This is a Yahoo News exclusive, which, interestingly, no one else is really picking up. Could it be due to a responsibility to not broadcast secret material, or something else?
Exclusive: Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion
Ukrainian snipers had a problem: Russian forces in eastern Ukraine were trying to blind them.
As the Ukrainians were looking through their scopes in order to find their targets, the Russians had begun pinpointing their location using the glare of the glass, and were shooting high-energy lasers into them, damaging the snipers’ eyesight.
The two sides were squaring off in close proximity. In early 2014, Russia had already invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula. Shortly thereafter, pro-Russia insurgents in the eastern Donbas region began a grinding secessionist war against Kyiv.
Russian troops soon entered the fray. So, quietly, did the CIA.
As the battle lines hardened in Donbas, a small, select group of veteran CIA paramilitaries made their first secret trips to the frontlines to meet with Ukrainian counterparts there, according to former U.S. officials.
CIA paramilitaries soon concluded that, in Russia and its proxies, the agency was facing an adversary whose capabilities far outmatched the Islamist groups that CIA had been battling in the post-9/11 wars. “We learned a lot real quick,” says a former senior intelligence official — including about the Russians’ laser-blinding techniques. “That s*** wouldn’t happen with the Taliban.”
The Ukrainian military has claimed to have killed three Russian generals, including at least one reportedly eliminated by sniper fire. (Yahoo News could not independently verify whether the Russian commanders were killed by CIA-trained troops.)
The CIA was spending a lot of time in Ukraine training snipers, working to overcome the obstacles presented by well trained Russian troops with high tech capabilities, and more
As part of the Ukraine-based training program, CIA paramilitaries taught their Ukrainian counterparts sniper techniques; how to operate U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles and other equipment; how to evade digital tracking the Russians used to pinpoint the location of Ukrainian troops, which had left them vulnerable to attacks by artillery; how to use covert communications tools; and how to remain undetected in the war zone while also drawing out Russian and insurgent forces from their positions, among other skills, according to former officials.
Sounds like a good operation. It’s certainly helped Ukraine fight back, eh? Perhaps Yahoo News should have scuttled essentially telling the Russians all about the secret program, which they say was verified by many, many unnamed sources. The piece spends many, many paragraphs describing all the training the CIA provided, well worth the read. Good of Obama to greenlight the program (if he even knew about it, since he seemed to find out most things from the media). The job was to train and advise, not engage Russians, to make the Ukrainians more effective. The Trump admin was concerned about the potential for direct confrontation, but, still kept it. But
The Ukraine-based CIA program operated for years, according to former officials. But as the threat of a large-scale Russian invasion became increasingly acute last month, the Biden administration, still feeling the sting of the Afghanistan withdrawal, pulled all CIA personnel out of the country, including war-zone-hardened agency paramilitaries, according to a former intelligence official in close touch with colleagues in U.S. government.
The administration was “terrified of even clandestine folks being on the frontline,” says the former official.
Run away, run away! I wonder of Biden even knew about it till last month?
Read: Good News: Media Exposes Secret CIA Program In Ukraine (which Biden scuttled) »