For several months last year, a Ukrainian housewife, 35 and lonely in a marriage that had gone cold, traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander, Achmad, stationed somewhere in Ukraine’s occupied south. They wrote about their days, their disappointments, what they hoped to do when the war ended. She asked about the front. He told her.
“Send me a picture,” she said. “I want to see your life.
At first glance, last week looked like a catastrophe for Anthropic.
The AI company refused to let the U.S. government use its products to surveil the American public or direct autonomous weapons without human oversight. In response, the Department of Defense canceled its $200 million contract. On Truth Social, President Trump called the company “leftwing nut jobs” and ordered every federal agency to immediately stop using its products.
On Ukraine’s front lines, combat patches are currency. Soldiers trade their insignia for those of other units, mostly, but sometimes for alcohol and cigarettes. When I visited earlier this summer, I brought a stack of U.S. Navy patches from my time as an aviator, along with a rucksack that has featured a steady rotation of insignia from soldiers I’ve met in war zones around the world.
The latest addition is a camouflaged crab, the emblem of Ukraine’s 34th Coastal Defense Brigade.