Ukraine
The Upgrade Party stands with Ukraine — and thinks the reasons behind this war deserve more scrutiny than they get.
The Upgrade Party stands with Ukraine.
We always wonder whether the right questions are being asked and answered in the corporate media.
What's Actually Under Ukraine
One major incentive behind Russia's invasion is straightforward: Ukraine's mineral resources. Estimates commonly cited by Forbes Ukraine and the Ukrainian Geologic Survey put the total value around $15 trillion, though outside analysts caution the real figure is genuinely uncertain — proven, economically recoverable reserves are hard to pin down, and estimates in serious reporting have ranged from roughly $12 trillion to $15 trillion.
Estimates vary by source; figures here reflect Ukrainian Geologic Survey and Forbes Ukraine reporting, with outside analysts noting genuine uncertainty in the total.
Russia has already seized the areas holding the highest-value deposits. Ukraine is also a major wheat exporter — and a direct competitor to Russia in that market, which is a second, quieter incentive sitting alongside the mineral wealth.
Which Countries Support Ukraine, and How
Support breaks down into three overlapping categories: military hardware, direct financial aid, and humanitarian assistance. More than 50 countries have contributed at least one of the three since the 2022 invasion.
The shape of that support has shifted significantly over time. The United States led by a wide margin in the war's early years, but as direct U.S. aid slowed through 2025 and 2026, European institutions and individual countries — Germany and the UK foremost among them — moved into the leading role, with EU aid spending overtaking U.S. spending by the end of 2025.
A newer mechanism, the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), launched in mid-2025: rather than donating their own weapons stockpiles, allied countries — including the UK, Canada, Poland, Romania, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Baltic states — pool funds to purchase American-made equipment directly for Ukraine, at a pace of roughly $500 million a month, with the fund expected to reach around $15 billion in 2026.
- Not supporting Russia's opposition, for balance: China, India, Iran, and North Korea have maintained varying degrees of neutrality or active support for Russia rather than Ukraine throughout the war — a genuinely different position from the 50+ countries above, worth naming plainly rather than glossing over.
Which Countries Now Have Military Alliances With Ukraine
Ukraine is not a NATO member, and these agreements are explicitly not a substitute for Article 5 mutual-defense protection. What Ukraine has instead, since 2024, is a growing web of bilateral security agreements — as of November 2025, 28 of them, each running for a ten-year term.
These agreements trace back to the G7 Joint Declaration of Security Assurances, signed at NATO's 2023 Vilnius Summit. Each one commits the partner country to sustained military, political, financial, and humanitarian support, plus deeper cooperation on defense industry, intelligence, and cybersecurity — and each one explicitly frames itself as a bridge toward eventual NATO membership, not a replacement for it.
Signatories include the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Canada, Netherlands, Japan, Spain, Norway, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Czech Republic, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Portugal, Slovenia, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Albania, and Greece, along with the European Union itself. Notably absent, at least as of these agreements being signed: Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, and a small handful of others who have not signed on.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes that killed Iran's Supreme Leader and targeted its nuclear and military sites. Iran's retaliation arrived almost immediately: more than 500 ballistic missiles and roughly 2,000 drones in the first five days alone, according to U.S. Central Command. American air defense systems — built for a very different, higher-value threat environment — struggled badly against the sheer volume of cheap, slow-moving Shahed-style drones. A strike on a U.S. base in Kuwait killed six American servicemembers; drone attacks damaged the U.S. Fifth Fleet's headquarters in Bahrain.
Here's the part worth sitting with: within days, the Washington Post reported that the United States and its Gulf allies had approached Ukraine — not the other way around — asking for its drone-defense expertise. Ukraine had been shooting down exactly this style of Iranian-designed Shahed drone since 2022, developing layered, low-cost interceptor systems that reportedly downed thousands of them at a fraction of the cost of traditional missile defense. That knowledge had been sitting in plain sight, freely discussed in open-source military analysis, for over three years before the Iran war ever started.
How This Could Have Been Prepared For
This is the same pattern this site keeps coming back to on Warnings Ignored: the warning wasn't secret or subtle. Ukraine had spent three years in a live-fire laboratory against the exact family of weapons — cheap, mass-produced, one-way attack drones — that would go on to kill American troops and damage a U.S. fleet headquarters in 2026. Analysts, including at U.S. defense-focused think tanks, had already published the core lesson well before the Iran war: mass drone attacks can't be countered primarily with expensive, limited-supply interceptor missiles built for a handful of high-value targets — they require layered, cheap, high-volume defenses instead.
The U.S. and its Gulf partners had every opportunity to study and adopt Ukraine's approach — acoustic and radio-frequency drone detection, low-cost interceptor drones, electronic jamming — proactively, before a war made it urgent. Instead, that adoption happened reactively, after American service members had already died. It's the same Prepper President principle from elsewhere on this site: warehouses need to be full before the emergency, not scrambled together after the first casualties.
Beyond resources, there's a documented pattern of pressure on the Ukrainian population in occupied territory: forced passportization, deportation of civilians (including well over 100,000 children, by multiple tallies), and demographic replacement through resettlement of non-Ukrainian populations into occupied areas.
The U.S. State Department, the International Criminal Court's framework on unlawful deportation, and independent human rights researchers have all characterized these practices as war crimes; some organizations go further and describe the pattern as consistent with genocide under the UN Convention's definition. These are serious, contested legal determinations — but the underlying reports of forced deportation and forced citizenship are well documented by multiple independent sources.
Ukrainian Upgrade Drones
Ukraine is probably the world headquarters for drone development right now — a capability forged by necessity, under wartime pressure few other countries have faced. We'd like to see that same expertise turned toward peacetime work: Ukrainian-built Upgrade Drones helping build the cities Ukraine will need once the rebuilding starts.