For more than 10 years, the United States has maintained a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine, which is now crucial for both countries in countering Russia, writes the American The New York Times , interviewing 200 sources in both countries and in Europe.
The publication writes that over the past eight years, the CIA has built 12 spy bases along the Russian border, one of which was visited by an NYT reporter.
In an underground bunker in the forest, Ukrainian Armed Forces servicemen track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on negotiations between Russian military commanders.
On one of the screens, a red line is the route of a drone that broke through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in Rostov, Russia, the journalist notes.
This base is almost entirely funded and partially equipped by the CIA. “110 percent,” says intelligence general Sergei Dvoretsky in an interview he gives at the base.
According to The New York Times, the details of the partnership between Ukrainian and American intelligence agencies were kept secret for a decade.
The CIA and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track the movements of Russian troops, and help maintain spy networks.
And Ukrainian intelligence services, according to the publication, previously handed over to US special services radio intercepts related to the MH17 crash in 2014 in the Donetsk region. They also helped the US in revelations related to interference in the 2016 presidential elections there.
Around the same time, the article says, the CIA began training an elite Ukrainian special forces unit to capture Russian drones and communications equipment so that CIA engineers could reconstruct them and crack the encryption systems.
According to the NYT, one of the officers in this unit was the current head of the GUR, Kirill Budanov.
The CIA also helped train Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, throughout Europe, in Cuba, and elsewhere.
CIA officers remained in a remote location in western Ukraine as the administration of US President Joe Biden evacuated personnel weeks before Russia's large-scale offensive began in February 2022.
The publication points out that this network is very important now, as Russia is advancing , and Ukraine is increasingly “relying on sabotage and long-range missile strikes, which require the presence of spies far behind enemy lines.”
Also, according to journalists, on February 22, CIA Director William Burns arrived in Ukraine to assure the Ukrainian leadership of continued cooperation. This visit was the tenth since the start of the Russian Federation's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“From the beginning, a common enemy—Russian President Vladimir Putin—united the CIA and its Ukrainian partners. Obsessed with delaying Ukraine’s move toward the West, Putin regularly intervened in Kyiv’s political system, personally selecting leaders he believed could keep Ukraine in Russia’s orbit, but each time it backfired, drawing protesters into the streets,” The New York Times points out.
PHOTO BY EPA
A new generation of spies
According to the publication, the CIA and GUR partnership began in late February 2014, when former President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia.
Such cooperation was proposed by Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, who headed the SBU at the time. At the same time, US rules prohibited intelligence services from providing Ukraine with any support that would have deadly consequences.
The result was a delicate balancing act. The CIA was supposed to strengthen Ukrainian intelligence without provoking the Russians. However, the red lines were not clearly defined, which created constant tension in the partnership, the authors of the article point out.
The NYT writes that in Kyiv, Nalyvaichenko chose his longtime aide, General Kondratyuk, as head of counterintelligence, and they created a new paramilitary unit that was deployed behind enemy lines to conduct operations and collect intelligence that the CIA or MI6 could not provide.
This unit, known as the Fifth Directorate, was staffed with officers born after Ukraine gained independence.
“They had no connection with Russia,” said General Kondratyuk. “They didn’t even know what the Soviet Union was.”.
Ukrainian intelligence worked diligently with the CIA and gradually became vital to the Americans, the publication writes. In 2015, General Kondratyuk came to a meeting with the deputy director of the CIA and, without warning, handed over a stack of top-secret files.
This first package contained secrets from the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet, including detailed information about new Russian nuclear submarine designs. Soon, groups of CIA officers began regularly leaving his office with backpacks of documents, the article said.
“We understood that we needed to create conditions for trust,” explained General Kondratyuk.
That summer, a Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur exploded in mid-air and crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 passengers and crew. The Fifth Directorate intercepted phone calls and provided other intelligence within hours of the crash that quickly pinned responsibility on Russian-backed separatists.
The CIA was impressed and made its first serious commitments, providing secure communications equipment and special training for members of the Fifth Directorate and two other elite units.
PHOTO AUTHOR, GETTY IMAGES Photo caption, Boeing MH17 wreckage
“The Ukrainians wanted fish, and we couldn’t give them the fish for political reasons,” said the former U.S. official, referring to intelligence that could help them fight the Russians. “But we were happy to teach them how to fish and provide them with fishing equipment.”.
Journalists write that cooperation with Ukraine was so successful that the US was thinking about creating similar units in other European intelligence services to confront the Russian Federation.
The head of the CIA department that deals with operations against Russia even organized a secret meeting in the Netherlands. There, representatives of the CIA, Britain's MI6, the Ukrainian GUR, the Dutch service, and other agencies agreed to more closely pool their intelligence on Russia.
The result was a secret coalition against Russia, and Ukrainians were important participants in it.
PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES
However, if Republicans in Congress cut off military funding to Kyiv, the CIA may have to cut spending, the NYT writes.
Some Ukrainian intelligence officers are now asking their American counterparts whether the CIA will abandon them. “It already happened in Afghanistan, and now it could happen in Ukraine,” said one Ukrainian officer.
However, the recent visit of CIA Director William Burns to Ukraine suggests otherwise, the authors of the article point out.
Speaking about Burns' visit to Kyiv last week, a CIA official said: "We have demonstrated a clear commitment to Ukraine for many years, and this visit was another strong signal that the US commitment will continue.".
The CIA and the GUR built two more secret bases to intercept Russian communications, and combined with the 12 forward operating bases that General Kondratyuk said were still in operation, the GUR is now collecting more intelligence than at any time during the war – mostly sharing it with the CIA.
“You can’t get such information anywhere – only here and now,” confirmed General Dvoretsky.
