When Putin Calls, the Cloud Crashes

Ukraine rewrites its survival script while Trump plays court jester to autocrats, the Marines fire over freeways, and the internet forgets how to breathe.

Good morning! President Zelensky arrived in Washington last week with something dangerously close to optimism. After months of back-channel maneuvering, Kyiv had built a plan to thaw relations with the United States: coordinated defense talks, quiet pressure from European allies, and a not-so-subtle plea for long-range Tomahawks. For a fleeting moment, it looked as if Ukraine might finally drag the White House back into the world of facts and commitments. Then the phone rang.

“Putin called Trump,” Zelensky later told reporters, his understatement carrying more weight than a thousand intelligence briefings. The call, placed just hours before Zelensky’s high-stakes meeting, effectively detonated whatever progress Kyiv had hoped to make. Trump emerged from his private huddle with Moscow and promptly informed the world that Ukraine should “stop where they are.” Translation: congratulations, Mr. Putin, you win again.

The Ukrainian delegation left Washington with a handshake, a shrug, and a reminder that America’s foreign policy now fits neatly inside whatever Vladimir Putin says before dessert. Trump’s next move? Announce a “peace summit” in Budapest, Viktor Orbán’s gleaming autocrat Disneyland, where the future of Eastern Europe will presumably be decided between two men who still think the Cold War was a casting call.

The president, fresh from another taxpayer funded golf weekend, treated reporters to a midair soliloquy aboard Air Force One, a kind of airborne therapy session for the clinically unmoored, in which he managed to declare Colombia a “drug manufacturing machine,” threaten India with “massive tariffs,” pity Argentina as “dying,” and congratulate himself for turning Washington, D.C., into “one of the safest cities in the country.” His evidence for this miracle of urban renewal: deporting “1,700 career criminals,” an entirely made-up number he delivered with the conviction of a man who just invented it mid-sentence. All this while ignoring American soybean farmers, who’ve spent months watching their exports rot in silos thanks to his tariff tantrums. He swears China will start buying again “any day now,” but that day, like his memory of basic trade economics, never seems to arrive.

Asked about Ukraine, he repeated the new White House mantra: “Stop at the battle lines. Go home. Be done.” Diplomacy, Trump-style: surrender rebranded as common sense. When pressed about protesters, he blamed George Soros, called them “whacked out,” and reminded the press that he’s “not a king,” just seconds after explaining that he, and he alone, decides what happens to New York. “As of now, it’s terminated,” he said of the Hudson River Tunnel project. “And that’s up to me.” The man who insists he’s no monarch keeps issuing royal edicts from 30,000 feet, where turbulence and ego blur together in equal measure.

In Kyiv, Zelensky wasted no time adapting to reality. If the American president is too busy chasing Putin’s approval to sign a defense deal, Ukraine will go around him. Zelensky announced plans to sign a contract for twenty-five Patriot systems directly with Raytheon, a long-term hedge against Trump’s moods, bypassing the White House altogether. It’s an elegantly defiant move: work through U.S. agencies and manufacturers, not the erratic figurehead with a rotary-dial approach to foreign policy. “The White House can move us up in the queue if there is political will,” Zelensky said, which is diplomatic code for, don’t hold your breath.

Europe, meanwhile, is preparing to ship Tomahawk missiles from its own stockpiles, the kind of workaround once unthinkable in the days when Washington still led alliances instead of undermining them. Zelensky’s diplomacy now resembles distributed computing: if one node fails, the others keep the system running.

And while Ukraine was busy reinforcing its skies, America was theatrically bombing itself. During what the administration billed as an early “250th anniversary salute” to the Marine Corps, a spectacle suspiciously timed to coincide with the No Kings rallies, 155-millimeter artillery shells were fired over Interstate 5 in California as part of a “public demonstration.” The governor had warned against it, but the Pentagon did it anyway. One shell exploded prematurely, showering Vice President J.D. Vance’s motorcade with shrapnel. No one was seriously hurt, though the metaphor limped away bleeding. In Trump’s America, even the fireworks come with friendly fire. The message was unmistakable: while citizens chanted for democracy, the regime answered with a show of force.

As if the real world weren’t glitching enough, the digital one decided to join in. In the pre-dawn hours, Amazon Web Services, the invisible nervous system of modern civilization, collapsed. The outage took down everything from Signal and Coinbase to Disney and The New York Times. Even Amazon’s own support system crashed, leaving engineers unable to report their own failure. The culprit: a database error in DynamoDB, the same technology that underpins half of the internet.

Corinne Cath-Speth of Article 19 called it a “democratic failure,” and she wasn’t wrong. One company hiccuped, and millions of people lost access to news, communication, and commerce. If Putin’s hackers had tried to pull this off, the Pentagon would call it an act of cyberwar. But because it was a bug in Bezos’s empire, we call it “an operational issue.” AWS says it’s “fully mitigated,” which is Silicon Valley for “we’ve duct-taped the servers and hope you don’t notice the smoke.”

By sunrise, as Ukraine scrambled to secure Patriots and America rebooted its cloud, the digital propaganda machine was back online. Elon Musk’s X feed totally ignored that millions of peaceful protesters marched across the country this weekend to demand constitutional accountability and an end to the government shutdown, and by Monday morning, they were algorithmically erased. Not a trending tag, not a single acknowledgment from the man who calls himself a “free speech absolutist.”

Instead, the top promoted post was from The Epoch Times, blaring: “Is America becoming a safer place to live?” beneath a photo of a tattered flag and two unchecked boxes. It’s the kind of question designed to replace news with neurosis, the perfect distillation of the Musk media ethos: feed fear, starve awareness, monetize anxiety.

Sure, America’s safer, if you ignore the artillery overhead, the autocrat on the line, and the cloud server smoking in northern Virginia. The country may be teetering between two worlds, one analog, one algorithmic, but both seem to be running on fumes and hubris. Somewhere, democracy is still buffering.

Somewhere between rebooting democracy and refreshing AWS, I’ll be rebooting my own jaw. Marz is dragging me to the dentist today, he’s finally had enough of my complaints about a broken tooth. “Humans are such wimps!” So if today’s roundup feels a bit slower than usual, blame the pain, not negligence. Even editors need maintenance.