https://sg.news.yahoo.com/british-commandos-helped-bring-cia-050000609.html
How British commandos helped bring the CIA into the heart of the Ukraine war
A team of British commandos escorted Ukrainian generals out of Kyiv to join an emergency war room where Western military chiefs plotted the defeat of Russia.
Two generals were taken by armed guard on diplomatic passports into Poland, then Germany, shortly after the war broke out to join an operation involving the CIA that would help turn the tide of the conflict and embarrass Vladimir Putin’s armed forces.
The operations room was set up two months into the war in Clay Kaserne, the headquarters of US Army Europe and Africa, a component of the US armed forces, in Wiesbaden, Germany.
Clay Kaserne would become a complex staging post for joint efforts involving Nato allies to assist Ukraine in fighting Russia.
Details of assistance to Ukraine were revealed on Sunday in a wide-ranging investigation by The New York Times (The NYT) that raised questions about how intimately involved the US, Britain and the West have been in the war in Ukraine.
Reports of Western military planning and intelligence sharing in the Ukraine war have emerged sporadically since the invasion but little has been known about the level of co-operation.
The details are likely to anger the Kremlin, which has long insisted that Russia is fighting a proxy war with the West and Nato through Ukraine.
The new Trump administration has already begun to roll back elements of this assistance, developments that worry many Ukrainians over the future of their country.
Ben Wallace ‘ordered sacking of Ukrainian general’
According to the investigation drawn from 300 interviews with government, military and intelligence sources in nine countries across the US and Europe, the Americans provided a vast range of weapons, intelligence, strategy and planning, while a British general managed the logistics hub from Clay Kaserne.
Britain, according to the investigation, placed small teams of officers in Ukraine, unlike the Americans. This gave British military planners relatively more clout.
Sources claimed that Ben Wallace, the defence secretary at the time, ordered that Maj Gen Andrii Kovalchuk be sacked for failing to attack while Russian forces were on the ropes near Kherson.
The Ukrainian field commander had reportedly hesitated to launch an advance against Russian soldiers who were low on food and ammunition on Dnipro’s west bank.
Mr Wallace reportedly asked his American counterparts what they would do if a subordinate refused to act on instructions. Christopher T Donahue, a US general, said he would sack him.
“I got this,” Mr Wallace replied, before demanding the commander be fired.
Mr Donahue had been the one to first propose the partnership at the US base in Germany back in spring 2022.
Mr Wallace denied the account, and said that he “never demanded any general be replaced” and that he “never lobbied for the removal of anyone. I felt that was a matter for Ukrainians only”.
The investigation notes that while British military teams were helping in Ukraine, the Biden administration pulled out all “boots on the ground” on the eve of the invasion and closed the embassy.
According to the investigation, the Ukrainians felt that a senior US military officer had said: “We told them, ‘The Russians are coming – see ya.’”
A small team of CIA officers was allowed to stay, the report notes.
Meanwhile, in Wiesbaden, other CIA officers helped plan and support a campaign of intelligence sharing that led to pinpoint strikes on key Russian targets, at first inside occupied territory and eventually in Russia.
The investigation captures the complicated geopolitical balancing act that both the US and UK have had to manage, given serious concerns that too deep an involvement in the conflict could push a nuclear-armed Russia over the edge and risk provoking an attack elsewhere.
The US and UK became increasingly entrenched as the war continued, though the relationship between Ukraine and its Western allies when it came to transparency and trust experienced significant ups and downs as a result of divergent strategic aims.
While at the start of the war, support primarily amounted to arming Ukraine. By mid-2024, American and British officers were overseeing every aspect of each strike for a specific operation in Crimea, from identifying target co-ordinates to calculating the flight paths of missiles.
Operation Lunar Hail
That mission, code-named Operation Lunar Hail, was reportedly proposed by the Americans to Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, and entailed a massive bombing campaign to force the Russians to withdraw its military infrastructure from Crimea and move it back home in what could amount to a strategic victory.
British authorities also worked with the Ukrainians to devise a plan of attack for Lunar Hail, including how to bring down the Kerch Strait Bridge linking the Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland – a potent symbol to Putin of Crimea’s connection to the motherland.
The bridge had previously been a red line for the Americans near the start of the war. Though Crimea remained contested territory to the Ukrainians, Russia had already claimed it as theirs. The worry was that targeting the bridge could be seen by Putin as a direct attack on Russian soil – a move that could have potentially invited a counterattack against US interests.
That is one of many examples cited regarding how the US and UK’s red lines moved several times, as described by the New York Times, amounting to a higher risk tolerance.
The relationship between Ukraine and its Western allies was at times fraught. The Ukrainians demanded more weapons and equipment, while the Americans considered some of these requests to be unreasonable.
There was also a sense amongst some in Washington that Ukraine was not doing enough to get every able-bodied man onto the frontlines, despite Kyiv lowering the conscription age to 25.
This reportedly became a point of contention, with Mr Zelensky pushing back against Lloyd Austin, the then US secretary of defence, saying that more men would not help the war effort as there were not enough weapons to arm them, reported the NYT.
The investigation also describes US frustrations with a lack of communication from the Ukrainian side.
In April 2022, in the weeks before the key meeting in Germany between Ukrainian and US officers, the Americans spotted the Moskva missile cruiser – the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet – during a routine intelligence sharing call. From this discovery, the Ukrainians were able to sink the ship.
While this incident demonstrated Ukraine’s sophisticated military prowess and marked a significant early victory, the US was reportedly angry as they had not been notified in advance, nor did they intend to enable Kyiv to attack Russia so severely.
It would happen again two years later. In March 2024, the US reportedly discovered that the Ukrainian military intelligence agency was planning – without Washington’s knowledge – a ground operation into south-west Russia.
When the US found out, they warned Ukrainian counterparts that such a mission would happen without their support.
Such incidents sparked bitter jokes in the Biden administration that they knew more about what the Russians were planning, because of their own espionage efforts, than what their Ukrainian partners had in store, reported the NYT.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was “better than ask and stop” to the Ukrainians, Lt Gen Valeriy Kondratiuk, a former Ukrainian military intelligence commander, said. “We are allies, but we have different goals. We protect our country, and you protect your phantom fears from the Cold War.”
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