speak with Tamar Jacoby, the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project. She was a senior writer and justice editor at Newsweek and, before that, the deputy editor of the New York Times op-ed page. Now a regular contributor to Forbes, she is the author of Displaced: The Ukrainian Refugee Experience and we discuss her article at The Washington Monthly, “Can Europe Turn Tough Talk on Russia into Action?”
issue: Foreign Policy & Defense
Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Can Europe Turn Tough Talk on Russia into Action?
The war in Ukraine has transformed Western European thinking about defending itself against its giant neighbor, Russia. The latest push, proposed last week by the European Union, is a blueprint for a better coordinated military buildup—procuring and manufacturing weapons together rather than separately, country by country. It’s an ambitious plan, in line with other pending continent-wide reforms—deregulation and a single capital market—and like them, it promises increased efficiency and scale in pursuit of shared European goals. What’s unclear is whether the 27 EU members and their allies, including Britain, can put aside national interests for the common good. The stakes could hardly be higher, but the evidence is mixed.
Much has changed in Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, with countries across the continent talking a much different game than four years ago. After decades of hoping for good relations with Moscow, most leaders now see their eastern neighbor as an aggressive, revanchist power, preparing potentially for a hot war and already menacing nearby nations with an array of gray-zone weapons—from disinformation and cyberattacks to sabotage of critical infrastructure. Uncertain if an increasingly fickle and isolationist U.S. will stand by them, many Europeans recognize they must prepare to face the enemy alone, and defense is now Topic A in political circles.
Many countries are actively preparing. National defense budgets have increased dramatically—from €218 billion in 2021 to a projected €392 billion in 2025. A generation of innovative startups is competing with seasoned contractors to develop cutting-edge weapons. The most concerned capitals are discussing mandatory conscription, and some have mounted national programs to teach civilian defense.
Still, for all this progress, many across the continent, concerned about the pace of change, wonder if Europe will succeed in translating its bold talk into action.
Read more in Washington Monthly.
Is the Ukraine War Spilling into Europe? A PPI Conversation
Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Estonia in the Crosshairs
It was the kind of display only NATO can mount. Several hundred Italian troops from the alliance’s Baltic air policing mission stood in formation at Estonia’s Ämari Air Base, more than 1,500 miles from home. Some of the world’s most powerful weaponry loomed behind them on the windswept tarmac: an F-35 fighter jet, a SAMP/T air defense missile launcher, a Typhoon Eurofighter, and a CAEW radar surveillance plane.
Just days after three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets violated Estonian airspace, loitering for 12 minutes before being escorted out by NATO aircraft, Italian defense minister Guido Crosetto had flown in to thank the Italian pilots who intercepted the planes. A big bear of a man with a shaved head, he and Estonian defense minister Hanno Pevkur stood together on the runway to announce that Italy would extend its rotational presence in Estonia, leaving its jets and air defense system at Ämari through spring 2026.
“If [the Russians] are looking for a response,” Crosetto declared, “this is it—our strengthened presence here.”
Ainsley for The Spectator: Labour’s deputy divisions: insider vs outsider?
Tim Shipman and Claire Ainsley from the Progressive Policy Institute join Patrick Gibbons to reflect on Labour’s party conference as it draws to a close in Liverpool. This conference has been received positively for Labour but, on the final day, a hustings for the deputy leadership demonstrated that divides remain under the surface. Is Lucy Powell versus Bridget Phillipson a case of left versus right in the party, or is it more about the outsider versus the insider? And, as a leading political commentator declares Labour to now be the ‘party of the professional middle class’, what does the contest tell us about who Labour needs to appeal to?
Listen to the podcast on the Spectator.
Jacoby for Forbes: Kyiv’s E-Points Drone Marketplace—An Amazon For Frontline Units
The tall, bearded officer, code-named Prickly—like all Ukrainian fighters, he uses a call sign to protect his identity—is proud as a peacock of what he has done in six months at the helm of his frontline drone unit, and he gives some of the credit to Kyiv’s new “e-point” system, Army of Drones Bonus.
He and several of his men explain how the system works in an interview near a former farmhouse in eastern Ukraine. The yard is littered with military equipment and junk, including the farmer’s much-worn living-room furniture, now arranged around a makeshift fire pit. Several stray cats and a mangy dog come and go as we talk. “We’ve improved our performance by a factor of 10,” the commander boasts. “We know that thanks to the drone points system, which measures how many men we kill and how much equipment we destroy.”
After more than three and a half years of fighting, drones have transformed the battlefield in Ukraine. Every operation depends on uncrewed platforms, either to carry out the mission or protect soldiers. Units work with an increasingly varied drone arsenal—large and small devices, powered by rotors and fixed wings, guided by radio waves and fiber optic cable. Kyiv and Moscow are locked in a deadly technology race, constantly competing to counter the other side’s latest developments, and things change so fast that an wounded fighter returning to the front after just a few months away can no longer recognize his unit’s tactics. Estimates suggest that unmanned aerial vehicles are responsible for up to 80% of battlefield casualties.
Read more in Forbes.
Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Downing Russian Drones: “The U.S. and Europe Should Learn From Us”
Looking back, it was a prescient warning. Just the day before the Kremlin sent 19 unmanned aerial vehicles deep into Polish territory, prompting NATO to scramble its most advanced fighter jets and anti-missile air defenses, I met with the commander of a Ukrainian air defense unit protecting the city of Sloviansk from Russian drones. We sat outdoors in a quiet courtyard near the city center, just 15 miles from the front line. The officer, who goes by the name Fin—he worked in the financial sector, running a grain export company, before volunteering for combat duty in 2022—explained how his team of advanced IT technicians and other specialists uses signals intelligence (SIGINT) to intercept incoming Russian drones.
A tall, well-built man with a graying beard, Fin took out his phone to show me a video of a typical intercept. The unit had hacked into the frequencies the targeted Russian drone was using to send video images back to its pilot behind the front line, letting us see the battlefield through enemy eyes. Ukrainian forests and fields floated by, bracketed by the drone’s spinning rotors on the edges of the frame. Then it all went gray. The SIGINT unit, code-named Specter, had used the device’s own navigational signals to bring it down, crashing to earth far short of its target.
“We do this for a fraction of what it would cost Europe and the U.S.,” Fin explained. “No jets, no million-dollar weaponry. And we intercept a large number of drones.” Just the night before, he told me, a routine evening in Sloviansk, the unit brought down 198 enemy UAVs. “Europe and the U.S. should start learning from us before it’s too late,” he warned. “They’ll either learn from our experience, or they’ll learn on their own—the hard way.”
Read more in Washington Monthly.
Jacoby for Forbes: Ukrainian Veterans Prepare For Postwar Leadership
Nothing about the dozen men and women gathered on a summer Saturday in the nondescript classroom in downtown Kyiv signaled who they were. Pale, skinny women in punkish black mingled comfortably with beefy men in rugged work clothes. Ages ranged from early 20s to late middle age. They greeted each other warmly and shared a few jokes as they squeezed into plastic chair desks and waited for their instructor.
What they had in common: all were Ukrainian veterans chosen to participate in a program they hope will prepare them for future leadership, whether in government, nonprofit organizations, or community settings—any initiative, as the program’s cofounders put it in an interview, to “rebuild and strengthen Ukraine.”
Virtually no one in Ukraine expects peace anytime soon—they don’t believe Vladimir Putin will make peace until he has achieved his goal of subjugating his southern neighbor. But in a nation fighting to break free of Russian influence, refashioning itself as a European democracy, the future of the country is on everyone’s mind—that’s what they’re fighting and dying for—and it’s never too soon to think about rebuilding.
Read more in Forbes.
Jacoby for Washington Monthly: A Deadly Night in Kyiv Makes a Mockery of the Peace Process
It was already clear at 10:00 p.m. that it would be a tough night in Kyiv. The air alert sounded at 9:24 p.m., blaring outside and shrieking out of the state-supported app on my phone. Like many in Ukraine, I checked a couple of privately run Telegram chats to see what was incoming—the chats use open-source intelligence to give real-time updates, sometimes with a text every few seconds, showing exactly what is in the air and where, pinpointed to the neighborhood. The picture didn’t look good: already two dozen little drone icons on my go-to channel’s schematic map. But none were yet in Kyiv, so I breathed easy for now and went back to my otherwise quiet Wednesday night.
That day, the news in the Western media was still all about Donald Trump’s efforts to broker a ceasefire a week earlier. Several media outlets were still analyzing what exactly had happened when seven European leaders, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, traveled to the White House on August 18 to try to undo the damage Trump caused at his chummy meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska the week before. Another story revealed European leaders were working to develop security guarantees—perhaps European soldiers at Ukrainian airports and train stations—to be implemented once a peace agreement is signed. Another shocking report detailed ExxonMobil’s secret talks with a state-run Russian energy giant about resuming business as usual when the ink on a deal is dry.
Read more in Washington Monthly.
Jacoby for Forbes: Ukraine Looks Abroad For Joint Ventures To Boost Its Defense Industry
Before Russia invaded in 2022, Pyotr Ivanenko produced sports equipment in Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv. When Russian troops surrounded the city, bombarding it relentlessly and prompting three-quarters of the population to flee, Ivanenko, a fit man with a shaved head and ice green eyes, made a decision. “I needed to change what I was doing,” he told me an interview, “to switch to making what the country needs.” (Ivanenko is not his real name—he requested a pseudonym to protect his business and his family.)
By 2023, he was churning out homegrown armored vehicles—his company makes everything but the engines—and angling for a contract with the defense ministry. By 2025, he had developed two types of unmanned ground vehicles that can transport supplies to remote military positions, evacuate wounded soldiers, and carry a mounted gun into hostile territory, allowing a gunner in the rear to fire at the enemy from close range.
Now, like almost all Ukrainian arms manufacturers, Ivanenko has a problem. His defense ministry contract is coming to an end, and although he sells personnel carriers and robotized vehicles to fighting units all along the front line, he says he could make 10 times as many if the government had the money to buy them. But the 2025 Ukrainian budget allocates just $17.5 billion to purchase weapons, exactly half the $35 billon in equipment the domestic arms industry says it can produce. Virtually all manufacturers, large and small, are clamoring for some kind of relief.
Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Trump, Zelensky, and European Leaders Got Along—Mostly by Sidestepping the Big Issues
The seven European leaders who accompanied President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House on Monday made little secret of why they had suddenly interrupted their summer vacations to make the trip. They believed they might need to shield the Ukrainian leader from the disparagement and bullying he had to endure on his last Oval Office in February.
In the end, that wasn’t necessary. Host Donald Trump was jovial and eager to get along with his guests. He complimented Zelensky on his suit-like attire and flattered the seven Europeans— NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Finnish President Alexander Stubb—each with a personalized compliment. They flattered back with even more lavish and ingratiating thanks and praise, and everyone seemed to go home happy.
The questions left hanging amid all the smiles and good cheer: what exactly did they discuss—and what issues, if any, were settled?
Read more in Washington Monthly.
Jacoby on Washington Monthly’s Politics Roundtable: Trump Just Gave Putin Everything He Wanted
Trump’s recent summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, ended not in toughness but in capitulation. Despite pledging red lines beforehand, Trump rolled out the red carpet, and has now appeared to endorse Moscow’s demands for the surrender of Ukrainian territory. In this week’s episode of the Washington Monthly politics roundtable, special guest Tamar Jacoby, Director of the New Ukraine Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, shares reaction on the ground in Kyiv to Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine. She also suggests steps Trump should be taking instead to regain the advantage over Putin.
Listen to the full podcast.
Jacoby for Washington Monthly: How to Reverse Trump’s Capitulation to Putin
Last week was a relatively good week in Kyiv. Despite all the hype and hoopla swirling in the Western media, few Ukrainians expected much from the summit in Anchorage. But in the run-up to the meeting, Vladimir Putin was eager to get on Donald Trump’s good side, and he showed some restraint in launching missile and drone attacks. There were no significant air alerts in the capital city for a week. Residents got their first full night’s sleep in many months, and it showed in the mood—everyone seemed just a little kinder and more cheerful. “Now, if only we can survive the peace,” one active-duty soldier joked, looking ahead to the Alaska talks.
When the news came late Friday, no one in Kyiv was surprised that the meeting had fizzled. If anything, there was a sigh of relief—no deal had been made above Ukrainian heads.
Now the grim reality is setting in—in Kyiv and across the West. If all the silly talk and false hope leading up the summit served any purpose, it was to remind the world that war is still raging in Europe. It also helped concentrate minds—among Western publics and politicians—on the end game in Ukraine.
Keep reading in Washington Monthly.
Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Ukrainian Fighters Aren’t Expecting Much from the Trump-Putin Summit
The city of Sloviansk, prewar population just over 100,00, sits smack in the middle of the territory Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will discuss “swapping” when they meet on Friday in Alaska—the first U.S.-Russia summit since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moscow and Kyiv have been fighting over Sloviansk more or less nonstop for more than 11 years, since Russian proxies first tried to take over the Donetsk province in 2014. With one exception—three months in spring 2014—the city has remained in Ukrainian hands.
Now, as world leaders talk over Ukrainians’ heads about giving up Sloviansk without another shot fired, I sat down with two soldiers who have been defending the city for over a year. Vlad Huma, 38, and Hlib Velitchenko, 32, say a swap of the kind Putin has proposed is unthinkable. But they know the conversation won’t end there, and they are girding for the worst.