1). “Siding with Ukraine's far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky's mandate for peace”, April 10, 2022, Aaron Mate, at < https://mate.substack.com/p/
And
2). “Yes, There Are Bad Guys in the Ukrainian Government: It's time for a frank conversation about some of the unsavory characters in Kiev”, March 18, 2014, Oren Kessler (a Tel Aviv-based writer and analyst) & Andrew Foxall, archived by Democracy Lab, at < https://archive.ph/lFRVs >, (Originally published by Foreign Policy at < https://foreignpolicy.com/
And
3). “CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades”,January 13, 2022, Zach Dorfman, Yahoo News, at < https://news.yahoo.com/cia-
~~ posted for dmorista ~~
“The Powerful Ukrainian Far Right, the 2014 Coup, the Actual Role of Zelensky, and Secret CIA Training for Ukrainian Paramilitaries in the Southern U.S.”
Introduction by dmorista:
The massive propaganda and disinformation campaign that is trying, with significant success, to demonize Vladimir Putin and whitewash the Ukrainian State Apparatus, and its various internal far-right allies. This effort depends on convincing the people of the West that the political scene in Ukraine is, and has been for the entirety of its 31 years as an independent nation, a normal democratic undertaking. This is hardly the case and there is plenty of material out there that explains just how far from that rosy scenario the Ukrainian reality really is. Many commentators have pointed out that the U.S. and NATO leaders wanted to recruit both Ukraine and Georgia to become members of both the E.U. and NATO. Some, even more astute commentators, have noted that Ukraine is already a defacto member of NATO; with massive amounts of weaponry supplied to it by the U.S. and other NATO member states. In fact Ukraine was provided with these armaments without paying for them; or resolving the ongoing Civil War, that was waged steadily since the 2014 Coup; or committing 2% of its GDP to its military; or complying with any other requirement for joining NATO. Ukraine has certainly been treated as a special case by NATO.
The first article (for which I want to acknowledge that dreamjoehill2 alerted me to it's existence), “Siding with Ukraine's far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky's mandate for peace”, examines the role of the Ukrainian far-right in pushing an aggressive pro-War with Russia agenda, in cooperation with the U.S. Current Ukrainian President Zelenskyy won the election with over 73% of the vote, on a pro-peace platform. That platform included negotiating with the Russians on the basis of the Minsk II agreements, (of course the political parties that had represented the ethnic Russian population were forcibly disbanded after the 2014 Coup). But he was resisted stoutly by the various far-right and overtly fascist organizations that were major political players in Ukraine. Among those far-right operatives were several who threatened Zelenskyy's life. This group included “Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army”; who stated publicly just one week after Zelenskyy's inaugural speech that: “He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk - if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War.” Here Yarosh is clearly referring to the 2014 Coup as “the Revolution” and the 8 year struggle that began with the 2014 Coup as “the War”. Liberals and duped leftists in the U.S. might believe the propaganda and disinformation, but Yarosh and other right-wing extremists in Ukraine obviously don't.
The second article, “Yes, There Are Bad Guys in the Ukrainian Government ... ” also takes a very dubious view of events there during and in the month after the 2014 Coup. The article points out that: “The uncomfortable truth is that a sizable portion of Kiev’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists. ... Ukraine is home to Svoboda, arguably Europe’s most influential far-right movement today. ... In Svoboda’s eyes, gays are perverts and black people unfit to represent the nation at Eurovision, ... Svoboda began life in the mid-90s as the Social-National Party (a name deliberately redolent of the National Socialist Party, better known as Nazis), with its logo the fascist Wolfsangel. ... Today, Svoboda holds a larger chunk of its nation’s ministries (nearly a quarter, including the prized defense portfolio) than any other far-right party on the continent. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister represents Svoboda (the smaller, even more extreme "Right Sector" coalition fills the deputy National Security Council chair), as does the prosecutor general and the deputy chair of parliament — where the party is the fourth-largest. And Svoboda’s fresh faces are scarcely different from the old: one of its freshmen members of parliament is the founder of the 'Joseph Goebbels Political Research Centre' and has hailed the Holocaust as a 'bright period ' in human history.” (Emphasis added)
While it is true that the far-right parties lost their seats in the parliament in an election that occurred later, these far-rightists certainly did not change their outlooks and retained plenty of power. Enough political and military power, as the first article pointed out, to keep Zelenskyy from pursuing a pro-peace policy. Zelenskyy accepted defeat and began to pursue a new acting role, as the courageous leader of Plucky little Ukraine. Meanwhile, both before and after his encounters with the far-right, Zelenskyy has been feathering his nest and has amassed at least a $650 million, and some report over a $1 billion, personal fortune. He has his golden parachute in place in case things don't work out too well.
Finally the third article, “CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades”, takes a look at secret training of paramilitaries in the heavily militarized southern U.S. This has been handled by the famous American covert operations agency, the CIA. The article notes that: “ ... the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it, said a former senior intelligence official in touch with colleagues in government.” The article goes on to point out that “How to characterize the program is a matter of dispute. The U.S. over three presidents has debated whether to provide military assistance to Ukraine, ... how this training will be applied by the Ukrainians may change rapidly with facts on the ground.”
Once again this article points out that the role of the U.S. and NATO towards Ukraine is not the noble innocent operation that the Corporate Controlled Media is portraying it to be. The truth is buried under layers of secrecy, covert operations, policy papers, deniability and other subterfuges. But as one insider pointed out in this article, published a month before the war began: “If the Russians launch a new invasion, 'there’s going to be people who make their life miserable,' said the former senior intelligence official. The CIA-trained paramilitaries 'will organize the resistance' using the specialized training they’ve received.
“ 'All that stuff that happened to us in Afghanistan,' said the former senior intelligence official, 'they can expect to see that in spades with these guys'. ” But what would we expect from a foreign policy tradition that is soaked in bombing campaigns, death squads, coups and assassinations.
Siding with Ukraine's far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky's mandate for peace
In 2019, Zelensky was elected on an overwhelming mandate to make peace with Russia. As Stephen F. Cohen warned that year, the US chose to side with Ukraine's far-right and fuel war.
Zelensky in his May 2019 inaugural address. (President.gov.ua)
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On a warm October day in 2019, the eminent Russia studies professor Stephen F. Cohen and I sat down in Manhattan for what would be our last in-person interview (Cohen passed away in September 2020 at the age of 81).
The House was gearing up to impeach Donald Trump for freezing weapons shipments to Ukraine while pressuring its government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The Beltway media was consumed with frenzy of a presidency in peril. But Professor Cohen, one of the leading Russia scholars in the United States, was concerned with what the impeachment spectacle in Washington meant for the long-running war between the US-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas.
At that point, Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky was just months into an upstart presidency that he had won on a pledge to end the Donbas conflict. Instead of supporting the Ukrainian leader's peace mandate, Democrats in Congress were impeaching Trump for briefly impeding the flow of weapons that fueled the fight. As his Democratic allies now like to forget, President Obama refused to send these same weapons out of fear of prolonging the war and arming Nazis. By abandoning Obama’s policy, the Democrats, Cohen warned, threaten to sabotage peace and strengthen Ukraine's far-right.
"Zelensky ran as a peace candidate," Cohen explained. "He won an enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin." But there was a major obstacle. Ukrainian fascists "have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin… His life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine."
Peace could only come, Cohen stressed, on one condition. "[Zelensky] can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back," he said. "Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war. So the stakes are enormously high."
Stephen F. Cohen in October 2019.
In October 2019, Stephen F. Cohen (RIP) implored DC to support Zelensky's peace mandate.
The subsequent impeachment trial, and bipartisan US policy since, has made clear that Washington has had no interest in having Zelensky's back, and every interest in fueling the Donbas war that he had been elected to end. The overwhelming message from Congress, fervently amplified across the US media (including progressive outlets) with next to no dissent, was that when it comes to Ukraine's civil war, the US saw Ukraine's far-right as allies, and its civilians as cannon fodder.
The Ukrainian battle against Russian-backed rebels, State Department official and opening impeachment witness George Kent testified, was being waged by the "Ukrainian equivalent of our own Minutemen of 1776." In his opening statement at Trump's trial, Democratic impeachment manager Adam Schiff approvingly quoted another Kent line: "The United States aids Ukraine and her people, so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here."
If you don’t want Russia to fight Ukraine over there, don’t use Ukraine to fight Russia from here.
Although Trump's impeachment failed to remove him from office, it succeeded in cementing the proxy war aims of its chief proponents: rather than support Zelensky's peace mandate, Ukraine would instead be used to "fight Russia over there."
In using Ukraine to bleed Russia, the US has showcased its contempt for everything in Ukraine that it claims to defend, namely its democracy and security. By treating Ukraine as a depot for US weapons, the US has joined Ukrainian fascists in sabotaging the 2015 Minsk accords that could have put an end to the civil war triggered by a US-backed coup the year prior. Minsk called for granting Ukraine's Russian-speaking population in the eastern Donbas limited autonomy and respect for their language. This prospect was a non-starter for the far-right nationalists and Nazis empowered by the 2014 US-backed Maidan coup.
"The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kiev’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists," two specialists with prominent Western think tanks wrote in Foreign Policy in March 2014, one month after the coup.
The fascists have blocked peace in the Donbas at every turn. When the Ukrainian government voted on a "special law" advancing the Minsk accords in August 2015, the Svoboda party and other far-right groups led violent clashes that killed three Ukrainian soldiers and left dozens wounded. Then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who had signed Minsk at a time when President Obama was resisting heavy bipartisan pressure to arm Ukraine, got the message and refused to uphold Ukraine's end of the bargain.
In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was "not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings," and was "prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives."
But Ukraine's powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.
"No, he would lose his life," Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky's inaugural speech. "He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk - if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War."
May 2019 headline: “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose not his position, but his life”
Along with the threats to his life, Zelensky experienced direct obstacles to his peace mandate on multiple fronts.
When Zelensky travelled to the Donbas in October 2019 to promote elections for the rebel-held areas, he was confronted by angry members of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion rallying under the slogan of "No to Capitulation." In one exchange caught on video, Zelensky sparred with an Azov member over the president's calls for a military drawdown. "I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons," Zelensky pleaded.
Zelensky is NOT running the show. The neo-nazis are.
But Zelensky met continued defiance. The same far-right forces set up an armed checkpoint to delay a Ukrainian military pullback. Thousands of far-right and nationalist protesters, cheered by the liberal intelligentsia and carrying flares as torches, also marched in Kiev.
When Zelensky's press secretary, Iuliia Mendel, "drew attention to the prevalence of civilian casualties" in the Donbas, "which she blamed on government forces’ injudicious use of return fire," she was greeted instead with "a prosecutorial summons," Katharine Quinn-Judge of the International Crisis Group reported in April 2020, one year after Zelensky's election. Mendel's recognition of the suffering in the Donbas, Quinn-Judge observed, resulted from "Zelensky's campaign pledge to treat residents of Russia-backed enclaves more like full-fledged Ukrainians," – a non-starter for the US-favored far-right nationalists, who harbored no such interest in Ukrainians' equality.
Although Zelensky dithered on Minsk, he nonetheless continued talks on its implementation. The far-right continued to express its violent opposition at every turn, such as in August 2021, when at least eight police officers were wounded in armed protests outside the presidential offices.
The far-right threats to Zelensky undoubtedly thwarted a peace agreement that could have prevented the Russian invasion. Just two weeks before Russia troops entered Ukraine, the New York Times noted that Zelensky "would be taking extreme political risks even to entertain a peace deal" with Russia, as his government "could be rocked and possibly overthrown" by far-right groups if he "agrees to a peace deal that in their minds gives too much to Moscow."
Yuri Hudymenko, leader of the far-right Democratic Ax, even threatened Zelensky with an outright coup: "If anybody from the Ukrainian government tries to sign such a document, a million people will take to the streets and that government will cease being the government."
Zelensky has clearly gotten the message. Instead of pursuing the peace platform that he was elected on, the Ukrainian President has instead made alliances with the Ukrainian far-right that violently opposed it. As recently as late January, amid last-chance talks to salvage the Minsk accords, Zelensky-appointed Ukrainian security chief Oleksiy Danilov instead pronounced that "the fulfillment of the Minsk agreement means the country’s destruction." At the final round of Minsk talks in February, just two weeks before Russia's invasion, a "key obstacle," the Washington Post reported, "was Kyiv’s opposition to negotiating with the pro-Russian separatists."
Zelensky's acquiescence to Nazi forces was most recently underscored on April 7th, when an address to the Greek parliament was overshadowed by his airing of a video featuring a member of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion.
"I think Zelensky found out very quickly that because of the Ukrainian right, it was impossible to implement Minsk II," John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago professor who has warned for years that US policies were pushing Ukraine into a conflict with Russia, said in a public event the same day. "…Zelensky understands that he cannot take the Ukrainian right on by himself. So basically we have a situation where Zelensky is stymied."
Echoing his late friend and colleague Stephen F. Cohen, Mearsheimer stressed the centrality of the US role.
"The Americans will side with the Ukrainian right," Mearsheimer said. "Because the Americans, and the Ukrainian right, both do not want Zelensky cutting a deal with the Russians that makes it look like the Russians won. So this is the principal reason I'm very pessimistic about Ukraine's ability to help shut this one down."
While claiming to profess concern for Ukrainian lives, NATO policymakers have made plain their disregard for diplomacy. Instead, as retired senior US diplomat Chas Freeman recently told me, they have pursued a policy of fighting Russia "to the last Ukrainian."
"Everything we are doing, rather than accelerate an end to the fighting and some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting," Freeman, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, among a number of other senior positions, said.
Invoking Freeman's warning, Noam Chomsky concurs that US policy amounts to a "death warrant" for Ukraine.
thegrayzone.com/2022/03/24/us-…
) Flooding Ukraine with weapons & blocking diplomatic solutions is a "death warrant", Chomsky says.
Indeed, on April 5, the Washington Post made clear the prevailing viewpoint in Washignton and Brussels: "For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe." While rhetorically claiming to support Ukrainian agency, in reality, the Post added, "there are limits to how many compromises some in NATO will support to win the peace." This is undoubtedly the message being relayed to Zelensky from the White House in what National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described as "near-daily contact" with Zelensky’s team about the negotiations with Russia.
In sabotaging Zelensky's peace mandate to side with the Ukrainian far-right, the US pushed Ukraine into a calamity that Professor Cohen warned about nearly three years ago.
"There were moments in history, political history, when there’s an opportunity that is so good and wise and so often lost, the chance," Cohen told me in October 2019. "So, the chance for Zelensky, the new president who had this very large victory, 70 plus percent to negotiate with Russia an end to that war, it’s got to be seized. And it requires the United States, basically, simply saying to Zelensky, 'Go for it, we’ve got your back.'"
By choosing to ignore the pleas of lonely voices like Cohen to instead have the back of Ukraine's far-right, Washington sabotaged a historic peace mandate and helped provoke a catastrophic war.
Yes, There Are Bad Guys in the Ukrainian Government
It's time for a frank conversation about some of the unsavory characters in Kiev.
Vladimir Putin insists Russia invaded Crimea to protect the ethnic Russians who live in that southern Ukrainian territory. Ukraine, the Russian president contends, has come under the control of "neo-Nazis and Nazis and anti-Semites," and the country’s Russian population is under threat. It is easy to dismiss Putin’s rhetoric — he is, after all, a serial fibber and fabricator who conflates gays and pedophiles and heads a state where Cossacks gas and whip punk rockers in broad daylight. But while Western governments and pundits are correct to dismiss Putin’s pretenses for invading Ukraine, they are wrong to presume his Ukrainian opponents are necessarily in the right. The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kiev’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists.
The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kiev’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists.If Western governments hope to steer Ukraine clear from the most unsavory characters in Moscow and Kiev, they will need to wage a two-pronged diplomatic offensive: against Putin’s propaganda and, at the same time, against Ukraine’s resurgent far-right.
Ukraine is home to Svoboda, arguably Europe’s most influential far-right movement today. (In the photo above, Svoboda activists seize a Ministry of Agriculture building during Kiev’s Euromaidan protests in January.) Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok is on record complaining that his country is controlled by a "Muscovite-Jewish mafia," while his deputy derided the Ukrainian-born film star Mila Kunis as a "dirty Jewess." In Svoboda’s eyes, gays are perverts and black people unfit to represent the nation at Eurovision, lest viewers come away thinking Ukraine is somewhere besides Uganda.
Svoboda began life in the mid-90s as the Social-National Party (a name deliberately redolent of the National Socialist Party, better known as Nazis), with its logo the fascist Wolfsangel. In 2004, the party gave itself an unobjectionable new name (Svoboda means "Freedom") and canned the Nazi imagery, and in the subsequent decade has seen its star swiftly rise.
Today, Svoboda holds a larger chunk of its nation’s ministries (nearly a quarter, including the prized defense portfolio) than any other far-right party on the continent. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister represents Svoboda (the smaller, even more extreme "Right Sector" coalition fills the deputy National Security Council chair), as does the prosecutor general and the deputy chair of parliament — where the party is the fourth-largest. And Svoboda’s fresh faces are scarcely different from the old: one of its freshmen members of parliament is the founder of the "Joseph Goebbels Political Research Centre" and has hailed the Holocaust as a "bright period" in human history.
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When the Ukraine crisis first broke in November, however, Western officialdom found itself in the dark. The end of the Cold War has occasioned a sharp drop in governmental interest in the Soviet successor states, and as Michael McFaul, a Russia scholar and the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, recently observed, Team America is batting with a considerably "shorter bench."
Nowhere has this dearth of nuance been more apparent than in the Ukraine crisis. In December, shortly after protests began against Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, U.S. Senator John McCain shared a platform and an embrace with Svoboda chief Tyahnybok at a mass rally in Kiev, assuring demonstrators, "The free world is with you; America is with you." In February of this year, France and Germany oversaw a peace deal between Tyahnybok, two other opposition leaders, and Yanukovych (though soon after, protests forced Yanukovych to flee to Russia). And in early March, the U.S. State Department published a debunking of Putin’s "False Claims About Ukraine," assuring Americans that Ukraine’s far-right "are not represented" in parliament.
Western commentators have done little better. When Liz Wahl, an anchor for the Kremlin-funded TV network RT America, quit on-air on March 5, she was feted for her bravery. Granted an extended interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she explained her decision by recounting her disgust at the network "painting the opposition over there in the Ukraine as having neo-Nazi elements. I think that’s very dangerous."
Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the March 16 referendum on Crimea’s annexation to Russia, Svoboda was busier than ever. One of its chief demands — that all government business be done in Ukrainian — was passed into law, instantaneously marginalizing the one-third of Ukraine’s citizens (and 60 percent of Crimeans) who speak Russian. Then for good measure, the party launched a push to repeal a law against "excusing the crimes of fascism."
So is Ukraine poised for a Nazi putsch? The good news is that opinion polls show Tyahnybok at just 5 percent approval, far behind Vitali Klitschko (the hulking, pro-Western former boxing champion) and the center-right ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. In fact, it was the same French- and German-backed peace deal that gave Svoboda its disproportionate share of the resulting government’s ministries.
Western governments, then, are at least partially complicit in facilitating Svoboda’s rise.
Western governments, then, are at least partially complicit in facilitating Svoboda’s rise.In the short-term, they will have to be more discerning about which members of the Ukrainian leadership they engage, backing only those who genuinely hoist the flag of human rights rather than ethnic supremacy. In the medium- and long-term, those same governments, universities, and think tanks will have to get serious about re-investing in the study of Russia and its former domains.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Its justification rings just as hollow as it did four years ago when Russia de facto annexed the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Sound policy, however, can only be based on sound analysis of the players involved. That requires conceding the point — even when made by the Kremlin — that more than a few of the protesters who toppled Yanukovych, and of the new leaders in Kiev, are fascists.
CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades
The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.
The CIA-trained forces could soon play a critical role on Ukraine’s eastern border, where Russian troops have massed in what many fear is preparation for an invasion. The U.S. and Russia started security talks earlier this week in Geneva but have failed thus far to reach any concrete agreement.
While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it, said a former senior intelligence official in touch with colleagues in government.
By 2015, as part of this expanded anti-Russia effort, CIA Ground Branch paramilitaries also started traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise their counterparts there, according to a half-dozen former officials.
The multiweek, U.S.-based CIA program has included training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move,” intelligence and other areas, according to former officials.
How to characterize the program is a matter of dispute. The U.S. over three presidents has debated whether to provide military assistance to Ukraine, and how much, with discussions often focusing on whether that help is offensive or defensive in character.
U.S. officials deny that the CIA training program is, or was ever, offensively oriented. “The purpose of the training, and the training that was delivered, was to assist in the collection of intelligence,” said a current senior intelligence official.
But just what intelligence support entails, in the paramilitary context, can be ambiguous. And how this training will be applied by the Ukrainians may change rapidly with facts on the ground.
The program has involved “very specific training on skills that would enhance” the Ukrainians’ “ability to push back against the Russians,” said the former senior intelligence official.
The training, which has included “tactical stuff,” is “going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,” said the former official.
One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.”
The program, which does not appear to have ever been formally aimed at preparing for an insurgency, did include training that could be used for that purpose. Another former agency official described technical aspects of the program, like showing Ukrainians how to maintain secure communications behind enemy lines or in a “hostile intelligence environment” as potential “stay-behind force training.”
The current senior intelligence official strongly denied that the program was designed in any way “to assist in an insurgency.”
“Suggestions that we have trained an armed insurgency in Ukraine are simply false,” said Tammy Thorp, a CIA spokesperson.
Going back decades, the CIA has provided limited training to Ukrainian intelligence units to try and shore up an independent Kyiv and prevent Russian subversion, but cooperation “ramped up” after the Crimea invasion, said a former CIA executive.
The CIA paramilitaries in Ukraine have “a very small footprint,” said the former agency executive, and are helping train Ukrainian forces in “potential critical nodes the Russians may focus on” if Moscow seeks to push farther into the country.
Though the agency’s paramilitary resources have been otherwise stretched thin in Afghanistan and on other counterterrorism missions, the U.S.-based training program has been a “high priority” for the CIA since its Obama-era inception, said the former senior intelligence official.
The program did not require, or receive, a new presidential finding, which is used to authorize covert action, and has been run under previously existing authorities, according to former officials.
The Trump administration — partially at the urging of Congress — later expanded funding for the initiative, increasing the number of Ukrainian cohorts brought over yearly to the U.S., according to former officials.
Training forces that could take part in an insurgency is not the same as actively supporting an insurgency if one takes place following a Russian invasion. The Biden administration has reportedly assembled a task force to determine how the CIA and other U.S. agencies could support a Ukrainian insurgency, should Russia launch a large-scale incursion.
“If the Russians invade, those [graduates of the CIA programs] are going to be your militia, your insurgent leaders,” said the former senior intelligence official. “We’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. That’s where the agency’s program could have a serious impact.”
Over the years, the CIA training programs have been “very effective,” said the former CIA executive.
It has helped “turn the tide,” said the first former CIA official, who said he or she was briefed that “gains were being made on the battlefield” as a “direct result” of the program.
Both U.S. and Ukrainian officials believe that Ukrainian forces will not be able to withstand a large-scale Russian incursion, according to former U.S. officials. But representatives from both countries also believe that Russia won’t be able to hold on to new territory indefinitely because of stiff resistance from Ukrainian insurgents, according to former officials.
Working so closely with the Ukrainians has presented unique challenges, according to former officials. For years, U.S. officials have believed that, because of Russia’s web of spies within Ukraine’s intelligence services, the program has very likely been compromised by Moscow.
Senior Trump administration officials discussed worries about Russian penetration of the program with their Ukrainian counterparts, according to a former national security official. The Ukrainians, well aware of the issue, have tried to vet the U.S.-bound trainees to weed out moles, according to former officials.
Still, Trump-era National Security Council officials established a rule not to tell the Ukrainians anything they weren’t comfortable with the Russians subsequently learning about, recalled the former national security official.
A small number of trainees in the earlier U.S.-based cohorts were sent back to Ukraine for breaking security rules, like possessing unauthorized electronic devices, according to the first former CIA official.
CIA officials also believed their trainees were being targeted by the Russians once they returned to Ukraine. “Russians and traitorous Russian loyalists within the Ukrainian security services were seeking out graduates of those classes to assassinate,” said the former CIA official.
Russian penetration of Ukrainian intelligence has been a long-standing problem for the CIA, according to former intelligence officials. For decades, the agency has tried to work only with special select Ukrainian units — some created at the agency’s insistence — that have been isolated from the rest of the country’s intelligence services in order to prevent Russian compromise, according to former officials.
Even though the CIA assumes some Russian compromise when working with the Ukrainians, the agency still believes the training program has been, on balance, highly valuable, according to former officials.
If the Russians launch a new invasion, “there’s going to be people who make their life miserable,” said the former senior intelligence official. The CIA-trained paramilitaries “will organize the resistance” using the specialized training they’ve received.
“All that stuff that happened to us in Afghanistan,” said the former senior intelligence official, “they can expect to see that in spades with these guys.”
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