U. S. intel helped Ukraine protect air defenses
Those early shoot- downs helped thwart the Russian air assault operation designed to take Hostomel Airport near Kyiv, which would have allowed the Russians to flood troops and equipment to the region around the capital.
The Russians eventually took the airport for a time, but never had enough control to fly in massive amounts of equipment. That failure had a significant impact on the battle for Kyiv, U. S. officials say.
The CIA is also devoting significant resources, current and former officials say, to gathering intelligence with the aim of protecting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom the Russians want to kill. The agency is consulting with the Ukrainians on “how best to move him around, making sure that he’s not co- located with his entire chain of command, things like that,” a U. S. official said.
“I would say where we are at is revolutionary in terms of what we have been able to do,” Army Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress last month in describing the sharing of information and intelligence between the U. S. and Ukraine.
CIA Director William Burns told Congress last month that when he met with Zelenskyy in Kiev in January, “We shared with him intelligence we had at the time about some of the most graphic and concerning details of Russian planning about Kyiv as well and we’ve continued to do that every day since then.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last month that the U. S. has shared “a significant amount of detailed timely intelligence on Russia’s plans and activities with the Ukrainian government to help Ukrainians defend themselves,” adding that the material “includes information that should help them inform and develop their military response to Russia’s invasion, that’s what’s happening — or has been happening.”
The U. S. military and the CIA began seeking to deepen their relationships with Ukrainian counterparts after Russia seized Crimea in 2014. The CIA first helped Ukrainian services root out Russian spies, the former senior official said, and then provided training and guidance. The U. S. military also trained Ukrainian soldiers.
“There has been a very robust relationship between U. S. intel agencies and the Ukrainians for the last eight years,” the official said, adding that by the time Russia invaded two months ago, the U. S. trusted Ukraine enough to provide details of Russian troops’ deployment, attack routes and real- time targeting information.
“The foreknowledge we had of Russian plans and intentions shows that our intelligence was very solid on the overall situation,” said John McLaughlin, a former acting CIA director who now teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “So just logically, if we so earnestly want them to win as we have publicly said, it only follows that we’d be giving them the results of intelligence. It would be along the lines of, ‘ Here’s what we know — it doesn’t matter how we know it.’”
One Western intelligence official noted that it’s not only the intelligence that has proven decisive — it’s the performance of the Ukrainians in using it. The source said Ukrainians have fought the Russians with agility and courage, and when they have received actionable intelligence, they have moved with astonishing speed.
McLaughlin said the Ukrainians have made clever use of so- called open- source intelligence — commercial satellite imagery and intercepts of Russians talking openly on unencrypted radios.
“The fact that there is so much open source [ intelligence] available means that those collecting classified intelligence can focus on the things that are really hard and not publicly available.”
As the Ukrainian government sees it, intelligence sharing has improved, a source familiar with the government’s view told NBC News. That’s as far as he would go.
“It’s gotten better,” he said.