The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine

[Timber Rattler]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/29/world/europe/us-ukraine-military-war-wiesbaden.html

This is the untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.

On a spring morning two months after Vladimir Putin’s invading armies marched into Ukraine, a convoy of unmarked cars slid up to a Kyiv street corner and collected two middle-aged men in civilian clothes.

Leaving the city, the convoy — manned by British commandos, out of uniform but heavily armed — traveled 400 miles west to the Polish border. The crossing was seamless, on diplomatic passports. Farther on, they came to the Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, where an idling C-130 cargo plane waited.

The passengers were top Ukrainian generals. 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.

One of the men, Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, remembers being led up a flight of stairs to a walkway overlooking the cavernous main hall of the garrison’s Tony Bass Auditorium. Before the war, it had been a gym, used for all-hands meetings, Army band performances and Cub Scout pinewood derbies. Now General Zabrodskyi peered down on officers from coalition nations, in a warren of makeshift cubicles, organizing the first Western shipments to Ukraine of M777 artillery batteries and 155-millimeter shells.

Then he was ushered into the office of Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, who proposed a partnership.

Its evolution and inner workings visible to only a small circle of American and allied officials, that partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology would become the secret weapon in what the Biden administration framed as its effort to both rescue Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order.

EXCERPT

[Canuck Conservative]

Paywall at the Slimes website. No thanks.

But I think most people suspected the gist of this already ...

[Timber Rattler]

Paywall at the Slimes website. No thanks.

But I think most people suspected the gist of this already ...

Yeah, there are no real surprises in the article...the gist is that the U.S. Army and CIA in Europe have been doing the planning and targeting for the Ukrainians after Putin's invasion but that strategic objectives and force allocations were conflicted by personalities and political considerations within both the U.S. and Ukraine.

A simple way to defeat the paywall for the NYTs is to hit the "stop reload" button on your browser as the page is loading.  Do it multiple times if necessary to achieve the desired outcome.