Andre Damon
April 1, 2025
On Sunday, the New York Times published an extensive article on US involvement in the Ukraine war entitled The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” which admits that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.”
The United States” was woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil,” the Times report asserts.
The article is an admission that the United States waged, and is waging, an undeclared, unauthorized and illegal war against Russia. It makes clear that American officers, some deployed inside Ukraine, have been selecting targets for attack and authorizing individual strikes, making them, for all intents and purposes, combatants.
The article documents how, over the course of the war, the Biden administration systematically violated its own restriction on the conduct of war, up to the point of authorizing the attacks on Russian territory, using American weapons, ordered by American commanders.
The Times report explains that American officers decided what Russian troops and civilian targets would be attacked, transmitted their coordinates to the Ukrainian military, then authorized the attacks using weapons provided by the NATO powers themselves. It reports that American and British soldiers were deployed to Ukraine to personally direct combat operations.
The article presents a picture of the Ukraine war in which the American military planned everything from large-scale strategic troop movements to every individual long-range strike. As the article explains, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”
The US command center in Wiesbaden, Germany would oversee each HIMARS [long-range missile] strike” against Russian troops. US officers would review the Ukrainians’ target lists and advise them on positioning their launchers and timing their strikes.”
So tight was the US oversight that The Ukrainians were supposed to only use coordinates the Americans provided. To fire a warhead, HIMARS [missile] operators needed a special electronic key card, which the Americans could deactivate anytime.”
As the Times account explains, Each morning, U.S. and Ukrainian military officers set targeting priorities—Russian units, pieces of equipment or infrastructure. American and coalition intelligence officers searched satellite imagery, radio emissions and intercepted communications to find Russian positions. Task Force Dragon then gave the Ukrainians the coordinates so they could shoot at them.”
As a result of this arrangement, the United States military was, in the words of one European intelligence official quoted in the article, part of the kill chain,” i.e., making decisions about which Russian troops and infrastructure would be attacked.
Among the targets provided by the US to Ukrainian troops was the Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea fleet, which was attacked and sunk on April 14, 2022. The US also provided coordinates for a long-range missile attack on the Kerch bridge from the Russian mainland to Crimea. For the first time, the Times reports that the Ukrainian attack on the 2024 Toropets arsenal west of Moscow was directed by the Central Intelligence Agency. As the article explains, C.I.A. officers shared intelligence about the depot’s munitions and vulnerabilities, as well as Russian defense systems on the way to Toropets. They calculated how many drones the operation would require and charted their circuitous flight paths.”
The article points to the lengths to which American officers went to obfuscate their direction of the war. As the Times explains, The locations of Russian forces would be ‘points of interest.’ As one official cited in the article explained, 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.’” The Times wrote that HIMARS strikes that resulted in 100 or more Russian dead or wounded came almost weekly.”
Just as importantly, the Times article also admits that an undisclosed number of active duty US troops were deployed to Ukraine. Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited. American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting.” And the British military had placed small teams of officers in the country after the invasion.”
In addition, the article provides extensive details on the conflicts between various US and Ukrainian officials, and within the US military itself, over the direction of the war. If a single, unified theme emerges from these various conflicts and disagreements, it is the consistent pressure by the United States for Ukraine to mobilize a broader share of its population, and in particular more and more young people, to fight and die in the US-led war.
The article recounts the demand by General Christopher Cavoli, then NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, to get your 18-year-olds in the game.” It noted the demand by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Ukrainian President Zelensky to take the bigger, bolder step and begin drafting 18-year-olds.” As one American official complained, it’s not an existential war if they won’t make their people fight.”
Indeed, it is not an existential war.” It is not a war of self-defense. It is a US-NATO war, directed and led by NATO officers, with Ukrainians doing the dying.
This report contradicts nearly everything that the Biden administration, and the New York Times itself, had told the public about the Ukraine war since it began over three years ago.
The official position of the White House throughout the Biden administration was that NATO is not involved” in the war in Ukraine, as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki stated in 2022. It is not a proxy war,” Psaki said, This is a war between Russia and Ukraine.” Those who claimed the contrary were, in the words of the White House, repeating Kremlin talking points.”
The New York Times systematically supported the Biden administration’s false claims about the degree of US involvement in the war, condemning true assertions that the United States was waging war against Russia as Russian propaganda.” As the Times wrote in March 20, 2022, Using a barrage of increasingly outlandish falsehoods, President Vladimir V. Putin has created an alternative reality, one in which Russia is at war not with Ukraine but with a larger, more pernicious enemy in the West.”
But the Times does not attempt to reconcile its own admission now that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood” and its earlier statement that claims of American involvement in the war constituted an alternate reality.”
To be blunt, the New York Times deliberately lied to the American public for years.
Why did the Biden administration engage in war against Russia, without telling the American people? And why did the Times, which obviously knew all of this in real time, never tell the public?
In War, the book by journalist Bob Woodward on the Biden administration, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained the Biden administration’s thinking on the Ukraine war:
Biden felt his ability to really support Ukraine fully, have their back with weapons and consequential levels of support, rested on his ability to reassure the American people that they were not going to get their country dragged into that war. The president has essentially created the necessary permission structure for sustained American support to Ukraine.
In other words, the ability of the United States to fight a war with Russia was premised on the American public not knowing that the United States was fighting a war against Russia. And the Times saw it as its duty to enable this war by covering up the real extent of US involvement.
Had the Times acknowledged the extent to which Washington was directing the war, it would have burst the propaganda bubble about Ukraine waging a defensive fight for democracy” against Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression.” The fact of the matter is that the war was and remains a US-led imperialist war aimed at subjugating Russia to the status of a semi-colony, and seizing control of key natural resources and geostrategically significant territory in a new redivision of the world.
The Times is not a newspaper in a strict sense of the term—a sort of fourth estate” independently reporting in the public interest. It is the quasi-official publication of sections of the state. As such, what it reveals, and what it lies about, are dictated by the interests of those factions.
The lies of the Times must be contrasted to the coverage of the World Socialist Web Site. Each and every one of the major points belatedly admitted by the Times was reported in real time by the WSWS. Since the 2022 invasion, the WSWS consistently referred to the war in Ukraine as the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine”—a characterization that is completely consistent with the latest account published in the New York Times.
The lasting legacy of the Ukraine war, beyond the countless number of Ukrainian and Russian lives lost—which collectively number in the hundreds of thousands—is the breaking of an effective prohibition, in place since the end of World War II, on a direct war against a nuclear-armed state by the United States.
Whatever the future course of the Ukraine war —which is far from certain despite the efforts of the Trump administration to refocus US resources on war with China—a precedent has been set. In the event that the Trump administration provokes a crisis over the Taiwan Strait, or anywhere else in the world, this precedent will be invoked as the basis for ever further military escalation.
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