[World Socialist Network] 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.