On March 29, the New York Times published an extraordinarily long, 13,000-word report entitled “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine.” In the introduction, it reports that the Times investigation, based on more than 300 interviews with government, military and intelligence officials in Ukraine, the United States, Britain, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Türkiye over a year’s time, “reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”
“One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his NATO counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. ‘They are part of the kill chain now,’ he said, the introduction continues. The partnership’s guiding idea was that this close cooperation might allow the Ukrainians to accomplish the unlikeliest of feats—to deliver the invading Russians a crushing blow. And in strike after successful strike in the first chapters of the war—enabled by Ukrainian bravery and dexterity but also Russian incompetence—that underdog ambition increasingly seemed within reach.”
For the Russians, the report apparently contains no surprises. “The investigation, of course, does not change the Russian perception of the war, because we have always known that the war in Ukraine was, in essence, a proxy war of the United States against Russia,” Dmitry Suslov, the deputy director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, told RT on March 30.