9 ms·

The Secret History of the War in Ukraine

87 points by themgt 2y ago

oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
cosmicgadget 2y ago
https://archive.is/jTAcu https://archive.is/jTAcu > All the Ukrainians would see on a secure cloud were chains of coordinates, divided into baskets — Priority 1, Priority 2 and so on. As General Zabrodskyi remembers it, when the Ukrainians asked why they should trust the intelligence, General Donahue would say: “Don’t worry about how we found out. Just trust that when you shoot, it will hit it, and you’ll like the results, and if you don’t like the results, tell us, we’ll make it better.”
- rdtsc 2y ago
  > “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. That's some shady word mincing. Who are they afraid of, US Congress? journalists? Who would be asking these questions. This is in the same vein as "we never engaged in water torture!". But did you use "enhanced interrogation techniques using water?". You can still answer "No", if you use diesel fuel instead, you see.
  - pseudalopex 2y ago
    The context was stated in the 2 paragraphs before. Some people avoided calling locations targets because the information needed verification. A target is a place to attack. A point of interest is a place to look.
    - rdtsc 2y ago
      Above they are still called targets though. > Every morning, officers recalled, the Ukrainians and Americans gathered to survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets > Given the delicacy of the mission, was it unduly provocative to call targets “targets”? It's about "the delicacy" of the mission not them moving or not moving. It could have been "potential targets" or "moving targets" instance otherwise. > “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. The un-named "US official" spelled it out for us eventually so we don't have to guess and read between the lines.
howard941 2y ago
A deep, deep dive into the logistic, intelligence, and kill chains. Well worth the read.
allturtles 2y ago
A somewhat shallow comment, but why do post-Cold War U.S. weapon systems have such intentionally bland names? ATACMS, HIMARS, etc? They used to give weapons names that made them sound aggressive, dangerous, legendary, bold: Thor, Dragon, Phoenix, Patriot, etc. It has happened to vehicles as well, which used to be named after venerated war leaders: Abrams and Bradley are now HMMWV and MRAP. Is this an intentional effort to make warfighting sound more like a kind of bureacratic exercise?
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  > Is this an intentional effort to make warfighting sound more like a kind of bureacratic exercise? I'm not sure how intentional it is in the sense that they made a deliberate choice rather than it being an unspoken consensus to move this way. However, the language around warfighting in the US has been increasingly sanitized over the years. A key event here is the change in name from Department of War to Department of Defense. Later on we started calling things "defense" instead of military. It's the "defense sector" of the economy, not the military sector. The defense budget, not the military budget. You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in). Now with drones the operators (note the term, it doesn't convey what the job actually entails) may be located at a state side base and go home after conducting a mission somewhere else in the world.
  - cjs_ac 2y ago
    The US Department of War and Department of the Navy were combined to form the Department of Defense. This separation imitated that in the United Kingdom, where the War Office administered the British Army, and the Admiralty administered the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines (and, later, the Air Ministry administered the Royal Air Force).
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    > You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in). . . . because the American public ever since Desert Storm has demanded sanitized, bloodless wars. As soon as you have so-called "boots on the ground," it magically becomes a "quagmire." Yet everyone insists we prevent the next 9/11.
ilamont 2y ago
Excellent reporting, particularly concerning the rivalries in the top levels of the Ukrainian military leadership. If only it was possible to do a similar deep dive into the Russian side. One "what if" I am left wondering about concerns the U.S. frustrations and Ukrainian reluctance to lower the draft age. Maybe that ties into Zelensky and Budanov's belief that Putin has been "approaching death" for 2 years? https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/zelensky-putin-death-spring-offensive-kharkiv-sumy-90d7fqzmv https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/ze...
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  I think the answer is simpler - if they draft young people, their demographic pyramid will be even more utterly devastated after the war ends.
- ProjectArcturis 2y ago
  Definitely the demographic thing, but also the "Putin approaching death" meme feels like mostly a PsyOp from Ukraine. The unspoken correlary is, Ukraine doesn't have to outlast Russia, it just has to outlast Putin.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ajcp 2y ago
  > belief that Putin has been "approaching death" for 2 years? I truly believe this was a significant part of why Alexei Navalny was willing to go back to Russia knowing full-well he'd disappear into their penal system; he was betting he'd be able to outlive Putin.
apercu 2y ago
Seems like a great article, and I followed the war (maybe we should call it genocide & imperialism and not war) pretty closely for maybe 3 years or so. Why's does this the author talk about dates and not include years? > ("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.") Is this 2021? 2022? Seems like a nitpick, I know but like, why make your readers work?
- ajcp 2y ago
  April, 2022. In the NYTimes app version of the article as you scroll down information about the "part" you are on stays at the top like a sticky nav to give better context. So for where your quote comes form it says "Part 1 February - May 2022"
  - apercu 2y ago
    Aww, that might not have displayed in the reader view. Blaming the author instead of the paywall workaround lol. Sorry.
    - ajcp 2y ago
      Not at all! If I were a journalist I would not want my reporting to rely on external formatting and styling to convey key information.
- stogot 2y ago
  There’s a year in here (2023) that I’m pretty sure they meant 2024 and it was a typo. It was talking about the election, but the context makes zero sense in 2023
dralley 2y ago
> 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. And this is my biggest problem with the last administration's policies on Ukraine, despite the fact that they were vastly better than the current administration's. They acted like the goal was to step on Putin's toes without pissing him off too much, not enable Ukrainians to successfully fight a defensive war after 10 years of Russian aggression. The response to the greatest Ukrainian successes was dismay and pullback. After 2022, there was very little forwards thinking, only reactions that came months late and at the expense of thousands of lives. I'm not saying that Ukrainians were perfect, they have a TON of problems and mistakes of their own. But they were also put under ludicrous constraints. It's totally absurd that ATACMS was only provided after Congress forced their hand (despite Congressional stonewalling otherwise!). Imagine if Ukraine had been able to hit Russian airfields on Ukrainian soil with cluster ATACMS in spring 2023 before the offensive instead of after it had fallen apart, partially due to those same airfields. Or if cluster shells were provided before Bakhmut fell rather than after. There was no coherent strategy, only endless handwringing and over-intellectualization and Kremlinology.
- ferguess_k 2y ago
  I think it has everything to do with US strategy: What do you want to get out from this war? I guess different interest groups have different answers. And sometimes they don't want to share the answers for apparent reasons.
  - 2y ago
light_triad 2y ago
Interesting article. It seems every war post-Cold War has turned into some kind of proxy war. No matter how much US politicians who are isolationist try to spin the Ukraine war as a "territorial dispute" and how well it plays with their domestic base, the US has been intimately involved since the start. Perhaps the Cold War never really ended and there's been a secret conflict in the background ever since?
- jgilias 2y ago
  Yes, the Cold War never ended. And it seems like Russia is winning now.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    The Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and a new Cold War with Russia started during the late 1990s, around the time of the NATO-Yugoslavia war.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    nobody wins in war
    - blitzar 2y ago
      In war, there are no winners, only widows.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      That doesn't match up with history or reality. Hard to argue that nobody benefits from war, and that there are winners and losers.
  - light_triad 2y ago
    The Russians had some successes in asymmetric warfare, but they can't 'win' outright on the ground, and peace would probably decimate their economy. From the WSJ a few days ago: For Russia’s Economy, Peace Poses a Threat https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-war-economy-ukraine-peace-deal-783b8bdb https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-war-economy-ukraine-...
rdtsc 2y ago
> They were perennially angered that the Americans couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give them all of the weapons and other equipment they wanted. That was the plan from the start, I believe. They were never going to be allowed to win. They won't be allowed to lose either, at least not too quickly. One example I like to use, is say, you're sick, and you need $10k for a life-saving surgery. Your friend sends you $7k. That's very generous, you should thank your friend, of course. But you'll still die. It's kind of like what's happened here. Ukrainians got the $7k. But then were receiving a few hundreds here, and another hundred there over a longer period of time. Russians were at first unprepared and couldn't control their troops well, but they learned soon enough. They use drones with fiber-optic control, glide bombs, they dug in well. People were laughing at Surovikin's "line", they are not laughing at it now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_the_Russian_...
- jemmyw 2y ago
  Ukraine hasn't sat on it's laurels either though, they can see the situation. They have also responded with domestic production, and European manufacturers have started building factories in western Ukraine. Not giving them what they needed to win but just enough to hang on was a huge mistake imo because they're not going away, Russia isn't going to roll over the rest no matter what happens now. Instead we prolonged the war and failed to create a superb ally in a great position.
rdtsc 2y ago
> 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. Did I read that correctly that the Americans were undermining Zaluzhny by giving the intelligence directly to Syrsky? I mean even in a business environment that's shitty but in the military chain of command that's a slap in the face.
ac130kz 2y ago
The article is weirdly framed in favour of Biden's administration, who delayed heavy weapons by a year, and didn't fully utilize the allocated budget. Now we have a stupidly long conflict.
jopsen 2y ago
American intel sharing with Ukraine is not a surprise. The US publicly stated invasion was coming, which kind of made it clear that: US was supplying intel.

87 points by themgt 2y ago

[dead]

https://archive.is/jTAcu https://archive.is/jTAcu > All the Ukrainians would see on a secure cloud were chains of coordinates, divided into baskets — Priority 1, Priority 2 and so on. As General Zabrodskyi remembers it, when the Ukrainians asked why they should trust the intelligence, General Donahue would say: “Don’t worry about how we found out. Just trust that when you shoot, it will hit it, and you’ll like the results, and if you don’t like the results, tell us, we’ll make it better.”

rdtsc 2y ago
> “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. That's some shady word mincing. Who are they afraid of, US Congress? journalists? Who would be asking these questions. This is in the same vein as "we never engaged in water torture!". But did you use "enhanced interrogation techniques using water?". You can still answer "No", if you use diesel fuel instead, you see.
- pseudalopex 2y ago
  The context was stated in the 2 paragraphs before. Some people avoided calling locations targets because the information needed verification. A target is a place to attack. A point of interest is a place to look.
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    Above they are still called targets though. > Every morning, officers recalled, the Ukrainians and Americans gathered to survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets > Given the delicacy of the mission, was it unduly provocative to call targets “targets”? It's about "the delicacy" of the mission not them moving or not moving. It could have been "potential targets" or "moving targets" instance otherwise. > “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. The un-named "US official" spelled it out for us eventually so we don't have to guess and read between the lines.

howard941 2y ago

A deep, deep dive into the logistic, intelligence, and kill chains. Well worth the read.

allturtles 2y ago

A somewhat shallow comment, but why do post-Cold War U.S. weapon systems have such intentionally bland names? ATACMS, HIMARS, etc? They used to give weapons names that made them sound aggressive, dangerous, legendary, bold: Thor, Dragon, Phoenix, Patriot, etc. It has happened to vehicles as well, which used to be named after venerated war leaders: Abrams and Bradley are now HMMWV and MRAP. Is this an intentional effort to make warfighting sound more like a kind of bureacratic exercise?

Jtsummers 2y ago
> Is this an intentional effort to make warfighting sound more like a kind of bureacratic exercise? I'm not sure how intentional it is in the sense that they made a deliberate choice rather than it being an unspoken consensus to move this way. However, the language around warfighting in the US has been increasingly sanitized over the years. A key event here is the change in name from Department of War to Department of Defense. Later on we started calling things "defense" instead of military. It's the "defense sector" of the economy, not the military sector. The defense budget, not the military budget. You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in). Now with drones the operators (note the term, it doesn't convey what the job actually entails) may be located at a state side base and go home after conducting a mission somewhere else in the world.
- cjs_ac 2y ago
  The US Department of War and Department of the Navy were combined to form the Department of Defense. This separation imitated that in the United Kingdom, where the War Office administered the British Army, and the Admiralty administered the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines (and, later, the Air Ministry administered the Royal Air Force).
- psunavy03 2y ago
  > You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in). . . . because the American public ever since Desert Storm has demanded sanitized, bloodless wars. As soon as you have so-called "boots on the ground," it magically becomes a "quagmire." Yet everyone insists we prevent the next 9/11.

ilamont 2y ago

Excellent reporting, particularly concerning the rivalries in the top levels of the Ukrainian military leadership. If only it was possible to do a similar deep dive into the Russian side. One "what if" I am left wondering about concerns the U.S. frustrations and Ukrainian reluctance to lower the draft age. Maybe that ties into Zelensky and Budanov's belief that Putin has been "approaching death" for 2 years? https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/zelensky-putin-death-spring-offensive-kharkiv-sumy-90d7fqzmv https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/ze...

StefanBatory 2y ago
I think the answer is simpler - if they draft young people, their demographic pyramid will be even more utterly devastated after the war ends.
ProjectArcturis 2y ago
Definitely the demographic thing, but also the "Putin approaching death" meme feels like mostly a PsyOp from Ukraine. The unspoken correlary is, Ukraine doesn't have to outlast Russia, it just has to outlast Putin.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ajcp 2y ago
> belief that Putin has been "approaching death" for 2 years? I truly believe this was a significant part of why Alexei Navalny was willing to go back to Russia knowing full-well he'd disappear into their penal system; he was betting he'd be able to outlive Putin.

apercu 2y ago

Seems like a great article, and I followed the war (maybe we should call it genocide & imperialism and not war) pretty closely for maybe 3 years or so. Why's does this the author talk about dates and not include years? > ("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.") Is this 2021? 2022? Seems like a nitpick, I know but like, why make your readers work?

ajcp 2y ago
April, 2022. In the NYTimes app version of the article as you scroll down information about the "part" you are on stays at the top like a sticky nav to give better context. So for where your quote comes form it says "Part 1 February - May 2022"
- apercu 2y ago
  Aww, that might not have displayed in the reader view. Blaming the author instead of the paywall workaround lol. Sorry.
  - ajcp 2y ago
    Not at all! If I were a journalist I would not want my reporting to rely on external formatting and styling to convey key information.
stogot 2y ago
There’s a year in here (2023) that I’m pretty sure they meant 2024 and it was a typo. It was talking about the election, but the context makes zero sense in 2023

dralley 2y ago

> 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. And this is my biggest problem with the last administration's policies on Ukraine, despite the fact that they were vastly better than the current administration's. They acted like the goal was to step on Putin's toes without pissing him off too much, not enable Ukrainians to successfully fight a defensive war after 10 years of Russian aggression. The response to the greatest Ukrainian successes was dismay and pullback. After 2022, there was very little forwards thinking, only reactions that came months late and at the expense of thousands of lives. I'm not saying that Ukrainians were perfect, they have a TON of problems and mistakes of their own. But they were also put under ludicrous constraints. It's totally absurd that ATACMS was only provided after Congress forced their hand (despite Congressional stonewalling otherwise!). Imagine if Ukraine had been able to hit Russian airfields on Ukrainian soil with cluster ATACMS in spring 2023 before the offensive instead of after it had fallen apart, partially due to those same airfields. Or if cluster shells were provided before Bakhmut fell rather than after. There was no coherent strategy, only endless handwringing and over-intellectualization and Kremlinology.

ferguess_k 2y ago
I think it has everything to do with US strategy: What do you want to get out from this war? I guess different interest groups have different answers. And sometimes they don't want to share the answers for apparent reasons.
- 2y ago

light_triad 2y ago

Interesting article. It seems every war post-Cold War has turned into some kind of proxy war. No matter how much US politicians who are isolationist try to spin the Ukraine war as a "territorial dispute" and how well it plays with their domestic base, the US has been intimately involved since the start. Perhaps the Cold War never really ended and there's been a secret conflict in the background ever since?

jgilias 2y ago
Yes, the Cold War never ended. And it seems like Russia is winning now.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  The Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and a new Cold War with Russia started during the late 1990s, around the time of the NATO-Yugoslavia war.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  nobody wins in war
  - blitzar 2y ago
    In war, there are no winners, only widows.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    That doesn't match up with history or reality. Hard to argue that nobody benefits from war, and that there are winners and losers.
- light_triad 2y ago
  The Russians had some successes in asymmetric warfare, but they can't 'win' outright on the ground, and peace would probably decimate their economy. From the WSJ a few days ago: For Russia’s Economy, Peace Poses a Threat https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-war-economy-ukraine-peace-deal-783b8bdb https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-war-economy-ukraine-...

rdtsc 2y ago

> They were perennially angered that the Americans couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give them all of the weapons and other equipment they wanted. That was the plan from the start, I believe. They were never going to be allowed to win. They won't be allowed to lose either, at least not too quickly. One example I like to use, is say, you're sick, and you need $10k for a life-saving surgery. Your friend sends you $7k. That's very generous, you should thank your friend, of course. But you'll still die. It's kind of like what's happened here. Ukrainians got the $7k. But then were receiving a few hundreds here, and another hundred there over a longer period of time. Russians were at first unprepared and couldn't control their troops well, but they learned soon enough. They use drones with fiber-optic control, glide bombs, they dug in well. People were laughing at Surovikin's "line", they are not laughing at it now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_the_Russian_...

jemmyw 2y ago
Ukraine hasn't sat on it's laurels either though, they can see the situation. They have also responded with domestic production, and European manufacturers have started building factories in western Ukraine. Not giving them what they needed to win but just enough to hang on was a huge mistake imo because they're not going away, Russia isn't going to roll over the rest no matter what happens now. Instead we prolonged the war and failed to create a superb ally in a great position.

rdtsc 2y ago

> 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. Did I read that correctly that the Americans were undermining Zaluzhny by giving the intelligence directly to Syrsky? I mean even in a business environment that's shitty but in the military chain of command that's a slap in the face.

ac130kz 2y ago

The article is weirdly framed in favour of Biden's administration, who delayed heavy weapons by a year, and didn't fully utilize the allocated budget. Now we have a stupidly long conflict.

jopsen 2y ago

American intel sharing with Ukraine is not a surprise. The US publicly stated invasion was coming, which kind of made it clear that: US was supplying intel.