Showcase showdown

Ukraine provides global arms manufacturers with a lab-cum-showroom

There are a lot of lenses through which to view the war in Ukraine: the front line in a new Cold War between freedom and tyranny, a proxy war in the battle to defend U.S. hegemony from China’s challenge, or the latest (and perhaps final) chapter in Russia’s centuries-old paranoid fear of Western invasion.

But except for the daily suffering inflicted on the Ukrainian people, the most tangible and immediate impact of the war is the massive boost in orders it has provided to big defense contractors able to advertise their wares for free every day for the past 18 months on Ukraine’s muddy battlefields.