For more than a year, Adam Entus conducted more than 300 interviews with government, military and intelligence officials in Ukraine, the United States, Britain, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Turkey.On a spring morning, two months after Vladimir Putin's armies entered Ukraine, a convoy of unmarked vehicles slid up to a Kiev street corner and gathered two middle-aged men in civilian clothes.
Leaving the city, the convoy - manned by British commandos, out of uniform but heavily armed - drove 400 miles west to the Polish border. The crossing was uneventful, with diplomatic passports. Further on, they reached Rzeszów-Jazyonka airport, where a C-130 cargo plane was waiting.
The passengers were senior Ukrainian generals. Their destination was Clay Kaserne, the U.S. Army headquarters for 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, Lieutenant General Mykhailo Zabrodsky, recalls being led up the stairs to a walkway overlooking the main hall of the Tony Bass Auditorium at the garrison. Before the war, it had been a sports hall used for all-commanders' meetings, army band performances and scouting competitions in combat sports. Now General Zabrodsky watched the officers from the coalition countries who, in a whole bunch of makeshift offices, organized the first Western deliveries to Ukraine of M777 artillery batteries and 155mm shells.
He was then ushered into the office of Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, who offered him a partnership.
This partnership in intelligence, strategy, planning, and technology would become a secret weapon in what the Biden administration formulated as an effort to save Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order.
Today, that order-along with the protection of Ukrainian soil-is on the razor's edge as President Trump seeks rapprochement with Putin and promises to end the war. For Ukrainians, the outlook is not encouraging. In the great power competition for security and influence since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Ukraine has become a pivotal state whose tilt to the West Moscow has increasingly feared. Now, at the outset of negotiations, the American president is wrongly accusing the Ukrainians of starting the war, pressuring them to divest much of their mineral wealth, and asking them to agree to a ceasefire without the promise of specific American security guarantees - peace without certainty of continued peace.
Trump has already begun to terminate elements of the partnership forged in Wiesbaden in the spring of 2022. Yet tracing its history means we can better understand how the Ukrainians have managed to survive three long years of war in the face of a much larger and more powerful enemy. It also means seeing, through a secret keyhole, how the war got to the precarious place it is today.
With remarkable transparency, the Pentagon has offered a public inventory of the $66.5 billion in weapons supplied to Ukraine. dollars-including, at last count, more than half a billion rounds of small arms ammunition and grenades, 10,000 Javelin anti-tank weapons, 3,000 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 272 howitzers, 76 tanks, 40 high mobility missile systems, 20 Mi-17 helicopters, and three Patriot air defense batteries.
But a New York Times investigation reveals that America was involved in the war much more closely and extensively than previously thought. At critical moments, the partnership has been the backbone of Ukrainian military operations, in which, according to American figures, more than 700,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded. (Ukraine puts the death toll at 435,000.) Side by side at the mission's command center in Wiesbaden, American and Ukrainian officers plan Kiev's counterattacks. A massive U.S. intelligence-gathering effort both guided the overall battle strategy and provided accurate information about Ukrainian soldiers' objectives on the ground.
One European intelligence chief recalled being surprised to learn how deeply his NATO counterparts were enmeshed in Ukrainian operations. "Now they are part of the murder chain," he said.
The guiding idea of the partnership was that this close cooperation could allow the Ukrainians to accomplish the most amazing feat - to deal a crushing blow to the invading Russians. And after one successful strike in the early chapters of the war-thanks to Ukrainian bravery and agility, but also to Russian incompetence-this ambition seemed increasingly within reach. Early evidence of this was the campaign against one of Russia's most feared battle groups, the 58th Army, with combined arms. In mid-2022, using American intelligence and targeting information, the Ukrainians fired missiles at the 58th Army headquarters in Kherson Oblast, killing the generals and staff officers inside. Again and again the group settled elsewhere; each time the Americans found it and the Ukrainians destroyed it.
Far to the south, the partners head for the Crimean port of Sevastopol, where the Russian Black Sea Fleet is loading warships and submarines with missiles destined for Ukrainian targets. At the height of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2022, a swarm of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed maritime drones attacked the port, damaging several warships and prompting the Russians to begin withdrawing them.
But eventually the partnership is strained - and the balance of the war changes - amid rivalries, grievances and differing imperatives and agendas.
At times, the Ukrainians saw the Americans as overbearing and controlling - a prototype of the patronizing Americans. Americans sometimes couldn't understand why Ukrainians simply didn't take good advice.
When Americans focused on measurable, attainable goals, they saw Ukrainians constantly striving for the big win, the bright, shiny prize. The Ukrainians, in turn, often saw that the Americans were holding them back. The Ukrainians sought to win the war with full force. Even as they shared this hope, the Americans wanted to make sure the Ukrainians did not lose it.
As they won greater autonomy within the partnership, the Ukrainians increasingly kept their intentions secret. They were constantly angry that the Americans could not or would not give them all the weapons and other equipment they wanted. The Americans, for their part, were angered by what they saw as the Ukrainians' unreasonable demands and their unwillingness to take politically risky steps to bolster their vastly outnumbered forces.
At the tactical level, the partnership brought triumph after triumph. Yet at arguably the pivotal moment of the war - in mid-2023, when the Ukrainians launched a counteroffensive to build defeatist momentum after the successes of the first year - the strategy developed in Wiesbaden fell victim to Ukraine's fractious domestic politics: President Volodymyr Zelensky defied his military chief (and potential election rival), and the military chief defied his hardline subordinate commander. When Zelensky sided with his subordinate, the Ukrainians harnessed vast amounts of men and resources in a fruitless campaign to recapture the devastated town of Bakhmut. Within months, the entire counteroffensive ended in failure.
The partnership operated in the shadow of the deepest geopolitical fear - that Putin might consider it a breach of the red line of military engagement and carry out his frequent nuclear threats. The history of the partnership shows how close Americans and their allies have sometimes been to that red line, how increasingly frightening events have forced them - too slowly, some say - to move it to more dangerous places, and how they have carefully developed protocols to stay on the safe side of it.
More than once, the Biden administration has authorized covert operations it had previously prohibited. US military advisers were sent to Kiev and later allowed to get close to the fighting. Military and CIA officers in Wiesbaden helped plan and support a campaign of Ukrainian strikes in Russian-annexed Crimea. Eventually, the military, and then the CIA, got the green light to launch point strikes deep into Russia itself.
In some ways, Ukraine was a broader rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russian proxy wars - Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.
It was also a major experiment in warfare that would not only help the Ukrainians but reward the Americans with lessons for any future war.
During the wars against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, U.S. forces conducted their own ground operations and supported those of their local partners. In Ukraine, by contrast, the US military was not allowed to deploy a single soldier of its own on the battlefield and would have to help remotely.
Would precision targeting, perfected against terrorist groups, be effective in a conflict with one of the most powerful militaries in the world? Would Ukrainian artillerymen fire their howitzers without hesitation at coordinates sent by American officers at a headquarters 1,300 miles away? Will Ukrainian commanders, based on intelligence relayed by a disembodied American voice pleading, "There's no one there - leave," order infantrymen into a village behind enemy lines?
The answers to these questions - indeed, the entire trajectory of the partnership - will depend on how much American and Ukrainian officers trust each other.
Building trust - and a killing machine
In mid-April 2022, about two weeks before the Wiesbaden meeting, U.S. and Ukrainian naval officers were having a routine intelligence-sharing conversation when something unexpected appeared on their radar screens. According to a former high-ranking U.S. military officer, the Americans say, "Oh, it's Moscow!" The Ukrainians respond, 'Oh, my God. Thank you very much. Goodbye."
"The Moskva is the flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet. The Ukrainians sank it.
The sinking was a signal triumph - a demonstration of Ukrainian skill and Russian ineptitude. But this episode also reflects the frayed state of Ukrainian-American relations in the first weeks of the war.
The Americans were angry because the Ukrainians had not warned them; surprised that Ukraine possessed missiles capable of reaching the ship; and panicked because the Biden administration did not intend to allow the Ukrainians to attack such a symbol of Russian power.
The Ukrainians, for their part, proceeded from their own deep-seated skepticism.
Their war, in their view, began in 2014, when Mr. Putin seized Crimea and fomented separatist rebellions in eastern Ukraine. President Barack Obama condemned the seizure and imposed sanctions on Russia. But fearing that American interference 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 you can't win a war with blankets," complained then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Eventually, Obama relaxed these intelligence restrictions somewhat, and Trump, in his first term, relaxed them even more and provided the Ukrainians with their first Javelin anti-tank weapons.
Then, in the foreboding days before Russia's full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, the Biden administration closed the embassy in Kiev and withdrew all military personnel from the country. (A small team of CIA officers was allowed to stay.)
When U.S. generals offered help after the invasion, they faced a wall of disbelief. "We are fighting the Russians. You are not fighting. Why should we listen to you?" said the commander of Ukraine's ground forces, Colonel General Oleksandr Sirskyi, in his first meeting with the Americans.
Sirsky quickly came to his senses: the Americans could provide battlefield intelligence that his men could never get.
In those early days, that meant that General Donahue and a few aides, with only their telephones, relayed information about Russian troop movements to General Sirsky and his staff. But even this ad hoc arrangement touched a raw nerve of rivalry in the Ukrainian army, between General Sirsky and his superior, the commander of the armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhny. For those loyal to Zaluzhniy, General Sirsky was already using the relationship to build an advantage.
Further complicating the situation was Zaluzhniy's testy relationship with his American counterpart, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
During the telephone conversations, General Miley was able to dismiss the Ukrainians' requests for equipment. He could give battlefield advice based on satellite information on a screen in his Pentagon office. There was an awkward silence after that before General Zaluzhniy interrupted the conversation. Sometimes he simply ignored the American's calls.
To get them to talk, the Pentagon set up an elaborate telephone network: Baldwin, the commander of the California National Guard, calling a wealthy Los Angeles airship manufacturer named Igor Pasternak, who grew up in Lviv with Oleksiy Reznikov, then Ukraine's defense minister. Reznikov would track down General Zaluzhnyi and tell him, according to General Baldwin, "I know you're angry with Milly, but you should call him."
In March 2022, when the assault on Kiev was delayed, the Russians reoriented their ambitions and their military plan by directing additional forces east and south, a logistical feat that the Americans thought would take months. It took two and a half weeks.
General Donahue and the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe and Africa, General Christopher G. Kavoli concluded that unless the coalition refocused its own ambitions, the Ukrainians would lose the war. In other words, the coalition will have to start providing heavy offensive weapons - artillery batteries and M777 shells.
Previously, the Biden administration had arranged for emergency supplies of anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. The M777s were something quite different - the first big jump in support of a major land war.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and General Miley had put the 18th Airborne in charge of delivering the weapons and advising the Ukrainians on how to use them. When President Joe Biden signed the M777 contract, Tony Bass Auditorium became a full-fledged headquarters.
A Polish general became General Donahue's deputy. A British general would run the logistics center on the former basketball court. A Canadian general would oversee training.
The basement auditorium became a so-called fusion center that produced intelligence on Russian positions, movements, and intentions on the battlefield. There, intelligence officials said, officers from the CIA, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency were joined by coalition intelligence officers.
The 18th Airborne Corps is known as the Dragon Corps; the new operation will be Task Force Dragon. All it took to put the pieces together was a reluctant Ukrainian high command.
At an international conference on 26 April at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, General Milli introduced Reznikov and Deputy Zaluzhniy to Generals Kavoli and "These are your people here," General Milli told them, adding, "You have to work with them. They will help you."
Reznikov agreed to talk to General Zaluzhniy. In Kiev, "we organized the composition of a delegation" to Wiesbaden, Reznikov said. "And that's how it all started."
At the heart of the partnership were two generals, the Ukrainian, Zabrodsky, and the American, Donahue.
General Zabrodsky was to be Wiesbaden's chief Ukrainian contact, albeit in an unofficial capacity since he worked in parliament. In all other respects he was a natural partner.
Like many of his contemporaries in the Ukrainian army, General Zabrodsky knew the enemy well. In the 1990s, he had studied at a military academy in St. Petersburg and served five years in the Russian army.
He also knew the Americans: from 2005 to 2006, he studied at the Army Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Eight years later, the Ukrainian officer led a dangerous mission behind the lines of Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine, modeled in part on the one he studied at Fort Leavenworth - Confederate Gen. J.B. Stewart's famous reconnaissance mission around Gen. George B. Kerry's Army of the Potomac. McClellan. This caught the attention of powerful people in the Pentagon; the general, they felt, was a leader they could work with.
General Zabrodsky recalls his first day in Wiesbaden: "My mission was to find out, Who is this General Donahue? What are his credentials? How much can he do for us?"
General Donahue is a star in the secret world of special forces. Along with CIA assassination teams and local partners, he has hunted terrorist masterminds in the shadows of Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. As head of the elite Delta Force, he helped forge a partnership with Kurdish fighters in the fight against ISIS in Syria. General Cavoli once compared him to a "comic book action hero."
Now he showed General Zabrodsky and his companion, Major General Oleksandr Kirilenko, a map of the besieged east and south of their country, where Russian forces far outnumber theirs. Referring to their battle cry "Glory to Ukraine," he challenged, "You can shout 'Glory to Ukraine' all you want with other people. I don't care how brave you are. Look at the numbers." He then briefed them on the plan to gain the upper hand on the battlefield by the fall, General Zabrodsky recalled.
The first stage was underway - training Ukrainian gunners on their new M777s. Task Force Dragon would then help them use the weapons to stop the Russian advance. The Ukrainians would then have to launch a counter-offensive.
That evening General Zabrodsky wrote to his superiors in Kiev.
"You know, many countries wanted to support Ukraine," he recalled. But "someone had to be the coordinator, to organize everything, to solve the present problems and figure out what we needed in the future. I told the commander in chief, 'We've found a partner.'
Soon Ukrainians began arriving in Wiesbaden, about 20 in all - intelligence officers, specialists in operational planning, communications and fire control. Every morning, the officers recall, the Ukrainians and Americans would gather to study Russian weapons systems and ground forces and identify the most valuable targets. The priority lists were then passed to the intelligence fusion center, where officers analyzed the data streams to determine the location of targets.
At U.S. European Command, this process has generated a nice but tense linguistic debate: given the sensitivity of the mission, is it unduly provocative to call the targets "targets"?
Some officers thought "targets" was appropriate. Others referred to them as "information spikes," since the Russians were moving frequently and information had to be verified on the spot.
The debate was settled by Major General Timothy D. Brown, European Command's chief of intelligence: the location of Russian forces would be a "point of interest." Intelligence on air threats would be "a point of interest."
"If you're ever asked the question, 'Did you betray a target to the Ukrainians?", you'd be justified in not lying if you said, "No, I didn't," explains one US official.
Any point of interest would have to abide by intelligence-sharing rules designed to reduce the risk of Russian retaliation against NATO partners.
There would be no points of interest on Russian territory. If Ukrainian commanders want to strike in Russia, General Zabrodsky explained, they will have to use their own intelligence and domestically produced weapons. "Our message to the Russians was, 'This war should be fought on Ukrainian territory,'" a senior U.S. official said.
The White House also banned the sharing of intelligence on the whereabouts of "strategic" Russian leaders, such as armed forces chief General Valery Gerasimov.
The way the system worked was for Task Force Dragon to tell the Ukrainians where the Russians were located. But to protect its sources and methods of intelligence from Russian spies, it would not say how it knew what it knew. All the Ukrainians would see in the protected cloud were chains of coordinates divided into baskets - priority 1, priority 2, and so on. As General Zabrodsky recalls, when the Ukrainians asked why they should trust the intelligence, General Donahue would reply, "Don't worry about how we found out. Just trust that when you shoot, you'll hit it and you'll like the results, and if you don't like them, tell us, we'll improve them."
The system was launched in May. The first target will be a radar-equipped armored vehicle known as a "Zoo," which the Russians can use to detect weapons systems like the Ukrainians' M777. The fusion center discovered "ZooPark" near Russian-occupied Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine.
The Ukrainians will set a trap: First, they will open fire on Russian lines. When the Russians turn on "Zoo" to track incoming fire, the fusion center will determine the coordinates of "Zoo" to prepare the strike.
On the appointed day, General Zabrodsky recounted, General Donahue called the battalion commander with a pep talk, "Are you feeling all right?" he asked. "I feel really good," the Ukrainian replied. General Donahue then checked the satellite images to make sure the target and the M777 were properly positioned. Only then did the gunner open fire, destroying the Zoo. "Everybody said, 'We can do it!" recalls an American official.
But one important question remained: Once the partners had done this against one stationary target, could they use this system against multiple targets in a large kinetic battle?
Such would be the battle being fought north of Donetsk, in Sieverodonetsk, where the Russians hope to make a river crossing on a pontoon bridge and then encircle and capture the city. General Zabrodsky called it "a hell of a target."
The ensuing fighting was widely reported as an early and important Ukrainian victory. The pontoon bridges became death traps; Ukrainian estimates say at least 400 Russians were killed. No mention is made that the Americans provided "points of interest" that helped thwart the Russian attack.
In the early months, fighting was concentrated mostly in eastern Ukraine. But U.S. intelligence also monitored Russian movements in the south, especially the large massing of troops near the major city of Kherson. Soon several M777 teams were reassigned, and Task Force Dragon began feeding information on points of interest to strike Russian positions there.
With practice, Task Force Dragon produced "points of interest" faster, and the Ukrainians fired on them faster. The more they demonstrated their effectiveness using M777s and similar systems, the more the coalition sent new ones - which Wiesbaden supplied with more and more points of interest.
"Do you know when we started to believe?" General Zabrodsky recalls. "When Donahue said, 'This is a list of items.' We checked the list and said, 'These 100 positions are good, but we need the other 50.' And they sent the other 50."
M777s are becoming the heart of the Ukrainian army. But because they could not generally fire their 155mm shells more than 15 miles, they could not counter the Russians' vast superiority in manpower and equipment.
To give the Ukrainians compensating advantages in precision, speed, and range, Generals Cavoli and Donahue soon proposed a far greater leap-providing highly mobile artillery rocket systems known as HIMARS, which used satellite-guided missiles to deliver strikes up to 50 miles away.
The ensuing debate reflected the evolution of American thinking.
Pentagon officials resisted, unwilling to deplete the Army's limited stockpile of HIMARS. But in May, General Cavoli visited Washington and presented arguments that eventually convinced them.
Celeste Wallander, then assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, recalls, "Miley always said, 'You have a small Russian army fighting a big Russian army, and they fight the same way, and the Ukrainians will never win.'" General Cavoli's argument, she said, was that "with HIMARS, they can fight like us, and that's how they'll start beating the Russians."
At the White House, Biden and his advisers weighed that argument against concerns that pushing the Russians would only cause Putin to panic and expand the war. One official recalled that when the generals requested HIMARS, the moment was like "standing on that line and wondering, if you step forward, will World War III break out?" And when the White House took that step forward, the official said, Task Force Dragon became "the whole back office of the war."
Wiesbaden would control every HIMARS strike. General Donahue and his aides would review the Ukrainians' target lists and advise them on how to deploy their launchers and time the strikes. The Ukrainians were to use only the coordinates provided by the Americans. To launch a warhead, HIMARS operators needed a special electronic card that the Americans could deactivate at any time.
HIMARS strikes, which resulted in 100 or more Russians killed or wounded each time, were almost weekly. Russian forces remained stunned and confused. Their morale plummeted, and with it their willingness to fight. According to a U.S. official, as the HIMARS arsenal grew from eight to 38, and as Ukrainian attackers became more sophisticated, casualties increased up to fivefold. | BGNES
