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Early this year, Ukrainian officials came to President Volodymyr Zelensky with a risky new plan to end the war with Russia. It would require expanding their bombing campaign to include a set of targets and a class of weapons they had long avoided. In addition to Ukraine’s ongoing strikes against Russian military bases, oil refineries, supply lines, and logistics hubs, the officials wanted to launch waves of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports, hoping to stop international carriers from flying in and out of the Russian capital, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the plan, which has not been previously reported.

Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive military operations. If executed, the plan would mark a terrifying milestone in the history of warfare: an attack in which swarms of autonomous drones equipped with AI guidance systems would seek out and hit their targets without a human pilot controlling their movements. Such systems have been tested by various countries in recent years, including the United States. But the legality of their use has been vigorously debated as a possible violation of the laws of war, and they have never been deployed at scale.

When officials presented the plan to Zelensky this winter, he expressed strong reservations, one of the sources said. He worried that it could be seen as “piracy” if the drones hit a civilian airliner in Moscow, especially if the strikes killed or injured passengers, airport staff, or members of the flight crew. But in his desperation to find a Russian pressure point that could restart the peace process, Zelensky allowed preparations for the strikes to continue for several months this spring and early summer, both sources said.

A spokesperson for Zelensky declined to comment. Another official in the president’s office denied the existence of a plan to launch swarms of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports. “That’s total nonsense,” the official told me, asking not to be named in an article about this topic. Ukraine has long sought to force the closure of Russian airports, the official added, and its drone strikes against various targets in Russia have often achieved that goal for short periods of time. But Ukraine does not have long-range weapons that are precise and reliable enough to hit Russian airports without posing an undue risk to civilians, the official said.

[Read: Inside the feud over Ukraine’s drone success]

According to Russian aviation authorities, airports across the country were forced to close 114 times during a one-month period last summer, from June 28 to July 28, usually due to the threat of Ukrainian drones. Moscow was affected by the highest number of shutdowns—at least 17 in total at its four main airports. The Russian association of travel agents reported more than 290 of these incidents nationwide in the first quarter of this year. The airport closures, which Russians refer to as a kovyor, meaning “carpet,” usually last a few hours before authorities give the all-clear and allow flights to resume. “We’ve only ever had one operation against the airports,” the official said. “Force the Russians to declare ‘carpets’ all the time.”

By the middle of spring, the plan to force a more permanent shutdown of Moscow’s airports had advanced far enough to receive a code name: M&Ms, a reference to the many small, cheap, and nearly identical drones that the mission would require. To overwhelm Russian air defenses, the operation would need to send as many as 1,000 drones a night to airports in and around Moscow, said one of the sources familiar with it.

Attacks of that size would not be far outside the norm in this conflict. Earlier this week, Russian authorities reported shooting down 791 Ukrainian drones in a single night, one of the largest attacks of the war; more than 600 of them were flying toward the Moscow region, according to the city’s mayor.

“The idea is to shut down the Moscow airspace to civilian flights for an extended period of time,” one of the sources familiar with the plan told me. Since the start of the Russian invasion, in February 2022, civilian air travel over Ukraine has been suspended. But Russian airports have mostly remained open, and millions of passengers used them this year to travel abroad. Due to Western sanctions, only a few international carriers still fly in and out of Moscow, including Turkish Airlines and Emirates, which many well-to-do Russians use to reach hubs in Istanbul and Dubai.

Forcing those carriers to stop flying to Russia would make life less comfortable for officials, oligarchs, and other wealthy loyalists of President Vladimir Putin. “People in the elites might come to Putin and say: We have a problem here,” said one of the sources familiar with the Ukrainian plan. That kind of pressure from the elites, in combination with other wartime strains on Russia’s economy and society, could force Putin to negotiate a peace deal, the source said.

Both sources told me planning for the operation was halted in July, when Zelensky abruptly fired its mastermind, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. As the architect of Ukraine’s military drone program, Fedorov had worked on the plan for most of this year, keeping it a secret even from some of his closest aides. He helped assemble a team of Ukrainian computer programmers to develop the AI guidance system, and he secured financing from Ukraine’s allies in Europe to produce the autonomous drones at scale, the two sources said.

Having served throughout the war as a crucial member of Zelensky’s team, Fedorov changed this month into a potential rival for the presidency. In a video address posted on YouTube yesterday, the former defense minister called for Ukraine to hold elections and choose a new government. Ukraine has not held presidential or parliamentary elections since 2019, because Ukrainian martial law, which has been in effect since the start of the invasion, prohibits elections in a time of war. Opinion polls taken in recent weeks show that Fedorov has grown popular enough in Ukraine since his dismissal to pose a serious challenge to Zelensky in a presidential race. “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” Fedorov said in his speech.

The same day, the Ukrainian Parliament confirmed the nomination of a new defense minister, Yevhenii Khmara, a decorated military veteran. The vote in Parliament foreclosed Fedorov’s hopes of returning to his previous post anytime soon. It also threw into doubt the future of the operation known as M&Ms. One of the sources familiar with the plan expressed hope that the new defense minister would carry it forward. “We will try. Technically it’s possible,” the source said. “You can revive this project with a new team, but it would take, in my view, around three months.” By that time, another brutal winter of war will have arrived.

In the months before his dismissal, Fedorov pursued numerous high-tech plans to force the Russians to negotiate before the onset of winter. The Atlantic reported earlier this month that he had appealed for help from Elon Musk, and that Zelensky had asked President Trump to secure Musk’s assistance. The Ukrainians needed Musk to allow the use of Starlink, his satellite-communications network, as a navigation tool for drones to hit targets inside Russia, including Russian ballistic-missile launchers, with precision. Musk has refused to allow the use of Starlink over Russian territory. He has not replied to my messages seeking comment on the matter.

As an alternative to Starlink, the Ukrainians have rushed to develop reliable drones equipped with AI, which offer a way to get around Russia’s counter-drone defenses. Most attack drones require a pilot to guide them to their targets, through radio signals, mobile internet connections, or some other means of remote control. Russia, like most advanced military powers, uses electronic jamming to disrupt the signal between enemy drones and their pilots, forcing the weapons to crash or veer off course.

[Read: Ukraine’s plan to unnerve Putin]

Last summer, the Ukrainians found an ingenious way around this problem. They hid 117 drones inside five long-haul trucks and hired unwitting drivers to bring them close to Russian air bases. Once in position, the drones connected to the internet, reportedly using Russian SIM cards, and flew out of the trucks’ secret compartments. Drone pilots back in Ukraine used the internet connection to guide most of the weapons to their targets. The mission, known as Operation Spider’s Web, damaged or destroyed roughly two dozen Russian warplanes, including nuclear-capable bombers, that stood parked on the tarmac of their bases in Russia.

Ukraine’s latest plan would allow the drones to pilot themselves, using an AI-powered technique known as map matching, the two sources familiar with the plan told me. The technique involves uploading detailed maps of a drone’s intended flight path to its onboard computer, along with pictures of its targets. As the drone flies, its camera collects images of the terrain below. The onboard computer uses an AI model to compare those images with the ones stored in its memory, a bit like a person consulting a map on an unfamiliar highway. When the camera spots something that matches, or resembles, the image of the target, the drone flies into it and explodes. A human pilot does not need to confirm that the drone has found the right target before it strikes.

When this technology first appeared in Ukraine a couple of years ago, some drone manufacturers told me, they had declined to make it available to their clients in the military, because they found it too risky. One drone maker showed me an AI-targeting system with a kind of accuracy selector, which he could slide up and down on a screen. If he chose the lower setting, it would give the drone permission to attack even if its AI model is only 30 percent certain that it sees the right target. The highest setting tells the AI to reach 90 percent certainty before it decides to strike. Even that did not seem precise enough for the manufacturer, who wondered what would happen if a child on a bicycle were to enter the frame of the drone’s camera as it locked onto its target: “Who is responsible if that kid dies?”

Ukrainian officials, arms makers, and military officers have wrestled with such questions for years. Some have called for the Ukrainian Parliament or an international body such as the United Nations to develop guidelines for the use of AI targeting in warfare. No such rules exist in Ukrainian law. The U.S. and most of its allies have vague guidelines about a human needing to be “in the loop” before an AI model decides to attack. But most experts on the laws of war see such restrictions as outdated and insufficient.

Zelensky raised concerns about unintended targets being struck when it came to the plan to attack Moscow’s airports, one of the sources familiar with these conversations told me. The officials behind the plan offered work-arounds, the source said. They suggested, for example, that Ukraine would warn civilian airlines to avoid Russian airports and evacuate their planes before the swarm of Ukrainian drones arrived. “If they say to themselves, You know what, it’s getting too risky. Why even continue flying there?” the source said. “That would already have quite an impact on the Russian elites. Those are their main connections to the outside world.”

Western military planners do not seem eager to talk about their nightmare scenario, much less prepare for it. But they tend to agree on how it would begin: a coordinated, near-simultaneous attack on opposite sides of the planet, in which Russia targets a NATO member in Eastern Europe while China makes its move against Taiwan. The U.S. military would need to react on two fronts at once—three if it remains at war in the Middle East.

Until recently, this possibility sat at the more outlandish end of the threat spectrum, somewhere between a loose nuke and an alien invasion. Synchronized attacks would require a conspiracy too big for Beijing and Moscow to hide. Satellites would see their forces getting into position, giving the United States and its allies time to rally their defenses.

About a year ago, General Alexus Grynkewich, the top NATO commander in Europe, issued a rare public warning about the risk of a two-front war against Russia and China, and he called on European allies to help the U.S. prepare. But when I asked a range of military experts and strategists what the West would do in such a situation, the responses rang surprisingly hollow. Most of them expressed bewilderment and a bit of shame about how little has been done in recent years to study this risk in detail.

“Let’s just say this is the scenario we’re currently not ready for,” Florence Gaub, the director of the research division at the NATO Defense College, one of the alliance’s main academies for officers, in Rome, told me. NATO strategists remain “keenly aware” of this gap in their planning, Gaub, who specializes in the forecasting and analysis of future threats, said. But they have not taken steps to fill that gap.

Even as Russia and China have intensified their military cooperation, the West has held only a few low-profile exercises to analyze what would happen if the two launched a joint attack. Public discussion of this possibility has been remarkably muted among Western experts and military brass, who seem to lack the theoretical frameworks to process such a calamity and game out a response.

Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral of the U.S. Navy and a frequent participant in high-profile war games and strategic-planning exercises, told me that he and his colleagues last studied the idea of a two-front war against Russia and China roughly 15 years ago. “It didn’t go well,” he said.

Back then, the exercises showed that the U.S. did not have the weapons stockpiles or the industrial capacity to sustain a lengthy period of fighting on multiple fronts, and it could not rely on its allies to pick up the slack. Since then, Montgomery said, “Every one of those metrics has gone down. None of them has gotten better.” Under pressure from the Trump administration, U.S. allies have increased their defense spending. “But their forces have not yet shown improvement.”

The other sides have. Although Russia has been failing to achieve its objectives in the war in Ukraine, it has succeeded in shifting its enormous industrial base onto a war footing, and formerly civilian factories now aid in the production of missiles and tanks. The Russian experience in Ukraine has also made its forces adept at drone warfare. China, which produces most of the world’s drones, has not fought a war in decades and suffers from corruption in its upper ranks. But it has overtaken the U.S. in the number of warships and long-range missiles in its arsenal. Russia and China have also built stronger ties between their militaries under what their leaders describe as a “no-limits” partnership.

From their vantage point, the window of opportunity to strike the West might never have looked more tantalizing. The U.S. remains bogged down in Iran, having pulled a lot of its ships and aircraft out of Asia and Europe to backfill its forces in the Middle East. An estimated two-thirds of the American arsenal of advanced air-defense missiles has been depleted since February, and Donald Trump’s persistent insults and threats against NATO have turned the rift between the U.S. and its allies into a yawning chasm.

For most of his tenure as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin has aspired to dismantle NATO, and its current moment of weakness offers him a rare chance to achieve that goal. He has already started testing its defenses. NATO members in Eastern Europe, such as Romania, Poland, and the Baltic states, have seen repeated violations of their air space by Russian drones, missiles, and fighter jets. Earlier this month, German authorities found a suspected Russian drone loaded with explosives at an airport in Leipzig, apparently preparing to blow up a Ukrainian cargo plane over NATO territory.

The most recent U.S.-intelligence assessments have reportedly concluded that Russia could try to test NATO’s resolve in the next few years, using a cyberattack or a small-scale incursion against a member of the alliance. Such a gambit would be more likely to succeed in weakening NATO if Russia timed it to coincide with a Chinese attack on Taiwan, Admiral Rob Bauer, a former chair of the alliance’s Military Committee, told me. As of last January, when he retired from NATO leadership, Bauer was not aware of any concerted effort inside the alliance to prepare a strategy for this “worst-case scenario,” as he called it. “What are we going to do? Who’s getting which troops?” Bauer asked. “I think it would be wise to think that through.”

Many military threats have seemed far-fetched until they happened. Before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941, Joseph Stalin received repeated warnings from his own generals and spies. But he refused to believe them until the bombing started, hindering the ability of his forces to prepare. The U.S. likewise failed to prepare for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the lead-up to the First World War, Europe split into two rival alliances, and no one predicted the scale of the destruction that their conflict would unleash.

“The indications were clear that they would clash, and we just weren’t ready for it,” David Santoro, the president and CEO of the Pacific Forum, a research institute in Hawaii that focuses on Indo-Pacific security issues, told me. In 2023, Santoro and his team organized a round of theoretical war games, known as tabletop exercises, in which two American allies called for help at the same time: Taiwan came under attack from China while North Korea seized its chance to invade South Korea. “We were struggling to keep up and divide labor,” Santoro recalled. “And we weren’t even talking about Europe. I can only imagine what would happen if you threw Russia in there.”

[From the June 2024 issue: The new propaganda war]

A great variety of tabletop exercises happen all the time. Most involve two teams of military experts sitting around a conference table and responding to one another’s moves, like a multiplayer chess game. The organizers try to keep the rules simple and clearly defined. Such tight parameters do not reflect the chaos of warfare, but they prevent the games from getting too hectic when players from different fields of research talk past one another. This bias toward orderly games helps explain why so little research has been done on what experts call “multi-crisis environments.” Almost by definition, such scenarios would quickly get confusing.

“It’s complicated, to be sure, but I don’t think it is too complicated to study,” Eric Heginbotham, an authority on war-gaming at MIT’s Security Studies Program, told me. “I just don’t believe that anyone has done it.” He cautioned that some secretive department within the Pentagon or elsewhere may have quietly analyzed this grim contingency and drawn up response plans.

The general topic of a two-front war now gets discussed among military experts “more than it used to be,” he said. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., published a lengthy report in June on the best ways for the U.S. to “counter an axis led by China and Russia.” But Heginbotham, who has worked closely with CSIS, said that none of the most prominent research institutes in the U.S. and Europe has organized war games on the subject. “You’d need two relatively big and elaborate games running simultaneously, with some sort of command authority setting priorities in the middle,” he said in an email. “Sounds very interesting.”

In the public statements of senior NATO leaders, the risk of a multifront war has come up over the past year or so, though not very often. In December, a few months after Grynkewich issued his warning to U.S. allies, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte mentioned the threat at the end of an interview that he gave to a German newspaper. “China is looking at Taiwan,” Rutte said. “And I am convinced that if China takes military action there, it will pressure its junior partner, Russia, under Putin’s leadership, to keep us busy here in Europe.”

One of the most detailed analyses of this possibility, at least in the public domain, comes from an obscure research institute in Prague called the European Values Center for Security Policy. Its 35-year-old director, Jakub Janda, told me that he began studying the idea of a “dual-theater” war in Europe and Asia after the institute opened an outpost in Taipei, in January 2022. At the time, the risk of a coordinated attack from Russia and China seemed remote or, as Janda put it, “not a major consideration.”

That began to change the following month, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Putin had visited Beijing less than three weeks before he ordered the invasion. He has since made at least four more visits to China, and another one is planned for November. Throughout this period, China has become the main supplier of technology to the Russian weapons industry while propping up the Russian economy through the purchase of oil and gas. Although they have no mutual-defense pact, Russia and China hold regular military drills to help keep their forces in sync.

[Read: The autocrat’s dilemma]

The first war game to simulate a joint attack from both of them took place at Janda’s institute in the spring of 2024. Finding experts with enough background knowledge to participate proved difficult for him. Most research institutions and think tanks have separate teams that specialize in their own regions, he said. “They work in their silos, with different expertise.”

Over time, the participants grasped the way that wars in Asia and Europe could overlap and reinforce one another. The institute has already held roughly 20 rounds of war games on this topic, gathering experts in a variety of countries, including Japan and South Korea. The results have been particularly alarming, Janda said, for the Europeans. In almost every two-front scenario that he has studied, the U.S. prioritizes the Chinese threat and transfers military resources from Europe to Asia, leaving its NATO allies to defend themselves against Russia.

In one hypothetical case, China begins the war slowly by banning the export of raw materials to Europe’s defense sector. It maintains the embargo for five months, long enough for European factories to run out of supplies and stop producing weapons. Then Russia, with full access to Chinese resources, invades a NATO ally in Eastern Europe.

All of the scenarios in Janda’s series laid bare the need for Western unity. In the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, for example, the U.S. might demand that Europe impose severe sanctions on China’s economy, effectively cutting off trade. “But European governments don’t want to do that,” Janda said, describing how that premise played out among the experts. “The problem with European capitals is that Taiwan is far away. They want to focus on the threat from Russia, and that’s what scares me.”

If Russia and China act in unison while the U.S. bickers with its allies, the chances of a Western victory in a two-front war begin to look bleak. The side that comes out on top, in other words, tends to be the one that moves with common purpose and remains united over time.

Earlier this summer, Ukraine had finally seized the initiative in its punishing four-year war. President Volodymyr Zelensky had plenty of dramatic victories and technological advances to tout to his Western backers as he made the case that Russia can be defeated. His clash with Donald Trump in the Oval Office last year had been eclipsed by more recent encounters in which the U.S. president seemed open to helping Ukraine prevail. After closed-door talks with Zelensky in Turkey last month, Trump offered to meet Kyiv’s desperate need for air defenses and told reporters during a briefing about the two leaders’ promising vibe: “There was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity.”

In Washington, Zelensky also had a well-connected ambassador in place. Olha Stefanishyna, a former deputy prime minister, was constantly describing Ukraine’s battlefield successes to officials and lawmakers. Her goal was to move beyond those sympathetic to Kyiv’s plight to build “reliable, economic, interest-based relations across America,” she told us in an interview.

That momentum, built up since the start of the year, fizzled in a matter of days. At his meeting with Zelensky last week, Trump did not agree to send more of the Patriot air-defense systems that Ukraine needs to stop Russian ballistic missiles. He also backtracked on his pledge to let Ukrainian companies make these systems themselves. Back in Kyiv, long-festering issues related to wartime corruption weakened Zelensky’s team, leading to the ouster of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov last month and the resignation of Stefanishyna earlier this week. (She returned to Kyiv to address corruption allegations, which she denies.)

In a rare show of public dissent, protesters have rallied for weeks in Kyiv to demand that Zelensky reinstate the defense minister. His reengagement may be vital to Zelensky’s plan for Ukraine to survive the winter. Zelensky had asked Trump during their meeting to call in a favor from Elon Musk, The Atlantic first reported last week; Musk’s SpaceX operates the Starlink satellite system. Zelensky wants to use the system to guide strikes against the missile batteries that Russia uses to hammer Kyiv and other cities. Trump was noncommittal about that proposal too. Since he was dismissed, Fedorov has been working through back channels to appeal to Musk, who so far has refused to relent, two of Fedorov’s close allies in Kyiv told us.

“As of this moment, there is no positive decision,” one of those allies said on Wednesday. Musk continues to argue with Fedorov over the risk of further Russian escalation in the war. “Elon keeps saying it’s time to make a deal,” the Fedorov ally said. (Musk and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.)

After the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky, Trump said that his trusted envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner would make their first visit to wartime Kyiv in the coming days. But there are no other signs indicating that the pair will make the trip, despite Witkoff’s eight visits to Moscow as Trump’s envoy. Ukrainian officials are skeptical that the real-estate tycoons, who would have to make the long train ride to Kyiv from Poland, will show up anytime soon.

[Read: Zelensky asked Trump for a favor from Elon Musk]

All of these developments have been as unwelcome as they are painfully familiar for Ukraine’s leadership: Throughout the war, they have seen the resolve of their most important ally falter in the moments when it has mattered most—and when a real breakthrough seemed within reach. The White House, fearful of Kremlin retaliation and worried about a shortage of munitions during its war with Iran, has left Kyiv to face another winter of Russian bombardment, just weeks after things finally appeared to be looking up.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to address internal deliberations, told us that the United States was exploring options for defense-industry cooperation with Ukraine but suggested, as Trump has publicly in recent weeks, that following through with his promise to grant Ukraine the ability to manufacture Patriot systems could endanger America’s military edge. “We must prioritize protecting these exquisite systems and expanding overall production of critical weapons systems for the U.S. warfighter and for our partners and allies,” the official said in a statement.

At a meeting of his war council on Wednesday, Zelensky mused that his foreign partners might have darker motives for withholding the air defenses that his country needs. “Maybe these are political steps aimed at making Ukraine more, let’s call it, compliant,” he said in televised remarks. “In my view, that’s also part of it.”

Perhaps the Ukrainians should have seen this coming. After Trump won the election in 2024, many of Zelensky’s allies in Kyiv clung to naive expectations for his second term. They had grown deeply frustrated with what they viewed as the Biden administration’s lack of urgency in providing Ukraine with high-powered weapons. A common refrain in Kyiv held that Joe Biden, due to his fear of escalation, gave them enough to survive the war but not enough to win.

Officials in Kyiv had hoped that Trump might jump-start negotiations with the Kremlin after he repeatedly promised to end the war quickly. “We needed to show that we were not the obstacle to peace,” a senior Ukrainian official told us about that period. “The obstacle is Russia, and we need to overcome it together.”

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s human safari is the dystopian future of war]

This became the central message of Ukrainian diplomacy during the U.S. presidential transition, and Zelensky delivered it to Trump at every opportunity. But Trump wanted to see some tangible benefit for the United States in supporting Ukraine. Senator Lindsey Graham, a confidant of both Trump and Zelensky, came up with a plan for the U.S. to profit from its role in the war through the extraction of Ukraine’s natural resources, especially rare earth minerals. Zelensky balked at the plan’s most onerous provisions, which seemed to turn Ukraine from an American ally into an economic vassal. He rejected drafts presented to him by J. D. Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, among others.

Stefanishyna, then serving as both the deputy prime minister and the justice minister, helped design a compromise that both sides could accept. She hoped the signing ceremony at the White House, which she attended, would be a brief, cordial affair. The now-famous encounter last February instead devolved into a televised fracas, in which Trump and Vance accused Zelensky of ingratitude and disrespect. Trump’s aides asked the Ukrainian delegation to leave the White House. “Complete and utter disaster,” Graham fumed to reporters gathered outside the West Wing.

Looking back, Stefanishyna told us, Zelensky and his aides hadn’t come prepared to make Ukraine’s case in a way that would resonate with Trump. They didn’t realize the extent to which Trump and his aides viewed Ukraine’s suffering—at least 16,000 civilian deaths have been documented, in addition to nearly half a million soldiers killed or wounded—as a Democratic cause. Biden had spearheaded the Western coalition in support of Ukraine and sought to make his defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty a defining issue of his presidency. With Trump back in power, this all worked in Russia’s favor. “We came with all this pain to the White House,” she said, “and it became very obvious that this was our pain” and not something shared by the Trump administration. Although Trump may have empathized on some level, she added, “as president of the United States, he has a very different perspective. This was a wake-up.”

The administration official said that Trump and his team remain committed to contributing to the war’s end. “We are the only country in the world that can play that role,” the official said.

[Read: Zelensky makes his pitch to Trump]

In July of last year, Stefanishyna arrived in the U.S. to represent Ukraine in Washington. Soon after, Trump hosted Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska. Stefanishyna was horrified to see the Russian president get a much warmer reception than Zelensky had in February. The summit ended Putin’s long global isolation without Trump demanding a single concession. The moment generated a “very physical fear,” Stefanishyna said. “To wake up in the morning in a reality where the United States is coming back to friendly relations with Russia,” she said, was “like Ukraine never existed.” The rapprochement “was much more terrifying than living in Ukraine under bombs.”

Through the bitterly cold winter that followed, in which temperatures fell below zero Fahrenheit, Russian missiles hammered Ukraine’s power grid and heating infrastructure, leaving millions of civilians to freeze in darkened homes or bomb shelters. Many saw this as the low point for Kyiv in the war.

Ukraine survived. But by the middle of winter, Russia had figured out a potent new way to attack. Russian troops were guiding their drones in Ukraine with the help of Starlink. “This could have been a real catastrophe,” Fedorov told us. The technology allowed the Russians to circumvent Ukraine’s air defenses and bombard any target they wanted, including the government district in Kyiv. To stop them, Fedorov reached out to Musk with an urgent appeal for help.

The billionaire called him back at the end of January, when Fedorov happened to be at his daughter’s birthday party, and the minister stepped out to chat with Musk, whose face appeared on the screen of his phone. That conversation led to a plan to cut off Russian access to Starlink terminals. Ukrainian forces continued to fly their drones with Starlink inside Ukrainian territory, including in Crimea and other Russian-occupied regions.

The technological imbalance allowed Ukraine to shift the momentum at the front, where its troops reclaimed a few hundred square kilometers of occupied territory by the middle of February. Around the same time, Ukraine began a campaign of long-range strikes targeting Russian oil refineries. It also used drones early this summer to cut off Russian supply lines to Crimea. Moscow and other cities soon faced fuel shortages, and Kremlin-backed authorities in Crimea declared a state of emergency. For the first time in years, Ukraine appeared to have Russia on the back foot.

[Read: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]

The White House noticed. “The real factor that has changed the U.S. attitude, including President Trump, is success on the battlefield by the Ukrainians,” William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told us regarding its recent battlefield gains. He noted Russia’s staggering casualty rate, far higher than Ukraine’s. After all, Taylor added: “Trump likes to back a winner.”

The start of the war in Iran at the end of February—as it happens, one year to the day after Zelensky’s clash with Trump in the Oval Office—gave Stefanishyna another chance to make Ukraine’s case around Washington. Ukraine had invented a way to shoot down the cheap drones that Iran was using to target Persian Gulf nations and U.S. bases in the Middle East. The Ukrainian interceptor drones cost as little as $1,000 to produce, compared with millions for sophisticated U.S. interceptor missiles. “We discovered that we are the only country on the whole planet who’s able to provide effective means of defense in that regard,” Stefanishyna told us. The innovation gave Ukraine the opportunity to engage with the United States not as a supplicant asking for aid but as a partner.

Zelensky offered to share the technology with the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East. Trump did not seem interested. “We don’t need their help in drone defense,” he told Fox News in March, days after a deadly drone attack on the U.S. base in Kuwait. “We know more about drones than anybody.”

Others in his administration saw it differently. In congressional testimony in May, U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said that he had learned a lot from the Ukrainians. Their military operating system, known as Delta, “is absolutely incredible,” Driscoll said. “It fully integrates every single drone, every sensor, and every shooting platform into just one single network. Ours does not.”

Ukrainian strikes against Russian oil refineries and other infrastructure also bolstered the impression of momentum shifting in Ukraine’s favor. “Now everybody in Washington thinks Ukraine is going to win,” one Republican strategist told us last week. “They have all these drones, and we want all these drones.”

Following what Trump called a “very good meeting” with Zelensky on the sidelines of a G7 summit in June, the U.S. president piled pressure on Putin, saying that “Russia should make a deal.” Then came Trump and Zelensky’s talks at the NATO conference in Ankara, Turkey, last month, where Trump dangled the Patriot-production license as an answer to Kyiv’s long-term air-defense needs.

[Read: What’s eating ‘Putin’s brain’?]

When Zelensky and Stefanishyna met again with Trump last week, ahead of Graham’s funeral in Washington, the tensions of the previous year’s encounter were absent. Rather than arguing for support on moral and legal grounds, Zelensky touted Ukraine’s battlefield advantage and the expertise that Kyiv could offer in waging war in the 21st century. The message was that “Ukraine is no longer a charity case” but rather a valuable partner holding its own on the battlefield, a former Zelensky adviser told us after the meeting. “It was a much more realistic approach, given the administration’s ‘America First’ policy. And if you look at the results, it’s night and day.” Now it was Putin, not Zelensky, whom U.S. officials viewed as the obstacle to peace. Even Laura Loomer, an informal Trump adviser and erstwhile supporter of the Kremlin, returned from Kyiv gushing about how Ukraine deserved American backing to figure out how to win.

That was last week, shortly before we visited the Ukrainian embassy, which occupies a historic brick structure in Georgetown, north of the Potomac River. In 1791, President George Washington met with a group of local landholders in the building to discuss acquiring terrain for the American capital. Today, a hallway in the building holds a Ukrainian bomber drone called a Vampire, which Stefanishyna used to showcase her country’s wartime innovations.

On the day of our interview, however, Stefanishyna was preparing to leave after less than a year on the job. Investigative journalists in Kyiv had scrutinized her property deals and her record in government going back to 2013, when she served as a junior official in the justice ministry. The price her family had paid for an apartment in Kyiv nearly a decade later also raised suspicion in the press. Anti-corruption investigators began looking into her financial records, questioning her friends and relatives. She denied all of the claims of wrongdoing but decided that the allegations were too distracting for her to remain the ambassador to the U.S. “I cannot really pretend like I’m doing a great job here, having fun, while my family is under threat,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

A week after we spoke with Stefanishyna, anti-corruption authorities in Kyiv charged her with “illicit enrichment,” and a court set her bail at 6 million hryvnia, worth roughly $130,000. “The mission has been successfully completed, and I am in Ukraine to answer here,” she wrote in response on social media. “The burden of proof lies with the one making the accusation. As for me, I will do all I can: calmly defend my position in accordance with the law.”

Her departure was part of a government reshuffle that also cost Fedorov, the defense minister, his job. Speaking last week to Ukrainian journalists, he said that his firing was also related to problems with corruption. In his role as the defense minister, he had pushed for reforms that angered a long list of arms manufacturers and their allies in the military high command, and they had teamed up to undermine Fedorov’s position. His allies told us that he has continued to try to persuade Musk to relent on Starlink, but to no avail.

In a matter of days, the optimism that for months had been building around Ukraine’s prospects seemed to fade. At one point earlier this summer, Zelensky could look ahead to an influx of new U.S. missiles to defend Kyiv, the right to make even more in Ukraine, and the potential ability to strike inside Russia thanks to Fedorov’s overtures to Musk. He enjoyed greater respect from Trump for Ukraine’s innovations and battlefield momentum, and better relations across Washington thanks to a well-regarded young ambassador.

[Read: Putin is slipping into delusion]

Instead, Trump appears to have turned lukewarm and is stalling on previous commitments on Patriot missiles. Entreaties to Musk have so far failed. Zelensky’s firing of his popular defense minister has prompted protests at home. And Ukraine has no ambassador to make the case for continued U.S. support, because the previous one returned home to face charges of corruption.

As if to emphasize the turnaround, Russia has intensified its missile strikes on Kyiv, taking advantage of Ukraine’s depleted air defenses. Earlier this week, the city and its suburbs faced a barrage of at least two dozen ballistic missiles in a single night. Ukraine was unable to shoot any of them down. Seventeen civilians died, and at least 44 others were wounded.

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During closed-door talks at the White House on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky laid out a plan for his country to survive another winter of war with Russia. For it to work, President Trump would need to call in a big favor from his ally Elon Musk. But according to two officials familiar with the conversation, Trump was noncommittal, leaving the future of the plan in doubt.

The new proposal, which has not been previously reported, offered the United States a way around sending Ukraine advanced air-defense missiles, known as Patriot interceptors, which the war in Iran has dramatically depleted. Instead, Ukraine would expand its use of another American technology: the Starlink satellite-communications network, which Musk controls.

Zelensky asked Trump to secure Musk’s permission for the use of Starlink to guide drone strikes inside Russia, according to the two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. (A third official confirmed Zelensky’s request.) Up to now, Musk has allowed the Ukrainians to use Starlink only on their own territory, including in Crimea and other regions that Russia has occupied. Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, has restricted the use of Starlink inside Russia.

Ukraine’s campaign of long-range drone strikes has therefore employed less reliable targeting methods, including onboard computers with AI-powered navigation tools. These weapons have been effective at hitting large infrastructure sites in Russia, such as oil refineries and warehouses. But, in his talks with Trump on Tuesday, Zelensky explained the need to hit much smaller and more mobile targets, especially the ballistic-missile batteries that Russian forces have used to hit cities across Ukraine. Last night, as Zelensky and his entourage traveled home through Poland, Russia launched more than 70 missiles, killing at least 10 people in one of the biggest salvos of the war. One of the rockets exploded in Poland.

Starlink offers the most precise means available to steer Ukrainian drones to the Russian missile launchers, many of which are mounted on trucks dispersed across Russia. During his visit to the U.S. this week, Zelensky asked to meet with Musk to talk about his plan for targeting these launchers, but the billionaire declined the invitation, according to one person involved in the discussions. Musk and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

When they met at the White House, Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart that he would consider the requests, but he did not indicate whether he would eventually grant them, one official told told us. Trump did tell Zelensky that he would talk with Musk about it but did not offer a timetable for that conversation or for his eventual decision.

Trump has made no secret of his desire to bring the Russia-Ukraine conflict to a close, and has been frustrated at how long it has taken. One of the officials told us that his eventual decision on Zelensky’s proposal would likely be largely based on whether he felt it could help hasten the end of the conflict. If he thinks that using Starlink would enable Ukraine to push Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, then Trump may support it. But if he feels it would only escalate matters, then he likely would not, one official told us.

[Read: Zelensky makes his pitch to Trump]

Trump, of course, has been highly deferential to Putin for more than a decade now, and that has hardly changed during this war. Although he has flashed his frustration with the Russian leader at times, he has mostly stayed skeptical of Ukraine’s cause and its chances. But, one official told us, Trump has been impressed with Ukraine’s recent ability to strike deep within Russia with its drone technology and has sensed that Kyiv has some momentum in the conflict (Trump loves to be associated with winners). The meeting remained convivial and Zelensky invoked the memory of the late Senator Lindsey Graham when making his pitch.

With the war in its fifth year,  Zelensky emphasized to Trump that Ukraine needs to counter the missile threat before the onset of winter, when Russia may again try to use these weapons to knock out Ukraine’s power grid and heating systems, according to the two officials familiar with the talks.

Without the ability to hit launchers inside Russia, “we have no clear path through this winter,” one of the officials told us. Last winter, Ukraine still had a limited supply of Patriot interceptors to shoot down Russian missiles and protect its most crucial infrastructure. But the war in Iran has since depleted roughly two-thirds of the U.S. stockpile of these interceptors, according to an analysis published this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institute based in Washington, D.C. The CSIS report estimated that the U.S. now has as few as 759 of the most advanced Patriot rockets.

Zelensky asked the U.S. to send 300 of these for Ukraine to use this winter. Trump has demurred. Instead, during his talks with Zelensky earlier this month in Ankara, he promised to give Ukraine a license to make its own Patriot interceptors—though Ukraine would not be able to produce them at scale for years.

In the Tuesday meeting, Zelensky argued that Starlink could offer a faster and cheaper answer to the ballistic-missile threat from Russia, according to two of the officials familiar with the conversation. Ukraine already has the long-range drones needed to target missile launchers inside Russia. The Ukrainian company that produces many of them, Fire Point, uses various guidance systems to get around the ban on deploying Starlink inside Russia.

[Read: Ukraine’s Dr. Strangelove]

One of the company’s co-founders, Denys Shtilerman, told us that drones equipped with Starlink could prove far more effective than Patriot interceptors in neutralizing the Russian ballistic-missile threat. “Instead of shooting down the arrows, we would strike the archers,” he said.

Inside its own territory, Ukraine has already used Starlink-enabled drones to create what it calls a “kill zone” along the front line—a no-man’s-land, dozens of miles wide, where drones can target any Russian forces that seek to advance. With permission to do the same thing inside Russian territory, “we could widen the kill zone to 500 kilometers,” Shtilerman told us. “If they increase the range of their strikes, we would widen the kill zone all the way to Siberia if needed. The technology would allow us to do that.”

Musk has long resisted the use of Starlink in warfare. The system depends on the world’s largest constellation of satellites to provide a high-speed internet connection to anyone with a Starlink subscription and a receiver. At the start of the Russian invasion, in 2022, Musk provided Ukraine with Starlink receivers free of charge. Ukrainian hospitals, emergency workers, and government agencies used them to stay online despite Russian attacks on the country’s internet infrastructure. The armed forces of Ukraine soon began using Starlink to coordinate troop movements and pilot drones, and the system became the backbone of Ukraine’s military communications.

During some of Ukraine’s most brazen strikes against Russian forces, Musk got cold feet. “How am I in this war?” Walter Isaacson quoted him as asking in his 2023 biography. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good, peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

That year, the Pentagon began contracting with SpaceX for the communications services it provides to Ukraine’s armed forces. The company also created a separate network, known as Starshield, for use in defense and national security. During his talks with Trump on Tuesday, Zelensky suggested that if Musk refuses to allow the use of Starlink for strikes on Russia, the Pentagon could give Ukraine access to the Starshield network for the same purpose, two of the officials told us.

One of them added, however, that Starshield would not work as well for Ukraine. “It’s more expensive, more complicated, more difficult to integrate into our systems,” the official said. “We have long figured out how to fly drones on Starlink. It would not be hard for us to send them across the border. But Starshield is a somewhat different system. We would need to figure out how to integrate it.” That leaves Starlink as the cheapest and most reliable guidance system available for Ukraine’s long-range drones.

From Musk’s earlier decisions, it can be hard to discern a coherent strategy toward the war in Ukraine. He has used Starlink in ways that each of the warring sides has perceived as helping the other. A few months into the Russian invasion, Musk began to complain about the spiraling cost of providing Ukraine with Starlink service. He refused a Ukrainian request in September 2022 to use Starlink in an attack on Russian warships in Crimea, arguing that the operation risked a nuclear response from the Kremlin.

The following month, Musk published a four-point plan for peace in a post on Twitter. (He would buy the social network for $44 billion a few weeks later.) His peace plan hewed closely to Russian demands, including a provision for Ukraine to remain “neutral” after the war. In response, Zelensky posted his own Twitter survey, asking whether people preferred the Musk who supports Ukraine or the one who supports Russia. Andriy Melnyk, who served as Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany at the time, also shot back at Musk’s peace plan: “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you @elonmusk.”

In Zelensky’s wartime government, the official who cultivated the strongest ties with Musk and SpaceX was Mykhailo Fedorov, the chief architect of the Ukrainian drone program. Early this year, while serving as minister of defense, Fedorov persuaded Musk to shut off the Starlink receivers that Russian forces had been using to fly their own drones in Ukraine. But Fedorov lost his job this month in a government reshuffle, which cost Ukraine its main point of contact with Musk. “Fedorov has a super constructive relationship with him,” a Ukrainian official told us. “So the timing is very bad to install a new minister.”

[Read: Elon Musk moves against the Russians in Ukraine]

One person close to Fedorov told us that, in the weeks before he was fired, the minister lobbied Musk and various other contacts in the U.S. to allow the use of Starlink for drone strikes into Russia. Fedorov received assurances from Musk that it would be possible “if Trump says to do it,” the person said. The talks broke off, he added, after the government reshuffle. (Fedorov did not respond to a request for comment.)

The Trump administration could have its own reasons to balk at Zelensky’s request. “It’s one thing to let Ukraine do this on its own territory,” the Ukrainian official said. “It’s another thing to use American technology on the territory of Russia to take out their air defenses, their launchers for ballistic missiles. This is an unfriendly act. I don’t know how Russia could react to that.”

Russia recently deployed new methods for interfering with Starlink signals in Ukraine. Earlier this month, a set of documents was published that appeared to show Russia plotting with China to destroy Starlink satellites, through either hacking, jamming, or knocking them out of orbit. The documents, allegedly produced by China and obtained by The Insider, highlighted the risks Musk faces in helping Ukraine fight the war.

His willingness to broaden that assistance could depend on the leverage Trump has over Musk—and his desire to use it for Ukraine’s benefit. Earlier this month, Trump seemed open to Zelensky’s strategy for pressuring Russia to negotiate a peace deal. “It’s an escalation,” Trump said when asked about Ukraine’s strikes on oil refineries and military targets deep inside Russia. Seated beside Zelensky in Ankara, Trump added: “But it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end.”