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Regulators and bankers are sounding the alarm about an explosion in privately-rated securities

Seventeen years after credit rating agencies’ starring role in the financial crisis, “ratings shopping” is in focus again.

The first time around, large established agencies competing to grade a finite pool of debt gave out inflated stamps of approval to risky assets. Buyers of the assets were falsely left with the impression that the subprime credit they were holding was as safe as it got.

This time it is not the big three agencies of Moody’s, S&P and Fitch that are in the line of fire, but second-tier shops that have shot to prominence by catering to the booming private credit market, which has grown to some $3tn in recent years.

Smaller, specialist providers such as Morningstar DBRS, Kroll Bond Rating Agency, HR Ratings and Egan-Jones have seized market share by offering private capital groups the chance to shop around.

Some of the world’s biggest asset managers, including Blackstone and Apollo, are now among the most frequent users of ratings from firms beyond the big three.

But as sudden bankruptcies at First Brands and Tricolor have fuelled fears that cracks are emerging in the private credit universe, some financial heavyweights are warning that ratings arbitrage could pose risks to the wider financial system.

UBS chair Colm Kelleher warned last week that insurers shopping for better ratings on their private credit assets was creating a “looming systemic risk”, while Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey said industry figures were sounding the alarm to him about “the role of the rating agencies”.

“What you’re seeing now is a massive growth in small rating agencies ticking the box for compliance of investment,” Kelleher said.

Private letter ratings are not disclosed publicly, but can be used to determine capital requirements.

As private capital groups have boomed — and piled into the insurance industry, buying up life insurers — so has the demand for private letter ratings on everything from debt issued by individual portfolio companies to slices of asset-backed securities packaged into bonds destined for investment-grade buyers.

Insurers affiliated with the private capital groups use those investment-grade credit ratings to trim the capital they are required to have to back their long-term obligations to retirees.

As their needs have grown, the big private capital firms have turned to the smaller agencies as they seek a faster, more flexible service to suit their complex needs.

Private capital groups are defending the use of smaller agencies for the ratings — to a point.

Apollo’s chief executive Marc Rowan insisted on the company’s earnings call on Tuesday that Kelleher was “just wrong”. DBRS and KBRA had developed specialist expertise in an important niche, he insisted, and they were “doing a good job competitively, with Moody’s, S&P and Fitch close on their heels”.

Rowan did distance Apollo’s insurer, Athene, from one trailblazer that had thrust themselves to the fore of the market for ratings.

“Athene does not use Egan-Jones, let’s start with that.”

Egan-Jones, which first began issuing private ratings in 2014 and now has more than 22,000 transactions to its name, has come under scrutiny for the sheer volume of ratings it has been able to issue with relatively few analysts in very little time. 

Egan-Jones has just 20 or so analysts and managed to issue more than 3,600 ratings last year alone, making it the most prolific grader of loans to individual businesses. Egan-Jones told the FT it had issued another 3,400 so far in 2025.

Some of the biggest names in private credit have sought to distance themselves from the firm. As well as Apollo, Blue Owl and BlackRock have singled Egan-Jones out as the only ratings company that they will not accept a valid rating from in some of their fund documentation.

Some ratings analysts said that they had recently been approached by issuers and loan sponsors who asked them to quote ratings on issuers that had been assessed by Egan-Jones.

As sponsors of middle-market borrowers found that they were taking “a lot of heat” from regulators over ratings from Egan-Jones, one person said, their agency had been approached with lists of businesses that had received BB ratings from HR or Egan-Jones.

Their agency typically produced ratings that were several notches lower, the person said, ranging from CCC+ to B-.

Egan-Jones said that “nearly 600 clients have trusted Egan-Jones to provide high quality ratings since 1995 and the data confirms the accuracy of our work. Our realised defaults on the private debt side are far lower than would be expected based on our ratings”.

It added that “outside of surveillance and subscription ratings, which are narrow in scope and require less analyst time, our analysts have on average, more than 13 days to produce ratings for new deals”.

Between them, the second-tier firms of Egan, HR, DBRS and KBRA issued more than 6,000 private letter ratings in 2023, about three-quarters of the total. The number of private letter ratings issued by Moody’s, S&P and Fitch has stayed around 1,000 between 2020 and 2023.

Although DBRS and Egan-Jones have existed for decades, HR and KBRA have emerged far more recently. HR started in Mexico in 2007 providing public ratings to domestic borrowers before pushing into the US in 2012, while KBRA was set up in 2010 by corporate intelligence pioneer Jules Kroll as a post-crisis alternative to the big three.

The second-tier providers argue that they have thrived because they offer a more tailored approach and are willing to pick up business from complex investment structures or smaller issuers.

“What we’re offering is a very high-touch product,” said Michael Dimler of DBRS, who leads the agency’s private credit rating business for single-name borrowers. By specialising in smaller companies with a median annual revenue of about $300mn, Dimler’s team of analysts has almost doubled to nearly 30 in five years. 

HR and Egan have both focused on loans to single borrowers rather than complex structured products such as collateralised loan obligations in which corporate loans of varying quality are bundled together into securities whose top tranches may then be awarded a triple A rating.

Part of their pitch is speed, pricing and a less “punitive” approach to rating smaller companies than the big players, HR told the Financial Times.

“We’re not going to be an Egan-Jones, time-wise, but we’re quicker than what we’re hearing about some of the others,” Gregory Root, business development executive director at HR Ratings, told the Financial Times.

HR declined to disclose its fees, but said that clients generally paid one pricing tier for ratings from the big three, and a second tier for KBRA, DBRS, HR and Egan.

Rather than single-name borrowers, both DBRS and KBRA have carved a niche in more complex structured products such as collateralised fund obligations (CFOs), which can package up ownership stakes in hundreds of private equity-owned companies.

These instruments have boomed as insurers and other credit investors have sought higher yields in private markets.

KBRA, which is now controlled by Boston-based private equity firm Parthenon Capital Partners, has “more than 70 analysts dedicated to its funds and private credit ratings”.

About half of its ratings are in structured finance, while the other half include corporates, financial institutions and governments.

KBRA “work in areas that are new or very complex,” said William Cox, chief rating officer, since “we were specifically created to serve investors with more in-depth research”. Those include commercial and residential mortgage-backed securities and asset-backed securities such as music royalties.

“DBRS and Kroll have most of the expertise right now in structured products, and they are doing a good job competitively with Moody’s, S&P and Fitch close on their heels,” Apollo’s Rowan said.

“I object to lumping in Kroll and DBRS with Egan,” another asset management executive told the Financial Times. “They’re now basically real ratings [agencies].”

But although these agencies have been hired by top-ranking private credit funds to rate private loans and structured products, concerns that initially centred on Egan-Jones have rippled across the group.

At issue is whether the smaller rating agencies may award higher ratings than their larger, more prestigious peers, when rules tightened after the financial crisis require them to manage potential conflicts with their commercial interests.

Last month the Bank for International Settlements said ratings on private credit assets held by US insurers might have been inflated by smaller providers, who may face commercial pressure to assign more favourable scores.

It said the strategy could “lead to inflated assessments of creditworthiness” and “obscure the true risk of complex assets”, and warned of the growing risk of “fire sales” during periods of financial turmoil.

When the National Association of Insurance Commissioners published a report last year that found smaller rating agencies had assigned more generous scores to private credit investments than larger ones did, KBRA criticised it as “statistically unsound”. The NAIC ultimately withdrew it.

Egan-Jones said its “public ratings were similar to those of another major rating agency in 2024 — within 0.19 notches (weighted average) for the 1,170 issuers rated by both agencies”.

“The other major rating agency had an equal or higher rating relative to Egan-Jones 60.7% of the time. The market generally considers one notch to be immaterial,” it added.

If it were up to the rating agencies themselves, several people said, they would happily publish their private ratings, which they said they treated no differently than public ones.

“We do very, very normal due diligence. We do a very, very normal process of understanding the entity, going through financials, writing the full report,” HR chief executive Pedro Latapi told the FT.

“What we can offer to the entities is a very normal look and feel, in terms of rating agency.”

CEO Vlad Tenev plans to offer shares in a fund that holds a handful of private artificial intelligence companies

US broker Robinhood plans to give amateur investors a route to put money into private artificial intelligence companies whose valuations have vastly increased.

Chief executive Vlad Tenev told the Financial Times that he is more interested in giving “normal people” exposure to the rapid growth of private AI companies than worrying about whether a bubble is forming in the sector.

AI is going to create “widescale disruption and we want people to have exposure to the drivers of that disruption”, he said.

Robinhood plans to offer tradeable shares in a new fund managed by its subsidiary Robinhood Ventures, which will invest in a highly concentrated portfolio of five or more “best in class” private companies — and may borrow money to boost its return.

The trading platform’s move comes as money managers are seeking to tap small investors as a new pool of capital to plough into private markets.

President Donald Trump’s executive order in August has made it easier for employers to include assets such as private equity and private credit in retirement plans.

Asset managers including Blue Owl, Blackstone and Apollo are moving beyond institutional investors and seeking to appeal to individuals.

Public markets have been shrinking for decades, while the number of private companies in the US valued at more than $1bn rose above 1,000 in 2024 from 20 in 2016, PitchBook data shows.

Top AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic have led the boom in start-up valuations, with just 10 lossmaking companies adding close to $1tn to their value over the past 12 months through private deals.

Robinhood’s move to open the door for small-time investors to back these groups has caused concern, given the proposed fund’s structure and the trading venue’s relative lack of experience managing money.

The fund will be closed-end, meaning traders will not be able to quickly redeem their shares at will and could find their money trapped if too many investors rush for the exit.

“Managing a complex, private equity strategy like this could seriously burn their fast-moving user base,” said Bryan Armour, director of passive strategies research at data provider Morningstar.

Tenev said retail customers notorious for buying stock market dips are clamouring for such opportunities despite the significant amount of risk and the knowledge that investments could go to zero.

He also pushed back against concerns that the AI boom is a bubble and said Robinhood customers were “buying heavily” into the AI theme.

“I don’t think [Big Tech] price-to-earnings ratios are crazy out of whack,” said Tenev, who became one of the faces of the 2021 meme stock boom because of Robinhood’s popularity with the raucous crowd of adventurous, do-it-yourself traders.

Robinhood is the S&P 500’s third-best performing stock this year, up 255 per cent. The California-based company’s shares fell almost 11 per cent on Thursday even after it said revenues in the third quarter doubled year-on-year to $1.27bn. Revenues from crypto transactions rose 300 per cent to $268mn.

In March, Robinhood partnered with Kalshi to launch its own prediction market business, offering traders shares in binary outcomes — whether a basketball team wins or loses, for example — amid a wider explosion in gambling in the US on sports, politics and pop culture events.

The number of so-called event contracts traded on its platform more than doubled quarter-on-quarter to 2.3bn between July and September and rose to 2.5bn in October alone, Robinhood said on Wednesday.

Tenev predicted this market could expand further into new areas. “A lot of people think that this evolves to become more bespoke and personalised, a direction that’s very exciting,” he said.

“If you could price the risk of someone’s house being subjected to a flood or fire, that could be a much better product potentially than the insurance products that one can currently get.”

To fund heavy spending on infrastructure for artificial intelligence, companies have leveraged a growing list of complex debt-financing options.

Like many companies trying to keep up in the A.I. boom, QTS Data Centers, a digital infrastructure company that’s wholly owned by the investment giant Blackstone, has been dropping billions of dollars to expand its network of cutting-edge computing facilities. It has also, like a growing number of fellow tech companies, found a way to unlock additional (and much-needed) cash: exotic financial instruments.

According to an investor offering sheet obtained by DealBook, Blackstone is on the cusp of closing a $3.46 billion commercial-mortgage-backed securities (C.M.B.S.) offering to refinance debt held by QTS, the biggest player in the artificial intelligence infrastructure market. It would be the largest deal of its type this year in a fast-accelerating market. (Blackstone declined to comment.)

The bonds would be backed by 10 data centers in six markets (including Atlanta, Dallas and Norfolk, Va.) that together consume enough energy to power Burlington, Vt., for half a decade.

Blackstone’s offering is part of the latest push in the A.I. infrastructure financing blitz. According to McKinsey, $7 trillion in data center investment will be required by 2030 to keep up with projected demand. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon have together spent $112 billion on capital expenditures in the past three months alone.

The sheer scale of spending is spooking investors: Meta’s stock tumbled 11 percent after the company revealed its aggressive capital expenditure plans last week, and tech stocks have sold off this week on overvaluation fears.

Now, the tech giants are turning to financing maneuvers that may add to the risk. To obtain the capital they need, hyperscalers have leveraged a growing list of complex debt-financing options, including corporate debt, securitization markets, private financing and off-balance-sheet vehicles. That shift is fueling speculation that A.I. investments are turning into a game of musical chairs whose financial instruments are reminiscent of the 2008 financial crisis.

Big tech companies are looking for new sources of financing. While Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google previously relied on their own cash flow to invest in data centers, more recently they’ve turned to loans. To diversify their debt, they’re repackaging much of it as asset-backed securities (A.B.S.). About $13.3 billion in A.B.S. backed by data centers has been issued across 27 transactions this year, a 55 percent increase over 2024.

If investors want to buy data center A.B.S., they have two options, according to Sarah McDonald, a senior vice president in the capital solutions group at Goldman Sachs: They can invest in a data center that has one tenant, like a hyperscaler, or in a co-location data center, which has thousands of smaller tenants. The former is an investment-grade tenant with a long-term lease, but the risk is highly concentrated; the latter is most likely renting out to noninvestment-grade tenants with short-term leases, but the investment is extremely diversified.

Digital infrastructure “is something that investors have a huge appetite for,” McDonald said.

Despite the increase in popularity, data center securities are just a small slice of the A.B.S. market, which is dominated by credit card, auto, consumer and student loans.

Blackstone’s $3.46 billion C.M.B.S. offering may seem like small potatoes compared with some other debt-fueled deals, such as Meta’s $30 billion corporate offering to finance its data center in Louisiana. But it’s unprecedented for the C.M.B.S. market, where issuance for data-center-backed deals was just $3 billion for all of 2024.

“They realize how much cash they’re going to need, so they’re getting the C.M.B.S. market comfortable with this type of asset,” said Dan McNamara, the founder and chief investment officer of Polpo Capital, a hedge fund that focuses on C.M.B.S. He added that while most traders in the market were well versed in assets like office space or industrial buildings, with data centers, “it’s not traditional ‘bricks and sticks’ commercial real estate.”

To complicate matters further, the share of single-asset-single-borrower securities (S.A.S.B.) — for example, the assets inside the bond being sold are all from the same company or a single data center — is rising, with 13 percent of all S.A.S.B. deals coming from data centers, according to Goldman Sachs.

“It’s one company, and these assets are quite similar. If there’s a problem with A.I. data centers, like if their current chips are obsolete in five years, you could have big losses in these deals,” McNamara said. “That’s the knock on S.A.S.B.: When things go bad, they go really bad.”

Also at play: a financial tool that came into vogue before the financial crisis. Called a special purpose vehicle (S.P.V.), it’s a legal entity that allows a company to take on a lot of debt without having to hold it on its own balance sheet.

When Meta structured its $30 billion debt offering for its new data center in Louisiana — the largest private capital transaction on record — Morgan Stanley arranged the debt to sit in one of these custom, off-balance-sheet vehicles. Although the S.P.V. was created to service Meta, the debt technically belongs to the S.P.V., not Meta, which makes Meta look healthier on paper.

The maneuver made it easier for Meta to raise another $30 billion in the more traditional corporate bond market. Overall, according to Morgan Stanley, $800 billion in private credit will be needed over the next two years to fund data centers. And S.P.V.s are becoming a more popular way to structure it. Following Meta’s lead, Elon Musk’s xAI is also tapping an S.P.V. to potentially hold $20 billion in debt to buy Nvidia chips and then rent them to xAI.

Are murky financial instruments spreading the risk of the A.I. spending frenzy? According to Menlo Ventures, only 3 percent of consumers pay for A.I.-related services, amounting to about $12 billion per year. If hyperscalers are unable to generate enough profit to offset the costs related to capital expenditures, systemic risk could enter credit markets.

In October, the Bank of England wrote that, as companies continue to shift from using their own cash flow to amassing debt for data centers, risk will continue to mount. “This is a fast-evolving topic, and the future is highly uncertain,” the bank wrote.

Lawyers for Elon Musk argued that his federal lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman should proceed to a trial, according to a legal document filed Friday evening.

The latest filing responds to OpenAI’s request last month for an early legal ruling against Musk. In that document, OpenAI’s lawyers asked the court to toss out Musk’s allegations that OpenAI has violated its charitable duties—a key claim in the lawsuit—because Musk made his early donations to OpenAI through donor-advised funds, which they argue “severed Musk’s legal interest in the funds.”

Musk’s lawyers contend that he still has the right to sue, even though the donations were made through intermediaries. The donor-advised funds “never refused to make a contribution to OpenAI that Musk directed, and they never made a contribution without Musk’s direction,” they wrote. They argue that resolving this disagreement is best left to a jury during a trial in March.

We’ve moved from marveling about AI’s potential to puzzling over how to pay for it. The price tag seems to grow every day. On Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested Tesla will need so many chips for its robots and self-driving cars that it might build its own chip factory. He also said Tesla would have to spend “tens of billions” to train the AI in its robot. Meanwhile, his archrival, Sam Altman, is pursuing so many investment initiatives that his finance chief (briefly) opened the door to the idea of the federal government helping guarantee the financing for AI chips.

One group of companies that may have more funding options are the hugely profitable tech firms, such as Google, Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Amazon. These deep-pocketed giants so far have been mostly financing their AI expansion through the cash their businesses throw off, although that’s changing, as this deal done by Meta demonstrated. Last week, Tony Kim, who runs BlackRock’s global technology funds, pointed out in an appearance on The Information’s TITV that given the strength of their balance sheets, the biggest big tech companies could afford to borrow trillions of dollars between them. Imagine what that would mean: Instead of being deep-pocketed giants able to spend freely on whatever struck their fancy, these companies would suddenly be forced to think about every penny they spent. That might not be such a bad thing in the long run, at least for shareholders.

In the TITV interview, Kim estimated that the 10 biggest tech firms between them generate roughly a trillion dollars in annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization—and have no net debt (meaning their cash reserves are higher than any debt they carry). Given the debt levels companies in other industries often take on, he asked why tech firms couldn’t borrow at “one, two, three times net debt to Ebitda” to help fund capex for AI. In this (very speculative) scenario, Google, which now has $100 billion in cash and only $21 billion in debt, could end up with, say, $450 billion in debt and perhaps just $20 billion in cash.

There is of course enormous risk associated with borrowing money for something that has an uncertain return, which certainly describes AI. But this isn’t like borrowing money to buy crypto, which has no underlying value. AI has the potential to create real benefits for businesses, so the debt could enhance long-term returns. As their AI spending increases, big tech companies could become net consumers of cash rather than net producers—at least until AI revenues ramp up. Such a bet may pay off, but life in tech won’t be the same.

The Nord Stream Investigation That’s Splintering Europe Over Ukraine

German detectives have spent three years building their case. A Ukrainian veteran could soon be in the dock.

BERLIN—For three years, a crack team of detectives gathered each weekday morning around a whiteboard at the German Federal Police headquarters in Potsdam, near Berlin. Now their investigation into who was behind the greatest act of sabotage in modern history—the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines—is threatening to splinter support for Ukraine, the country they hold responsible.

Poland already has refused to extradite one of the suspects to stand trial in Germany. It instead views him a hero for destroying a vital source of revenue for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has long questioned Germany’s dependence on Russian energy, ridiculed the investigation. The problem isn’t that the pipeline was blown up, he said. The “problem is that it was built.”

At home, the opposition AfD party has seized on public anger with how the bombings cemented high energy prices with no relief in sight. It is now campaigning to cut aid to Kyiv, a vital plank in the West’s support for Ukraine.

Another extradition case, this time involving a Ukrainian suspect in Italy, is expected to be resolved in the coming weeks and threatens to place Kyiv’s role under further public scrutiny.

The longest of the pipelines ran for 760 miles under the Baltic Sea, shipping Russian natural gas to its largest customer, Germany, and the rest of Europe. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the project quickly became a focal point in discussions on how the West should respond.

Some countries argued for turning off the pipelines and removing an easy supply of hard currency for Russia. Others relied heavily on cheap Russian fuel and argued that cutting supplies would damage their economies. Germany hedged its bets: It kept Nord Stream 1 open but didn’t certify Nord Stream 2, which was then ready to go online.

The bombings, in September 2022, rendered the debate moot. As vast amounts of CO2 fizzed into the Baltic, totaling the annual emissions of Denmark, some U.S. and German officials accused Russia of engineering the blasts. The Kremlin claimed that the U.S. and U.K. were behind the attack.

German police, prosecutors and other people familiar with the intricacies of the case instead developed what they said is a clear picture of how an elite Ukrainian military unit carried out the attacks under the direct supervision of Ukraine’s then-supreme commander, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy.

The slow process of piecing the plot together began shortly after the explosions in the Baltic.

By tracking boat rental companies, phones and license plates, the Potsdam team laid the groundwork for German authorities to issue arrest warrants for three soldiers from the special Ukrainian military unit and four veteran deep-sea divers, people familiar with the case said. The saboteurs’ goal was to cut both Russia’s oil revenues and its economic ties with Germany, they said.

Decisive evidence came from a grainy black-and-white photo taken by a German speed trap. It showed the face of a Ukrainian deep-sea diver, whom police identified by using a commercially available face-recognition software. Within minutes, they found his social-media profiles and professional websites, with links to other suspects in the case.

It turns out not everyone appreciated their efforts.

The Ukrainian diver the team traced to Poland was subsequently taken to Ukraine in a black BMW with diplomatic plates, driven by the Ukrainian military attaché in Warsaw. Ukraine’s government refused to comment. Privately, a senior Ukrainian official said Kyiv acted after a warning from the Polish government.

The commander of the sabotage unit, meanwhile, was found in Italy after an exhaustive hunt. At first, the detectives had only a passport photograph of a smiling, broad-shouldered man with pale blue eyes, the people familiar with the investigation said. It was taken from the Ukrainian travel document he used during the time of the operation: a genuine passport issued in a false name, which police said is typical for Ukraine’s special service operations. He had no social-media presence, and no European or allied database held his picture.

During one of the 9.30 am meetings, the investigation team landed on a possible solution after one of them asked, “Where do Ukrainians go on vacation?” Perhaps their suspect was traveling outside the European Union. The team sent out some feelers.

Soon after, border police in a friendly nation found a match. The man had traveled there on business. The detectives now had a copy of his passport with his real name and date of birth. They identified him as Serhii K., a 46-year-old veteran of Ukraine’s SBU security service. He had joined a special-forces unit on the first day of the Russian invasion and commanded an air-defense detachment during the Battle of Kyiv in the early weeks of the war.

German police placed what is known as a “silent alert” on his passport, designed to go off if he crossed an EU border.

On Aug. 13, they got an alert as Serhii crossed from Ukraine into Poland. They then tracked him across to the Czech Republic and then to Italy, using data from a road toll system and his wife’s hotel reservations made on an online travel website.

Italy’s Carabinieri police force arrested him after he checked in to a bungalow resort in the medieval town of San Clemente. The following day, on his way to court, Serhii faced news crews and raised three fingers—a Ukrainian salute symbolizing the Tryzub, the national emblem. His lawyer argued that Serhii was innocent, but that whoever blew up Nord Stream was acting as part of a military operation in defense of Ukraine and is therefore immune from prosecution.

At their 9.30 a.m. meeting the next day, the German detectives were jubilant. They sensed their investigation would reach its conclusion in a German court, according to people familiar with the meeting.

By December, Italian judges are expected to decide whether to extradite the Ukrainian to Germany. German police have already prepared a dedicated aircraft to pick up Serhii in Italy and bring him to Hamburg for trial.

It could be a mixed blessing. Any legal hearing appears certain to further strain relations between Ukraine and Germany, Kyiv’s largest financial backer and the supplier of some of its most sought-after military hardware, especially air-defense systems. The political pressure is also building on the German leader, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, though people close to him said they would be able to manage the repercussions domestically despite the opposition’s attempts to break off funding to Ukraine. They said the German public has already become accustomed to the idea that Kyiv was behind the attack, including through reports in The Wall Street Journal.

Still, senior officials have suggested, the diplomatic fallout of the bombings might have been easier for Germany to navigate if the detectives hadn’t so effectively built a case against Ukraine.