Key takeaways from United States’ secret military partnership with Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is at an inflection point, with President Donald Trump seeking rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin and pressing for an end to the fighting.

But for nearly three years before Trump’s return to power, the United States and Ukraine were joined in an extraordinary partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology whose evolution and inner workings have been known only to a small circle of US and allied officials.

With remarkable transparency, the Pentagon has offered a public accounting of the $66.5 billion in weaponry it has supplied to Ukraine. But a New York Times investigation reveals that the United States’ involvement in the war was far deeper than previously understood. The secret partnership both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.

Here are five takeaways from the investigation.

A US base in Wiesbaden, Germany, supplied the Ukrainians with the coordinates of Russian forces on their soil.

The idea behind the partnership was that the United States’ close cooperation with Ukraine would compensate for Russia’s vast advantages in manpower and weaponry. To guide the Ukrainians as they deployed their ever-more-sophisticated arsenal, the United States created an operation called Task Force Dragon.

The secret center of the partnership was at the US Army garrison in Wiesbaden. Each morning, US and Ukrainian military officers set targeting priorities — Russian units, pieces of equipment or infrastructure. US 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.

Military officials worried that it might be unduly provocative to call the targets “targets.” Instead, they were referred to as “points of interest.”

US intelligence and artillery helped Ukraine quickly turn the tide against the Russian invasion.

In the spring of 2022, the Biden administration agreed to send High Mobility Artillery Systems, or HIMARS, which used satellite-guided rockets for strikes up to 50 miles distant.

In the war’s first year, the Ukrainians were extremely dependent on the United States for intelligence, and Task Force Dragon vetted and oversaw virtually every HIMARS strike.

The strikes caused Russian casualty rates to soar, and Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensive was largely successful: By December, the Ukrainians held an unlikely, David-versus-Goliath upper hand against their Russian foe.

The Biden administration kept moving its red lines.

From the first, administration officials sought to lay down a red line: The United States was not fighting Russia; it was helping Ukraine. Still, they worried that steps taken to accomplish that might provoke Putin to attack NATO targets or perhaps make good on his nuclear threats. Even as the administration developed an ever-greater tolerance of risk to help Ukraine meet the evolving threat, many of the most potentially provocative steps were taken in secret.

— Easing a prohibition against US boots on Ukrainian ground, Wiesbaden was allowed to put about a dozen military advisers in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. To avoid drawing public attention to their presence, the Pentagon initially called them “subject matter experts.” Later, the team was expanded, to about three dozen, and the military advisers were eventually allowed to travel to Ukrainian command posts closer to the fighting.

— In 2022, the US Navy was authorized to share targeting information for Ukrainian drone strikes on warships just beyond the territorial waters of Russian-annexed Crimea. The CIA was allowed to support Ukrainian operations within Crimean waters; that fall, the spy agency covertly helped Ukrainian drones strike Russian warships in the port of Sevastopol.

— In January 2024, US and Ukrainian military officers in Wiesbaden jointly planned a campaign — using coalition-supplied long-range missiles, along with Ukrainian drones — to attack about 100 Russian military targets across Crimea. The campaign, named Operation Lunar Hail, largely succeeded in forcing the Russians to pull equipment, facilities and forces in Crimea back to the Russian mainland.

Ultimately, the US military and CIA were allowed to help with strikes into Russia.

The hardest red line was the Russian border. But last spring, to protect the northern city of Kharkiv against a Russian assault, the administration authorized the creation of an “ops box” — a zone of Russian territory within which US officers in Wiesbaden could provide the Ukrainians with precise coordinates. The box’s first iteration extended across a wide swath of Ukraine’s northern border. The box was expanded after North Korea sent troops to help fight the Ukrainians’ incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. The US military was later allowed to enable missile strikes in an area of southern Russia where the Russians staged forces and equipment for their offensive in eastern Ukraine.

Long-standing policy barred the CIA from providing intelligence on targets on Russian soil. But the CIA could request “variances,” carve-outs to support strikes for specific objectives. Intelligence had identified a vast munitions depot in Toropets, 290 miles north of the Ukrainian border. On Sept. 18, a swarm of drones slammed into the munitions depot. The blast, as powerful as a small earthquake, opened a crater the width of a football field. Later, the CIA was allowed to enable Ukrainian drone strikes in southern Russia to try to slow advances in eastern Ukraine.

Political disagreements in Ukraine contributed to the 2023 counteroffensive’s collapse.

The 2023 counteroffensive was meant to build momentum after the first year’s triumphs. But after the partners held war games in Wiesbaden and agreed on a strategy, the plan ran headlong into Ukrainian politics.

The Ukrainian armed forces chief, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, embraced the plan, whose centerpiece was an assault in the direction of the southern city of Melitopol that would cut off Russian supply lines. But his rival and subordinate, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, had his own plan — to impale Russian forces in the occupied eastern city of Bakhmut. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sided with him and divided up the ammunition and forces between two main fronts instead of one. The Ukrainians never did reclaim Bakhmut, and within months, the counteroffensive ended in failure. Russia now had the upper hand.