Trump ceasefire Russia rejects, splits with Ukraine in US proxy war
A Russian Kremlin spokesman declared that President Trump's "anger over the ceasefire delay" was a "tedious process" and was breaking it.
And the cracks were revealed in the war in Ukraine, which became a proxy war for the United States.
In a telephone conversation with reporters on the 31st, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response to a question about Trump's "anger" remarks, "There is nothing concrete that we can and should announce yet. This is a tedious process due to the difficulty of the content," effectively rejecting the US offer, AP reported.
In a statement on the same day, the Russian Defense Ministry said, "Air defense networks in three Russian regions shot down 66 Ukrainian drones," and "the continued attacks by the Ukrainian military on Russian energy facilities demonstrate the Kiev regime's complete lack of respect for its obligations related to resolving the Ukrainian conflict."
The New York Times, which analyzed the war as a “proxy war for the United States” in the wake of Putin’s invasion, reported on the 29th in a special feature titled “Partnership: The Secret History of the Ukraine War” with the subtitle “This is the untold story of America’s hidden role in the Ukrainian military operation against the Russian invaders” that Ukrainian generals met in the underground bunker of the U.S. Central Command in Germany at the beginning of the invasion and directed military operation plans.
The NYT said that the secret operation site was Clay Kaserne, the U.S. Army’s European and African Command in Wiesbaden, Germany, and that their mission was to “help fabricate” what would become one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Ukrainian war.
Aboard a Ukrainian military transport plane from Poland, Ukrainian Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi was led down a hallway overlooking the cavernous atrium of the garrison’s Tony Bass Auditorium, which before the war had served as a gymnasium for all-hands meetings, Army band performances and the Cub Scout Pine Tree Derby but had been converted into a secret operations room. From a makeshift cubicle, Zabrodsky looked down on Allied officers as he organized the first Western shipment of M777 batteries and 155mm artillery shells to Ukraine.
Then he was led into the office of Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps, or Dragon Corps, and offered a partnership, the Times reported.
The evolution of the battlefield command center, its inner workings and its partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology, visible only to a select few US and allied officials, has become a secret weapon framed by the Biden administration in its efforts to save Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order, but now that order is teetering on a knife’s edge as the defense of Ukraine’s territory and President Trump vows to reconcile with Putin and end the war.
The Pentagon recently released a public inventory of $66.5 billion worth of weapons delivered to Ukraine, including more than 500 million rounds of small arms ammunition and grenades, 10,000 Javelin anti-aircraft weapons, 3,000 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 272 howitzers, 76 tanks, 40 rapid-fire artillery rocket systems, 20 Mi-17 helicopters and three Patriot air defense batteries.
The decisive rupture was the Ukrainian Intelligence Service (HUR) deceiving the CIA and the surprise Russian capture of Kursk in Wiesbaden in August of last year.
At that time, the Ukrainian military in northern and eastern Ukraine was dangerously thin. Despite this, General Sirsky continued to tell the US military, “I need a victory.”
The foreboding was rekindled in March of that year when the US discovered that the Ukrainian military intelligence service, HUR, was secretly planning a ground operation in southwestern Russia.
The CIA station chief in Kiev told HUR commander General Kyrylo Budanov that if he went over to Russia, he would do so without American weapons or intelligence support.
“We are allies, but our goals are different,” said Lieutenant General Valery Kondratyuk, commander of the Ukrainian military intelligence service. “We protect our country, and you protect the phantom fear of the Cold War.” In August of that year, General Aguto’s tour in Wiesbaden was coming to an end as scheduled, and he left the battlefield on the 9th.
On August 10, the CIA station chief left for headquarters. On that day, amid confusion among his commanders, General Sirsky sent troops across the southwestern Russian border into the Kursk region.
“For the Americans, the invasion was a serious breach of trust,” the Times reported. “The Ukrainians were not just keeping them in the dark again. They were secretly crossing a mutually agreed-upon line and transporting Allied-provided equipment into Russian territory, surrounded by a box, in violation of the rules set out when the box was created.”
The box was meant to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Kharkiv, not to be used by the Ukrainians to seize Russian territory.
“It was hardly a threat, it was a threat,” a senior Pentagon official told the Times.
The Americans could have pulled the plug on the box. But they knew that doing so would “lead to disaster.” If the operation box was stopped, Ukrainian soldiers deployed to occupy Kursk would be left defenseless against HIMARS rockets and American intelligence.
Immediately after taking office, President Trump demanded that Zelensky sign the “mineral transfer agreement,” and when it was delayed, he temporarily implemented it with an “information blackout.”
The South Korean National Intelligence Service, the South Korean media, the National Assembly and political partiesbecame loyal supporters of the Kursk occupation led by Ukrainian intelligence.
The Americans concluded that the Kursk occupation was the victory that President Zelensky had been hinting at.
It was also evidence of Zelensky’s calculations. He was still talking about a complete victory. However, he explained that one of the goals of the operation was to seize and hold Russian lands that could be exchanged for Ukrainian lands in future negotiations as leverage.
The Times found that “the United States was much more closely and extensively involved in the war than previously understood, and at key moments this partnership was the backbone of the military operation in Ukraine,” adding that “from the mission command center in Wiesbaden, Germany, American and Ukrainian officers worked side by side to plan the counteroffensive in Kiev, while the vast American intelligence effort guided the big-picture battle strategy and delivered precise targeting information to Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield.”
The head of the European intelligence service was “astonished at how deeply NATO agents were entangled in the Ukraine operation,” the Times reported. “They are now part of the kill chain.” The idea behind this U.S.-Ukrainian partnership was to demonstrate that through this close cooperation, Ukraine could “deal with an invading Russian force” in the most improbable of feats.
As the war’s early successes continued, “Ukrainian courage and dexterity, and Russian incompetence, made Ukraine’s ambitions as an underdog seem increasingly within reach,” the Times said. An early demonstration of the partnership’s success was a combat campaign against one of Russia’s most feared combat groups, the 58th Allied Army.
In mid-2022, Ukrainian forces used American intelligence and targeting intelligence to launch a rocket attack on the 58th Regiment’s headquarters in the Kherson region, killing the general and staff inside.
Several times the Russian group took up positions in other locations, but each time the Americans discovered them and the Ukrainians destroyed them.
Further south on the battlefield, the two sides targeted the Crimean port of Sevastopol, where the Russian Black Sea Fleet loaded its warships and submarines with missiles aimed at Ukrainian targets, and at the height of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2022, a swarm of CIA-backed sea drones attacked the port at dawn, damaging several warships and forcing the Russians to withdraw. The rift in the closeness of the alliance “ultimately became strained, and the war’s dynamic changed amid competition, resentment, and differing tasks and agendas,” the New York Times analyzed. “Ukrainians sometimes saw Americans as overbearing and controlling, and Americans sometimes did not understand why Ukrainians did not take good advice.”
The rift between the two arose from the fact that Americans focused on measurable and achievable goals, while they saw Ukrainians as constantly grasping for big victories, bright and shiny prizes. Ukrainians often felt that the United States was holding them back, and now that Ukrainians were aiming for a complete victory in the war, the Americans, sharing that hope, wanted to keep the Ukrainians from losing that hope, but as Ukraine gained greater autonomy in the partnership, they increasingly kept their intentions secret.
They were constantly angered by the fact that the US military could not or would not give them all the weapons and other equipment they wanted, while the US military, in turn, was angry at Ukraine’s unreasonable demands and “politically risky measures” to bolster its vastly outnumbered forces.
On a tactical level, this partnership was a success, but in mid-2023, at a critical moment in the war, the strategy devised in Wiesbaden finally exploded in the face of Ukraine’s divided internal political divisions: President Zelensky versus the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces (a potential electoral rival), with the Chief of Staff being scapegoated as the scapegoat for his stubborn subordinate commander.
President Zelensky sided with his subordinate, the Chief of Staff was sacked, and the Ukrainians poured massive forces and resources into an operation to recapture the devastated city of Bakhmut in a show of force, but within months the entire counteroffensive was a stillborn failure.
Putin’s ‘nuclear threat’ emerged from the rift between the US and Ukraine, and the Biden administration has repeatedly approved previously banned covert operations. US military advisers were sent to Kiev and could later move closer to the fighting.
Military and CIA officers in the Wiesbaden Operations Center in Germany helped plan and support the Ukrainian airstrikes in Crimea, which Russia annexed, and eventually the military and CIA were given permission to launch precision strikes deep inside Russia.
The New York Times said of the US proxy war, “In some ways, Ukraine was a rematch in the long history of proxy wars between the US and Russia, like Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Syria 30 years later, when viewed on a broader canvas.” “It was a grand experiment in warfare, one that would not only benefit the Ukrainians but also reward the Americans with lessons for future wars.”
The defining moment of the bilateral breakdown was in mid-April 2022, about two weeks before the Wiesbaden talks, when US and Ukrainian naval officers were having a routine intelligence-sharing call when something unexpected appeared on their radar screens, and Ukraine sank the Russian Moskva in the Black Sea with previously US-supported missiles without US consent.
According to a former senior U.S. military officer, “Americans say, ‘Oh, that’s Moscow!’ Ukrainians say, ‘Oh my goodness. Thank you very much. Goodbye.’” The Moskva was the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and the Ukrainians sank it.
“The sinking was a signal victory for Ukrainian technology and Russian incompetence, but it also reflected the fractured state of Ukrainian-American relations in the early weeks of the war,” the Times said. “For Americans, the Ukrainians were furious because they had not been informed of the attack in advance.”
The incident, surprisingly, escalated the battle because Ukraine had missiles capable of reaching the ship, and the Biden administration had no intention of allowing the Ukrainians to attack such a powerful symbol of Russian power.
On February 24, 2022, just days before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Biden administration closed the Kiev embassy and withdrew all American troops.
A small team of CIA agents were allowed to stay, and as the Ukrainians watched, a senior U.S. military officer told the Times, “We told them, ‘The Russians are coming,’” as “advance information on the outbreak of war.”
The New York Times feature, The Secret History of the Ukraine War, is the result of more than 300 interviews conducted by Adam Entus over a period of more than a year with current and former policymakers, defense officials, intelligence officials and military officers in Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom and several European countries.
Some of the interviewees agreed to be on the record, but most asked that their names not be used to discuss sensitive military and intelligence operations.
See <White House ‘approves security support’ in the face of Ukraine’s defeat in Kursk Battle, Korean media manipulates, December 29, 2024>
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