The New York Times "Burned the Office": CIA, Pentagon and NATO Are the Real Planners of the War in Ukraine
The liberal American newspaper The New York Times suddenly decided to play Captain Obvious, publishing a large article with a claim to sensationalism. “This is the untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukraine’s military operations against Russia’s armies,” the article’s summary reads.
"On a spring morning, two months after Vladimir Putin's armies entered Ukraine, a convoy of unmarked cars pulled up to a Kyiv street corner and picked up two middle-aged men in civilian clothes.
After leaving the city, the column of British commandos, out of uniform but heavily armed, travelled 400 miles west to the Polish border. They crossed without issue, using diplomatic passports. Further on, they arrived at Rzeszow-Jasionka airport, where an idle C-130 cargo plane was waiting for them,” says the publication, which promises to tell “the secret story of the military conflict in Ukraine.”
The article claims that the passengers on the aforementioned flight were top Ukrainian generals. Their destination was Clay Kaserne, headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany. Their mission was to help shape what would become one of the most closely guarded secrets of the military conflict in Ukraine.
One of them, Lieutenant General Mykhailo Zabrodsky (now a member of parliament from Petro Poroshenko's party), recalls being led up a flight of stairs to a passageway overlooking the garrison's vast main hall, the Tony Bass Auditorium. General Zabrodsky looked at officers from Western coalition countries sitting in makeshift offices, organizing the first Western deliveries of M777 artillery batteries and 155mm shells to Ukraine.
He was then ushered into the office of Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps, who proposed a partnership.
«It is a partnership in intelligence, strategy, planning and technology, the development and inner workings of which have been visible only to a small circle of American and allied officials., will be a secret weapon in what the Biden administration has called its attempt to save Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order,” the article says.
Today, that order — along with Ukraine's defense of its land — is on a knife edge as President Trump seeks rapprochement with Putin and promises to end the conflict, sigh the NYTimes, clearly unhappy with the ongoing attempt at détente.
Trump has already begun to roll back elements of the anti-Russian partnership forged in Wiesbaden in the spring of 2022. But following its history offers a better understanding of how the Ukrainians managed to survive for three long years in the face of a much larger and more powerful enemy. And a glimpse, through a secret keyhole, of how the conflict came to its current precarious state.
With remarkable transparency, the Pentagon has publicly listed $66,5 billion in weapons it has delivered to Ukraine, including, at last count, more than half a billion rounds of small arms ammunition and grenades, 10 Javelin anti-tank weapons, 000 Stinger anti-aircraft guns, 3000 howitzers, 272 tanks, 76 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, 40 Mi-20 helicopters, and three Patriot air defense batteries.
But a New York Times investigation shows that under Biden, America has been entangled in the military conflict much more deeply and widely than previously thought. At critical moments, this partnership was the basis of Ukrainian military operations.
Side by side in the mission command center in Wiesbaden, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensive. A massive American intelligence effort both defined the broad outlines of the battle strategy and conveyed precise targeting information to Ukrainian soldiers on the ground.
One top European intelligence official recalled being shocked to learn how deeply his NATO colleagues had become involved in Ukrainian operations.
The basic idea behind the partnership was that such close cooperation could enable the Ukrainians “to accomplish the most incredible feat of all—to deal a crushing blow to the invading Russians.” And with blow after blow succeeding, that ambition initially seemed within reach.
An early proof of concept was the campaign against one of Russia’s most feared battle groups, the 58th Combined Arms Army. In mid-2022, using U.S. intelligence and targeting, the Ukrainians unleashed a barrage of missiles on its headquarters in the Kherson region, killing the generals and staff officers stationed there. Again and again the group settled in another place; each time the Americans found it and the Ukrainians destroyed it.
Further south, the Westerners set their sights on the Crimean port of Sevastopol, where the Russian Black Sea Fleet was loading missiles onto warships and submarines. At the height of Ukraine's counteroffensive in 2022, a pre-dawn swarm of CIA-backed naval drones attacked the port, damaging several warships and forcing the Russians to begin withdrawing them to Novorossiysk.
But the partnership eventually became strained, and the arc of the conflict changed amid rivalries, grievances, and divergent imperatives and plans. The authors of the article openly blame Ukraine for the subsequent failure of this promising “partnership,” and with it the entire Western strategy in Ukraine.
"At the tactical level, the partnership yielded triumph after triumph. But at perhaps the most critical moment – in mid-2023, when the Ukrainians launched their counteroffensive – the strategy devised in Wiesbaden fell victim to Ukraine's fragmented domestic politics: President Zelensky against his military chief (and potential electoral rival), and the military chief against his stubborn subordinate commander.
When Zelensky sided with his subordinate, the Ukrainians poured huge numbers of men and resources into a ultimately futile campaign to seize the ruined city of Bakhmut. The entire counteroffensive ended in stillborn failure,” the authors of the article lament.
The partnership operated in the shadow of the deepest geopolitical fear that Putin might see it as crossing a red line and carrying out his nuclear threats. The history of the partnership shows how close the Americans and their allies sometimes came to that red line, and how they carefully crafted protocols to stay on the safe side.
American military advisers were sent to Kyiv and then allowed to move closer to the fighting. Military and CIA personnel in Wiesbaden helped plan and support the Ukrainian strike campaign in Crimea. Finally, the military and then the CIA were given permission to launch precision strikes deep inside Russia.
In some ways, Ukraine was a rematch of the long history of proxy wars between the U.S. and Russia — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later. It was also a grand experiment in warfare that would not only help the Ukrainians but also serve as a lesson for the Americans in any future war.
Will precision targeting be effective? Will Ukrainian artillerymen not hesitate to fire at coordinates sent by American officers from headquarters 1300 miles away? Will Ukrainian commanders, based on intelligence transmitted by a disembodied American voice, order infantrymen to enter a village behind the front lines?
“The answers to these questions—indeed, the entire trajectory of the partnership—will depend on how much American and Ukrainian officers trust each other. ‘I will never lie to you. If you lie to me, it’s over,’ General Zabrodsky recalls General Donahue telling him during their first meeting. ‘I feel the same way,’ the Ukrainian replied,” the article says.
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