May 12, 2026 Yesterday in Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelensky — a guy Donald Trump screamed at in the Oval Office fourteen months ago, paused military aid to, and let JD Vance lecture about gratitude on national television — sat down with Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. Karp flew in. Zelensky didn’t fly to him. And the two of them announced they’re deepening cooperation on AI-driven battlefield software, including a platform called Brave1 Dataroom, where, per Ukraine’s defence minister, more than a hundred companies are already training over eighty AI models on real combat data to detect and intercept aerial threats. Karp’s company is now openly described by Ukraine’s own defence ministry as helping plan deep strikes inside Russia. The CEO of the most powerful defence-AI firm on Earth showed up in Kyiv on a Tuesday in May 2026 and effectively said: " This is where the future of war is being written, and I want to be in the room. That same week, Zelensky announced that nearly twenty countries are now lined up for what Ukraine is calling “Drone Deals” — bilateral agreements to co-produce Ukrainian-designed drones, interceptors, electronic warfare systems, and the AI that runs them. Four are already signed: Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, plus ten-year defense export partnerships with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. And on May 11, Zelensky said the next major agreement being prepared is with Canada. Canada. The country Trump has spent the last year calling the 51st state and trying to economically bully into submission. Here’s what Canada’s already done. In August 2025, PM Mark Carney flew to Kyiv on Ukraine’s Independence Day and signed a Letter of Intent on Canada-Ukraine Joint Production of Defence Materiel. He committed CA$220 million specifically for drone, counter-drone, and electronic warfare capabilities — including joint ventures between Canadian and Ukrainian industry. The Department of National Defence stood up a whole new office — the Directorate of Military Assistance Coordination, or DMAC — to broker these partnerships. The first concrete deal is already in motion: Hamilton, Ontario-based Sentinel R&D is in advanced talks with a Ukrainian drone company to manufacture the ReKam 3.2 — a 500-kilometre-range, payload-agnostic, fixed-wing UAV — on Canadian soil. DMAC buys them. Canada donates them to Ukraine. And Canadian industry inherits the IP, the manufacturing know-how, and four years of the most battle-tested drone design lessons in human history. Then in March 2026, Ottawa dropped another CA$900 million on a national drone strategy with a dedicated Drone Innovation Center. Zelensky himself said in February that Ukraine now has 450 drone companies feeding its battlefield — an industrial model NATO members are scrambling to replicate before they need it themselves. Ukraine is currently producing over four million drones a year, and Zelensky says they could double that with the right funding. Canada is buying a ticket on that train. So is everyone else. Now ask yourself: where is the United States in this picture? Here’s where it gets ugly for American defence. In August 2025, in a closed-door White House meeting, Zelensky personally offered Trump Ukraine’s interceptor drone technology — the cheap, devastatingly effective stuff Ukraine has been using to swat down Iranian-made Shaheds for years. The Ukrainians brought a PowerPoint. They literally warned, in writing, that “Iran is improving its Shahed one-way-attack drone design.” They proposed building “drone combat hubs” in Turkey, Jordan, and the Gulf — exactly where US bases sit. They structured it like a Trump deal: jobs in America, US companies get a cut of production, Ukraine buys American weapons in return. Trump’s administration dismissed it - then gave his sons billions in US taxpayer-funded grants to “own the drone supply chain.” Soup to nuts. Then the US bombed Iran on February 28, 2026. Iran’s Shahed drones started killing American servicemen. And in March, two US officials — speaking to Axios on background — said the snub of Ukraine’s offer ranks as “one of the biggest tactical miscalculations” of the entire Iran conflict. The Pentagon is now, per the same reporting, scrambling to send personnel to Ukraine to “pull the tech and the tactics from the Ukrainian military.” They want what Zelensky offered them for free. They want it badly enough that on July 3, 2025, Zelensky announced a deal with Swift Beat — Eric Schmidt’s drone startup — to jointly produce “hundreds of thousands” of drones, including interceptors. Schmidt. Former CEO of Google. Signing ceremony with Zelensky and the Ukrainian defence minister. While Trump was still publicly trashing Ukraine on Truth Social, his former tech-industry rivals were quietly cutting the deals he refused to. This is where, according to reporting today from — who’s been talking directly to people in the know — the Trump family’s domestic consolidation of US drone manufacturing starts to look less like industrial strategy and more like a desperate, late-stage attempt to corner a market that’s already moving offshore without them. No one has done deeper work to understand how Trump and his Crime Family have tried to roll up the drone warfare supply chain in the US than former congressman . The problem? DATA. They need 4 years of drone warfare data that only UKRAINE has. Then, of course, there’s the issue of Russia being on the verge of collapse, and Ukraine is on the verge of winning. Trump hates associating with losers even though he’s the definition. Ken told us today that weapons makers and the Trump Regime are watching Russia's collapse in real time while Ukraine, out of desperation, has become the world’s drone/modern warfare superpower in the process. In short? Trump’s Regime is starting to realize (not seas - lol) Russia is losing, Ukraine is winning, and they’d like a re-do - they just don’t want you knowing about it, of course. Want to know the tell? Watch Trump’s Truth Social feed. Go back and look. From the Oval Office blowup in March 2025 through the summer, Trump was calling Zelensky a dictator, accusing him of starting the war, and threatening to cut him loose. Then came “Vladimir, STOP!” in April 2025. Then “He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” about Putin in May. Then, the UN General Assembly meeting in September, where Trump suddenly suggested Ukraine could win back all its territory. Then last week’s three-day ceasefire announcement, where Trump publicly thanked “President Zelenskyy” for agreeing to his initiative. No more “dictator.” No more “no cards.” When was the last time you saw a Truth Social post calling Zelensky a criminal? When was the last full-throated pro-Putin post? They’ve evaporated. The man who once paused military aid to Ukraine to force Zelensky into a Putin-friendly settlement is now publicly grateful to him on a Friday afternoon. Russia is grinding through its third year of an economy on war footing with depleted reserves, a battered Black Sea fleet, and a Shahed-dependent air war that Ukrainian interceptors — the same ones Trump turned down — are increasingly neutralizing. Ukraine just demonstrated the ability to strike targets over 1,000 kilometres deep into Russia with domestically-made weapons. Eleven Russian regions cancelled Victory Day celebrations, citing security concerns. The country that was supposed to roll over Kyiv in seventy-two hours is rerouting air defence from its own regions to protect Red Square for a parade. And every general, every defence executive, every Pentagon procurement officer who reads the same intelligence Trump reads has come to the same quiet conclusion: the future of warfare is being built in Ukraine and exported to America’s allies, and the United States — by Trump’s choice, against the advice of his own military — is on the outside looking in. That’s why Eric Schmidt signed with Swift Beat. That’s why Alex Karp got on a plane to Kyiv yesterday. That’s why the Pentagon is beggi…
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