The Secret History of the War in Ukraine

3/30/2025 at 2:53:11 PM

> 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.”

by outer_web

4/2/2025 at 8:56:49 PM

> “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.

That's some shady word mincing. Who are they afraid of, US Congress? journalists? Who would be asking these questions.

This is in the same vein as "we never engaged in water torture!". But did you use "enhanced interrogation techniques using water?". You can still answer "No", if you use diesel fuel instead, you see.

by rdtsc

4/3/2025 at 3:46:48 AM

The context was stated in the 2 paragraphs before. Some people avoided calling locations targets because the information needed verification. A target is a place to attack. A point of interest is a place to look.

by pseudalopex

4/3/2025 at 4:07:55 AM

Above they are still called targets though.

> Every morning, officers recalled, the Ukrainians and Americans gathered to survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets

> Given the delicacy of the mission, was it unduly provocative to call targets “targets”?

It's about "the delicacy" of the mission not them moving or not moving. It could have been "potential targets" or "moving targets" instance otherwise.

> “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.

The un-named "US official" spelled it out for us eventually so we don't have to guess and read between the lines.

by rdtsc

4/2/2025 at 4:43:08 PM

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?

by light_triad

4/2/2025 at 4:44:39 PM

Yes, the Cold War never ended. And it seems like Russia is winning now.

by jgilias

4/2/2025 at 4:49:01 PM

The Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and a new Cold War with Russia started during the late 1990s, around the time of the NATO-Yugoslavia war.

by dragonwriter

4/2/2025 at 4:53:21 PM

The Russians had some successes in asymmetric warfare, but they can't 'win' outright on the ground, and peace would probably decimate their economy.

From the WSJ a few days ago:

For Russia’s Economy, Peace Poses a Threat

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-war-economy-ukraine-...

by light_triad

4/2/2025 at 5:47:02 PM

Ukraine was literally part of the USSR at the start of the cold war, and a satellite state following the breakup.

It seems like this is a low point for Russia - a protracted hot war on what was previously its own turf.

by s1artibartfast

4/2/2025 at 5:53:08 PM

> It seems like this is a low point for Russia - a protracted hot war on what was previously its own turf.

That kind of “low point” is most of the history of the independent Russian Federation, given the first (1994-1996) and second (1999-2009) Chechen wars and the North Caucasus insurgency (2009-2017).

by dragonwriter

4/2/2025 at 6:06:21 PM

I dont disagree. The cold war has not gone well for the USSR and Russia. Thats why I think it is absurd to say it is winning.

by s1artibartfast

4/2/2025 at 6:12:36 PM

There is this idea that the breakup of Russia and Ukraine was bloodless in 1991, but that a military response was inevitable from the petulant displeased Russian state. We managed to delay the fight, but it was kind of inevitable.

by philistine

4/2/2025 at 7:08:05 PM

I don't think that is true at all, especially if the "we" is the west. This strikes me as some sort of savior complex.

How has NATO delayed bloodshed in Ukraine between 1991 and 2022?

by s1artibartfast

4/3/2025 at 4:18:29 PM

At first, Ukraine stayed firmly rooted in Russia's economical orbit. It's the slow inevitable lean towards Western Europe that enraged Russia.

NATO had nothing to do with it. It's economical.

by philistine

4/2/2025 at 5:48:12 PM

One of the surprising thing here is how much the European and American media managed to convince Ukrainians that they are 100% on their side.

Let's play a realpolitik change of perspective, and assume that both the Europeans and the Americans wanted to weaken and grind down Russia's military and economy for some years to come in a strategic move without putting any "boots on the ground", well not their own boots at least, but using Ukrainian "boots". Well, I posit they would use Ukraine in the exact shape they did it over the last 4 years or so. Nothing more or less. I believe Biden admin expected a repeat of 2014, quick and easy take-over and Zelensky gets to run away on an offered ride. But he didn't, that was surprising but the Americans didn't hesitate and decided to use that "bravery" for their goals as well. Sure, they may have also saved Ukraine but I don't think their actions since indicate they really cared about Ukraine per se, that was a secondary propaganda spin, they just saw a chance for a nice proxy war with Russia and they got it.

by rdtsc

4/2/2025 at 4:58:43 PM

nobody wins in war

by mistrial9

4/2/2025 at 5:13:50 PM

In war, there are no winners, only widows.

by blitzar

4/2/2025 at 5:56:35 PM

That doesn't match up with history or reality. Hard to argue that nobody benefits from war, and that there are winners and losers.

by s1artibartfast

4/2/2025 at 5:19:27 PM

We're in a Cold War with hot proxies. The original Cold War was also like that.

Now, China, Iran and North Korea are backing Russia without engaging in direct confrontation in Ukraine; the EU, NATO, and maybe still the US are backing Ukraine. If Trump realigns with Putin against Ukraine, then the axis of authoritarian countries will have won a major battle. Trump will ofc lose many of his old-guard GOP supporters if he does that.

by blueyes

4/2/2025 at 5:20:11 PM

> Now, China, Iran and North Korea are backing Russia without engaging in direct confrontation in Ukraine;

Not true of North Korea, which is engaging in direct confrontation in Ukraine.

by dragonwriter

4/2/2025 at 5:05:59 PM

Remember how Putin saying that Russia was fighting the USA and not Ukraine was supposed to be an example of either him going insane or puffing up the conflict for his domestic audience? Well, for whatever reason now the western media are allowed to tell the truth. Now, why would that be - that's still a mystery.

by riehwvfbk

4/2/2025 at 5:13:33 PM

It's no mystery. The US regime changed to one sympathetic to Russia (at the very least), so the ever-supplicating political establishment has started realigning. Remember this is the same paper that helped drum up support for the Iraq War. Even "leftist" corpo media is still just blue-flavored state media.

As far as the truth, the problem is the lack of two functioning political parties. Two parties representing different approaches to the US's interests would have meant that the opposition poking holes in the official narratives would point to a competing US-benefiting alternative. Imagine instead of this feckless trickle of weapons effectively keeping the Ukrainians on a leash, the US could have taken the lesson from the Moskva and let Ukraine run with it. That is the debate we should have had.

by mindslight

4/3/2025 at 6:06:43 AM

Run with it and do what? Defeat a nation with five times the population? And remember, far from everyone in Ukraine is eager to serve the new masters. The men from the "occupied" territories? They are on the front lines fighting, and not on the US side. American media have started to cover "busification". They may be able to talk about this angle soon.

by riehwvfbk

4/3/2025 at 2:51:05 PM

Paranoid grievance politics. I thought you had implied you were interested in truth?

A branch of my family fled Soviet subjugation. Eighty years later and the Russians are still doing the same shit.

The US has its problems and I've certainly called it a type of empire, but only a fool equates the two.

by mindslight

4/2/2025 at 3:48:05 PM

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?

by allturtles

4/2/2025 at 4:04:25 PM

It’s largely due to a move from single-branch designs to weapons “platforms” that are used by multiple branches of the armed forces so they now go through far more bureaucratic design processes. They had to do it because of the funding cuts after the end of the Cold War (although some systems like ATACMS predate that, both it and HIMARS just reflect a more bureaucratic army). HMMWV and MRAP though are generic terms, not really restricted to the US armed forces.

Designs that are ordered by a single branch like the USAF often still have the emotive names like the Predator and Reaper drones.

by throwup238

4/2/2025 at 3:55:49 PM

> Is this an intentional effort to make warfighting sound more like a kind of bureacratic exercise?

I'm not sure how intentional it is in the sense that they made a deliberate choice rather than it being an unspoken consensus to move this way. However, the language around warfighting in the US has been increasingly sanitized over the years. A key event here is the change in name from Department of War to Department of Defense. Later on we started calling things "defense" instead of military. It's the "defense sector" of the economy, not the military sector. The defense budget, not the military budget. You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in). Now with drones the operators (note the term, it doesn't convey what the job actually entails) may be located at a state side base and go home after conducting a mission somewhere else in the world.

by Jtsummers

4/2/2025 at 4:01:41 PM

The US Department of War and Department of the Navy were combined to form the Department of Defense. This separation imitated that in the United Kingdom, where the War Office administered the British Army, and the Admiralty administered the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines (and, later, the Air Ministry administered the Royal Air Force).

by cjs_ac

4/2/2025 at 4:42:56 PM

> You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in).

. . . because the American public ever since Desert Storm has demanded sanitized, bloodless wars. As soon as you have so-called "boots on the ground," it magically becomes a "quagmire." Yet everyone insists we prevent the next 9/11.

by psunavy03

4/2/2025 at 4:31:52 PM

Combat vehicles still tend to get good names. American Indian tribes are traditional for helicopters, while ground combat vehicles still get named after troops & their leaders, like the new M10 Booker assault gun:

https://www.defensenews.com/land/2023/06/10/us-armys-new-com...

While it's entirely justifiable to name trucks after famous logistics officers or heroic motor transport drivers, it's just not done. Artillery is interesting, with Paladins (in action) and Crusaders (cancelled), but nobody refers to them by those names. Ships and subs are their own kettle of fish.

by aerostable_slug

4/2/2025 at 4:24:22 PM

For World War 2 we relied on the British to name things (The US produced the M4 Medium Tank, the Brits called it the "Sherman"). The theory was they were government designed and (at least theoretically) produced by many companies.

I believe the Cold War names mostly came from US contractors- the government defined requirements ("air superiority fighter") and the contractors came up with designs that then had to be marketed against each other so they were given cool names ("Fighting Falcon").

Now there has been a lot of consolidation of contractors, and budgets are much more constrained. You no longer have the DoD funding competing designs and selecting, but a situation closer to early WW2 where the government is closer to the design.

At least that's my 5 minute guess, probably lots of 'citation needed' to be done.

by panzagl

4/2/2025 at 4:00:18 PM

A somewhat silly response, but to me ATACMS sounds a lot like the plural of atack'em which is short for "atack them" in colloquial "American"

And HIMARS sounds like you are sending something to Mars. Quite the thing to name an artillery platform :)

For some reasons Americans like acronyms that spell words. Like SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) or PATRIOT act (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism)

by dh2022

4/2/2025 at 4:15:45 PM

> And HIMARS sounds like you are sending something to Mars. Quite the thing to name an artillery platform :)

Mars is also the Roman god of war.

by throwup238

4/2/2025 at 4:00:17 PM

Our servers used to be named after the Simpsons characters but now they are corp-us-web3 and dev-eu-sql2

by RamRodification

4/2/2025 at 4:41:22 PM

ATACMS is usually pronounced "Attack 'Ems", FWIW.

by TheBlight

4/2/2025 at 5:03:48 PM

> A somewhat shallow comment, but why do post-Cold War U.S. weapon systems have such intentionally bland names? ATACMS, HIMARS, etc?

Maybe because so many of them from the late Cold War on got cancelled between the stage where they would previously get a “friendly” (hostile?) name and deployment that they just stopped doing that as much and kept the development project name. But I think you exaggerate the significance of the change.

> Abrams and Bradley are now HMMWV and MRAP.

HMMWV was deployed during the late Cold War. And that name with the pronunciation “Humvee” is a lot like the classic GPW “Jeep”.

More similar to the M1 Abrams tank and M2 Bradley personnel carrier in the post-Cild War world are the (cancelled late in the program) M8 Buford armored gun system; the newer M10 Booker assault gun, the Stryker infantry carrier vehicle, etc. All of which got names.

by dragonwriter

4/2/2025 at 4:02:41 PM

Not just bureaucratic, but also give it an air of technological sophistication. It's not about pure power, but being more advanced than anything else. And over the years, the way in which weapon systems are developed, funded, and procured have changed--the DOD does less of its own R&D, and outsources everything to contractors.

by Finnucane

4/2/2025 at 4:00:19 PM

>They used to give weapons names that made them sound aggressive, dangerous, legendary, bold

^True[1], and also planes also had cartoon character and naked women with big tits painted on them. Just google WW2 planes.

That might have to do with the life expectancy of the plane being about 20 minutes back then, but those are just details.

[1] https://archive.ph/X8GXA/9b82a68489e82ee6bbcb58761355a4c546e...

by FirmwareBurner

4/2/2025 at 4:14:40 PM

That was more a choice by individual aircrew than higher command or bureaucracy.

by smdyc1

4/2/2025 at 4:18:35 PM

I'm inclined to give, at least, the mid- and late-war bomber crew guys a pass on just about any personal "bad" behavior short of the extremely bad, given their terrible odds of surviving the next few months...

More likely than not they're living their final few weeks, let them paint a pretty lady on the plane's nose.

by alabastervlog

4/2/2025 at 6:47:43 PM

Too late to edit, I meant early- and mid-war. It did get somewhat less horrifying closer to the end.

by alabastervlog

4/2/2025 at 4:15:23 PM

And sitting on an airfield for months at a time bored senseless, it used to be cool to paint insulting platitudes like "Eat this MOFO" on munitions. Now:

1) Blowing kids to smithereens must be done in a politically correct fashion, even while violating the Geneva convention.

2) Nobody is sure who the enemy will actually be next week, so it would be shame to have to repaint them.

by nonrandomstring

4/2/2025 at 4:47:18 PM

I assure you the United States armed forces still write raunchy phrases on materiel.

by linkregister

4/2/2025 at 4:38:34 PM

> even while violating the Geneva convention.

Uhh . . . yeah, no. As someone who served, that's flat-out offensive.

by psunavy03

4/2/2025 at 5:29:14 PM

You don't need to take umbridge because your story is not everyones story. Unless you're claiming to speak for every serving person on the planet since 1949?

Now think, what do you suppose is the reason someone getting chewed out for scribbling on a shell really is when those are being used in a dubious theatre? (hint: attribution) The absurdity is the real crime.

by nonrandomstring

4/2/2025 at 4:27:12 PM

> 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.

To avoid anything that might be deemed not diverse and not inclusive enough.

Any real names might make someone feel bad about something. A sequence of random letters does not.

by DeathArrow

4/2/2025 at 4:40:41 PM

Wrong. I can tell what you're mad about, and I find it petty.

by arbitrary_name

4/2/2025 at 5:44:06 PM

Especially since all of those acronyms predate the current DEI wave by decades.

by throwup238

3/30/2025 at 8:31:38 PM

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

by howard941

4/2/2025 at 8:50:39 PM

> 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.

by rdtsc

4/2/2025 at 4:39:39 PM

> 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.

by dralley

4/2/2025 at 4:42:27 PM

I think it has everything to do with US strategy: What do you want to get out from this war?

I guess different interest groups have different answers. And sometimes they don't want to share the answers for apparent reasons.

by ferguess_k

4/2/2025 at 4:57:22 PM

The US seems to want Russia to lose the war but not for the government (i.e. Putin's grip on power) to collapse (because nukes). That seems to be the main thing driving this 'helping but not too much' strategy, but it's not obvious that it will or can succeed.

by rcxdude

4/2/2025 at 4:53:20 PM

> US strategy: What do you want to get out from this war?

Kill as many Russians as possible and use up as many Russian munitions as possible - with the inevitable consequence being the death of a lot of Ukrainians in the process.

by blitzar

4/2/2025 at 6:31:00 PM

> with the inevitable consequence being the death of a lot of Ukrainians in the process.

With the inevitable consequence being many Ukrainian lives being saved.

Do you somehow think that less Ukrainians would die without our support?

by dralley

4/2/2025 at 6:39:59 PM

> Do you somehow think that less Ukrainians would die without our support?

1000% yes. Without our support the war would have been over, even with Russian incompetence, in a few weeks.

Best estimates place the number of dead in the 100's of thousands, that would have been in the thousands.

by blitzar

4/2/2025 at 7:00:29 PM

How can people look at the human rights catastrophe in occupied territory and be delusional enough to think everything would have been fine had Russia "won". It's crazy.

by dralley

4/2/2025 at 7:10:00 PM

By 2015 1 million people had fled the occupied territory and taken refuge in Russia.

by blitzar

4/2/2025 at 8:06:17 PM

The key thing to successfully take refuge in Russia is to be mentally Russian. Ukraine has plenty of such people, at least because 20% of population are ethnical Russians who migrated here at different times in our history. For somebody like me, whose Russian skills are on lower intermediate side, posting comments like this in social networks occupation is effectively a death sentence, there's no way around that.

As an example my friend barely left Russian checkpoint alive after they took his phone for check-up. They were beating him for hours, because they found picture where he stands near the Ukrainian flag. Twist: he was 17 at that time, would he be a bit older, I don't know what would happen. And this is just one example among countless. You can see what happened in Bucha, Izyum, Mariupol, etc. You can learn what happened during the Soviet period after we briefly regained independence. Our population shrinked by double digit percentage pre WWII.

Average homo sovieticus with no sense of identity will be sort of okay, that's true. But Russia probably will use the men for the next war similar to what they did with people occupied in 2014.

by road_to_freedom

4/2/2025 at 7:57:01 PM

Crimea would be a counterexample, where the annexation was basically bloodless

by s1artibartfast

4/2/2025 at 8:18:48 PM

Apart from all the dissidents being tortured in basements. But sure, it happened quickly enough that most people ran to ground quickly.

by dralley

4/2/2025 at 5:28:00 PM

- dump old weapon systems to justify procuring new ones

- put a fig leaf over Victoria Nuland’s hubris and ineptitude

- create a political football

- make a productive peace with Russia impossible for another century

Who knows. Victory is not a goal. I don’t think it’s possible if it were.

by dughnut

4/2/2025 at 5:44:12 PM

Rounded to the nearest whole number there has never been anything more than a 0% chance of the Ukraine "winning" a war with Russia. Even the dumbest generals in Washington know this.

by blitzar

4/2/2025 at 4:58:27 PM

So we nuke them?

by postalrat

4/2/2025 at 5:03:29 PM

Obviously we don't want to be the ones that do anything. It's not a proxy war if you are doing the shooting.

by blitzar

4/2/2025 at 5:57:36 PM

How would that work?

by rdtsc

4/2/2025 at 6:26:01 PM

Badly for everyone.

by blitzar

4/2/2025 at 6:07:31 PM

> Kill as many Russians as possible and use up as many Russian munitions as possible - with the inevitable consequence being the death of a lot of Ukrainians in the process

Pretty much. I see you got downvoted because somehow there are still people that believe it's two more weeks and Russia will collapse.

Initially the plan was a rehash of 2014 when the Obama admin encouraged Ukrainians not to fight. It was going to be a media storm and very harsh pronouncements, sanctions and so on. However, from a geo-strategic point of view when Zelensky refused to take the ride offered to him by the Biden admin, it opened this new opportunity, and Americans and Europeans allies took it. Never let a crisis go to waste! They helped Ukraine stay afloat and saved Ukrainian lives as well, no doubt, but that's a bonus for the magazine stories. If we pretend their only goal was grinding down Russia without also letting it collapse or trigger WW3, the playbook would have looked exactly as it did for the last 4 years. So I think it's silly to pretend it was something other than that.

by rdtsc

4/2/2025 at 5:08:40 PM

From a realpolitik perspective, the US would like this war to go on forever. Under Biden, the war was grinding up enemy Russian troops and not-really-an-ally Ukrainian troops, weakening both strategically while costing us no troops and 0.2% of GDP. Plus we were able to expand NATO and give Russia an ongoing PR nightmare.

Obviously they can't say any of that out loud, but the underlying strategy is sound.

by ProjectArcturis

4/2/2025 at 8:29:17 PM

If you can believe Jeffry Sachs and RFK Jr., the expansion of NATO was a way to start the war, not a result.

And the objective was to pillage the country of Ukraine to the benefit of those in power, Europe gets to loan them money to rebuild, American corporations get to buy up the farmland.

If you can believe them.

by hermitShell

4/2/2025 at 6:26:56 PM

The underlying strategy is so sound that Russia now effectively owns 20% of what used to be Ukraine, ground which is never going back. Their military has gained extremely valuable experience in fighting a modern war. Additionally, European economy has been decimated and the second order effects (weapon proliferation, criminal syndicates, immigration, societal effects) are yet to play out.

Throw in the ever-present threat of small-yield tactical nuclear weapons being used by Russia if it ever thinks it's in danger of losing and I fail to see the logic behind all of this. Unless of course weakening Europe, utterly destroying Ukraine and strengthening Russia was the point from the get-go. Or you just need to admit that the US fucked this one up badly (as it has almost every other war it's been involved in over the last 40 years).

by armitron

4/2/2025 at 6:54:00 PM

How is the European economy decimated? Not saying you’re wrong, but that’s a bold statement especially without receipts.

by op00to

4/2/2025 at 8:09:47 PM

This 20% was captured before any aid was granted.

by road_to_freedom

4/2/2025 at 4:58:58 PM

> They acted like the goal was to step on Putin's toes without pissing him off too much...

I mean, when you're fighting a nuclear power, making sure you don't piss them off enough to make them use their nuclear weapons, or at least unleash their most powerful conventional weapons on your main cities, seems like a good strategy.

Imagine for a second that instead of Russia, it was the USA fighting a proxy war against, say, China. And that China had just provided the intelligence and maybe weapons for, say, Cuba to sink the largest US Carrier. I am very sure the USA would freaking unleash hell on Cuba, maybe also on China. The only reason the Russians didn't do the same is that they're probably not capable of doing so, at least not without losing too much for it to be a rational choice. But at the time, the USA was not entirely sure of what the Russians would do when provoked to such an extent. They were understandably worried. As they learned the Russians were not exactly doing what they might have expected, they gradually started pushing more and more up until the point the Russians launched an Oreshnic ballistic missile which could've easily been carrying a nuclear payload, but luckily didn't. Biden still pushed further a bit even after that, but in my opinion that was rather irresponsible. You can't push the Russians forever, even in their current position, before you should expect them to become desperate and start using whatever they can to start pushing back at you, and the Russians still can do that.

by brabel

4/2/2025 at 8:54:35 PM

Nukes aren't that great a weapon to use against the country right on your border that you're trying to annex, especially if you've been busy justifying the invasion to your own population as liberation.

by jemmyw

4/3/2025 at 6:15:44 AM

There are "tactical" nukes these days that can be "safely" used and in the beginning of the war, nobody was sure if the Russians were willing to use those. But even Hiroshima has recovered from a dirty nuke with relatively minor permanent losses.

by brabel

4/2/2025 at 4:33:55 PM

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?

by apercu

4/2/2025 at 5:31:59 PM

April, 2022. In the NYTimes app version of the article as you scroll down information about the "part" you are on stays at the top like a sticky nav to give better context. So for where your quote comes form it says "Part 1 February - May 2022"

by ajcp

4/3/2025 at 1:35:15 PM

Aww, that might not have displayed in the reader view. Blaming the author instead of the paywall workaround lol. Sorry.

by apercu

4/3/2025 at 2:32:20 AM

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.

by ac130kz

3/30/2025 at 1:53:48 PM

[dead]

by oldpersonintx

4/2/2025 at 4:12:30 PM

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...

by ilamont

4/2/2025 at 4:54:21 PM

I think the answer is simpler - if they draft young people, their demographic pyramid will be even more utterly devastated after the war ends.

by StefanBatory

4/2/2025 at 5:01:35 PM

Definitely the demographic thing, but also the "Putin approaching death" meme feels like mostly a PsyOp from Ukraine. The unspoken correlary is, Ukraine doesn't have to outlast Russia, it just has to outlast Putin.

by ProjectArcturis

4/2/2025 at 5:24:09 PM

> belief that Putin has been "approaching death" for 2 years?

I truly believe this was a significant part of why Alexei Navalny was willing to go back to Russia knowing full-well he'd disappear into their penal system; he was betting he'd be able to outlive Putin.

by ajcp

4/2/2025 at 5:31:27 PM

> 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_...

by rdtsc

4/2/2025 at 8:44:56 PM

Ukraine hasn't sat on it's laurels either though, they can see the situation. They have also responded with domestic production, and European manufacturers have started building factories in western Ukraine.

Not giving them what they needed to win but just enough to hang on was a huge mistake imo because they're not going away, Russia isn't going to roll over the rest no matter what happens now. Instead we prolonged the war and failed to create a superb ally in a great position.

by jemmyw