On the menu today: Readers, I knew that this journey to Ukraine would take me to some strange and unexpected places. Today, for the first time, I cannot disclose the exact location of where I was, and that’s not just because I often get lost. It’s because there’s something extraordinarily cool up there, and the deal was that in exchange for reporting about it, I wouldn’t reveal where it was.
Drone HuntersAn undisclosed location somewhere in Kyiv, Ukraine — This is the first edition of the newsletter in which I cannot tell you exactly where I’m reporting from, because the Ukrainian government and my hosts would prefer that I not reveal which building’s roof has one of six anti-drone stations around the city, where one of the machine guns that dates from World War II is manned by a Supreme Court judge.
That is not a typo, and I did not have a stroke.
The first thing you should know is that Ukraine has roughly 160 Supreme Court judges, split into criminal, civil, administrative, and commercial or arbitration chambers. So a Supreme Court judge is slightly less rare here than in the United States.
Steven E. Moore, the former GOP congressional staffer who is now president of the Ukraine Freedom Project, an organization that helps get relief to Ukrainian communities near the front, introduced me to Yury Chumak. By day, Chumak is a speaker-judge of the Ukrainian Supreme Court in the commercial chamber, but he spends part of his spare time attempting to shoot down Iranian-made Shahed drones when they fly over the skies of Kyiv:
Chumak’s role in the war began almost as soon as it started, when he and some fellow judges, in Moore’s words, “grabbed a lot of AKs and ran towards the Russians” as Moscow’s forces advanced closer and closer to the city.
“Kyiv was about 60 to 70 percent surrounded, and our idea was to fight inside of the city, like partisans,” Chumak said. “About eight to ten people, we judges, we organized a squad.” Once the immediate threat had passed, he and his fellow judges and other government workers set out to formally establish themselves as a volunteer force. Ukrainian law allows citizens to join and organize “Volunteer Defense Force units,” which take on certain roles and work with the military to free up forces for other tasks.
“We registered it . . . because we are lawyers,” Chumak says with a smile. The Ukrainian military regularly checks in on the volunteer units to make sure they are operating safely and professionally.
Ukraine has multiple layers of air defense — including U.S.-made Patriots and German IRIS-Ts — and the anti-drone team is exactly what it sounds like. They’re not expected to shoot down Russian planes, which it sounds like aren’t often seen over Kyiv these days anyway.
The guns are aimed in the direction of areas that are fairly sparsely populated, to minimize the odds that a destroyed or damaged drone lands on civilians below.
When Ukraine set up this volunteer force to man air-defense systems, the group was given whatever was left, after all the best weapons were sent to the front. If you picture some long-forgotten gun stuck way at the absolute back of some Ukrainian arms warehouse, covered in dust . . . that’s pretty much what the drone-defense team received.
The team’s first, and largest gun is a Soviet version of a Maxim gun, manufactured in 1944:
The team made the tripod; the barrel of the Maxim gun has water inside of it to cool it, resulting in an odd sloshing sound when the barrel is moved. When I made that observation, one of the volunteers joked, “Yes, we have a pool up here.”
The Maxim gun fires up to 250 rounds from a belt, a combination of tracer rounds, regular rounds, and rounds that are more explosive. The gun has a range of about 1.2 miles:
The team’s, er, “newer” gun is small enough to be carried by a soldier and was manufactured in Czechoslovakia in 1964. It has a similar range of about 1.2 miles:
A third volunteer mans a powerful spotlight, and a fourth man may use a rifle to shoot at the drone. Because the Shahed drones are usually traveling about 62 miles per hour, the gunners are instructed to aim five drone-lengths ahead of them. (It’s a bit like Wayne Gretzky’s advice in hockey to skate to where the puck is going, instead of where the puck is.)
The team is outfitted with helmets and body armor, which they encouraged me to try on, confirming that I look even more ridiculous than Michael Dukakis driving a tank. No, you don’t get to see that picture, but you can rest assured that at least one team of Ukrainian anti-drone volunteers got a good hearty laugh to lift their spirits one sunny afternoon.
The mood was light on the afternoon that we visited; most of the drone attacks occur at night, and a flying object is a much easier target during the day than after dark. Drones approaching Kyiv often come in low along the Dnieper River, making them tougher to detect. Because most drone attacks occur at night, the men there tell me they are much easier to hear coming than see coming; they say that by the time they can hear a Shahed drone, it is in range. Cruise missiles are louder, because of their engines, but they move too fast for the drone station to be all that effective against them. The team also has a thermal weapon sight to detect the heat from the drone, and a laser pointer.
In addition to the six teams on rooftops, there is also a mobile unit that drives around the city.
A member of the Ukrainian military is also always present with a Stinger missile. “With a Stinger, you can shoot anything,” Chumak said. But Stingers cost $38,000 apiece and are in limited supply, so the philosophy is generally not to waste a Stinger taking out a Shahed drone — that’s what all the other guns are supposed to be for.
Chumak says the anti-drone units around the city have shot down “a handful” of Shaheds. No one on this team has managed to take one down, but they’re determined. And credit the team for operating under the high degree of difficulty that comes with using one gun manufactured when Franklin Roosevelt was president and another manufactured when Lyndon Johnson was was starting his presidency.
Chumak points out that one of the maddening ironies of this war is how close the Russian and Ukrainian peoples once were. “My wife’s mother is from Russia,” he tells me. “My wife speaks to my children in the Russian language. Why am I telling you this? We were friendly. We did not want to fight with them. Even in 2014, when we lost Crimea, a majority of the Ukrainian people said Russia was our friend.”
A few moments later, the judge makes some comments indicating that certain Ukrainians are watching developments in the U.S. political scene with great concern:
We are lucky, and we are happy. The United States, and Europe, but mostly the United States, understand that we must fight. We like very much Reagan. He was Republican. Yes, I am a judge, maybe I know a little more than other people, but he was Republican. He said that we shall destroy the Evil Empire. And he did it! And he was Republican. And now we are afraid — it’s going into politics — now we are afraid that Republicans will say, like DeSantis, we will stop the war. We won’t send weapons to Ukraine. They [the Russians] will kill most of our people.
There are few figures better situated to understand and maximize communications and cooperation between congressional Republicans and Ukraine than Steven Moore, who spent seven years on Capitol Hill working in the House of Representatives mostly as chief of staff for former representative Pete Roskam, and who now runs his charitable organization from Kyiv. As he describes himself, he’s likely the only person in the world who has delivered humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian front and whipped votes on the floor of the House of Representatives with then-majority whip Kevin McCarthy.
Moore’s analysis of the trend in support for Ukraine among congressional Republicans is required reading for anyone who cares about this issue. The short version is that Republicans are growing more wary of supporting Ukraine, but they become more supportive when they learn that one, the amount of aid is not that much relative to defense spending; two, Ukraine is winning; and three, Russia’s war-fighting capabilities are being severely degraded.
Regarding the amount of aid, as of last week, the U.S. government had provided $43.8 billion worth of military support to Ukraine, detailed here. It is worth reminding some people that this kind of aid is not cash. It is all kinds of vehicles, guns, and ammunition that the Pentagon largely had in storage. (As I wrote back in April, there are certain weapons systems in short supply — HIMARs, Javelins, and Stingers, in particular — that the U.S. should not send any more of until our stockpiles are replenished to sufficient levels to deal with other potential threats, including one particular threat with a Great Wall. But the majority of weapons, ammunition, vehicles, and equipment that the U.S. is sending Ukraine is in great supply. Some of it was going to be scrapped!)
As of this writing, the U.S. government has spent $5.3 trillion in fiscal year 2023. In other words, all military aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the war a year and a half ago adds up to about four-fifths of 1 percent of all U.S. government spending this year. Military aid to Ukraine since the start of the war is about half of what we spend on the U.S. Department of Transportation alone in one year. It is about a quarter of what we spend on the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is about one-sixth of what we spend on the U.S. Department of Education.
There are a lot of ways in which the U.S. government spends gobs of money, and we can fairly ask what we’re getting from all that spending. If you’ve been reading this newsletter the past few days, I think it’s abundantly clear what the consequence of our contribution is: Ukrainians who otherwise would have been murdered don’t die. What amount of our unused defense stockpiles we’re willing to send is literally a matter of life and death to these people.
As for the question of whether Ukraine is winning, a few days before our rooftop meeting, the Ukrainians boasted they had already had commandos land on Crimea for a hit-and-run mission. Ukrainian forces have liberated Robotyne and are advancing on several fronts.
Look, I don’t have a crystal ball, but nobody in Ukraine has told me they expect a short war. “Ukraine is winning” is not the same as “Ukraine will win the war quickly.” They’re trying to do this while losing as few men as possible and they’re often outgunned, with contested skies. But the Russians can be beaten; their troops were all over the surrounding suburbs of Kyiv in the opening days, and they were beaten back. The whole Prigozhin coup attempt was an indicator that Russian morale is terrible, and the entire brittle and inflexible Russian system of government is starting to show cracks from stress.
As for the question of whether Russia’s war-fighting capabilities are being severely degraded, there is confirmed visual evidence of 11,906 Russian military vehicles being taken out, with 8,188 destroyed, 475 damaged, 444 abandoned, and — wait for it — 2,869 captured by the Ukrainians. (If you think the U.S. has given the Ukrainians a lot of vehicles, think about how many the Russians have given them.) The comparable numbers for Ukraine are 4,322 vehicles taken out, with 2,901 destroyed, 331 damaged, 148 abandoned, and 942 captured.
Apparently, we can expect some big fight on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks over the administration wanting to send more than $13 billion in additional security assistance and $7.3 billion for economic and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. That’s change under the couch cushions compared to the amount of money our government threw around in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Hey, will skeptics in Congress sign on if we call this new assistance “the Russian Armed Forces Reduction Act?”
ADDENDUM: Remember those M1A1 Abrams tanks that Biden announced he was providing Ukraine in January?
The Biden administration hopes to get them to Ukraine this fall.