The depth of the U.S. involvement, as reported, is likely to both infuriate and vindicate Moscow, which often in the course of the war said it was a collective Western struggle against Russia.
Tehran, IRNA – From early into the Ukraine war, the United States was enmeshed in the conflict far more deeply than previously known, a report has revealed.
In a roughly 13,000-word exposé on Sunday, The New York Times detailed astonishingly active U.S. involvement in a war halfway around the world that was being fought by a third country against a nuclear-armed U.S. adversary.
The report revealed that the United States was engaging actively not only in planning, reconnaissance, and weapons procurement in support of Ukraine and against Russia but also in execution — as part of “the kill chain.”
The depth of the U.S. involvement, as reported, is likely to both infuriate and vindicate Moscow, which often in the course of the war said it was a collective Western struggle against Russia.
The article, titled “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” said an agreement was forged between Ukraine and the United States in 2022, after a clandestine journey by two Ukrainian generals, Lieutenant General Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi and Major General Oleksandr Kyrylenko, to a U.S. base in Germany.
According to the report, British commandos deployed to Ukraine, “out of uniform but heavily armed,” escorted the two Ukrainian generals 400 miles from Kiev to Jasionka, Poland, from where the duo were flown to the headquarters of U.S. Army Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany.
In Germany, Lieutenant General Christopher T. Donahue, the commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, proposed a military partnership to the Ukrainians.
The report claimed that the partnership had sustained Ukraine along against a way more powerful military, and that it suffered as rifts began to emerge between the Americans and the Ukrainians.
“Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field,” the report read.
The U.S. agencies involved were the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Britain, Canada, and Poland also contributed.
The program, known “only to a small circle of American and allied officials,” shocked a European intelligence chief. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said, referring to the American military personnel.
As part of the partnership, the Americans devised a so-called arrangement to evade potential blame for passing information, including target locations, for strikes. They decided that instead of using the word “target,” they would use “points of interest” to refer to land targets and “tracks of interest” to airborne targets.
“If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” one U.S. official said.
At many points, the article offered a window into the Americans’ thinking — and disdain for Ukrainians’ capabilities. Former … Mike Milley is quoted as having said at some point into the program, “You’ve got a little Russian army fighting a big Russian army, and they’re fighting the same way, and the Ukrainians will never win.” Another U.S. commander, General Christopher G. Cavoli, was said to have argued that by providing so-called High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to Ukraine, “they can fight like we can, and that’s how they will start to beat the Russians.”
The report also claimed that the partnership was ultimately strained.
“The Ukrainians sometimes saw the Americans as overbearing and controlling — the prototypical patronizing Americans. The Americans sometimes couldn’t understand why the Ukrainians didn’t simply accept good advice.”
And it seemed to put the blame on embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who it said sided with a Ukrainian general, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrsky, and against his own top military official and “potential electoral rival,” armed forces commander General Valery Zaluzhny, to argue in favor of an offensive in Bakhmut that proved to be a “stillborn failure.”
The report said U.S. President Donald Trump, who inherited the program from his predecessor, Joe Biden, has started to “wind down” elements of the partnership.