It’s inadvisable to weigh in late on these things, when so many have weighed in so much already, but regarding the recent New York Times feature “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine”; first, what the Times gets (half) right, albeit by questionable pro-war premises:
In the great-power contest for security and influence after the Soviet Union’s collapse, a newly independent Ukraine became the nation in the middle, its Westward lean increasingly feared by Moscow. Now, with negotiations beginning, the American president has baselessly blamed the Ukrainians for starting the war, pressured them to forfeit much of their mineral wealth and asked the Ukrainians to agree to a cease-fire without a promise of concrete American security guarantees — a peace with no certainty of continued peace.
Of course by “baselessly blamed” the Times means Trump should be placing all the blame on Putin. But the Times ignores our share of blame and actions that have driven events since before the Maidan Coup of 2014, even as the paper goes on to describe a criminal scandal it doesn’t acknowledge as such: the secret war we’ve been waging on Russia, through Ukraine, from the start, under cover of the Times’ own dishonest reporting.
President Trump and Vice President Vance, depending on where you stand, were either shamelessly irresponsible or righteously indignant when they publicly berated Volodymyr Zelensky at their infamous joint press conference. But that event looks more and more contrived by Trump to leave Zelensky holding the bag. Vance demanding Zelensky thank us for our support in the grand goat fuck into which we’ve drawn him is a level of hypocrisy that can only be achieved in our hyper-dishonest time–and few seem even to notice. The fact of the matter is Zelensky is on the verge of becoming the latest in a long historical line of victims of an alliance with aggressive US foreign policy; and while he remains to blame for the destruction of Ukraine, motivated by his greed and ambition, the dynamic between he and any US administration at this point should that of competing recriminations between partners in a failing criminal enterprise.
The proper response from Zelensky, if the former professional now figurative clown is still capable of a good comeback, would have been to demand an apology–for being suckered into our grand plan. No doubt more smoke was blown up the little guy’s ass than that produced by a burning surplus M113 regarding the prospects for victory (and probably the likelihood of a Kamala Harris administration keeping the US firmly in the “kill chain”). Keep in mind it may have been more than once Zelensky–who originally ran for president as a peace candidate (sound familiar, Trump voters?) and may have actually meant it before being lured into the role of proxy Churchill–has tried to get off this ride or de-escalate the conflict. When Boris Johnson allegedly scuppered a peace deal in April of 2022 and before that receiving death threats from Azov supporters rejecting his plan to mutually disengage with the Russians in the Ukrainian town of Zolote–an action that might have led to peace talks (precisely what Azov feared). Under the joint finger-wagging of Trump and Vance Zelensky should have offered Michael Corleone’s response to a corrupt politician shaking him down while calling him a thug: “Senator, we’re both part of the same hypocrisy…”
The tale begins:
On a spring morning two months after Vladimir Putin’s invading armies marched into Ukraine, a convoy of unmarked cars slid up to a Kyiv street corner and collected two middle-aged men in civilian clothes.
Leaving the city, the convoy — manned by British commandos, out of uniform but heavily armed — traveled 400 miles west to the Polish border. The crossing was seamless, on diplomatic passports. Farther on, they came to the Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, where an idling C-130 cargo plane waited.
The passengers were top Ukrainian generals. Their destination was Clay Kaserne, the headquarters of U.S. Army 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, Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, remembers being led up a flight of stairs to a walkway overlooking the cavernous main hall of the garrison’s Tony Bass Auditorium. Before the war, it had been a gym, used for all-hands meetings, Army band performances and Cub Scout pinewood derbies. Now General Zabrodskyi peered down on officers from coalition nations, in a warren of makeshift cubicles, organizing the first Western shipments to Ukraine of M777 artillery batteries and 155-millimeter shells.
Then he was ushered into the office of Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, who proposed a partnership.
The Times piece has been compared to The Pentagon Papers that exposed the futility and official lies of the war in Vietnam. If the Times’ view of that war mirrored their view of this one they would have framed the Pentagon Papers expose as the story of South Vietnamese military leadership failing to heed the wise counsel of US generals. After all, wasn’t South Vietnam just trying to split from its backward Northern half and join the free West, escaping the clutches of an authoritarian Russia? My how times, and the Times, have changed. The liberal establishment’s thinking has, in one of their favorite phrases, evolved.
Just as Trump and Vance staged their episode with Zelensky (Servant of the People, Season Four, Episode 1, “Thrown Under the Bus”) to leave Zelensky holding the bag of blame–we were just trying to help the ungrateful bastard!–the NYT’s expose is a staged effort to shift the military’s and the Times’ own blame.
But ultimately the partnership strained — and the arc of the war shifted — amid rivalries, resentments and diverging imperatives and agendas.
The Ukrainians sometimes saw the Americans as overbearing and controlling — the prototypical patronizing Americans. The Americans sometimes couldn’t understand why the Ukrainians didn’t simply accept good advice.
Where the Americans focused on measured, achievable objectives, they saw the Ukrainians as constantly grasping for the big win, the bright, shining prize. The Ukrainians, for their part, often saw the Americans as holding them back. The Ukrainians aimed to win the war outright. Even as they shared that hope, the Americans wanted to make sure the Ukrainians didn’t lose it.
You could argue from this that the American military subjected their proxy to the slow bleeding the war became after Ukraine’s early successes, while the Ukrainians correctly sensed their best chance was to overwhelm Russian forces as they reeled through the early days of the war. But what’s most remarkable is how the Times describes a criminal level of US involvement–and leaves out media complicity (do you think connected reporters were utterly ignorant of the extent of US involvement?)–without questioning the propriety of it; the piece is entirely an absolution of blame for and lament of the now acknowledged failure of the project.
Only tepidly does the report address the Biden Administration’s risking nuclear war to escalate US involvement:
The partnership operated in the shadow of deepest geopolitical fear — that Mr. Putin might see it as breaching a red line of military engagement and make good on his often-brandished nuclear threats. The story of the partnership shows how close the Americans and their allies sometimes came to that red line, how increasingly dire events forced them — some said too slowly — to advance it to more perilous ground and how they carefully devised protocols to remain on the safe side of it.
The ass-covering didn’t start with this report; the military’s use of petty euphemisms for their involvement reveals they understood well the questionable nature of their involvement:
Inside the U.S. European Command, this process gave rise to a fine but fraught linguistic debate: Given the delicacy of the mission, was it unduly provocative to call targets “targets”?
Some officers thought “targets” was appropriate. Others called them “intel tippers,” because the Russians were often moving and the information would need verification on the ground.
The debate was settled by Maj. Gen. Timothy D. Brown, European Command’s intelligence chief: The locations of Russian forces would be “points of interest.” Intelligence on airborne threats would be “tracks of interest.”
“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.
While the report is as close to a mea culpa as we’ve seen from the media, the Times suggests the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men (suggesting in the triumphal account of early Ukrainian and US successes in killing large numbers of the latter a boon all its own, without saying it outright) did not come without tangible benefits to the US:
That autumn day, the planning session and their time together done, General Donahue escorted General Zabrodskyi to the Clay Kaserne airfield. There he presented him with an ornamental shield — the 18th Airborne dragon insignia, encircled by five stars.
The westernmost represented Wiesbaden; slightly to the east was the Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport. The other stars represented Kyiv, Kherson and Kharkiv — for General Zaluzhny and the commanders in the south and east.
And beneath the stars, “Thanks.”
“I asked him, ‘Why are you thanking me?’” General Zabrodskyi recalled. “‘I should say thank you.’”
General Donahue explained that the Ukrainians were the ones fighting and dying, testing American equipment and tactics and sharing lessons learned. “Thanks to you,” he said, “we built all these things that we never could have.”
Shouting through the airfield wind and noise, they went back and forth about who deserved the most thanks. Then they shook hands, and General Zabrodskyi disappeared into the idling C-130.
Miss Manners of the Oval Office JD Vance would approve of all the gratitude on display here.
But General Donahue’s argument here has appeared elsewhere, in an arena where US interests are even harder to discern (and expenditures even harder to tally): as a defense of our unwavering support and arming of Israel, that being justified by such as the demonstrated lethality of 500 pound bombs deployed against civilians cowering in rubble. Unfortunately Donahue’s enthusiasm here suggests the lunatic aims of the neocon class, smarting from the impending defeat by backward old Russia, includes a very real potential for a direct war with Moscow. No need for working through pesky proxies. Of course just as the US military got to test out toys and tactics to be used against Russia in future conflicts, Russia has had the same opportunity. Those early months of Russian confusion and failure, and ensuing period demonstrating the superiority of their arms (and arms production) will have, should the need arise, proven invaluable in any future war with the US. That war, for an America that can no longer count on the patriotism of its legacy white population or the production of its industrial base, will likely depend on a quick, overwhelming shock and awe campaign. And while that itself is a long shot, based on the size and military strength of Russia, the threat of a nuclear exchange by one or both desperate parties becomes more likely.
And in the tragic third act of the New York Times’ account, as prospects for victory dwindle due to Ukrainian infighting and intransigence, Zelensky loses his heroic luster and the Times joins the White House in lightening the troika by tossing Zelensky (because at the end of the day these competing factions share the same ride):
Soon after, at a hastily arranged meeting on the Polish border, General Zaluzhny admitted to Generals Cavoli and Aguto that the Ukrainians had in fact decided to mount assaults in three directions at once.
“That’s not the plan!” General Cavoli cried.
What had happened, according to Ukrainian officials, was this: After the Stavka meeting, Mr. Zelensky had ordered that the coalition’s ammunition be split evenly between General Syrsky and General Tarnavskyi. General Syrsky would also get five of the newly trained brigades, leaving seven for the Melitopol fight.
“It was like watching the demise of the Melitopol offensive even before it was launched,” one Ukrainian official remarked.
Fifteen months into the war, it had all come to this tipping point.
“We should have walked away,” said a senior American official.
But they would not.
“These decisions involving life and death, and what territory you value more and what territory you value less, are fundamentally sovereign decisions,” a senior Biden administration official explained. “All we could do was give them advice.”
When they start invoking “sovereignty” reach for your revolver.
untethered 