Dean’s LIVE with Ken Harbaugh — Live From Ukraine

June 2, 2026

Well. That was a show.

I went LIVE this morning at 10:30 with Ken Harbaugh, who joined us from Ukraine — actual boots on actual ground — hours after one of the worst nights of the entire war. If you missed it, here’s the recap, the numbers, and the context, because this one mattered.

Part 1: The overnight blitz on Ukraine

We opened cold with the scale of it, because the scale is the story. Overnight into Tuesday, Russia launched 73 missiles and 656 drones across Ukraine — one of the single largest barrages of the war. The main targets: Kyiv, Dnipro, and the eastern cities of Poltava, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia.

Here’s the part that tells you who’s actually winning. Ukraine’s air defenses intercepted or suppressed 40 of the missiles and 602 of the drones. The net held against the overwhelming majority of what Moscow threw. And Russia reportedly emptied a chunk of its most exotic arsenal to do it — around 8 Zircon hypersonic missiles, likely the most of those it has ever fired in a single attack.

The human cost, which was still climbing as we were on air: at least ten people killed and around 100 injured, with the death toll rising to six in Kyiv and eleven in Dnipro. And the detail that gutted the room — a child’s body recovered from the rubble of an apartment building destroyed in Dnipro. Other reports put that child at three years old.

Moscow’s Defense Ministry, naturally, claimed it only struck “military-industrial,” fuel, and transport facilities, and that all designated objects had been hit. Ken, standing in a country where they were pulling a toddler out of an apartment block, had some thoughts about that.

The thesis we kept coming back to: this is the last gasp of a dying regime, not the flex of a winning one. The supporting evidence is overwhelming. Ukraine has struck 15 Russian oil refineries between January and May, feeding a growing fuel crisis — and even on the night it was being bombed, Ukraine hit back, with a fire breaking out at the Ilsky refinery in Krasnodar and strikes on a Pantsir-S1 air defense system and a Russian vessel in occupied Crimea. You don’t fire your rarest hypersonics into apartment blocks while your own gas stations run dry because you’re winning. You do it because you’re losing and you want the world to flinch.

Part 2: Iran just lit two fuses at once

Then we pivoted to the other fire, because while Russia was bombing Kyiv, Tehran spent the last 24 hours blowing up the diplomatic table and reaching for the global economy’s throat.

Here’s what happened. On June 1, within an 18-hour window, Iran suspended all mediator-channel negotiations with the United States, fired two ballistic missiles at a U.S. air base in Kuwait, and announced it had resolved to completely block the Strait of Hormuz and activate other fronts including the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Both missiles were intercepted by CENTCOM — but the message was the point.

The trigger, per Tehran, was Israel: Iran said it was suspending dialogue because of escalating Israeli operations in Lebanon, and that no talks would resume until Israel halts military action in both Lebanon and Gaza.

Why this is a genuinely big deal — and we walked through it on air — is the two chokepoints at once. Hormuz is the artery for a huge share of the world’s seaborne oil and LNG. Bab el-Mandeb is the Red Sea gateway. Naming Bab el-Mandeb mattered because it’s the chokepoint Saudi Arabia had been using to reroute exports around the Hormuz closure — so Iran is effectively trying to slam both doors of the entire Gulf-to-Mediterranean corridor at once. The markets felt it instantly: crude jumped more than 7% within hours, with Brent trading around $97 a barrel.

Ken’s read on the strategic logic here was sharp, and worth the price of admission alone. (Watch the replay.)

Part 3: The important question — will Ken be home for the karaoke night?

And then, because we contain multitudes, I asked Ken the question on everyone’s mind: with all this going on, will he make it back from an active war zone in time to enjoy Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 concert?

Reader, we laughed.

For the uninitiated: Trump hijacked America’s 250th birthday to throw himself a concert, hand-picked the lineup, and then watched two-thirds of it sprint for the exits the moment they realized it was a MAGA rally with a stage. The headliner bailed. The Commodores bailed. Bret Michaels bailed. And — the cherry — Milli Vanilli’s surviving half, Fab Morvan, pulled out yesterday. Let that sink in: a man whose entire career was a lip-sync fraud took one look at this event and decided it was too fake for him. When the guy famous for not actually singing won’t show up to your singing event, you have achieved something.

So now the grand finale on the National Mall is down to Vanilla Ice, C+C Music Factory, and a Flo Rida who appears to have gone completely dark. Three acts, one of whom really needs the check, performing for a president who’s reportedly so humiliated he wants his own staff fired — over the lineup he personally approved.

Ken’s verdict on whether he’d rush home from Ukraine for that? Let’s just say the man would rather stay where the missiles are. Fair.

The takeaway

Two dictatorships had a very loud 24 hours. One emptied its hypersonic arsenal onto apartment blocks and still couldn’t break the people it’s been trying to break for four years. The other torched the negotiating table and grabbed for two oil chokepoints to make the rest of us pay attention. Meanwhile, the leader of the free world spent his morning fuming that washed-up acts won’t sing at his birthday party.

The serious stuff is serious — people died last night, and oil at $97 touches every one of us. But the throughline of the whole show was the same: the people throwing the kitchen sink are the ones circling the drain. Ukraine held the sky. The markets will adjust. And Vanilla Ice will, God help us, take the stage.

More Ken Harbaugh in your life — here’s how

If you don’t already follow Ken, fix that today. Ken Harbaugh is a former U.S. Navy pilot and Yale Law graduate who helped build some of the country’s most influential veteran organizations. He’s the executive producer of the #1 Apple TV documentary Against All Enemies, host of the award-winning Burn the Boats podcast on the MeidasTouch Network, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, The Hill, and the Yale Journal of International Law. He’s not a partisan flamethrower — he’s a decorated vet who understands how the military actually moves when things are about to break bad. Which is exactly why you want him in your feed right now.

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🇺🇦 Slava Ukraini.

Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Iulia Huiu, Peter W Shuster, Dannys, Micheal Scott, and many others for tuning into my live video with The Ken Harbaugh Show! Join me for my next live video in the app.