Foreign Affairs published a Koch brothers propaganda puff piece today, attributed to Michael C. Desch of Notre Dame.

It plays dumb while trying to be serious and claim that Ukraine should surrender to Russia. Of course the Koch nuts would say that. They dropped it hot during live negotiations, as if academics are just hired guns to provide cover for whatever the Trump administration is about to impose on Kyiv. The author and all that big money behind him however give away the game.

The article is titled “Ukraine Is Losing the War” without a timeline. Today? Last year? Always and forever no matter what? See the dumb trick? Then it is subtitled “With Moscow Pressing Its Advantage, Kyiv Should Trade Land for Peace.” In just 5,000 words it manages to stumble into at least nine major logical contradictions.

Given how much disinformation was stuffed down the throat of Foreign Affairs editors, it is no surprise the Koch piece was summarized approvingly on Russian-language media within hours of publication. Yet the historical reasoning alone would fail any LSE seminar I ever took. Foreign Affairs owes its readers an explanation, if not a retraction. In the meantime, I’ll take a poke at it.

Desch Keeps Punching Himself in the Nuts

#	Desch Claims	Then Also Claims	Then Punches Own Nuts
1	Mass and resources make Ukrainian resistance futile	Post-surrender Ukraine should build drone defenses and pursue battlefield innovation	Prescribes the same technology-over-mass strategy he spent 3,000 words saying doesn’t work
2	Russian war aims expanded at every stage (Minsk to recognition to annexation of four oblasts)	Conceding the Donbas would satisfy Moscow	His own evidence documents serial escalation after each accommodation
3	The Donbas is not the Sudetenland because Russian tactics are not blitzkrieg	—	Munich was about appeasement dynamics, not Wehrmacht tactics. Refutes a comparison nobody made
4	At current rates it would take Russia 30 years to conquer east-bank Ukraine	Ukraine should stop fighting and lose Western support	The 30-year timeline depends on the Western assistance he wants to end
5	Ukraine’s 36 million population cannot match Russia’s 140 million	Russia has 700,000 troops in theater vs. Ukraine’s 300,000	Operational ratio is 2.3:1, not the 4:1 demographic ratio he leads with
6	Russia’s GDP at PPP is $7 trillion vs. Ukraine’s $657 billion	—	PPP inflates domestic purchasing power, not capacity to buy weapons on international markets. Nominal GDP puts Russia near Italy
7	Ukrainian corruption undermines fortifications and recruitment	Russia’s corruption is absorbed by its size	Russian corruption collapsed logistics at Kyiv, lost 1,000+ tanks, and sank the Moskva. Scale multiplies procurement corruption
8	Western technology has not given Ukraine a decisive edge	Russian technological innovation (fiber-optic drones, ISR-enabled artillery) is providing decisive advantages	Technology is irrelevant when the West provides it, decisive when Russia deploys it
9	The Surovikin Line proves Ukraine cannot breach fortified positions	Ukraine should not build similar fortifications because Russian infiltration defeats them	Russian fortifications work. Ukrainian fortifications would not. Logic runs whichever way the conclusion needs

The table speaks for itself, hopefully. Foreign Affairs should be ashamed. Now let’s look deeper at the disinformation methods.

Rigged Numbers

Desch compares Ukraine’s population of 36 million to Russia’s 140 million as though Russia can send its entire male population to just one meat grinder.

Russia has a 4,000-mile border with China, commitments in Syria, internal security requirements across eleven time zones, and a domestic economy that requires workers. His own operational numbers of 300,000 Ukrainian troops versus 700,000 Russian show a much narrower gap than raw population figures, but he buries this operational reality under a demographic spectacle.

Why?

Then he uses purchasing power parity to inflate Russia’s GDP to $7 trillion, making it look like a near-peer competitor. Their ominal GDP, measuring the actual capacity to purchase weapons systems on international markets, deflates Russia’s economy to roughly the size of Italy’s. Everyone knows this.

Again, why?

PPP measures how many bad haircuts you can buy in Novosibirsk, not how many precision-guided munitions could be imported. Let’s face it, Putin is bald.

Russian contract soldiers, known for their low morale somehow get inflated as more motivated than Ukrainian conscripts. The dude inverts everything documented about defensive warfare psychology. Ukrainians are fighting for their homes. Russian “volunteers” are bored, annoyed, reluctant, disproportionately recruited from impoverished regions by financial incentives they distrust. The claim that cheap mercenaries outperform homeland defenders contradicts everything everyone knows about combat motivation.

It’s stuff like this that makes me think the Russians wrote the first draft.

Corruption as Hypocrisy

Desch flags corruption as undermining the war effort, but not Russian corruption. No, he acts like only corruption in Ukraine matters. Fortifications not built, recruitment compromised? He waves away Russian corruption by arguing it simoly “absorbs the damage.” But Russian military corruption is the very reason they lost over a thousand tanks in the first year, the reason logistics collapsed north of Kyiv, the reason the Moskva sank. Scale does not neutralize corruption in military procurement. It actually multiplies it, meaning Ukraine has less of a problem.

Then he prescribes “comprehensive political and economic reforms” and “a serious anticorruption effort” for post-surrender Ukraine. Dude, part of the reason for the war was Ukraine was cracking down on Russian corruption. Calling that a solution after the war is like totally ignoring the causes. If corruption undermines Ukrainian fortification-building during a war for survival, why would it suddenly resolve after a demoralizing territorial surrender? He identifies corruption as the disease and surrender to corruption as the cure.

How dumber can this get, seriously?

Technology Only Works for the Hero

Desch argues that Western technology has not given Ukraine a decisive edge. Wait, allow me to clean the vomit off my keyboard. He then spends several paragraphs detailing how Russian technological innovation of fiber-optic drones, infiltration tactics, ISR-enabled artillery as if decisive advantages. Well, which is it? Technology matters enormously when Russia deploys it. When the West provides it to Ukraine, suddenly it is irrelevant.

He cites the Surovikin Line as proof that Ukraine cannot advance through fortified positions. He then argues Ukraine should not bother building similar fortifications because Russian infiltration tactics can defeat them. Russian fortifications prove offense is impossible. Ukrainian fortifications would be useless against offense. This guy. He really doesn’t seem to get that Pinocchio had a smaller nose.

The logic runs in whichever direction the conclusion requires.

Follow the Money

Desch is not a random academic voice.

He sits on the advisory board of the John Quincy Adams Society, which is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and operates within a “let bad guys win because profit” ecosystem that includes the Quincy Institute, Defense Priorities, and the Cato Institute’s foreign policy shop. His Notre Dame colleague Eugene Gholz sits on the same board. His daughter was a JQAS Marcellus Policy Fellow. Their ideological pipeline has consistent output toxic to analysts: NATO caused the problems, whatever they are, Ukraine is not vital to anyone, and the answer is accommodation of Russia because authoritarian rule is good for profit.

Desch has been saying exactly this since before the invasion. In January 2022, he told Newswise that “the way out of this crisis is the neutralization of Ukraine.” Weeks later, in February 2022, he told Notre Dame’s student paper that Russia was unlikely to invade because Putin was just posturing for diplomatic concessions. The full-scale invasion followed shortly after.

This Koch lineage now makes a funding trail into the case study of laundered influence.

Fred Koch built his fortune constructing oil refineries for Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s, then built the third-largest refinery serving the Third Reich. Soviet money and Nazi money became Koch Industries money. He came home, co-founded the John Birch Society in 1958, called Eisenhower a communist dupe, fought the civil rights movement as a Soviet plot, and bankrolled McCarthyism. Charles Koch held a lifetime JBS membership and funded its bookstores distributing attacks on Martin Luther King.

I am certain if MLK were alive today these guys would be publishing “MLK should concede to the KKK’.

The sons inherited the fortune of refined Soviet and Nazi crude. They laundered it through decades of right-wing institution-building, setting a precedent for Peter Thiel, and now fund academics arguing we should accommodate Russian territorial expansion. The empire that literally built Stalin’s oil infrastructure finances the intellectual apparatus telling us to let Moscow keep what it has taken.

This is how old big dirty money works.

No need to wire funds from the Kremlin direct to Notre Dame with a Foreign Policy piece purchase order. Instead build refineries for dictators, convert the profits into a political network, fund the network for three generations, and eventually the network produces a Foreign Affairs article arguing that dictator’s should get to keep conquests.

The money has been cleaned by the time it reaches the endowed chair. The conclusions are a start within the institution, to which all the evidence is dumped carelessly.

Editorial Decision Time

Foreign Affairs historically publishes pieces aligned with administration policy preferences. This piece reads like pre-positioning and intellectual cover for whatever territorial concessions the Trump team plans to impose. Within hours, Pravda USA was summarizing it approvingly. The article’s framing maps perfectly onto Russian information warfare messaging.

I’m not saying Desch needs to coordinate with Moscow. It means the Koch school’s output gets laundered through Russian media with zero friction because the conclusions are structurally identical to what Putin needs.

Foreign Affairs editors know how to count logical contradictions, right?

They know what PPP does and does not measure, right?

They know the Munich analogy is about appeasement dynamics, not blitzkrieg tactics, right?

They know that prescribing post-surrender reform to a country whose wartime morale is already collapsing is not serious analysis, right?

They published this bullshit article anyway, on the day it would do the most work for Putin and Trump, by an author embedded in a network funded by a fortune that traces back to Stalin and Hitler.

Any trained historian can see what this is. Desch perhaps believes what he wrote, and maybe even enjoys the public self-flaggelation. The question is why Foreign Affairs enabled him.

Google hosted a PRC espionage campaign for years, and now has published a very formal report framing the “disruption” (turning off their own API keys) as a national security achievement.

The report generates false legitimacy signals. Their framing positions Google as a hero against China, when the more accurate read is that Google was the unwitting (or indifferent) provider who eventually cleaned up a mess after their Mandiant team was pulled by a customer to look at a strange binary on a CentOS server.

The surveillance of dissidents and activists through compromised telcos in over 40 countries gets a few sentences of passive-voice acknowledgment. No analysis of which populations were endangered, which governments were complicit, or what obligations Google has to all the people whose PII was being exfiltrated through Google’s own API.

The report explicitly disclaims responsibility:

This activity is not the result of a security vulnerability in Google’s products.

Doesn’t that make it even worse? No discussion of why Google’s infrastructure is trivially weaponized for state espionage, or about the design changes to prevent it now and into the future.

Users are being set up to think about a company “taking action” against China and infer the cloud is being protected, when the actual story is that Google infrastructure was functioning uninterrupted as a conduit for a state actor C2 (GTIG tracked UNC2814 since 2017, and the IOCs they released cover infrastructure active since at least 2023).

Google is the drug company that discovered its product was causing organ failure in 42 countries, eventually pulled it from the shelf, then published a press release celebrating their pharmacovigilance program. No independent review of why Google Cloud was trivially weaponizable. No mandatory disclosure of how long they knew. No liability discussion. No institutional separation between the entity that profits from cloud adoption and the entity that decided when to act.

This GRIDTIDE report operates as a legitimacy-shield function, a form of moderation theater that displaces demand for the regulatory architecture that would actually constrain the problem.

Ok, ok, I know what the counter-argument will be. Let’s be honest. The technique is catalogued in MITRE ATT&CK. It’s a known, documented, years-old pattern across every major cloud provider. Every one of these services — Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint — has the same design vulnerability: their APIs can’t distinguish legitimate use from espionage traffic because the espionage is legitimate use.

APT29 (Russia/SVR) used Google Drive and Dropbox for C2 against European embassies. APT43 (North Korea) used Google Drive and Dropbox for staging and delivery. APT37 (North Korea) used OneDrive. APT28 (Russia/GRU) used OneDrive via the Microsoft Graph API. China-nexus groups including UNC5330 used OneDrive. The Inception Framework/Cloud Atlas used Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox simultaneously. Molerats used Dropbox, Google Drive, and Facebook. Symantec reported in 2024 that the number of espionage operations using legitimate cloud services for C2 had grown significantly, identifying multiple new backdoors like GoGra, Grager, and BirdyClient all using cloud APIs.

But let’s stick to the core issue here, which is corporate disinformation.

Google is the one publishing their own hero narrative. Microsoft hasn’t published a blog post celebrating the “disruption” of APT29’s use of OneDrive. Dropbox didn’t hold a press conference about Molerats. Google is claiming credit for disrupting a problem that exists across the entire cloud industry, that Google’s own infrastructure contributed to for years, and that Google has done nothing to address at the design level.

The “disruption” was turning off specific accounts — not fixing the architectural problem that makes every cloud API a potential C2 channel. The next GRIDTIDE? Just need a different spreadsheet service, as the report itself admits. Thanks for nothing Google.

…the actor could easily make use of other cloud-based spreadsheet platforms in the same manner…

If you thought Tesla making cars more deadly than Ford Pinto was bad, after lying to the public and regulators the whole time, have I got news for you.

SpaceX filed with the FCC to launch up to one million satellites. The filing contains no deployment schedule, no cost estimate, no hardware specifications, and no satellite mass. It contains the phrase “Kardashev Type II civilization” and requests to waive every milestone requirement.

The FCC is accepting public comments. The deadline is unpublished, meaning it could close without notice.

Objection, Objection

The FCC has categorically excluded satellites from environmental review since 1986. The GAO recommended the agency revisit this. The FCC agreed they would, then started making the exemption permanent instead. Chairman Brendan Carr is formally arguing that orbital operations are “extraterritorial” and things falling on the U.S. are outside the scope of U.S. environmental law. It’s like a factory arguing their smoke stack is so tall it’s the next town’s problem.

There are roughly 15,000 satellites in orbit. Starlink already tangled up 300,000 collision avoidance maneuvers in 2025. That rate doubles every six months. A January 2026 study calculated that if any avoidance maneuvers failed, a catastrophic collision would occur within 2.8 days. Does anyone remember that in 2018 that window was 121 days? Now imagine the window after trying to fill 100X more satellites into the same space.

Last week, researchers published the first direct measurement of what happens when a satellite or rocket burns up overhead. One Falcon 9 upper stage dumped about 30 kg of lithium into the upper atmosphere—roughly 400 days’ worth of what arrives naturally from meteors. Along with the lithium: aluminum, copper, and lead. These metals stick around. They settle into the stratosphere, where aluminum oxides interact with the ozone layer in ways researchers have flagged but cannot yet quantify.

Every satellite ever launched comes back down and burns up. That has been the disposal plan, not unlike when everyone dumped barrels of toxins into the ocean. At a million satellites with five-year lifespans, you get about 550 burning up per day, each one shedding metal pollution into the air above your head. We know this is happening because scientists proved it for the first time seven days ago. We do not know what it does at scale because nobody has studied it yet. Nobody has studied it because the FCC has never required a study.

Environmental review under the current framework, despite the obviousness of the need, still is not triggered.

How to Object

Go to the FCC CORES portal. Create an account. File a comment on application SAT-LOA-20260108-00016.

Demand environmental review under NEPA before any approval. There is also a Reflect Orbital filing (satellites with giant mirrors beaming sunlight to Earth at night) with a March 6 deadline.

The request is simple: make the FCC comply with the law Congress passed in 1969 requiring agencies to assess environmental consequences before acting. A categorical exclusion written for a few hundred satellites does not hold above 1,000 let alone 100K. A million? Fuhgetaboutit.