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[–><!–>On a spring morning two months after Vladimir Putin’s invading armies marched into Ukraine, a convoy of unmarked cars slid up to a Kyiv street corner and collected two middle-aged men in civilian clothes.–><!–>
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–>Building Trust — and a Killing Machine<!–>
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U.S. & Allies
Ukraine
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[–><!–>In mid-April 2022, about two weeks before the Wiesbaden meeting, American and Ukrainian naval officers were on a routine intelligence-sharing call when something unexpected popped up on their radar screens. According to a former senior U.S. military officer, “The Americans go: ‘Oh, that’s the Moskva!’ The Ukrainians go: ‘Oh my God. Thanks a lot. Bye.’”–><!–>
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[–><!–>At the heart of the partnership were two generals — the Ukrainian, Zabrodskyi, and the American, Donahue.–><!–>
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[–><!–>Soon the Ukrainians, nearly 20 in all — intelligence officers, operational planners, communications and fire-control specialists — began arriving in Wiesbaden. Every morning, officers recalled, the Ukrainians and Americans gathered to survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets. The priority lists were then handed over to the intelligence fusion center, where officers analyzed streams of data to pinpoint the targets’ locations.–><!–>
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[–><!–>The way the system worked, Task Force Dragon would tell the Ukrainians where Russians were positioned. But to protect intelligence sources and methods from Russian spies, it would not say how it knew what it knew. All the Ukrainians would see on a secure cloud were chains of coordinates, divided into baskets — Priority 1, Priority 2 and so on. As General Zabrodskyi remembers it, when the Ukrainians asked why they should trust the intelligence, General Donahue would say: “Don’t worry about how we found out. Just trust that when you shoot, it will hit it, and you’ll like the results, and if you don’t like the results, tell us, we’ll make it better.”–><!–>
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[–><!–>The system went live in May. The inaugural target would be a radar-equipped armored vehicle known as a Zoopark, which the Russians could use to find weapons systems like the Ukrainians’ M777s. The fusion center found a Zoopark near Russian-occupied Donetsk, in Ukraine’s east.–><!–>
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[–><!–>The M777s became workhorses of the Ukrainian army. But because they generally couldn’t launch their 155-millimeter shells more than 15 miles, they were no match for the Russians’ vast superiority in manpower and equipment.–><!–>
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–>‘When You Defeat Russia, We Will Make You Blue for Good’<!–>
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Ukraine
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[–><!–>At their first meeting, General Donahue had shown General Zabrodskyi a color-coded map of the region, with American and NATO forces in blue, Russian forces in red and Ukrainian forces in green. “Why are we green?” General Zabrodskyi asked. “We should be blue.”–><!–>
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[–><!–>That was the plan until it wasn’t.–><!–>
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[–><!–>Perhaps no piece of Ukrainian soil was more precious to Mr. Putin than Crimea. As the Ukrainians haltingly advanced on the Dnipro, hoping to cross and advance toward the peninsula, this gave rise to what one Pentagon official called the “core tension”:–><!–>
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–>The Best-Laid Plans<!–>
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Ukraine
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[–><!–>The planning for 2023 began straightaway, at what in hindsight was a moment of irrational exuberance.–><!–>
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[–><!–>The “new guy in the room” was Lt. Gen. Antonio A. Aguto Jr. He was a different kind of commander, with a different kind of mission.–><!–>
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[–><!–>Echoing 2022, the war games of January 2023 yielded a two-pronged plan.–><!–>
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[–><!–>Underlying assumptions had been upended. Still, the Americans saw a path to victory, albeit a narrowing one. Key to threading that needle was beginning the counteroffensive on schedule, on May 1, before the Russians repaired their fortifications and moved more troops to reinforce Melitopol.–><!–>
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[–><!–>In late May, intelligence showed the Russians rapidly building new brigades. The Ukrainians didn’t have everything they wanted, but they had what they thought they needed. They would have to go.–><!–>
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[–><!–>The leader of the Mariupol assault, General Sodol, was an eager consumer of General Aguto’s advice. That collaboration produced one of the counteroffensive’s biggest successes: After American intelligence identified a weak point in Russian lines, General Sodol’s forces, using Wiesbaden’s points of interest, recaptured the village of Staromaiorske and nearly eight square miles of territory.–><!–>
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[–><!–>The Ukrainians would not make it to Melitopol. They would have to scale back their ambitions.–><!–>
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Ukraine
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[–><!–>Shortly before Christmas, Mr. Zelensky rode through the Wiesbaden gates for his maiden visit to the secret center of the partnership.–><!–>
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[–><!–>General Zabrodskyi was in the Wiesbaden command center in late January when he received an urgent message and stepped outside.–><!–>
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[–><!–>The Americans were hardly surprised; they had been hearing ample murmurings of presidential discontent. The Ukrainians would chalk it up to politics, to fear that the widely popular General Zaluzhny might challenge Mr. Zelensky for the presidency. There was also the Stavka meeting, where the president effectively kneecapped General Zaluzhny, and the general’s subsequent decision to publish a piece in The Economist declaring the war at a stalemate, the Ukrainians in need of a quantum technological breakthrough. This even as his president was calling for total victory.–><!–>
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[–><!–>The red lines kept moving.–><!–>
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[–><!–>Summer 2024: Ukraine’s armies in the north and east were stretched dangerously thin. Still, General Syrsky kept telling the Americans, “I need a win.”–><!–>
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[–><!–>Provocative operations once forbidden were now permitted.–><!–>
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[–><!–>Mr. Austin and General Cavoli traveled to Kyiv in October. Year by year, the Biden administration had provided the Ukrainians with an ever-more-sophisticated arsenal of weaponry, had crossed so many of its red lines. Still, the defense secretary and the general were worrying about the message written in the weakening situation on the ground.–><!–>
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[–><!–>General Baldwin, who early on had crucially helped connect the partners’ commanders, had visited Kyiv in September 2023. The counteroffensive was stalling, the U.S. elections were on the horizon and the Ukrainians kept asking about Afghanistan.–><!–>
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