There are moments in a war when a single attack matters less for what it physically destroys than for what it reveals about the enemy’s vulnerabilities. That is exactly what happened on October 8, when Ukrainian drones hit Yandex’s largest data center in Sasovo, in Russia’s Ryazan region, just 26 days before the United States midterm elections. The Sasovo facility houses two of the three supercomputers used to train Yandex’s AI models, and follow-up strikes on October 9 and October 11 disabled modules at Yandex’s Kaluga center and shut down its Vladimir center. By the end of the week, Yandex Cloud’s status page listed at least 84 services offline. Volodymyr Zelensky described the strikes as a direct answer to a month of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers—attacks that Russia’s Defense Ministry had tried to spin as “a forced digital detox.” But the real story is bigger than infrastructure damage. Yandex is not just a tech company; it is the Kremlin’s information machine. It answers roughly 70 percent of search queries in Russia, according to the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin, whose 2024 report on the company was bluntly titled “From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool.” Two months into the invasion, a Yandex image search for Bucha returned postcard views of the town. The director of Yandex News resigned in 2022 and publicly called the company “a key element in concealing information” about the war. In February 2024, the Russian business was sold to a fund with close Kremlin ties. The supercomputers in Sasovo train the models behind Alice, the assistant inside Yandex Browser, which has 71 million monthly users. A 2026 study by the research group Policy Genome found that Alice endorsed Kremlin narratives in 86 percent of its Russian-language answers. Leaked documents from the Social Design Agency—the Presidential Administration contractor behind the Doppelganger network of cloned Western news sites—describe a program specifically designed to poison AI answers in targeted countries. None of this happened by accident.
For Putin, these successful strikes represent a powerful blow to his ability to control narratives among the Russian public, but they also have unsettling implications for the rest of the world. Ukraine did not just hit a data center; it hit the infrastructure of a propaganda ecosystem that has been used to manipulate elections and public opinion far beyond Russia’s borders. The Doppelganger network cloned Western news sites, spread fake stories, and tried to exploit American political divisions. The AI models trained at Sasovo were not only serving Russian users; they were being weaponized to shape what people in other countries see and believe. And yet, as Christopher Armitage of The Existentialist Republic points out, there is a strange and uncomfortable asymmetry in all of this. Ukraine can bomb the Kremlin’s information machine because its servers sit in buildings inside Russia. The campaign aimed at U.S. midterm elections, by contrast, sits on servers that no published investigation has located since Russian police raided Aeza in April 2025, and since February 2025 no FBI task force has looked for it. Ukraine hit that machine three times in four days, at its own cost, in the fifth year of defending its own existence. There is something both humbling and infuriating about that fact. A country fighting for its survival found the time, the will, and the capability to strike at the heart of Russian disinformation infrastructure, while American institutions, distracted or unwilling, have largely let the broader threat slide. The strikes may not end the information war, but they prove that the machine has a body, and that body can be hit.
If you want to see how the same playbook of political weaponization operates in domestic American politics, look at what just happened to Ilhan Omar. Federal agents raided the Minnesota congresswoman’s home in October, just weeks before she is up for re-election. The investigation, according to reports, is being spurred by a possible problem with paperwork filled out by her father when she was a child. Let that sink in. A woman who has served in Congress, won elections, and represented her district through multiple national crises is now facing a federal raid over paperwork that her father allegedly filled out decades ago, when she was a minor. As Zeeshan Aleem of MSNBC observes, the very fact that the Trump administration had to scrounge up something like this underscores how desperate it was to find anything. But desperation does not make the move less sinister; it makes it more revealing. This raid fits a broader pattern: Donald Trump looks for obscure alleged administrative wrongdoings by political foes and then uses federal law enforcement powers as a weapon. We have seen it before. There have been allegations of using mortgage fraud accusations to pressure and intimidate Democrats, even though Trump himself and members of his own Cabinet have reportedly committed the same kinds of acts he has called “deceitful and potentially criminal.” The timing of the raid—close to an election, against a high-profile critic of the administration—makes the political motive almost impossible to deny. It is not an investigation; it is a scare tactic. It sends a message to every elected official who dares to challenge the administration that no one is safe, that the machinery of the state can be turned against you at any moment, and that even your family’s history can be dug up and used as a weapon. That is not justice. That is intimidation, and it is a chilling sign of how far the norms of American governance have eroded.
There is another political story unfolding in the Democratic Party that is harder to watch, because it involves Democrats turning against their own constituents. In several midterm races, Democratic candidates are increasingly using anti-trans rhetoric, hoping to win back voters by distancing themselves from transgender people. Months after his March primary victory against Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Talarico said in a Fox News interview that he would “oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it endangers safety or fairness.” According to scholars and media watchdog groups like GLAAD, appeals to “safety” and “fairness” are common anti-trans dog whistles that perpetuate misinformation about transgender athletes. Republican-aligned super PACs are also hammering the issue. Elon Musk’s America PAC has spent $100 million on anti-trans ads in battleground states like Texas, Ohio, and Alaska. Some of those ads feature people implied to be transgender women, though it is unclear whether they were actors or AI-generated. Ohio offers clear examples of this gamble. In June, the state’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Amy Acton, made an anti-trans comment, referring to transgender girls as “boys.” That quickly drew criticism from statewide LGBTQ+ groups and community leaders. In Ohio’s 9th congressional district, Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s campaign has run multiple anti-trans ads focusing on parental rights and transgender children in school sports, saying that the congresswoman voted to keep “transgender ideology” out of schools. The campaign also recently ran mailers with this message. I understand the political calculation. Some strategists believe that taking a hard line on trans issues will help Democrats win over swing voters in a difficult environment. But understanding a calculation does not mean accepting it. It is painful to watch a party that claims to defend vulnerable people decide that some vulnerable people are expendable. Transgender children, in particular, are being turned into campaign props, stripped of their dignity in advertisements and used as symbols of everything that scare voters. The cost is real. It affects the safety and well-being of trans people across the country, many of whom feel increasingly abandoned by the very people they once counted on. Winning an election by throwing a marginalized group under the bus is not just cynical; it is dangerous. And no amount of political strategy can erase the damage it does.
Meanwhile, away from the political battles over who gets to use which bathroom or whose paperwork was filled out wrong, there is a quiet crisis unfolding in American health care that is about to get much worse. Urban hospitals are closing at an even faster rate than rural hospitals, according to a new analysis by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers examined hospital closures and openings that occurred between 2010 and last year, and found that closures increased by 4 percent year over year, while new hospital openings decreased by 3 percent year over year. The study comes as health systems across the nation brace for the effects of the broad tax and spending measure passed by congressional Republicans and signed by President Donald Trump in July 2025. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act is projected to cut federal Medicaid spending by an estimated $886.8 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Public attention has mostly focused on struggling rural hospitals, and for good reason—rural communities have seen a steady erosion of access to care for years. But the Harvard researchers found that urban hospitals have also been vulnerable. In fact, the closure rate was 9.1 percent for urban hospitals and 8.3 percent for rural hospitals. Across both rural and urban areas, hospitals that were for-profit, small, or safety-net, or that served the most vulnerable counties—such as those with higher poverty rates or less access to transportation—were most likely to close. The implications are staggering. When a hospital closes, it does not just mean longer drives for patients. It means lost emergency rooms, lost maternity wards, lost mental health beds, lost jobs, and lost hope for communities that are already struggling. It means that people in the poorest neighborhoods, often the same people who rely on Medicaid, will have fewer places to go when they are sick, injured, or giving birth. And all of this is about to get worse as the Medicaid cuts take effect. The figures are so large that they can feel abstract—$886.8 billion, 9.1 percent, 4 percent year over year—but behind every number is a family sitting in an emergency room waiting room, a nurse losing a job, a patient being told to go somewhere else. These are not abstractions. They are the texture of life in a country that is quietly allowing its health care safety net to unravel.
But not every story is grim, and there are moments where public policy actually works. Denver, Colorado, has recorded the biggest recent drop in street homelessness among the largest U.S. cities, according to an analysis of local data by German Lopez of The New York Times. The city’s drop was roughly 13 times the national rate in 2025, the most recent year for federal statistics. Since 2023, Denver’s unsheltered population is down 64 percent. That is not a rounding error; that is a transformation. “What they’re doing is working,” said Samantha Batko, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Urban Institute, which is independently evaluating the city’s progress. Since Mayor Mike Johnston took office in 2023, he has focused on getting unsheltered homelessness to zero. He has done so by using some fairly standard ideas. Police officers break up homeless encampments, warning that repeated violations could lead to arrest. With the help of social workers, the city connects those people to services and shelters. Crucially, it has expanded those services to ensure that officers and social workers have something to connect people to. Shelters have been opened, supportive housing has been created, and people have been given a real alternative to life on the streets. That last part is the key. In many cities, the police clear encampments and then simply move people along, leaving them with nowhere to go. Denver has tried to pair enforcement with support, making it possible for people to choose a safer, more stable life. The results speak for themselves. But there is a warning in Denver’s success as well. Much of the tens of millions of dollars the city has spent on shelters was paid for through temporary federal funds that have now expired. The Trump administration has also moved to cut housing subsidies across the country. The financial constraints have led some local officials to question whether the cost of the city’s efforts is worth the benefit. If that sentiment spreads, it could doom the progress. That would be a tragedy, not just for Denver but for every city that could learn from its example. Denver has shown that homelessness is not an unsolvable problem. It is an expensive, complicated, and politically difficult problem, but it is not unsolvable. With the right mix of resources, political will, and persistence, the number of people sleeping on the streets can be dramatically reduced. The question is whether the country has the collective will to maintain that effort—or whether, once again, a proven solution will be allowed to wither because of short-sighted budget decisions. Everyone have the best possible day that you can, and thanks for reading.