INTREP360 INTELLIGENCE REPORT

02.19.2026

February 19^th, 2026

Greetings! I am flying solo tonight as we approach February 24^th—the fourth anniversary of the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine—& I am in a reflective frame of mind.

My initial reaction to seeing Putin’s announcement on TV—it ran at 5:30 AM Moscow time—was to call my youngest son & tell him the world order as he knew it had forever changed & to mark the moment.

I am rarely rash in jumping to conclusions, but I did that night. As events ever since have played out, I was sadly right.

My thoughts then raced back to my own late father. He, like millions of other Americans, was part of the Greatest Generation.

He ended high school in an ROTC uniform & started World War II as an Aviation Cadet in the U.S. Army. He later saw combat in the Philippines & became part of the initial occupying force in Japan after the surrender of the Empire on September 22^nd, 1945.

The peace that he had fought for & won—and that far too many other Americans & allied soldiers had nobly died obtaining—had largely held—globally-speaking—for 77 years. Then, on February 24^th—the Cold War notwithstanding—I knew it was over.

***

The next day I visited my parents’ graves at a national cemetery. I felt that I owed it to him to mark the occasion & acknowledge one more time sacrificing his youth & early college years to safeguard our country.

If you haven’t visited a national cemetery—especially ones that largely commemorate World War II & Korean War veterans, I recommend that you do. Until you see row after row of similar birth dates, you can’t fully grasp—or at least I didn’t—the scale & enormity of an entire generation of Americans’ sacrifice.

Photo credit: D-Day Memorial Center. Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, France.

I did have an early sense of it. While growing up, my father’s work necessitated us living in Asia, Europe & the Middle East.

If we were within driving distance of a U.S. military cemetery, we always stopped, said a prayer & I’d watch my father—as I did many times—have this look on his face that screamed ‘Why them, why not me?’

Nowhere did that hit harder—emotionally at least for me—than on the beaches & American cemeteries in Normandy, France. We first visited those sites near the 30^th anniversary of D-Day in 1974.

Seeing June 6^th over & over as a date of death on row after row of Crosses & Stars of David is still seared into my mind.

Photo credit: Toth family. Mark’s father holding me in his arms while my brother looks on in Normandy, France, 1974.

Like most kids, I thought of my Dad as a giant. I still do. It was only years later that he confided in me that he never felt more insignificant as a man than that day we stood walking the graves of young American soldiers in Normandy.

He came back. They didn’t.

***

Normandy also taught me a lesson about my father’s generation that could only be fully understood if you lived through it as a person as I did as a kid. As we visited the D-Day sites across the region—essentially a tour of every scene of the 1962 epic war film, “The Longest Day”—older French people kept coming up to my father & many of them would just start crying.

They kept saying ‘Merci, Merci!’ My Dad did his best to try to tell them that he had served in the Pacific during World War II & not in Europe.

It didn’t matter to them.

They had lost something—liberty—to the Nazis & my father’s generation had restored it to them. I saw their gratitude as a kid. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I fully understood the magnitude of it & why.

***

Fast-forward back to February 24^th, 2022—technically, it was still February 23^rd where we were. After hanging up with my son, I kept repeating to myself about Gen. George S. Patton’s stump speech line—made famous by George C. Scott in the opening scene of the 1970 biopic “Patton”—where he asks, “What did you do in the great World War II?”

I knew I had to do something. I owed it to my father & to his generation & I knew that I owed it to my own children & their generation.

But how?

I was already in my late 50s. I could not fight but as fate & serendipity would have it, I found out that my pen—or to be technically correct, my MacBook—could. I was in the fight—not physically as my father did—but at least I was fighting to preserve what he & his generation fought for & achieved with their blood, sweat & tears.

***

Initially—as I began that keyboard fight—I was struck by the enormity of what had happened. Putin wasn’t just out to conquer Ukraine. He was out to destroy the global order as it had been since the end of World War II.

It wasn’t until July of 2022 that I fully began to assess Putin’s actions as the start of World War III. I knew it wasn’t a global war in a traditional sense, but I also knew that it was quickly becoming global in scope.

It was then that I questioned in a piece written with Jon Sweet at The Hill as to whether or not Putin had blundered the Kremlin into a dystopian World War III in Ukraine. Directionally, I knew I was likely right, but I still was struggling to define the nature of this unfolding global conflict that had started in eastern Europe.

By November of 2023, I had further refined my argument. In a new piece with Jon for the Daily Mail in London, I couched it as an ideological World War III that in the wake of the Oct. 7. Hamas attack on Israel was increasingly becoming kinetic.

I also argued in that piece that China was becoming increasingly invested in ensuring Putin would win in Ukraine. Doing so would destroy what Putin & Chinese President Xi Jinping viewed as U.S. global hegemony & replace it with a multi-polar that would be dominated—conveniently, of course—by Beijing & Moscow.

I was getting closer to framing the conflict. Not just in Ukraine, but on a global basis as Iran––particularly its IRGC-backed militias including Hamas, Hezbollah & the Houthis, its nuclear weapons program, & its supply of Shahed drones to Moscow––& North Korea actively began directly & indirectly aiding Putin’s war effort in Ukraine.

Yet I knew something was still missing. Using “World War III” in headlines & analyses kept conjuring up images of nuclear mushroom clouds & nightmare day after radioactive survival scenarios.

Then it finally hit me while speaking during an X space about how to frame the missing—indeed, far too long elusive—piece. The type of World War III that I was arguing was underway wasn’t Hollywood’s version, but rather war by a thousand cuts—partly kinetic, partly hybrid including assassination, sabotage, disinformation & espionage, & ideological warfare.

That argument ultimately culminated in another piece I penned with Jon for the Daily Mail in March 2025. Finally, I had finished framing out—at least in words—what I had begun arguing existed in the summer of 2022.

It was nebulous. But it was very, very real.

***

Tonight, I remain as motivated as ever to keep telling Ukraine’s story. Every day, I think long & hard how to tell it with fresh framing & insight. Ukraine fatigue in the media is very real. It is also understandable.

Its length has now surpassed the U.S. combat involvement in World War II. Life moves on. New generations are being born. Real threats—such as what we are seeing develop in Iran & across the Sahel in Africa—keep emerging.

Yet, as I begin to close out this special edition of the INTREP360 Intelligence Report, I find myself being haunted by a global war that has yet to be won. I keep thinking about a Ukrainian boy or girl walking through a military graveyard in Ukraine 30 years from now with their father or mother who served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Photo credit: Iryna Vasylieva / Instagram. Iryna Vasylieva visits the grave of her father Oleksandr, who was killed on March 27, 2022.

The fallen will be there. So too will be the dates of their deaths. But what will those kids be seeing? The graves of the victorious? Or the graves of the dead who gave all for what should have been—a world forever freed from Putin’s tyranny?

It must be the former. We owe that outcome to future generations. I owe it as well to my Dad & his generation.

***

Thank you for reading! I will see you tomorrow. Please subscribe, comment and share. I truly appreciate it!

Mark

Follow Mark on X at @MCTothSTL or on Bluesky at @MarkToth.bsky.social.