Foreign Affairs published a Koch brothers propaganda puff piece today, attributed to Michael C. Desch of Notre Dame.
Why?
It plays dumb while trying to be serious and claim that Ukraine should surrender to Russia. Of course 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 plainly “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 and crash into at least nine major logical contradictions.
Given how much disinformation was being stuffed down the throat of Foreign Affairs editors, it should surprise nobody Russian-language media was celebrating 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 what’s really going on.
Desch Keeps Punching Himself in the Nuts
| # | Desch Claims | Then Also Claims | Nut Punch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 nominal 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 and says it repeatedly. Russia is like Italy, yet he tries to make it seem so much bigger.
Again, why?
PPP measures how many bad haircuts you can buy in Novosibirsk, not how many precision-guided munitions could be imported.
Russian contract soldiers, known for their low morale, somehow get inflated as more motivated than Ukrainian conscripts. The piece 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.
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 simply “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. 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.
Technology Only Works for the Hero
Desch argues that Western technology has not given Ukraine a decisive edge. He then spends several paragraphs detailing Russian technological innovation (e.g. fiber-optic drones, infiltration tactics, ISR-enabled artillery) as if these are 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.
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.
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 magazine piece purchase order. Instead, build infrastructure for dictators, convert profits into a political network, fund the network for generations, and eventually the network produces a Foreign Affairs article arguing that dictators should get to keep conquests so they can order more infrastructure. Ka-ching!
The money has been cleaned by the time it reaches the endowed chair. The conclusions are a starting point within the institution, to which evidence is curated.
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 weak-sauce 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-flagellation. The question is why Foreign Affairs enabled him.