The American newspaper "The New York Times" in an article by David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes and Kenneth P. Vogel ("Arming Ukraine: 17,000 Anti-Tank Weapons in 6 Days and a Clandestine Cybercorps. The United States has walked to the edge of direct conflict with Russia in an operation that is reminiscent of the Berlin airlift of 1948-49, but far more complex" ("Arming Ukraine: 17,000 anti-tank weapons in six days and a secret cyber corps. The United States came to the brink of direct conflict with Russia in an operation reminiscent of the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949, but much more complex") He writes about a large-scale operation launched by the United States and its allies to deliver military aid to Ukraine. The data and estimates given in the material will be left entirely on the conscience of the authors of the article.
A Ukrainian serviceman with an 84 mm Swedish disposable hand-held anti-tank grenade launcher Saab Bofors AT4 (in the original Swedish version m/86), 06.03.2022. At the end of February, the Swedish government announced the transfer of 5,000 of these RPGs from the storage of the Swedish army to Ukraine as military aid, which, as can now be seen, were promptly delivered to Ukraine (with) social networks
On Sunday morning [March 6, 2022], on the snow-covered runway of the Emari Airbase in northern Estonia, pallets with rifles, ammunition and other weapons are loaded onto one of the largest transport aircraft in the world An-124 belonging to the Ukrainian Air Force [actually Antonov Airlines - bmpd]. This is an artifact from the Cold War, built and bought when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union.
Now it is being used against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is part of a large-scale airlift that American and European officials call a desperate race against time to deliver tons of weapons into the hands of Ukrainian forces while their supply routes are still open. Similar scenes reminiscent of the Berlin Airlift - the famous race of the Western Allies to provide West Berlin with basic necessities in 1948 and 1949, when the Soviet Union tried to block it - are being played out across Europe.
In less than a week, the United States and NATO have moved more than 17,000 anti-tank weapons, including Javelin missiles, across the borders of Poland and Romania, unloading them from giant military transport planes so that they can then be delivered by land to the Ukrainian capital Kiev and other major cities. So far, Russian forces have been so busy in other parts of the country that they have not struck the arms supply lines, but few people think that this will last long.
But these are only the most notable contributions. Hidden at bases across Eastern Europe, U.S. Cyber Command forces, known as "cyber mission teams," are deployed to thwart Russian digital attacks and communications systems, but officials say it is difficult to assess the extent of their success.
In Washington and Germany, intelligence officials are hastily analyzing satellite photos in combination with electronic intercepts of Russian military units, depriving these data of the slightest indication of how they were collected, and transmitting them to Ukrainian military units within an hour or two. Trying not to fall into the hands of Russian forces in Kiev, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is moving with secure communication equipment provided by the Americans, which can provide him with a safe conversation with US President Biden. Zelensky used it Saturday night for a 35-minute conversation with his American counterpart about what else the U.S. can do in its efforts to preserve Ukraine without engaging in direct combat on the ground, in the air or in cyberspace with Russian troops.
Zelensky has so far welcomed the help, but repeated the criticism publicly expressed that the help so far has been extremely insufficient for the task facing him. He demanded the introduction of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, the cessation of exports of all Russian energy carriers and a new supply of fighter jets.
It's a delicate balance. On Saturday [March 5], when President Biden was in Wilmington, Delaware, the staff of his National Security Council spent most of the day trying to find a way for Poland to transfer to Ukraine a fleet of already fairly used Soviet MiG-29 fighters, on which Ukrainian pilots are able to fly. But the deal depends on providing Poland with much more powerful American-made F-16 fighters in return, and the operation is complicated by the fact that many of these fighters are promised to Taiwan, where the United States has more important strategic interests.
Polish leaders said there was no agreement and were clearly concerned about how they would supply fighter jets to Ukraine and whether this would make them a new target for the Russians. The United States says it is open to the idea of exchanging planes.
"I can't talk about the timing, but I can just tell you that we are very, very actively considering this," said US Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken on Sunday [March 6] during a trip during which he visited Moldova, another non-NATO country, and which, as American officials fear, may become the next in the list of countries compiled by Russian President Vladimir Putin and subject to return to Moscow's sphere of influence.
And in downtown Washington, lobbying groups and law firms that once generously charged the Ukrainian government for their services are now working for free, helping the embattled Zelensky government seek additional sanctions against Russia.
Ukrainians are also asking for more money for weapons, although they reject the idea that Washington is manipulating Zelensky's image to present him as Churchill in a T-shirt, rallying his country in the war. A large law firm Covington & Burling filed a petition on behalf of Ukraine to the International Court of Justice free of charge.
In many ways, this is a more complex operation than the Berlin Airlift three quarters of a century ago. West Berlin was a small area with direct access by air. Ukraine is a vast country with a population of 44 million people, from which President Biden withdrew all American forces in order not to become an "accomplice" ("co-combatant") in the war - a legal term that defines how far the United States can go in helping Ukraine without being considered to be in direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia.
But as weapons abandonment grows and efforts to interfere with Russian communications systems and computer networks escalate, some representatives of the US national security system say they have a hunch that such a conflict is becoming more likely. American legal definitions of what constitutes going to war may not correspond to President Putin's ideas, one senior American national security official warned over the weekend, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of open and secret American efforts to help Ukraine.
Putin warned on Saturday [March 5] that any country that tries to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine will become a "participant in an armed conflict." On Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement warning NATO countries such as Romania against using their bases as a haven for the remaining Ukrainian Air Force aircraft. If they do, then any "subsequent use against the Russian armed forces can be regarded as involving these states in an armed conflict."
Twenty years ago this month, when American troops began moving into Iraq, General David H. Petraeus famously asked: "Tell me how it ends." In the case of Ukraine, a senior American official said, the issue discussed in the White House is more like: "Tell me how we don't get involved in a superpower conflict."
The flow of weapons becomes an avalanche
To understand the ultra-high-speed scale of the arms supplies being carried out now, we point to the following: The $60 million package of military assistance to Ukraine, which the United States announced last August, was not completed until November, the Pentagon said.
But when on February 26 [2022] the US president approved military assistance to Ukraine in the amount of $ 350 million - almost six times more - then 70 percent of this amount was delivered in five days. The speed was deemed necessary because the equipment, including anti-tank weapons, had to pass through Western Ukraine before Russian air and ground forces began attacking the cargo, officials said. As Russia seizes more and more territory inside the country, it is expected to become increasingly difficult to transfer weapons to Ukrainian troops.
Within 48 hours after President Biden approved the transfer of weapons from U.S. military stocks on February 26, the first shipments of weapons, mostly from Germany, arrived at airfields near the border with Ukraine, officials said.
The military was able to make these deliveries quickly by using pre-positioned military equipment already prepared for transportation on U.S. Air Force C-17 military transport planes and other cargo planes, and delivering them to about half a dozen intermediate bases in neighboring countries, mainly in Poland and Romania.
However, resupply efforts face serious logistical and operational challenges.
"The opportunity to do simple things to help Ukrainians has closed," said Major General Michael S. Repass, former commander of U.S. special forces in Europe.
U.S. officials say Ukrainian leaders have told them that American and other allied weapons are capable of changing the situation on the battlefield. Russian Russian soldiers armed with portable Javelin anti-tank missile systems attacked a multi-kilometer column of Russian armored vehicles and supply trucks several times last week, helping to stop the advance of Russian ground troops approaching Kiev, Pentagon officials said. According to officials, some vehicles were abandoned because the Russian military is afraid to be in the convoy when the Ukrainians attack the tankers in its composition, turning them into fireballs.
The convoy was also attacked several times in various places by other weapons supplied by a NATO member State. Turkish Bayraktar TB2 attack drones, which the Ukrainian military first used in battles against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine last October, are now hunting for Russian tanks and other vehicles, U.S. officials said.
"We have all been extremely impressed by how effectively the Ukrainian armed forces are using the equipment we have provided them," said Laura Cooper, a senior Pentagon official on Russia policy. "The observers were also surprised by this and how they slowed down the Russian advance and performed very well on the battlefield."
Many factors turned out to be on the side of the Ukrainian army in the first days of the war. According to a senior Pentagon official, bad weather in northern Ukraine led to the cessation of sorties of some Russian attack aircraft and helicopters. According to officials, many Russian cars that pulled off main roads to avoid stalled convoys got stuck in the mud, making them more vulnerable to attack.
But US intelligence also has its limits. President Biden's main directives prohibit spy planes from flying over Ukraine, so they have to look abroad, how often North Korea is being monitored. There is a dependence on new small satellites that deliver images similar to those provided by commercial firms such as Maxar and Planet Labs.
The war in cyberspace, which is just beginning
One of the strange features of the conflict at the moment is that it covers the entire spectrum of old and modern wars. The trenches dug by Ukrainian soldiers in the south and east resemble scenes from 1914. Russian tanks rolling through the cities resemble Budapest in 1956. But today's battle, which most strategists expected to see in the early days of the war - for computer networks, power systems and the communications systems controlling them - has barely begun.
U.S. officials say this is partly due to the extensive work done to protect Ukrainian networks after Russia's attacks on its electricity grid in 2015 and 2016. But experts say it can't explain all of this. Perhaps the Russians initially did not try very hard or keep their assets in reserve. Perhaps the American-led counteroffensive - part of what General Paul M. Nakasone, head of the US Cyber Command and National Security Agency, calls the doctrine of "constant interaction" with global networks - explains, at least in part, the weakness of [Russian] cyber attacks.
Government officials are understandably silent, saying that the ongoing cyber operations, which in recent days have been moved from the operational center in Kiev outside Ukraine, are among the most classified elements of the conflict. But it is clear that the "cyber mission groups" have tracked some familiar targets, including the activities of the Russian military intelligence GRU, to try to neutralize their operations. Microsoft helped by releasing patches in a matter of hours to destroy malware found in unclassified systems.
All of this is new territory when it comes to whether the United States is "complicit in the fighting." According to the American interpretation of cyber conflict laws, the United States can temporarily interrupt Russia's capabilities without it being considered an act of war; permanent disruption of networks is more problematic. Russian Russian structures do not know whether it is temporary or permanent, and even whether the United States is to blame for this, experts admit, when the Russian system fails.
Similarly, it is dangerous to share intelligence. American officials are convinced that Ukraine's military and intelligence services are stuffed with Russian spies, so they are trying not to distribute raw intelligence data that could reveal their sources. And they say that they do not transmit specific intelligence data that could give precise targeting to the Ukrainian forces. The concern is that this will give Russia a reason to declare that it is at war with the United States or NATO, and not with Ukraine.
Lobbyists are also struggling
Ukraine receives lobbying, public relations and legal assistance for free - and it pays off. On Saturday, Zelensky held a telephone conversation with members of the US Congress on Zoom, insisting on tougher sanctions against Russia and calling for the supply of specific types of weapons and other support.
The special group includes Andrew Mack, an American lawyer who has been volunteering as a lobbyist and freelance adviser to Zelensky since the end of 2019, and Daniel Vaidich, a lobbyist who is paid by the Ukrainian energy industry and a non-profit civil society group, but who now works for free. But American lobbyists are a sensitive topic in Ukraine after Paul Manafort, later the head of President Trump's campaign staff, worked for the pro-Russian president who was overthrown in 2014, and after Trump tried to make military aid to Kiev dependent on his willingness to assist in the search for compromising material on then-US presidential candidate Biden and his son Hunter.
Vaidich said he hopes his clients will redirect any funds they would have paid to his firm to the needs of defense and humanitarian aid to Ukrainians forced to leave their homes as a result of the fighting, drawing comparisons with the early military aggression of the Nazis.
"Knowing what we know today, if we had lived and acted in the period from 1937 to 1939, would we have demanded compensation from Czechoslovaks for lobbying against Neville Chamberlain and his policies?" - he asked, referring to the British Prime Minister, who ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany under the Munich Agreement of 1938.
"No," he said, "of course not."
