The NYT today published an article disclosing details of a long proxy war in which Ukraine has been a US client state for the past 10 years. It is, of course, selective. Probably it is timed to pressure Republicans to vote for continued funding. There is little else to be gained by admitting to the public after so many years, that covert operations were ongoing for all these years. Maybe next time they will discuss the US involvement in the Euromaidan-- a topic for another post. What they are now willing to put on the record, even in sanitized form should be enough to make NYT readers wonder how much of what they read there is factual. Following are some important quotes from the article. The link to full article can be found below.
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(Excerpts fr. NYT article)
"The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks... A secret nerve center of Ukraine’s military... is almost fully financed, and partly equipped, by the C.I.A. “One hundred and ten percent,” Gen. Serhii Dvoretskiy, a top intelligence commander, said in an interview at the base.
The listening post in the Ukrainian forest is part of a C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border... The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And the C.I.A. also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence. The relationship is so ingrained that C.I.A. officers remained at a remote location in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated U.S. personnel in the weeks before Russia invaded in February 2022. During the invasion, the officers relayed critical intelligence, including where Russia was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use. “Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them,” said Ivan Bakanov, who was then head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the S.B.U.
The C.I.A.’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Millions of Ukrainians had just overrun the country’s pro-Kremlin government and the president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his spy chiefs had fled to Russia. In the tumult, a fragile pro-Western government quickly took power. [Left out is the story of just how and why the CIA was there to assist the new gov't; to fill in that gap I left a link to a transcript of Victoria Nuland's intercepted-- by Russia-- phone call from a month earlier in which she literally picks the "best" candidates for the new government. But this is BEFORE there was a Euromaidan Revolution OR a new government. This is before Yanukovych fled to Russia. How would she have known, and why would she be involved in picking an choosing Ukraine's next leaders? See BBC link below*--ed].
"The government’s new spy chief, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, arrived at the headquarters of the domestic intelligence agency and found a pile of smoldering documents in the courtyard. Inside, many of the computers had been wiped or were infected with Russian malware...He went to an office and called the C.I.A. station chief and the local head of MI6. It was near midnight but he summoned them to the building, asked for help in rebuilding the agency from the ground up, and proposed a three-way partnership. “That’s how it all started,” Mr. Nalyvaichenko said."
Full article (long): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/the-spy-war-how-the-cia-secretly-helps-ukraine-fight-putin.html
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*Transcript of intercepted and leaked phone call of Victoria Nuland (now Undersecretary of State) discussing who should and should not be in the "next" Ukrainian government, which did not yet exist. This call took place before the Revolution and overthrow of Yanukovych in late Feb. of 2014. She is also pictured in meetings with Yanukovych shortly before the Euromaidan). https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
Context: Victoria Nuland was then the top Europe-Russia official. Her boss was Joseph Biden who handled the Ukraine portfolio for the Obama Admin. Obama was skeptical of the program, and almost refused to send arms to Ukraine, while Biden championed US involvement from the start. Nuland was point-person on the ground. Nuland is now Undersec. of State in Biden's admin. She is known as a hawkish neo-con type (her husband is the well-known neo-conservative, Robert Kagan, who was a key architect and advocate of the Iraq War). In 2019, he wrote a WaPo p-ed with his friend, current Sec of State, Antony Blinken setting out a "new vision" for foreign policy. Jake Sullivan then served as National Security Advisor to VP Biden, and is now National Security Advisor reporting directly to the president. In other words, the main foreign policy players in the Biden admin are the same people he worked with during the period discussed in both the NYT article, and at the time of the intercepted Nuland call. These are "Liberal Interventionists" whose ideas are greatly influenced by neo-conservatism. Indeed, Nuland Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2003-2005, and then under Bush served as the US Permanent Representative to NATO. This was during the time that Bush promised-- against the will of France, Germany and other European states-- NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia.
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