Russian invaders dig into Ukraine’s softening soil as Congress wallows in its own mire.

(Originally published March 1 in “What in the World“) Spring is just around the corner and already tidings abound.

An early thaw in Ukraine—the rasputitsa—is turning icy battlefields into muddy quagmires as Russian forces intensify their offensive to take the besieged city of Bakhmut. Drones that Russia says took flight in Ukraine migrated deep into Russia, with one spotted less than 100km from Moscow. It was attacks by Ukrainian drones against Russian missile bases that last December appeared to overcome U.S. President Joe Biden’s remaining reluctance to give Ukraine Patriot anti-missile batteries. Ukraine has since been pleading for long-range missiles, fighter jets, and attack drones, so don’t be surprised if they’re sighted this spring over Donbas.

That perpetually peripatetic American species, the Antony Blinken Secretary of State, is winging his way across Central Asia, Russia’s soft underbelly, to visit the ‘stans and keep them from extending support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. It’s a risky migration: the central Asian republics, all former Soviet states and still allies, have been a part of Moscow’s paranoid origin story since the ancient khans conducted raids to kidnap Russians as slaves for their palaces in what is now Uzbekistan. Some to this day have areas like Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas where ethnic Russians dominate. Blinken is playing on their fears that, if Moscow achieves its territorial aims in Ukraine, they could be next on its hit list. But Russia isn’t the only peril Blinken faces on the steppes: China has also been building ties in the region as it tries to rebuild a modern-day recreation of the Silk Road connecting it to Europe.

Back along the banks of the Potomac, meanwhile, the terrapin-jowled Mitch McConnell Kentucky Senator has issued a lonely and tremulous call for higher defense spending to meet the twin threats coming from Russia and China. Congress only last year passed a record, $858 billion defense budget. McConnell leads his Republican party’s minority in the U.S. Senate, but hard-right Republicans in the House of Representatives have threatened to trim military spending as part of their demands for government spending cuts. They’re holding the government’s legislated debt ceiling hostage and say they won’t raise it until their demands are met. If they don’t, the U.S government is projected to run out of money to pay its bills by spring’s end. At the same time, though, Congress this week established a new Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party to confront the “existential struggle” against China.

Further south in Arkansas, a Lockheed Martin factory outside Little Rock is ramping up production of Himars, or High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, to meet growing demand. After helping Ukraine turn the tide in the war against Russia’s invasion, the Himars are in hot demand across the Western alliance, where allies plundering their armories to supply Ukraine are finding them in a state of dangerous neglect. Once able to produce only 48 a year, Lockheed’s factory can now churn out 60 a year.

Lockheed can also look forward to a new order for its F-35s: Singapore plans triple its fleet of the advanced fighter jets by buying eight more. Singapore aims to replace its aging F-16s with F-35Bs, originally designed for the U.S. Marine Corps. A tiny island with soaring property prices, Singapore wants the F-35Bs to take advantage of their ability to use a swiveling jet nozzle to take off and land vertically, reducing its need for long landing strips that take up valuable real estate for the wealthy new immigrants flocking there from China.