It is years too late and alternative and independent media had already done so much work on exposing the reality, including 600+ page books which have been published, but the New York Times on Sunday is out with a lengthy report on The Partnership: The Secret History of America’s Role in the Ukraine War.
Up until very recently, mainstream media gatekeepers wouldn’t so much as admit that a proxy war has been unfolding from the very start of the conflict in Ukraine. This even after the so-called paper of record had earlier in Feb. 2024 acknowledged that the CIA had built 12 “secret spy bases” in Ukraine to wage a shadow war against Russia going back to 2014.
Again, it comes much too belatedly, but now with Ukrainian forces clearly losing the fight, the Times admits that the prior Biden administration was far more involved in being embedded on a military and intelligence level with Ukraine than was previously made public by official sources.
The report is a deep dive into the “extraordinary partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology” that became Zelensky’s “secret weapon” in countering Russia. It begins by describing that within two months of Putin sending his army across the border, Ukrainian generals in civilians clothes were being secretly whisked away for high-level war planning sessions at US bases in Germany.
“The passengers were top Ukrainian generals,” NY Times describes of men taken by a convoy of unmarked cars from the Ukrainian capital to Western Europe. “Their destination was Clay Kaserne, the headquarters of U.S. Army Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany. Their mission was to help forge what would become one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war in Ukraine.”
The report makes clear that US commanders were much more inter-woven into Ukrainian operations than known, to the point of ‘shocking’ some NATO allies. In essence many counter-Russia operations happening on Ukraine’s battlefields were simply run from the base in Germany.
“But a New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood,” the report continues. “At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) 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.”
Notably, this is essentially US officials and the NY Times also admitting that the Kremlin has all along been right when it insisted this was never really simply about Moscow vs. Kiev – but that NATO countries have militarized Ukraine and weaponized it against Russia. President Putin and Kremlin officials have been fiercely complaining about US intervention all along, but this was dismissed in the West as merely ‘propaganda’.
Below are some key excerpts from the very lengthy NY Times report, with subheadings and emphasis by ZeroHedge…
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Americans overseeing “kill chain”
One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.
The partnership’s guiding idea was that this close cooperation might allow the Ukrainians to accomplish the unlikeliest of feats — to deliver the invading Russians a crushing blow.
Biggest battlefield feats were actually the CIA/Pentagon
An early proof of concept was a campaign against one of Russia’s most-feared battle groups, the 58th Combined Arms Army. In mid-2022, using American intelligence and targeting information, the Ukrainians unleashed a rocket barrage at the headquarters of the 58th in the Kherson region, killing generals and staff officers inside. Again and again, the group set up at another location; each time, the Americans found it and the Ukrainians destroyed it.
Farther south, the partners set their sights on the Crimean port of Sevastopol, where the Russian Black Sea Fleet loaded missiles destined for Ukrainian targets onto warships and submarines. At the height of Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensive, a predawn swarm of maritime drones, with support from the Central Intelligence Agency, attacked the port, damaging several warships and prompting the Russians to begin pulling them back.
Overreach
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.
Where the Americans focused on measured, achievable objectives, they saw the Ukrainians as constantly grasping for the big win, the bright, shining prize.
Failed 2023 counteroffensive actually hatched at American HQ
Yet at arguably the pivotal moment of the war — in mid-2023, as the Ukrainians mounted a counteroffensive to build victorious momentum after the first year’s successes — the strategy devised in Wiesbaden fell victim to the fractious internal politics of Ukraine: The president, Volodymyr Zelensky, versus his military chief (and potential electoral rival), and the military chief versus his headstrong subordinate commander. When Mr. Zelensky sided with the subordinate, the Ukrainians poured vast complements of men and resources into a finally futile campaign to recapture the devastated city of Bakhmut. Within months, the entire counteroffensive ended in stillborn failure.
Biden banned clandestine operations in public, while crossing red lines in secret
Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited. American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting. Military and C.I.A. officers in Wiesbaden helped plan and support a campaign of Ukrainian strikes in Russian-annexed Crimea. Finally, the military and then the C.I.A. received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.
In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.
Task Force Dragon
The defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, and General Milley had put the 18th Airborne in charge of delivering weapons and advising the Ukrainians on how to use them. When President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed on to the M777s, the Tony Bass Auditorium became a full-fledged headquarters.
A Polish general became General Donahue’s deputy. A British general would manage the logistics hub on the former basketball court. A Canadian would oversee training.
The auditorium basement became what is known as a fusion center, producing intelligence about Russian battlefield positions, movements and intentions. There, according to intelligence officials, officers from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency were joined by coalition intelligence officers.
The 18th Airborne is known as Dragon Corps; the new operation would be Task Force Dragon. All that was needed to bring the pieces together was the reluctant Ukrainian top command.
Debate over plausible deniability
Soon the Ukrainians, nearly 20 in all — intelligence officers, operational planners, communications and fire-control specialists — began arriving in Wiesbaden. Every morning, officers recalled, the Ukrainians and Americans gathered to survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets. The priority lists were then handed over to the intelligence fusion center, where officers analyzed streams of data to pinpoint the targets’ locations.
Inside the U.S. European Command, this process gave rise to a fine but fraught linguistic debate: Given the delicacy of the mission, was it unduly provocative to call targets “targets”?
Some officers thought “targets” was appropriate. Others called them “intel tippers,” because the Russians were often moving and the information would need verification on the ground.
The debate was settled by Maj. Gen. Timothy D. Brown, European Command’s intelligence chief: The locations of Russian forces would be “points of interest.” Intelligence on airborne threats would be “tracks of interest.”
“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 explained.
CIA and assassinations of Russian top officers
The White House also prohibited sharing intelligence on the locations of “strategic” Russian leaders, like the armed forces chief, Gen. Valery Gerasimov. “Imagine how that would be for us if we knew that the Russians helped some other country assassinate our chairman,” another senior U.S. official said. “Like, we’d go to war.” Similarly, Task Force Dragon couldn’t share intelligence that identified the locations of individual Russians.
The way the system worked, Task Force Dragon would tell the Ukrainians where Russians were positioned. But to protect intelligence sources and methods from Russian spies, it would not say how it knew what it knew.
US operations room directly oversaw HIMARS strikes
Wiesbaden would oversee each HIMARS strike… HIMARS strikes that resulted in 100 or more Russian dead or wounded came almost weekly. Russian forces were left dazed and confused. Their morale plummeted, and with it their will to fight. And as the HIMARS arsenal grew from eight to 38 and the Ukrainian strikers became more proficient, an American official said, the toll rose as much as fivefold.
“We became a small part, maybe not the best part, but a small part, of your system,” General Zabrodskyi explained, adding: “Most states did this over a period of 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. But we were forced to do it in a matter of weeks.”
Together the partners were honing a killing machine.
Below: Editor-in-chief of Russia’s RT reacts to these latest detailed revelations…
New NYT “secret history” of American involvement in Ukraine makes the skin crawl. pic.twitter.com/SaPulmruO0
— Margarita Simonyan (@M_Simonyan) March 30, 2025
Tensions as Ukrainians push to blow past Putin’s red lines
The previous year, the Russians had unwisely placed command posts, ammunition depots and logistics centers within 50 miles of the front lines. But new intelligence showed that the Russians had now moved critical installations beyond HIMARS’ reach. So Generals Cavoli and Aguto recommended the next quantum leap, giving the Ukrainians Army Tactical Missile Systems — missiles, known as ATACMS, that can travel up to 190 miles — to make it harder for Russian forces in Crimea to help defend Melitopol.
ATACMS were a particularly sore subject for the Biden administration. Russia’s military chief, General Gerasimov, had indirectly referred to them the previous May when he warned General Milley that anything that flew 190 miles would be breaching a red line. There was also a question of supply: The Pentagon was already warning that it would not have enough ATACMS if America had to fight its own war.
The message was blunt: Stop asking for ATACMS.
Biden admin kept giving in to Zelensky
Until now, the Ukrainians, with help from the C.I.A. and the U.S. and British navies, had used maritime drones, together with long-range British Storm Shadow and French SCALP missiles, to strike the Black Sea Fleet. Wiesbaden’s contribution was intelligence.
But to prosecute the wider Crimea campaign, the Ukrainians would need far more missiles. They would need hundreds of ATACMS.
At the Pentagon, the old cautions hadn’t melted away. But after General Aguto briefed Mr. Austin on all that Lunar Hail could achieve, an aide recalled, he said: “OK, there’s a really compelling strategic objective here. It isn’t just about striking things.”
Mr. Zelensky would get his long-pined-for ATACMS. Even so, one U.S. official said, “We knew that, in his heart of hearts, he still wanted to do something else, something more.”
Allies clashed over Kursk incursion
On Aug. 10, the C.I.A. station chief left, too, for a job at headquarters. In the churn of command, General Syrsky made his move — sending troops across the southwest Russian border, into the region of Kursk.
For the Americans, the incursion’s unfolding was a significant breach of trust. It wasn’t just that the Ukrainians had again kept them in the dark; they had secretly crossed a mutually agreed-upon line, taking coalition-supplied equipment into Russian territory encompassed by the ops box, in violation of rules laid down when it was created.
The box had been established to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Kharkiv, not so the Ukrainians could take advantage of it to seize Russian soil. “It wasn’t almost blackmail, it was blackmail,” a senior Pentagon official said.
The Americans could have pulled the plug on the ops box. Yet they knew that to do so, an administration official explained, “could lead to a catastrophe”: Ukrainian soldiers in Kursk would perish unprotected by HIMARS rockets and U.S. intelligence.
US Intel behind attacks on huge Kerch Strait Bridge
Of roughly 100 targets across Crimea, the most coveted was the Kerch Strait Bridge, linking the peninsula to the Russian mainland. Mr. Putin saw the bridge as powerful physical proof of Crimea’s connection to the motherland. Toppling the Russian president’s symbol had, in turn, become the Ukrainian president’s obsession.
It had also been an American red line. In 2022, the Biden administration prohibited helping the Ukrainians target it; even the approaches on the Crimean side were to be treated as sovereign Russian territory. (Ukrainian intelligence services tried attacking it themselves, causing some damage.)
But after the partners agreed on Lunar Hail, the White House authorized the military and C.I.A. to secretly work with the Ukrainians and the British on a blueprint of attack to bring the bridge down: ATACMS would weaken vulnerable points on the deck, while maritime drones would blow up next to its stanchions.
But while the drones were being readied, the Russians hardened their defenses around the stanchions.
Lloyd Austin seen as ‘godfather’ of the secret ops
In early January, Generals Donahue and Cavoli visited Kyiv to meet with General Syrsky and ensure that he agreed on plans to replenish Ukrainian brigades and shore up their lines, the Pentagon official said. From there, they traveled to Ramstein Air Base, where they met Mr. Austin for what would be the final gathering of coalition defense chiefs before everything changed.
With the doors closed to the press and public, Mr. Austin’s counterparts hailed him as the “godfather” and “architect” of the partnership that, for all its broken trust and betrayals, had sustained the Ukrainians’ defiance and hope, begun in earnest on that spring day in 2022 when Generals Donahue and Zabrodskyi first met in Wiesbaden.
Read the full Secret History of America’s Role in the Ukraine War here.
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