Vlad Litnarovych

A Soviet debt deal gave South Korea a fleet of Russian helicopters that became indispensable for fighting wildfires. More than 30 years later, Dallas Analytics has traced efforts to keep those aircraft flying back toward sanctioned Russian aviation companies—turning a firefighting necessity into an uncomfortable national-security problem.

A $2.31 billion Patriot order sounds straightforward—until export pricing turns it into a question of whether Ukraine gets 190 missiles or nearly three times as many.