The First Security Guarantee Ukraine Can Trust: A 40-Km Kill Zone

Clusters of NASAMS, Skynex, and interceptor drones can do what treaties never will — stop Russian drones and missiles cold

I’ve long said the Kremlin starts each day asking, “What can we lie about today?” and ends it asking, “What should we lie about tomorrow?”

The Trump–MAGA machine is almost there. Every now and then, they stumble into the truth, but even then they can’t resist wrapping it in a fresh coat of deception. Give it time — under a GOP White House, Washington will look like a low-rent Kremlin replica.

Oligarchs? Check. Propaganda? Check.

The latest trick in their playbook is to blame Europe for Trump’s failures. It’s pure desperation — a frantic scramble to shield their dear leader from the one label he fears most: weakling.

Senator Lindsey Graham made the TV rounds yesterday with the usual refrain: Europe needs to “pull its weight.” The reality? Europe has already carried twice the load of the United States in military aid to Ukraine. Brussels dropped its Russian oil price cap to €47.6 months ago. Only Washington and Canberra are still clinging to the old level.

American oil companies, meanwhile, are quietly lining up backchannel talks with the Kremlin, preparing to cash in on the commodities market once the war ends. Europe has done the opposite — killing off the +€20-billion Nord Stream pipeline for good, while Ukraine takes aim at the Druzhba pipeline almost daily.

No one delivers more aid to Ukraine than Germany. Norway is second this year. The U.S.? A few dozen ATACMS, zero fighter jets, and just twelve pilots trained in three years. Washington sells weapons to Europe, tiptoes around Putin, and now has the gall to add “blame Europe” to the script.

Trump and his circle of American oligarchs may cheer this blame-Europe routine, but it’s already falling flat. Sorry, GOP — the tactic isn’t landing. Support for Ukraine among Republicans is actually growing, not shrinking. And when Gavin Newsom starts hammering Trump as a national-security failure and a foreign-policy novice, that label is going to stick.

It’ll sting all the way into the midterms.

Meanwhile, Poland just showed everyone how to say “fuck you” to security guarantees. Ukraine should take notes. Long-time readers know I never supported the idea in the first place. The only reason I pulled back from that position was out of respect for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who pushed for it. I couldn’t see his logic at the time, but I trusted his judgment and held my fire.

Now Putin has attacked Poland, probed Romania, and every country that once touted “security guarantees” has done precisely nothing. My patience is gone. Poland delivered the sentence I so badly wanted to hear.

Talking about security guarantees Poland’s foreign minister said, “I don’t find this convincing, I don’t see trust in it. Whoever wants to fight Russia can start right now. But I don’t see any volunteers. And in international relations there is nothing worse than offering guarantees that no one trusts.”

Ukraine needs to echo Poland’s position.

A NATO member was hit with drones, and what does Washington do? Apologize for Russia’s adventurism. Paris and London still won’t send long-range missiles. Here’s the sequence that matters: first, deliver the missiles to Ukraine. Second, shoot down drones and missiles that come within 40 kilometers of Poland and Romanian border with Ukraine. Then we can talk about splashy summits and grand guarantees. Until those two boxes are checked, the answer to security guarantees stays simple: fuck no.

Poland’s foreign ministry has already endorsed nearly all of my recommendations: long-range missiles to Ukraine, and urged the allies to consider shooting down Russian drones and missiles inside western Ukraine. But they stopped short on one key idea — the creation of a 40 km air-defense corridor inside Ukraine.

I take responsibility for not explaining this fully enough. Let’s fix it today.

Let us first consider the geography.

Poland’s frontlines tell the story. To the north, 209 km with Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. To the east, 418 km with Belarus, Moscow’s client state. And stretching further, 535 km with Ukraine, today’s battlefield. That’s a total of 1,162 km of exposed border — 627 km of it directly against Russia and Belarus.

If NATO’s air defenses operate only from Polish territory, Putin can — and will — stretch Europe thin by saturating this entire frontier with drones and missiles. Europe cannot defend a 627 km line with static systems alone.

But it doesn’t have to. The solution is to project the shield forward, inside Ukraine, starting with a 40 km corridor along the Polish–Ukrainian border.

Why 40 km? Because that matches the effective engagement envelope of existing short-range European systems:

• NASAMS (Norway) can intercept targets up to ~40 km.

• Skynex (Germany) detects and engages up to ~30 km.

• Skyranger (Germany) provides mobile point defense up to 4 km with guns, ~8–9 km with missiles.

Together, layered inside Ukrainian territory, these systems can create a continuous kill zone where drones and cruise missiles cannot penetrate.

The Logic of the “Cluster”

Instead of attempting to defend the entire 535 km Polish–Ukrainian border at once — which is logistically impossible and financially prohibitive — Europe should lock down a single 40 km cluster first.

This is not just about defending a slice of territory. The first cluster serves as the industrial ignition point:

• Orders go to NASAMS, Rheinmetall (Skynex, Skyranger), and other European manufacturers.

• Production lines that are idle or underutilized suddenly run at wartime speed.

• Once one 40 km cluster is in place, the infrastructure, training, and logistics chains created can be replicated outward.

A single Patriot battery, with a range of 160 km, can cover the airspace above four 40 km clusters. That buys time for Europe’s short-range systems to multiply.

Scaling Up

The beauty of this approach is compounding growth:

• One cluster = a 40 km wide stretch of border × 40 km depth into Ukraine = ~1,600 km² of protected airspace.

• Once the first is established, each additional cluster strengthens the coverage of the earlier one, node by node.

• Every cluster acts as both a defensive shield and a production driver, pushing European industry into high-gear mass output.

The United Kingdom is moving rapidly with its joint UK-Ukraine “Project Octopus” to mass produce advanced interceptor drones. Under new agreements, the UK will produce one thousand of these interceptor drones in the first delivery batch, and then scale up to thousands per month. These drones, developed in Ukraine (with UK technical and manufacturing support), have already proven effective against Russian Shahed-style one-way attack drones — despite costing less than 10% of the weapons they’re designed to intercept.

Taken together, this means that by the end of this year, it is realistically possible for Europe to lock down at least one 40-km cluster inside Ukraine, using interceptor drones to form a forward line of defence. Once that cluster is built, production capacity, supply chains, industrial skills, and political momentum are all in place to replicate further clusters, pushing the protective shield eastward.

One 40 km cluster is more than just a defensive bubble. It’s a production catalyst. The first orders for NASAMS, Skynex, and Skyranger kick factories into wartime rhythm. Once the machinery is running, the unit cost falls, supply chains adapt, and crews gain live training. In defense economics, nothing scales faster than a repeatable template. A single cluster is proof of concept. The second and third are easier. By the fifth, the system sustains itself.

From there it’s one cluster at a time, expanding eastward. In 12 months or may be 24, Poland and Europe could transform the entire NATO–Russia border from a vulnerable line into a hardened anti-drone, anti-missile wall.

Strategic Payoff

Russia cannot keep pace. Putin has drones and shells, but not capital. Europe has both. Once the cluster model starts rolling, the asymmetry flips: Moscow bleeds cash for every strike, while Europe spends less to intercept more. Within months, what was once a vulnerable frontier becomes a wall of steel and silicon stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

This is not a fantasy blueprint. It is a scalable defense model waiting only for the first order. Start with one cluster. Get the production lines humming. Then repeat. Eastern Europe’s map changes overnight — not with treaties or empty guarantees, but with hard air defense that Russia cannot overcome.

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Let's protect the democracies, together. Time to keep pushing Brussels.