Russia hit Kyiv with 68 missiles and 351 drones in a single attack over the weekend. Not a barrage — a volume strategy. Deliberately more than Ukraine's air defense can intercept, designed specifically to exhaust a finite supply of missiles that Western manufacturers cannot currently build fast enough to replenish. President Zelensky said it directly: they are running short on interceptors.
This week, NATO's leaders are gathered in Ankara to discuss, among other things, the war. Their host is Turkey.
The Host
Turkey has sold Bayraktar drones to Ukraine throughout the war. Ukraine has used them effectively. Turkey has also maintained active trade relations with Russia throughout the war, blocked certain sanctions enforcement, and positioned itself as a potential mediator — a role that requires keeping lines open to Moscow.
While NATO leaders arrived in Ankara, Turkish authorities were arresting a comedian for jokes about President Erdogan. Protesters demanding the comedian's release gathered outside. Inside, Erdogan's foreign minister told the press that the Trump-Erdogan personal friendship is good for NATO.
This is the summit host. A country simultaneously arming Ukraine, trading with Russia, cracking down on its own citizens, and leveraging a personal relationship with the American president to consolidate its position as indispensable to both sides. This is not hypocrisy. It is strategy. Turkey has spent this war making itself impossible to isolate — too useful to Ukraine to sanction, too useful to NATO to expel, too connected to Russia to fully align with the West.
It is also, viewed from a certain angle, the honest face of the arms trade: aligned with whoever is buying, positioned to survive whoever wins.
Who Else Is Selling to Both Sides
Turkey is the cleanest example but not the only one.
Israel maintained active business relationships with Russia through significant portions of the conflict while also supplying Ukraine with certain intelligence and defense technologies. Israeli defense exports operate across relationships that Western governments would find uncomfortable to examine closely.
European component manufacturers — in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere — have had parts traced to Russian weapons systems via third-country routing through the UAE, Kazakhstan, and Armenia. Not necessarily illegal under the specific sanctions framework in place at the time of sale. Practically, components built in NATO countries ending up in the missiles hitting Kyiv.
China supplies microchips, optical systems, and machine tools to Russia classified as civilian goods. The classification is technically accurate and operationally irrelevant. Russian defense production depends on this supply chain. The chips find their way into the guidance systems.
The common thread is not malice. It is the ordinary operation of a global arms and dual-use technology industry that was never designed to enforce the political alignments its customers claim. The industry sells to whoever can pay. War is good for business. The end of war is not.
Why Ukraine Is Running Out
The interceptor shortage Ukraine is experiencing is not simply a production problem. It is a structural one.
Western defense contractors were not tooled for the volume this war requires. They are at capacity and still backlogged. Interceptor production is being expanded — Patriot missiles, IRIS-T systems, various national programs — but the expansion is slow because the industry had spent decades optimizing for profitable peacetime contracts, not surge wartime production. The gap between what Ukraine needs and what the supply chain can deliver is a direct consequence of how the industry was built.
The industry is now highly profitable. Backlogs are full. Margins are up across the major defense primes in the US, UK, Germany, and France. The shortage Ukraine is experiencing is simultaneously a crisis for Ukraine and a business opportunity for the contractors who will eventually fill it.
There is no one in that supply chain whose financial interest is served by the war ending before the backlog clears.
The Same Machine
Two weeks ago we wrote about China's submarine missile test and the military industrial complex that runs bilaterally across the Pacific — serving neither the Chinese people nor the American people, serving itself. The same machine is running in Europe, with more moving parts.
The NATO summit should be the place where this gets addressed: production commitments, supply chain accountability, the question of which NATO members are maintaining back channels to the adversary while collecting the benefits of the alliance. Instead it is, by the reporting, primarily a backdrop for bilateral diplomacy between Trump and Erdogan — two leaders who have found personal alignment useful for reasons that have nothing to do with the people of Ukraine or the people of Russia or the people of any NATO member state.
The people of Ukraine are watching their buildings collapse. The interceptors are running low. The contractors are profitable. The summit host is selling to both sides.
Same old song. Different theater. The machine plays on.
— J.P. Howlett
Related: Two Chinas, Two Americas — the same machine, the Pacific theater, and the people on both sides who didn't ask for any of it.
Related: Tehran Takes Flight — what happens to the people when the machine that governs them serves its own interests instead.
Related: Here We Are — the MOU is in pieces. The 60-day window closed in 30 days. Followed by the prospectus.
Sources
- Ukraine warns of interceptor missile shortage as 22 killed in Kyiv region — BBC News
- Deadly Russian Strikes Rock Kyiv on Eve of NATO Summit — NYT World
- Turkey Hosts NATO Summit While Cracking Down on Critics — NYT World
- Ukraine Remade Air Defense, but Russia Has Changed Its Attacks — NYT World
- As Trump Cools on NATO, Turkey Hosts Summit Meeting — NYT World