The Secret History of the War in Ukraine

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

by themgt • 1 year ago

87 97 1 year ago

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.”

rdtsc7• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

howard941• 1 year ago

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

allturtles• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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).

psunavy032• 1 year 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.

RamRodification• 1 year ago

Our servers used to be named after the Simpsons characters but now they are corp-us-web3 and dev-eu-sql2

dh2022• 1 year ago

A somewhat silly response, but to me ATACMS sounds a lot like the plural of atack'em which is short for "atack them" in colloquial "American"

And HIMARS sounds like you are sending something to Mars. Quite the thing to name an artillery platform :)

For some reasons Americans like acronyms that spell words. Like SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) or PATRIOT act (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism)

throwup2383• 1 year ago

And HIMARS sounds like you are sending something to Mars. Quite the thing to name an artillery platform :)

Mars is also the Roman god of war.

FirmwareBurner• 1 year ago

They used to give weapons names that made them sound aggressive, dangerous, legendary, bold

^True[1], and also planes also had cartoon character and naked women with big tits painted on them. Just google WW2 planes.

That might have to do with the life expectancy of the plane being about 20 minutes back then, but those are just details.

[1] https://archive.ph/X8GXA/9b82a68489e82ee6bbcb58761355a4c546e...

smdyc1• 1 year ago

That was more a choice by individual aircrew than higher command or bureaucracy.

nonrandomstring2• 1 year ago

And sitting on an airfield for months at a time bored senseless, it used to be cool to paint insulting platitudes like "Eat this MOFO" on munitions. Now:

1) Blowing kids to smithereens must be done in a politically correct fashion, even while violating the Geneva convention.

2) Nobody is sure who the enemy will actually be next week, so it would be shame to have to repaint them.

Finnucane• 1 year ago

Not just bureaucratic, but also give it an air of technological sophistication. It's not about pure power, but being more advanced than anything else. And over the years, the way in which weapon systems are developed, funded, and procured have changed--the DOD does less of its own R&D, and outsources everything to contractors.

throwup2383• 1 year ago

It’s largely due to a move from single-branch designs to weapons “platforms” that are used by multiple branches of the armed forces so they now go through far more bureaucratic design processes. They had to do it because of the funding cuts after the end of the Cold War (although some systems like ATACMS predate that, both it and HIMARS just reflect a more bureaucratic army). HMMWV and MRAP though are generic terms, not really restricted to the US armed forces.

Designs that are ordered by a single branch like the USAF often still have the emotive names like the Predator and Reaper drones.

panzagl• 1 year ago

For World War 2 we relied on the British to name things (The US produced the M4 Medium Tank, the Brits called it the "Sherman"). The theory was they were government designed and (at least theoretically) produced by many companies.

I believe the Cold War names mostly came from US contractors- the government defined requirements ("air superiority fighter") and the contractors came up with designs that then had to be marketed against each other so they were given cool names ("Fighting Falcon").

Now there has been a lot of consolidation of contractors, and budgets are much more constrained. You no longer have the DoD funding competing designs and selecting, but a situation closer to early WW2 where the government is closer to the design.

At least that's my 5 minute guess, probably lots of 'citation needed' to be done.

DeathArrow• 1 year 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.

To avoid anything that might be deemed not diverse and not inclusive enough.

Any real names might make someone feel bad about something. A sequence of random letters does not.

arbitrary_name• 1 year ago

Wrong. I can tell what you're mad about, and I find it petty.

aerostable_slug• 1 year ago

Combat vehicles still tend to get good names. American Indian tribes are traditional for helicopters, while ground combat vehicles still get named after troops & their leaders, like the new M10 Booker assault gun:

https://www.defensenews.com/land/2023/06/10/us-armys-new-com...

While it's entirely justifiable to name trucks after famous logistics officers or heroic motor transport drivers, it's just not done. Artillery is interesting, with Paladins (in action) and Crusaders (cancelled), but nobody refers to them by those names. Ships and subs are their own kettle of fish.

TheBlight• 1 year ago

ATACMS is usually pronounced "Attack 'Ems", FWIW.

dragonwriter4• 1 year ago

A somewhat shallow comment, but why do post-Cold War U.S. weapon systems have such intentionally bland names? ATACMS, HIMARS, etc?

Maybe because so many of them from the late Cold War on got cancelled between the stage where they would previously get a “friendly” (hostile?) name and deployment that they just stopped doing that as much and kept the development project name. But I think you exaggerate the significance of the change.

Abrams and Bradley are now HMMWV and MRAP.

HMMWV was deployed during the late Cold War. And that name with the pronunciation “Humvee” is a lot like the classic GPW “Jeep”.

More similar to the M1 Abrams tank and M2 Bradley personnel carrier in the post-Cild War world are the (cancelled late in the program) M8 Buford armored gun system; the newer M10 Booker assault gun, the Stryker infantry carrier vehicle, etc. All of which got names.

ilamont• 1 year 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/ze...

StefanBatory• 1 year 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.

ProjectArcturis2• 1 year 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.

ajcp3• 1 year 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.

apercu2• 1 year 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?

ajcp3• 1 year 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"

apercu2• 1 year ago

Aww, that might not have displayed in the reader view. Blaming the author instead of the paywall workaround lol. Sorry.

stogot• 1 year 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

dralley4• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

blitzar7• 1 year ago

US strategy: What do you want to get out from this war?

Kill as many Russians as possible and use up as many Russian munitions as possible - with the inevitable consequence being the death of a lot of Ukrainians in the process.

rcxdude• 1 year ago

The US seems to want Russia to lose the war but not for the government (i.e. Putin's grip on power) to collapse (because nukes). That seems to be the main thing driving this 'helping but not too much' strategy, but it's not obvious that it will or can succeed.

brabel2• 1 year ago

They acted like the goal was to step on Putin's toes without pissing him off too much...

I mean, when you're fighting a nuclear power, making sure you don't piss them off enough to make them use their nuclear weapons, or at least unleash their most powerful conventional weapons on your main cities, seems like a good strategy.

Imagine for a second that instead of Russia, it was the USA fighting a proxy war against, say, China. And that China had just provided the intelligence and maybe weapons for, say, Cuba to sink the largest US Carrier. I am very sure the USA would freaking unleash hell on Cuba, maybe also on China. The only reason the Russians didn't do the same is that they're probably not capable of doing so, at least not without losing too much for it to be a rational choice. But at the time, the USA was not entirely sure of what the Russians would do when provoked to such an extent. They were understandably worried. As they learned the Russians were not exactly doing what they might have expected, they gradually started pushing more and more up until the point the Russians launched an Oreshnic ballistic missile which could've easily been carrying a nuclear payload, but luckily didn't. Biden still pushed further a bit even after that, but in my opinion that was rather irresponsible. You can't push the Russians forever, even in their current position, before you should expect them to become desperate and start using whatever they can to start pushing back at you, and the Russians still can do that.

jemmyw2• 1 year ago

Nukes aren't that great a weapon to use against the country right on your border that you're trying to annex, especially if you've been busy justifying the invasion to your own population as liberation.

ProjectArcturis2• 1 year ago

From a realpolitik perspective, the US would like this war to go on forever. Under Biden, the war was grinding up enemy Russian troops and not-really-an-ally Ukrainian troops, weakening both strategically while costing us no troops and 0.2% of GDP. Plus we were able to expand NATO and give Russia an ongoing PR nightmare.

Obviously they can't say any of that out loud, but the underlying strategy is sound.

armitron• 1 year ago

The underlying strategy is so sound that Russia now effectively owns 20% of what used to be Ukraine, ground which is never going back. Their military has gained extremely valuable experience in fighting a modern war. Additionally, European economy has been decimated and the second order effects (weapon proliferation, criminal syndicates, immigration, societal effects) are yet to play out.

Throw in the ever-present threat of small-yield tactical nuclear weapons being used by Russia if it ever thinks it's in danger of losing and I fail to see the logic behind all of this. Unless of course weakening Europe, utterly destroying Ukraine and strengthening Russia was the point from the get-go. Or you just need to admit that the US fucked this one up badly (as it has almost every other war it's been involved in over the last 40 years).

hermitShell• 1 year ago

If you can believe Jeffry Sachs and RFK Jr., the expansion of NATO was a way to start the war, not a result.

And the objective was to pillage the country of Ukraine to the benefit of those in power, Europe gets to loan them money to rebuild, American corporations get to buy up the farmland.

If you can believe them.

light_triad2• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Yes, the Cold War never ended. And it seems like Russia is winning now.

dragonwriter4• 1 year 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.

light_triad2• 1 year 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-...

mistrial9• 1 year ago

nobody wins in war

s1artibartfast5• 1 year ago

Ukraine was literally part of the USSR at the start of the cold war, and a satellite state following the breakup.

It seems like this is a low point for Russia - a protracted hot war on what was previously its own turf.

rdtsc7• 1 year ago

One of the surprising thing here is how much the European and American media managed to convince Ukrainians that they are 100% on their side.

Let's play a realpolitik change of perspective, and assume that both the Europeans and the Americans wanted to weaken and grind down Russia's military and economy for some years to come in a strategic move without putting any "boots on the ground", well not their own boots at least, but using Ukrainian "boots". Well, I posit they would use Ukraine in the exact shape they did it over the last 4 years or so. Nothing more or less. I believe Biden admin expected a repeat of 2014, quick and easy take-over and Zelensky gets to run away on an offered ride. But he didn't, that was surprising but the Americans didn't hesitate and decided to use that "bravery" for their goals as well. Sure, they may have also saved Ukraine but I don't think their actions since indicate they really cared about Ukraine per se, that was a secondary propaganda spin, they just saw a chance for a nice proxy war with Russia and they got it.

riehwvfbk3• 1 year ago

Remember how Putin saying that Russia was fighting the USA and not Ukraine was supposed to be an example of either him going insane or puffing up the conflict for his domestic audience? Well, for whatever reason now the western media are allowed to tell the truth. Now, why would that be - that's still a mystery.

mindslight2• 1 year ago

It's no mystery. The US regime changed to one sympathetic to Russia (at the very least), so the ever-supplicating political establishment has started realigning. Remember this is the same paper that helped drum up support for the Iraq War. Even "leftist" corpo media is still just blue-flavored state media.

As far as the truth, the problem is the lack of two functioning political parties. Two parties representing different approaches to the US's interests would have meant that the opposition poking holes in the official narratives would point to a competing US-benefiting alternative. Imagine instead of this feckless trickle of weapons effectively keeping the Ukrainians on a leash, the US could have taken the lesson from the Moskva and let Ukraine run with it. That is the debate we should have had.

blueyes• 1 year ago

We're in a Cold War with hot proxies. The original Cold War was also like that.

Now, China, Iran and North Korea are backing Russia without engaging in direct confrontation in Ukraine; the EU, NATO, and maybe still the US are backing Ukraine. If Trump realigns with Putin against Ukraine, then the axis of authoritarian countries will have won a major battle. Trump will ofc lose many of his old-guard GOP supporters if he does that.

dragonwriter4• 1 year ago

Now, China, Iran and North Korea are backing Russia without engaging in direct confrontation in Ukraine;

Not true of North Korea, which is engaging in direct confrontation in Ukraine.

jopsen4• 1 year ago

Trump will ofc lose many of his old-guard GOP supporters if he does that.

Are there any left? Trump has undermined the alliance system. That damage can't be easily undone.

rdtsc7• 1 year 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_...

jemmyw2• 1 year 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.

rdtsc7• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

jopsen4• 1 year 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.

The Secret History of the War in Ukraine

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