The common perception of America's involvement in the Ukraine War is that the U.S. functioned as an arms merchant and paymaster.
In fact, the U.S. military was up to its eyeballs in planning the war with the Ukrainian military, supplying real-time intel to Ukrainian troops and planning offensives with its Ukrainian counterparts.
In a 13,000-word exposé of the much larger role the U.S. played in the war than previously believed, the New York Times has revealed why, after Ukraine's inability to drive the Russians out after the summer offensive in 2023, Joe Biden kept the delusion of Ukrainian victory alive.
The reasoning for "Americanizing" the war was the delusion that with our help, Ukraine might somehow defeat the Russians on the field of battle. Amazingly, it actually seemed a real possibility in 2022 as Ukrainian bravery and Russian incompetence allowed Kyiv to make huge gains during the summer, fight off the initial Russian attempt to take Kyiv, and give Ukrainian citizens hope for the future.
After the failures of 2023, that hope was gone. If Biden had accepted the objective reality of Ukraine's inability to drive the Russians out, countless thousands of Ukrainian lives could have been saved.
But what the Times report reveals is that the U.S. had become massively invested in driving the Russians out of Ukraine. The Biden administration encouraged former comic actor Volodymyr Zelensky to hold fast in the hope that the superior tech of the West would win the day.
It was a lie.
The piece is also an extraordinarily comprehensive betrayal of Zelensky and Ukraine, exponentially worse than the “dressing down” by Trump. Authored by longtime veteran of controversial intel pieces Adam Entous, it’s sourced to 300 American and European officials who seem to be responding to their apparent sidelining via a shameless tantrum, exhibiting behavior that in the field would get military men shot. Not only do they play kiss and tell with a trove of operational secrets, they use the Times to deflect blame from their own failures onto erstwhile Slavic partners, cast as ignorant savages who snatched defeat from the jaws of America-designed victory. It’s as morally abhorrent a piece of a**-covering ever as I’ve seen in print, and that somehow is not its worst quality.
Indeed, the worst quality was playing down and outright lying about the risk of nuclear war.
They risked our lives and our children’s lives, knowingly, repeatedly, and for the worst possible reason: politics. Afraid to admit a mistake, they planned individual excuses while letting bureaucratic inertia expand the conflict. Worse, as was guessed at on this site late last year, the Biden administration after last November’s election increased the risk of global conflict by “expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia,” in order to “shore up his Ukraine project.” If you check this “secret history” against contemporaneous statements of American and European leaders, you’ll find the scale of the lies beyond comprehension. Heads need to roll for this:
"Entous describes a tale told 'through a secret keyhole' that reveals how America was 'woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.' (Translation: it was hidden from us.)," writes Taibbi.
The Russians knew darn well how the Ukrainian drones were sinking their ships and attacking their offensive positions with pinpoint accuracy. The entire intelligence apparatus of the U.S. was assisting Ukraine in targeting. For all practical purposes, the massive drone strikes and attacks using ATACM missiles were an American operation. We were targeting and killing Russians, risking nuclear war, for what? Ukraine couldn't win, no matter what kind of gee-whiz tech we gave it. With all hope of "victory" lost, all Ukraine could do was add to the butcher's bill.
If Joe Biden had won another term, I am absolutely convinced he would have found some pretext to send American troops to fight in Ukraine. That's what all of this "cooperation" was leading to.
