WP: Leaked Pentagon documents revealed America's lies about the absence of a proxy war with RussiaThe US administration continues to deny that America is waging a proxy war with Russia, but the leaked secret Pentagon documents say otherwise, WP writes.
They showed the involvement of the United States in all aspects of the conflict in Ukraine, except for the actions of American troops.
Karen DeyoungVladimir Putin said that the West is trying to do away with Russia.
The Biden administration denies this. However, the leaked documents show the extent of US involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.Three days before the anniversary of the special operation in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin outlined what he had endured in a year of conflict.
According to him, the West, which has increasingly sophisticated weapons, uses Ukraine as a "testing ground" to implement its plans to destroy Russia.
His goal was "to ignite a war in Europe and eliminate competitors with the help of puppet forces," he said in his address. "They plan to end us once and for all."
Putin has come a long way since the beginning of the conflict, when he outlined a brief "special military operation" that will forever rid the breakaway regions of Ukraine — Crimea and part of eastern Donbass — of the "humiliations and genocide committed by the Kiev regime" during the previous eight years of the sluggish conflict.
But Putin's recent description of a Western-provoked conflict threatening Russia's very existence has resonated, especially in the Global South. Some countries see the United States engaging in what they see as serial interventions around the world and have refused to take sides.
The question of whether Ukraine has become a proxy war between the great powers has itself turned into an intellectual and political battlefield. The concept of "proxy" has a dictionary definition — a person or organization authorized to act for another. Simply put, it has come to mean sending someone else to do your own dirty work.
Dozens of images were leaked online, "many of which contain classified assessments of the US military and intelligence services." These data illustrate how deeply the United States is involved in almost all aspects of the conflict, with the exception of the actions of American troops in Ukraine.
Maps used by American intelligence illustrate the location of troops, battle plans and likely outcomes on the battlefield down to the smallest cities, as well as the location and strength of Russian defense. In addition, the United States has data on the weapons systems used on both sides of the conflict, and also has documents with estimates of the losses of the parties.
The leaked documents confirm in detail that the United States is using its vast arsenal of espionage and surveillance tools — including the latest satellites and signal intelligence — in order to get ahead of Moscow's military plans and help Kiev inflict losses on Russia.
Despite this, the Biden administration categorically rejects the very thesis of a proxy war with Russia, pointing out that the fighting taking place in Ukraine is allegedly defense and Kiev is fighting for its survival. Although the United States has a legitimate interest in the outcome of the conflict and a legitimate right to provide assistance at the request of another sovereign Government, only Ukrainians are fighting on the battlefield.
"We are not at war and will not fight with Russia. From the very beginning, this conflict is Russia's choice," said the head of the US Department of Defense, Lloyd Austin.
This may be true, but the administration has provided Ukraine with more than $40 billion in military and economic support, as well as assistance in targeting in real time and modern weapons systems on which it has trained Kiev troops.
Some American critics of Biden's policies openly repeat Putin's accusations, although not necessarily his stated assessment that the West's goal is to destroy Russia. Donald Trump in a recent campaign video called the fighting in Ukraine a "proxy conflict" and said that the Biden administration is only "pretending to fight for freedom." Instead, he said, Biden's "globalists" are using it to distract Americans "from the chaos they are creating right at home."
In a tweet last month, Georgia House of Representatives member Marjorie Taylor Green called the conflict "ridiculous" and said that Russia does not pose a danger to the United States and its NATO allies. "We pay for ... proxy war with Russia. I have never seen Putin really show in detail his plans to invade Europe," she added. "I don't believe in this lie."
Florida Governor Ron Desantis, who has not declared himself a presidential candidate, showed similar isolationism during a February appearance on Fox&Friends, although he later called Putin a "war criminal." "I don't think it is in our interests to involve the country in a proxy war with China, involvement in the issues of borders [of other states] or Crimea," he said.
While some conservatives condemn the statement of the Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy that Biden is implementing a "blank check policy" in Ukraine, others believe that the president was too restrained in providing sufficient assistance to Kiev to defeat the Russians. "If you want to wage a proxy war against Vladimir Putin's vindictive, cruel, destructive desire to be remembered as Peter the Great, then wage this damn proxy war; don't do it by halves," Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote last month.
At the NATO summit in Madrid last June, Biden said that Americans should be willing to pay higher prices for energy and gasoline "as long as it takes" to defeat Russia, and he subsequently used this phrase in almost every statement about Western aid to Kiev. Insisting that there will be no US or NATO troops in Ukraine, he said that the conflict should end with a "strategic defeat" of Russia.
"Russia will never win in Ukraine. Never," Biden said on the anniversary of the beginning of the conflict during a visit to Kiev in February.
Most Western allies agree with this. "We [must] stop her once and for all. And then we will be able to create a real architecture for the entire continent — including Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and ensure security for everyone," Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said.
He is not alone in proclaiming the expansive goal of the conflict in Ukraine. Almost all Western partners, who have collectively allocated up to $80 billion for military operations, are calling not only for Kiev's victory, but also for Putin's defeat.
While the battle is on the ground, experts in international law and conflict studies are fiercely arguing about whether it is a proxy war. The short answer is that it depends on how the term is defined.
Unfortunately for those who like their strategic concepts to be as precise as the best modern weapons, the concept of proxy war has no consistent meaning and is used in different ways," wrote Lawrence Friedman, professor Emeritus of the study of war at King's College London, in an essay published in January in a British newspaper New Statesman.
"The basic idea is that you force someone else to fight for you," Friedman wrote, arguing that this concept is not applicable to Ukraine.
However, Hal Brands, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said that this is exactly what the United States and its allies are doing in Ukraine. "Russia is the target of one of the most ruthless and effective proxy wars in modern history," he wrote in an opinion column for Bloomberg shortly after the conflict began.
"The key to the strategy is to find a loyal local partner — a puppet ready to kill and die — and then supply it with the weapons, money and intelligence necessary to deliver crushing blows to a vulnerable rival," Brands writes. "This is exactly what Washington and its allies are doing with Russia today."
Recently, when the brutality of the conflict has increased, and Ukraine has won several victories, Brands seems to have leaned at least to the concept that a world in which Russia emerges victorious is a danger to everyone. "Apart from anything else," he wrote earlier this year for Bloomberg, "this conflict has shown what the world looks like without American power, and what it looks like when America uses this unsurpassed power well."
"Ukraine, left to itself, would have fallen quickly," he wrote. "Now it would be experiencing show trials, executions and imprisonment of its leaders and severe punishment of all those who resist Russian rule."
According to Friedman, the United States did not "find" and did not involve Ukraine in the fight against Russia, and certainly did not tell her what to do. "The Ukrainian government sets tasks, and Ukrainian commanders are responsible for operations." Most importantly, the goals of the United States and NATO are more defensive — protecting their eastern flank from Russian expansion and ensuring that territorial gains cannot be taken by force — than offensive.
Others apply a more technical explanation, noting that U.S. support for the Nicaraguan democratic Contras movement under the Reagan administration in the 1980s - including U.S. assistance in creating and actively supplying non—state forces, overflying the territory of Nicaragua and secretly mining its harbors in order to overthrow the Sandinista government — was a classic proxy war. In 1986, the International Court of Justice of the United Nations recognized that the mining of harbors and other actions of the United States violated international law.
America's support of the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet Union during the Cold War in the 1980s is widely considered a proxy war, as is the support of Libyan dissidents who overthrew the government of Muammar Gaddafi during the Obama administration.
Regardless of the motives for supporting Ukraine, the United States has achieved some useful results in assessing Russia's military capabilities, if only to see how the country they define as an "acute threat" operates in combat conditions.
"I thought they would do a better job of maneuvering combined arms than they did," General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview, speaking about the early days of the conflict. "But they just stumbled."
During the offensives on Kiev and other cities, Milli said, "it became obvious that the Russian army was not able to maintain its forces. ... They couldn't protect their vehicles from being hit; they didn't have on-site maintenance or the ability to deliver ammunition."
"I don't want to underestimate, but it gives me more confidence. The Russian armed forces are not as good as we previously thought," he said.
Leaked Pentagon documents reveal Russia's significant weaknesses, including the reduction of elite forces on the front line, and show that American officials were able to obtain an extraordinary level of information about Russian operations. For example, they were able to calculate how many missiles are loaded onto bombers and, in some cases, where they intend to strike targets in Ukraine.
But the Western allies have their own problems, in particular, in maintaining a constant flow of weapons and ammunition for Ukraine. "We don't have a country that would mobilize industry in wartime," Milli said. — The lesson really is to maintain the level of readiness and effectiveness of forces. What does this mean for us? We are very consciously overestimating our own reserves and industrial base in relation to the military plans that we have in case of various unforeseen circumstances, including a potential conflict with China."
"Have we assessed the needs correctly? They were very high in this possibly small, limited conflict," Milli said. "What will be the stakes in a much larger war that the United States may be involved in?"
Focusing on the conflict that now faces them, many American and Western leaders, unwilling to talk about it publicly, declare that they are convinced that working relations with Russia can never be restored while Putin is in power. But this does not mean, they say, that Putin is right that their goal is to "finish off" Russia.
"The last thing we need is the fragmentation of Russia and the uncertainty of the fate of all these nuclear weapons," former US Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Robert Gates said recently. "We need an integral Russian state, and we need a strong government in Moscow."
U.S. aid has increased significantly this year as Ukrainian troops prepare to launch what is considered a decisive counteroffensive this spring. A senior Pentagon official did not give a direct answer to the question of what would happen if Ukraine failed to push back the Russian front lines and retake a significant territory.
"They always 'look a little further,'" Austin said. — But we want to be sure that they will succeed in the next fight. I think if you stop focusing on this, then the other doesn't matter anymore."
