Tim Mak carries the cynicism of 2016 with him. He remembers digging into Trump’s business history as a journalist, exposing the rot in plain sight, and watching it “make no difference whatsoever.” That futility drove him to enlist — “no one needs a journalist” in a zombie apocalypse, he joked — but the Army only confirmed what he already knew. He wasn’t built to follow algorithms without hesitation. He was built to question, to probe, to doubt. That instinct is what now keeps him in Kyiv, where hesitation is dangerous — but indifference is worse.
Stuart Stevens draws out how personal that shift has been. Mak arrived the very night of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, and instead of fleeing, he built The Counteroffensive into a news outlet that Stevens called “extraordinary.” It’s not just war reporting, it’s an act of defiance: Training young Ukrainian journalists, equipping them with cots and earplugs so they can keep filing even from subway stations. The motto — “empathy and autocracy can’t mix” — is more than branding. It’s an argument for why truth-telling has to be rooted in human lives, not abstractions.
That urgency makes Poland shooting down Russian drones on Tuesday feel like a line crossed. “It really feels like some door has been opened, which can’t be closed again,” Mak warns. Stevens doesn’t bother with euphemisms: The GOP has become “a functional asset of the Russian Federation.” Between them, the picture sharpened — NATO scrambling to prove it still means something, Europe bracing for betrayal, Putin waiting for weakness. The choice isn’t just military; it’s moral, and America’s absence already registers as abandonment.
Meanwhile, Kyiv lives with the soundscape of war. The Shahed “mopeds” buzz like revved engines, every night an unwanted test of endurance. Families sleep in hallways, children in basements, newborns on cots. “Putin is waiting to get an answer” from NATO, Mak says — but Ukrainians already know theirs. They endure, they adapt, they refuse to surrender normal life. The last word wasn’t about Trump or NATO strategy, but about memory: Americans forget there’s a European war room at their own risk.
Tune in for this urgent conversation between Stuart Stevens and Tim Mak. And subscribe to The Counteroffensive for more of Tim’s essential reporting.
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