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.”

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?

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?

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

> 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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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...

> 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_...