The NY Times does a in-depth piece on how the Ukraine and Biden admin militarty married each other at the beginning of the war between the Ukraine and the attacking Russian’s….
This focus is about a story that HAS come up in bits and piece’s since day one….
But now is put together in joined piece….
We know in open source reports, some mentioned here in my posts, of how American and NATO Special Ops was sent to Kyiv to help the Ukraine….
We know in open source reports that EXTENSIVE American and NATO ‘God’s Eye’ intelligence assets HAVE been available to the Ukraine front satellite, to Recon aircraft looking down and into the battle lines….
But?
American military bosses knew what they had be taught in combat ops….
The Ukraine bosses where students of the Russian combat….
That would begin to cause riffs….
But?
The biggest problem for both bosses?
President Joseph Biden….
The America President from the jump was simply AFRAID to go FULL BLAST into helping the Ukraine in fear of what the Russian President would do in response to a stronger Ukraine bond with the Western Military….
It would only be after the Ukraine push into Russia at Kursk that Biden would unleash stronger US military hardware….
Biden had all along had to be pushed and draged to increase militarty assistance….
The piece is also about the Bosses, American and Ukraine General’s bonds , who worked together , to fight an adversary, and to deal with the political bosses they worked for….
IN MID-APRIL 2022, about two weeks before the Wiesbaden meeting, American and Ukrainian naval officers were on a routine intelligence-sharing call when something unexpected popped up on their radar screens. According to a former senior U.S. military officer, “The Americans go: ‘Oh, that’s the Moskva!’ The Ukrainians go: ‘Oh my God. Thanks a lot. Bye.’”
The Moskva was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The Ukrainians sank it.
The sinking was a signal triumph — a display of Ukrainian skill and Russian ineptitude. But the episode also reflected the disjointed state of the Ukrainian-American relationship in the first weeks of the war.
For the Americans, there was anger, because the Ukrainians hadn’t given so much as a heads-up; surprise, that Ukraine possessed missiles capable of reaching the ship; and panic, because the Biden administration hadn’t intended to enable the Ukrainians to attack such a potent symbol of Russian power.
The Ukrainians, for their part, were coming from their own place of deep-rooted skepticism.
Their war, as they saw it, had started in 2014, when Mr. Putin seized Crimea and fomented separatist rebellions in eastern Ukraine. President Barack Obama had condemned the seizure and imposed sanctions on Russia. But fearful that American involvement could provoke a full-scale invasion, he had authorized only strictly limited intelligence sharing and rejected calls for defensive weapons. “Blankets and night-vision goggles are important, but one cannot win a war with blankets,” Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro O. Poroshenko, complained. Eventually Mr. Obama somewhat relaxed those intelligence strictures, and Mr. Trump, in his first term, relaxed them further and supplied the Ukrainians with their first antitank Javelins.
Then, in the portentous days before Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the Biden administration had closed the Kyiv embassy and pulled all military personnel from the country. (A small team of C.I.A. officers was allowed to stay.) As the Ukrainians saw it, a senior U.S. military officer said, “We told them, ‘The Russians are coming — see ya.’”
When American generals offered assistance after the invasion, they ran into a wall of mistrust. “We’re fighting the Russians. You’re not. Why should we listen to you?” Ukraine’s ground forces commander, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, told the Americans the first time they met.
General Syrsky quickly came around: The Americans could provide the kind of battlefield intelligence his people never could.
In those early days, this meant that General Donahue and a few aides, with little more than their phones, passed information about Russian troop movements to General Syrsky and his staff. Yet even that ad hoc arrangement touched a raw nerve of rivalry within Ukraine’s military, between General Syrsky and his boss, the armed forces commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. To Zaluzhny loyalists, General Syrsky was already using the relationship to build advantage.
Further complicating matters was General Zaluzhny’s testy relationship with his American counterpart, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In phone conversations, General Milley might second-guess the Ukrainians’ equipment requests. He might dispense battlefield advice based on satellite intelligence on the screen in his Pentagon office. Next would come an awkward silence, before General Zaluzhny cut the conversation short. Sometimes he simply ignored the American’s calls.
To keep them talking, the Pentagon initiated an elaborate telephone tree: A Milley aide would call Maj. Gen. David S. Baldwin, commander of the California National Guard, who would ring a wealthy Los Angeles blimp maker named Igor Pasternak, who had grown up in Lviv with Oleksii Reznikov, then Ukraine’s defense minister. Mr. Reznikov would track down General Zaluzhny and tell him, according to General Baldwin, “I know you’re mad at Milley, but you have to call him.”
Ragtag alliance coalesced into partnership in the quick cascade of events.
In March, their assault on Kyiv stalling, the Russians reoriented their ambitions, and their war plan, surging additional forces east and south — a logistical feat the Americans thought would take months. It took two and a half weeks.
Unless the coalition reoriented its own ambitions, General Donahue and the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, concluded, the hopelessly outmanned and outgunned Ukrainians would lose the war. The coalition, in other words, would have to start providing heavy offensive weapons — M777 artillery batteries and shells.
The Biden administration had previously arranged emergency shipments of antiaircraft and antitank weapons. The M777s were something else entirely — the first big leap into supporting a major ground war.
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.
At an international conference on April 26 at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, General Milley introduced Mr. Reznikov and a Zaluzhny deputy to Generals Cavoli and Donahue. “These are your guys right here,” General Milley told them, adding: “You’ve got to work with them. They’re going to help you.”
Bonds of trust were being forged. Mr. Reznikov agreed to talk to General Zaluzhny. Back in Kyiv, “we organized the composition of a delegation” to Wiesbaden, Mr. Reznikov said. “And so it began.”
AT THE HEART OF THE PARTNERSHIP were two generals — the Ukrainian, Zabrodskyi, and the American, Donahue.
General Zabrodskyi would be Wiesbaden’s chief Ukrainian contact, although in an unofficial capacity, as he was serving in parliament. In every other way, he was a natural…..
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