Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian navy base seems deserted and destroyed, its command middle a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early within the warfare.
But that’s above floor.
Not far-off, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker the place groups of Ukrainian troopers monitor Russian spy satellites and listen in on conversations between Russian commanders. On one display, a purple line adopted the route of an explosive drone threading by Russian air defenses from some extent in central Ukraine to a goal within the Russian metropolis of Rostov.
The underground bunker, constructed to switch the destroyed command middle within the months after Russia’s invasion, is a secret nerve middle of Ukraine’s navy.
There can also be yet another secret: The base is nearly absolutely financed, and partly outfitted, by the C.I.A.
“One hundred and ten percent,” Gen. Serhii Dvoretskiy, a high intelligence commander, stated in an interview on the base.
Now getting into the third 12 months of a warfare that has claimed a whole bunch of hundreds of lives, the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine’s means to defend itself. The C.I.A. and different American intelligence businesses present intelligence for focused missile strikes, monitor Russian troop actions and assist assist spy networks.
But the partnership is not any wartime creation, neither is Ukraine the one beneficiary.
It took root a decade in the past, coming collectively in matches and begins underneath three very totally different U.S. presidents, pushed ahead by key people who typically took daring dangers. It has reworked Ukraine, whose intelligence businesses had been lengthy seen as completely compromised by Russia, into one among Washington’s most vital intelligence companions towards the Kremlin at this time.
The listening publish within the Ukrainian forest is a part of a C.I.A.-supported community of spy bases constructed up to now eight years that features 12 secret areas alongside the Russian border. Before the warfare, the Ukrainians proved themselves to the Americans by amassing intercepts that helped show Russia’s involvement within the 2014 downing of a business jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The Ukrainians additionally helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled within the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Around 2016, the C.I.A. started coaching an elite Ukrainian commando pressure — often called Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear in order that C.I.A. technicians may reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption methods. (One officer within the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the overall main Ukraine’s navy intelligence.)
And the C.I.A. additionally helped prepare a brand new era of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, throughout Europe, and in Cuba and different locations the place the Russians have a big presence.
The relationship is so ingrained that C.I.A. officers remained at a distant location in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated U.S. personnel within the weeks earlier than Russia invaded in February 2022. During the invasion, the officers relayed essential intelligence, together with the place Russia was planning strikes and which weapons methods they might use.
“Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them,” stated Ivan Bakanov, who was then head of Ukraine’s home intelligence company, the S.B.U.
The particulars of this intelligence partnership, lots of that are being disclosed by The New York Times for the primary time, have been a carefully guarded secret for a decade.
In greater than 200 interviews, present and former officers in Ukraine, the United States and Europe described a partnership that just about foundered from mutual mistrust earlier than it steadily expanded, turning Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub that intercepted extra Russian communications than the C.I.A. station in Kyiv may initially deal with. Many of the officers spoke on situation of anonymity to debate intelligence and issues of delicate diplomacy.
Now these intelligence networks are extra vital than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is extra depending on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy traces. And they’re more and more in danger: If Republicans in Congress finish navy funding to Kyiv, the C.I.A. could must reduce.
To attempt to reassure Ukrainian leaders, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, made a secret go to to Ukraine final Thursday, his tenth go to because the invasion.
From the outset, a shared adversary — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — introduced the C.I.A. and its Ukrainian companions collectively. Obsessed with “losing” Ukraine to the West, Mr. Putin had repeatedly interfered in Ukraine’s political system, handpicking leaders he believed would hold Ukraine inside Russia’s orbit, but every time it backfired, driving protesters into the streets.
Mr. Putin has lengthy blamed Western intelligence businesses for manipulating Kyiv and sowing anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine.
Toward the tip of 2021, in accordance with a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing whether or not to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the pinnacle of one among Russia’s principal spy providers, who instructed him that the C.I.A., along with Britain’s MI6, had been controlling Ukraine and turning it right into a beachhead for operations towards Moscow.
But the Times investigation discovered that Mr. Putin and his advisers misinterpret a essential dynamic. The C.I.A. didn’t push its means into Ukraine. U.S. officers had been typically reluctant to totally interact, fearing that Ukrainian officers couldn’t be trusted, and worrying about frightening the Kremlin.
Yet a decent circle of Ukrainian intelligence officers assiduously courted the C.I.A. and regularly made themselves very important to the Americans. In 2015, Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, then Ukraine’s head of navy intelligence, arrived at a gathering with the C.I.A.’s deputy station chief and with out warning handed over a stack of top-secret information.
That preliminary tranche contained secrets and techniques in regards to the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet, together with detailed details about the newest Russian nuclear submarine designs. Before lengthy, groups of C.I.A. officers had been repeatedly leaving his workplace with backpacks stuffed with paperwork.
“We understood that we needed to create the conditions of trust,” General Kondratiuk stated.
As the partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians grew to become impatient with what they thought-about Washington’s undue warning, and started staging assassinations and different deadly operations, which violated the phrases the White House thought the Ukrainians had agreed to. Infuriated, officers in Washington threatened to chop off assist, however they by no means did.
“The relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value in it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv — our station there, the operation out of Ukraine — became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on Russia,” stated a former senior American official. “We couldn’t get enough of it.”
This is the untold story of the way it all occurred.
A Cautious Beginning
The C.I.A.’s partnership in Ukraine will be traced again to 2 telephone calls on the night time of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day earlier than Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Millions of Ukrainians had simply overrun the nation’s pro-Kremlin authorities and the president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his spy chiefs had fled to Russia. In the tumult, a fragile pro-Western authorities shortly took energy.
The authorities’s new spy chief, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, arrived on the headquarters of the home intelligence company and located a pile of smoldering paperwork within the courtyard. Inside, lots of the computer systems had been wiped or had been contaminated with Russian malware.
“It was empty. No lights. No leadership. Nobody was there,” Mr. Nalyvaichenko stated in an interview.
He went to an workplace and referred to as the C.I.A. station chief and the native head of MI6. It was close to midnight however he summoned them to the constructing, requested for assist in rebuilding the company from the bottom up, and proposed a three-way partnership. “That’s how it all started,” Mr. Nalyvaichenko stated.
The scenario shortly grew to become extra harmful. Mr. Putin seized Crimea. His brokers fomented separatist rebellions that may change into a warfare within the nation’s east. Ukraine was on warfare footing, and Mr. Nalyvaichenko appealed to the C.I.A. for overhead imagery and different intelligence to assist defend its territory.
With violence escalating, an unmarked U.S. authorities airplane touched down at an airport in Kyiv carrying John O. Brennan, then the director of the C.I.A. He instructed Mr. Nalyvaichenko that the C.I.A. was all for creating a relationship however solely at a tempo the company was comfy with, in accordance with U.S. and Ukrainian officers.
To the C.I.A., the unknown query was how lengthy Mr. Nalyvaichenko and the pro-Western authorities can be round. The C.I.A. had been burned earlier than in Ukraine.
Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine gained independence after which veered between competing political forces: those who wished to stay near Moscow and those who wished to align with the West. During a earlier stint as spy chief, Mr. Nalyvaichenko began an identical partnership with the C.I.A., which dissolved when the nation swung again towards Russia.
Now Mr. Brennan defined that to unlock C.I.A. help the Ukrainians needed to show that they might present intelligence of worth to the Americans. They additionally wanted to purge Russian spies; the home spy company, the S.B.U., was riddled with them. (Case in level: The Russians shortly realized about Mr. Brennan’s supposedly secret go to. The Kremlin’s propaganda shops revealed a photoshopped picture of the C.I.A. director carrying a clown wig and make-up.)
Mr. Brennan returned to Washington, the place advisers to President Barack Obama had been deeply involved about frightening Moscow. The White House crafted secret guidelines that infuriated the Ukrainians and that some contained in the C.I.A. considered handcuffs. The guidelines barred intelligence businesses from offering any assist to Ukraine that may very well be “reasonably expected” to have deadly penalties.
The end result was a fragile balancing act. The C.I.A. was purported to strengthen Ukraine’s intelligence businesses with out frightening the Russians. The purple traces had been by no means exactly clear, which created a persistent pressure within the partnership.
In Kyiv, Mr. Nalyvaichenko picked a longtime aide, General Kondratiuk, to function head of counterintelligence, they usually created a brand new paramilitary unit that was deployed behind enemy traces to conduct operations and collect intelligence that the C.I.A. or MI6 wouldn’t present to them.
Known because the Fifth Directorate, this unit can be full of officers born after Ukraine gained independence.
“They had no connection with Russia,” General Kondratiuk stated. “They didn’t even know what the Soviet Union was.”
That summer time, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, blew up in midair and crashed in jap Ukraine, killing almost 300 passengers and crew. The Fifth Directorate produced phone intercepts and different intelligence inside hours of the crash that shortly positioned accountability on Russian-backed separatists.
The C.I.A. was impressed, and made its first significant dedication by offering safe communications gear and specialised coaching to members of the Fifth Directorate and two different elite models.
“The Ukrainians wanted fish and we, for policy reasons, couldn’t deliver that fish,” stated a former U.S. official, referring to intelligence that might assist them battle the Russians. “But we were happy to teach them how to fish and deliver fly-fishing equipment.”
A Secret Santa
In the summer time of 2015, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, shook up the home service and put in an ally to switch Mr. Nalyvaichenko, the C.I.A.’s trusted accomplice. But the change created a chance elsewhere.
In the reshuffle, General Kondratiuk was appointed as the pinnacle of the nation’s navy intelligence company, often called the HUR, the place years earlier he had began his profession. It can be an early instance of how private ties, greater than coverage shifts, would deepen the C.I.A.’s involvement in Ukraine.
Unlike the home company, the HUR had the authority to gather intelligence exterior the nation, together with in Russia. But the Americans had seen little worth in cultivating the company as a result of it wasn’t producing any intelligence of worth on the Russians — and since it was seen as a bastion of Russian sympathizers.
Trying to construct belief, General Kondratiuk organized a gathering together with his American counterpart on the Defense Intelligence Agency and handed over a stack of secret Russian paperwork. But senior D.I.A. officers had been suspicious and discouraged constructing nearer ties.
The normal wanted to discover a extra prepared accomplice.
Months earlier, whereas nonetheless with the home company, General Kondratiuk visited the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. In these conferences, he met a C.I.A. officer with a jolly demeanor and a bushy beard who had been tapped to change into the subsequent station chief in Kyiv.
After a protracted day of conferences, the C.I.A. took General Kondratiuk to a Washington Capitals hockey match, the place he and the incoming station chief sat in a luxurious field and loudly booed Alex Ovechkin, the staff’s star participant from Russia.
The station chief had not but arrived when General Kondratiuk handed over to the C.I.A. the key paperwork in regards to the Russian Navy. “There’s more where this came from,” he promised, and the paperwork had been despatched off to analysts in Langley.
The analysts concluded the paperwork had been genuine, and after the station chief arrived in Kyiv, the C.I.A. grew to become General Kondratiuk’s major accomplice.
General Kondratiuk knew he wanted the C.I.A. to strengthen his personal company. The C.I.A. thought the overall would possibly have the ability to assist Langley, too. It struggled to recruit spies inside Russia as a result of its case officers had been underneath heavy surveillance.
“For a Russian, allowing oneself to be recruited by an American is to commit the absolute, ultimate in treachery and treason,” General Kondratiuk stated. “But for a Russian to be recruited by a Ukrainian, it’s just friends talking over a beer.”
The new station chief started repeatedly visiting General Kondratiuk, whose workplace was embellished with an aquarium the place yellow and blue fish — the nationwide colours of Ukraine — swam circles round a mannequin of a sunken Russian submarine. The two males grew to become shut, which drove the connection between the 2 businesses, and the Ukrainians gave the brand new station chief an affectionate nickname: Santa Claus.
In January 2016, General Kondratiuk flew to Washington for conferences at Scattergood, an property on the C.I.A. campus in Virginia the place the company typically fetes visiting dignitaries. The company agreed to assist the HUR modernize, and to enhance its means to intercept Russian navy communications. In trade, General Kondratiuk agreed to share all the uncooked intelligence with the Americans.
Now the partnership was actual.
Operation Goldfish
Today, the slim highway resulting in the key base is framed by minefields, seeded as a line of protection within the weeks after Russia’s invasion. The Russian missiles that hit the bottom had seemingly shut it down, however simply weeks later the Ukrainians returned.
With cash and gear supplied by the C.I.A., crews underneath General Dvoretskiy’s command started to rebuild, however underground. To keep away from detection, they solely labored at night time and when Russian spy satellites weren’t overhead. Workers additionally parked their vehicles a distance away from the development website.
In the bunker, General Dvoretskiy pointed to communications gear and enormous pc servers, a few of which had been financed by the C.I.A. He stated his groups had been utilizing the bottom to hack into the Russian navy’s safe communications networks.
“This is the thing that breaks into satellites and decodes secret conversations,” General Dvoretskiy instructed a Times journalist on a tour, including that they had been hacking into spy satellites from China and Belarus, too.
Another officer positioned two just lately produced maps on a desk, as proof of how Ukraine is monitoring Russian exercise all over the world.
The first confirmed the overhead routes of Russian spy satellites touring over central Ukraine. The second confirmed how Russian spy satellites are passing over strategic navy installations — together with a nuclear weapons facility — within the jap and central United States.
The C.I.A. started sending gear in 2016, after the pivotal assembly at Scattergood, General Dvoretskiy stated, offering encrypted radios and gadgets for intercepting secret enemy communications.
Beyond the bottom, the C.I.A. additionally oversaw a coaching program, carried out in two European cities, to show Ukrainian intelligence officers how you can convincingly assume pretend personas and steal secrets and techniques in Russia and different nations which might be adept at rooting out spies. The program was referred to as Operation Goldfish, which derived from a joke a couple of Russian-speaking goldfish who provides two Estonians needs in trade for its freedom.
The punchline was that one of many Estonians bashed the fish’s head with a rock, explaining that something talking Russian couldn’t be trusted.
The Operation Goldfish officers had been quickly deployed to 12 newly-built, ahead working bases constructed alongside the Russian border. From every base, General Kondratiuk stated, the Ukrainian officers ran networks of brokers who gathered intelligence inside Russia.
C.I.A. officers put in gear on the bases to assist collect intelligence and likewise recognized among the most expert Ukrainian graduates of the Operation Goldfish program, working with them to method potential Russian sources. These graduates then educated sleeper brokers on Ukrainian territory meant to launch guerrilla operations in case of occupation.
It can typically take years for the C.I.A. to develop sufficient belief in a international company to start conducting joint operations. With the Ukrainians it had taken lower than six months. The new partnership began producing a lot uncooked intelligence about Russia that it needed to be shipped to Langley for processing.
But the C.I.A. did have purple traces. It wouldn’t assist the Ukrainians conduct offensive deadly operations.
“We made a distinction between intelligence collection operations and things that go boom,” a former senior U.S. official stated.
‘This is Our Country’
It was a distinction that grated on the Ukrainians.
First, General Kondratiuk was irritated when the Americans refused to supply satellite tv for pc photos from inside Russia. Soon after, he requested C.I.A. help in planning a clandestine mission to ship HUR commandos into Russia to plant explosive gadgets at prepare depots utilized by the Russian navy. If the Russian navy sought to take extra Ukrainian territory, Ukrainians may detonate the explosives to gradual the Russian advance.
When the station chief briefed his superiors, they “lost their minds,” as one former official put it. Mr. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, referred to as General Kondratiuk to make sure that mission was canceled and that Ukraine abided by the purple traces forbidding deadly operations.
General Kondratiuk canceled the mission, however he additionally took a unique lesson. “Going forward, we worked to not have discussions about these things with your guys,” he stated.
Late that summer time, Ukrainian spies found that Russian forces had been deploying assault helicopters at an airfield on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, presumably to stage a shock assault.
General Kondratiuk determined to ship a staff into Crimea to plant explosives on the airfield so that they may very well be detonated if Russia moved to assault.
This time, he didn’t ask the C.I.A. for permission. He turned to Unit 2245, the commando pressure that obtained specialised navy coaching from the C.I.A.’s elite paramilitary group, often called the Ground Department. The intent of the coaching was to show defensive strategies, however C.I.A. officers understood that with out their data the Ukrainians may use the identical strategies in offensive deadly operations.
At the time, the longer term head of Ukraine’s navy intelligence company, General Budanov, was a rising star in Unit 2245. He was identified for daring operations behind enemy traces and had deep ties to the C.I.A. The company had educated him and likewise taken the extraordinary step of sending him for rehabilitation to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland after he was shot in the best arm throughout combating within the Donbas.
Disguised in Russian uniforms, then-Lt. Col. Budanov led commandos throughout a slim gulf in inflatable speedboats, touchdown at night time in Crimea.
But an elite Russian commando unit was ready for them. The Ukrainians fought again, killing a number of Russian fighters, together with the son of a normal, earlier than retreating to the shoreline, plunging into the ocean and swimming for hours to Ukrainian-controlled territory.
It was a catastrophe. In a public deal with, President Putin accused the Ukrainians of plotting a terrorist assault and promised to avenge the deaths of the Russian fighters.
“There is no doubt that we will not let these things pass,” he stated.
In Washington, the Obama White House was furious. Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the vice chairman and a champion of help to Ukraine, referred to as Ukraine’s president to angrily complain.
“It causes a gigantic problem,” Mr. Biden stated within the name, a recording of which was leaked and revealed on-line. “All I’m telling you as a friend is that my making arguments here is a hell of a lot harder now.”
Some of Mr. Obama’s advisers wished to close the C.I.A. program down, however Mr. Brennan persuaded them that doing so can be self-defeating, given the connection was beginning to produce intelligence on the Russians because the C.I.A. was investigating Russian election meddling.
Mr. Brennan acquired on the telephone with General Kondratiuk to once more emphasize the purple traces.
The normal was upset. “This is our country,” he responded, in accordance with a colleague. “It’s our war, and we’ve got to fight.”
The blowback from Washington price General Kondratiuk his job. But Ukraine didn’t again down.
One day after General Kondratiuk was eliminated, a mysterious explosion within the Russian-occupied metropolis of Donetsk, in jap Ukraine, ripped by an elevator carrying a senior Russian separatist commander named Arsen Pavlov, identified by his nom de guerre, Motorola.
The C.I.A. quickly realized that the assassins had been members of the Fifth Directorate, the spy group that obtained C.I.A. coaching. Ukraine’s home intelligence company had even handed out commemorative patches to these concerned, each stitched with the phrase “Lift,” the British time period for an elevator.
Again, a few of Mr. Obama’s advisers had been livid, however they had been lame geese — the presidential election pitting Donald J. Trump towards Hillary Rodham Clinton was three weeks away — and the assassinations continued.
A staff of Ukrainian brokers arrange an unmanned, shoulder-fired rocket launcher in a constructing within the occupied territories. It was straight throughout from the workplace of a insurgent commander named Mikhail Tolstykh, higher often called Givi. Using a distant set off, they fired the launcher as quickly as Givi entered his workplace, killing him, in accordance with U.S. and Ukrainian officers.
A shadow warfare was now in overdrive. The Russians used a automobile bomb to assassinate the pinnacle of Unit 2245, the elite Ukrainian commando pressure. The commander, Col. Maksim Shapoval, was on his solution to assembly with C.I.A. officers in Kyiv when his automobile exploded.
At the colonel’s wake, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, stood in mourning beside the C.I.A. station chief. Later, C.I.A. officers and their Ukrainian counterparts toasted Colonel Shapoval with whiskey photographs.
“For all of us,” General Kondratiuk stated, “it was a blow.”
Tiptoeing Around Trump
The election of Mr. Trump in November 2016 put the Ukrainians and their C.I.A. companions on edge.
Mr. Trump praised Mr. Putin and dismissed Russia’s function in election interference. He was suspicious of Ukraine and later tried to stress its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to analyze his Democratic rival, Mr. Biden, leading to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.
But no matter Mr. Trump stated and did, his administration typically went within the different course. This is as a result of Mr. Trump had put Russia hawks in key positions, together with Mike Pompeo as C.I.A. director and John Bolton as nationwide safety adviser. They visited Kyiv to underline their full assist for the key partnership, which expanded to incorporate extra specialised coaching packages and the constructing of further secret bases.
The base within the forest grew to incorporate a brand new command middle and barracks, and swelled from 80 to 800 Ukrainian intelligence officers. Preventing Russia from interfering in future U.S. elections was a high C.I.A. precedence throughout this era, and Ukrainian and American intelligence officers joined forces to probe the pc methods of Russia’s intelligence businesses to establish operatives making an attempt to govern voters.
In one joint operation, a HUR staff duped an officer from Russia’s navy intelligence service into offering data that allowed the C.I.A. to attach Russia’s authorities to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference efforts in a lot of nations.
General Budanov, whom Mr. Zelensky tapped to guide the HUR in 2020, stated of the partnership: “It only strengthened. It grew systematically. The cooperation expanded to additional spheres and became more large-scale.”
The relationship was so profitable that the C.I.A. wished to duplicate it with different European intelligence providers that shared a spotlight in countering Russia.
The head of Russia House, the C.I.A. division overseeing operations towards Russia, organized a secret assembly at The Hague. There, representatives from the C.I.A., Britain’s MI6, the HUR, the Dutch service (a essential intelligence ally) and different businesses agreed to begin pooling collectively extra of their intelligence on Russia.
The end result was a secret coalition towards Russia — and the Ukrainians had been very important members of it.
March to War
In March 2021, the Russian navy began massing troops alongside the border with Ukraine. As the months handed, and extra troops encircled the nation, the query was whether or not Mr. Putin was making a feint or making ready for warfare.
That November, and within the weeks that adopted, the C.I.A. and MI6 delivered a unified message to their Ukrainian companions: Russia was making ready for a full-scale invasion to decapitate the federal government and set up a puppet in Kyiv who would do the Kremlin’s bidding.
U.S. and British intelligence businesses had intercepts that Ukrainian intelligence businesses didn’t have entry to, in accordance with U.S. officers. The new intelligence listed the names of Ukrainian officers whom the Russians had been planning to kill or seize, in addition to the Ukrainians the Kremlin hoped to put in in energy.
President Zelensky and a few of his high advisers appeared unconvinced, even after Mr. Burns, the C.I.A. director, rushed to Kyiv in January 2022 to temporary them.
As the Russian invasion neared, C.I.A. and MI6 officers made ultimate visits in Kyiv with their Ukrainian friends. One of the M16 officers teared up in entrance of the Ukrainians, out of concern that the Russians would kill them.
At Mr. Burns’s urging, a small group of C.I.A. officers had been exempted from the broader U.S. evacuation and had been relocated to a resort complicated in western Ukraine. They didn’t wish to desert their companions.
No Endgame
After Mr. Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the C.I.A. officers on the resort had been the one U.S. authorities presence on the bottom. Every day on the resort, they met with their Ukrainian contacts to cross data. The previous handcuffs had been off, and the Biden White House approved spy businesses to supply intelligence assist for deadly operations towards Russian forces on Ukrainian soil.
Often, the C.I.A. briefings contained shockingly particular particulars.
On March 3, 2022 — the eighth day of the warfare — the C.I.A. staff gave a exact overview of Russian plans for the approaching two weeks. The Russians would open a humanitarian hall out of the besieged metropolis of Mariupol that very same day, after which open fireplace on the Ukrainians who used it.
The Russians deliberate to encircle the strategic port metropolis of Odesa, in accordance with the C.I.A., however a storm delayed the assault and the Russians by no means took town. Then, on March 10, the Russians supposed to bombard six Ukrainian cities, and had already entered coordinates into cruise missiles for these strikes.
The Russians additionally had been making an attempt to assassinate high Ukrainian officers, together with Mr. Zelensky. In no less than one case, the C.I.A. shared intelligence with Ukraine’s home company that helped disrupt a plot towards the president, in accordance with a senior Ukrainian official.
When the Russian assault on Kyiv had stalled, the C.I.A. station chief rejoiced and instructed his Ukrainian counterparts that they had been “punching the Russians in the face,” in accordance with a Ukrainian officer who was within the room.
Within weeks, the C.I.A. had returned to Kyiv, and the company despatched in scores of recent officers to assist the Ukrainians. A senior U.S. official stated of the C.I.A.’s sizable presence, “Are they pulling triggers? No. Are they helping with targeting? Absolutely.”
Some of the C.I.A. officers had been deployed to Ukrainian bases. They reviewed lists of potential Russian targets that the Ukrainians had been making ready to strike, evaluating the data that the Ukrainians had with U.S. intelligence to make sure that it was correct.
Before the invasion, the C.I.A. and MI6 had educated their Ukrainian counterparts on recruiting sources, and constructing clandestine and partisan networks. In the southern Kherson area, which was occupied by Russia within the first weeks of the warfare, these partisan networks sprang into motion, in accordance with General Kondratiuk, assassinating native collaborators and serving to Ukrainian forces goal Russian positions.
In July 2022, Ukrainian spies noticed Russian convoys making ready to cross a strategic bridge throughout the Dnipro river and notified MI6. British and American intelligence officers then shortly verified the Ukrainian intelligence, utilizing real-time satellite tv for pc imagery. MI6 relayed the affirmation, and the Ukrainian navy opened fireplace with rockets, destroying the convoys.
At the underground bunker, General Dvoretskiy stated a German antiaircraft system now defends towards Russian assaults. An air-filtration system guards towards chemical weapons and a devoted energy system is on the market, if the facility grid goes down.
The query that some Ukrainian intelligence officers at the moment are asking their American counterparts — as Republicans within the House weigh whether or not to chop off billions of {dollars} in assist — is whether or not the C.I.A. will abandon them. “It happened in Afghanistan before and now it’s going to happen in Ukraine,” a senior Ukrainian officer stated.
Referring to Mr. Burns’s go to to Kyiv final week, a C.I.A. official stated, “We have demonstrated a clear commitment to Ukraine over many years and this visit was another strong signal that the U.S. commitment will continue.”
The C.I.A. and the HUR have constructed two different secret bases to intercept Russian communications, and mixed with the 12 ahead working bases, which General Kondratiuk says are nonetheless operational, the HUR now collects and produces extra intelligence than at any time within the warfare — a lot of which it shares with the C.I.A.
“You can’t get information like this anywhere — except here, and now,” General Dvoretskiy stated.
Natalia Yermak contributed reporting.
