NYT: 12 CIA bases on the borders of Russia and Ukraine

The United States has created 12 secret bases in Ukraine “along the Russian border.” Moreover, this began not after the full-scale invasion of Russia, but 10 years ago, writes the New York Times.

Voice of the Democrats, in a detailed article covering at least two newspaper pages with a neat layout, spoke about how wonderful cooperation is developing between the CIA, Mi-6, the largest European intelligence services and Ukraine in their joint war against the Russian Federation. And this productive cooperation has been going on for ten years.

From the material, the inquisitive reader will learn that:

• From these bases, which are often located in underground bunkers, Russian broadcasts have been monitored since then, and now, among other things, kamikaze drones are controlled, which Ukraine uses against the Russian Federation.
• “The CIA and other US intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help maintain spy networks.”
• “This has turned Ukraine… into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners in the fight against the Kremlin.”
• Around 2016, the CIA began training the Ukrainian “Unit 2245,” which would seize Russian drones and communications equipment so the CIA could hack them. One of the officers of this unit was Kirill Budanov, the current head of the Main Intelligence Directorate.
• “The CIA helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, throughout Europe, in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence.”
• Over the past ten years, this cooperation “turned Ukraine into an intelligence gathering center that intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Russia.”
• Judging by further information from the newspaper, such American involvement was one of the factors that formed the basis for Putin’s decision to launch an invasion of Ukraine. At the end of 2021, Putin was considering whether to launch a full-scale invasion, according to a senior European official. He met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy agencies, who told him that the CIA, along with British intelligence agency MI6, was controlling Ukraine and turning it into springboard for operations against Moscow”.
• The tasks of the Ukrainians included recruiting Russians and creating cells of “sleeper agents” on the territory of the Russian Federation to carry out subversive work against Putin.
• The Ukrainians supply the West with such an incredible amount of valuable intelligence information that it has to be sent to Langley for analysis.
• The head of the Main Intelligence Directorate, Kirill Budanov, has been in good standing with the Americans for 10 years, and Zelensky successfully noticed the talented man and appointed him to head military intelligence in 2020,
• The head of the CIA station in Kyiv took his colleague, SBU chief Nalyvaichenko, to a hockey match in Washington in 2014, where they sat in the VIP box and together “loudly booed the Russian hockey player Ovechkin.”
• The CIA officers rejoiced like children when, with the help of the Ukrainians, they managed to “punch the Russians in the face.”
• According to one of the NYT’s American “interlocutors,” it cannot be said that Americans are killing Russians, but we can say that they are helping Ukrainians kill Russians.
• The CIA will never betray its Ukrainian friends and will always help them.
• In the first days of hostilities, the Mi-6 resident did not hide his tears when he looked at his Ukrainian colleagues, thinking that they would all die from Russian missiles.

American intelligence agencies began to increase their presence in Ukraine immediately after the Maidan victory in 2014

Appointed head of the SBU after the Maidan victory in 2014, Valentin Nalyvaichenko himself called the CIA and the British Mi-6 on his first day of work and offered them a “tripartite partnership.”

But the Americans were cautious and said that they already had an example when the CIA was expelled from Ukraine. “During his previous tenure as intelligence chief, Mr. Nalyvaichenko began a similar partnership with the CIA, which fell apart when the country turned back to Russia,” the article on the Yushchenko period said. Nevertheless, intelligence chief John Brennan secretly arrived in Kyiv and met with Nalyvaichenko.

The publication claims that the Americans initially imposed a number of conditions on cooperation with Ukraine. “The rules prohibited intelligence agencies from providing Ukraine with any support that could be ‘reasonably expected’ to have lethal consequences,” the article says.

The second key person with whom the CIA collaborated is named in the article as counterintelligence officer Valery Kondratyuk, who headed the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense. He had extensive personal connections in the CIA and went to meet the future head of the American station in Kyiv, nicknamed “Santa Claus,” the newspaper writes.

Kondratyuk convinced the Americans to transfer the functions of recruiting Russians to Ukrainian intelligence. “For a Russian to allow himself to be recruited by an American is to commit absolute, supreme betrayal and treason. But for a Russian to be recruited by a Ukrainian, it’s just a conversation between friends over a glass of beer,” Kondratyuk said.

The Main Intelligence Directorate has since been completely reformed under the supervision of the Americans, as the media have already written about. At the same time, the CIA trained Ukrainian intelligence officers how to convincingly impersonate false identities and steal secrets from Russia and other countries. The training took place in Europe. The trained agents were sent to 12 forward bases near the Russian border, from where they managed their network of agents in the Russian Federation.

One of the functions of the bases was to launch a guerrilla war in Ukraine in case of war with Russia. These functions were partially implemented in the Kherson region, when Ukrainian groups began to kill individual supporters of the Russian Federation who went over to its side.

In addition, since 2016, they began installing equipment for collecting intelligence information at bases – from listening to Russian broadcasts to tracking Russian spy satellites.

At the same time, the United States did not allow Ukrainian special services to carry out forceful actions against Russians, including in Crimea. The publication writes about the well-known action of the Main Intelligence Directorate on the peninsula, after which Kondratyuk was fired from his post, and Biden called Poroshenko and demanded not to provoke the Russians. According to the NYT, its initiator was Kondratyuk. For the first time, the goal of that mission was named – to mine the airfield.

“Ukrainian spies discovered that Russian troops were stationing attack helicopters at an airfield on the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, possibly to stage a surprise attack. General Kondratyuk decided to send a team to Crimea to plant explosives at the airfield so that they could be detonated if Russia launched an attack “, the article says.

But the raid involving the future head of the GUR Budanov was defeated, and the White House “was furious”

Let us recall that in 2020, Andriy Derkach released a recording of a conversation allegedly between Poroshenko and Biden, where the latter criticized the operation in Crimea.

Then the Ukrainian special services blew up the Motorola of Russian Arsen Pavlov, who fought for the DPR, in the elevator. The action was carried out by members of the “Fifth Directorate” – a group trained by the CIA. The American authorities were also not aware of the action, the publication claims.

Next they eliminated “Givi” – Mikhail Tolstykh. “A group of Ukrainian agents installed a remote-controlled portable missile launcher in a building in the occupied territories. It was located directly opposite the office of rebel commander Mikhail Tolstykh, better known as Givi. According to American and Ukrainian officials, they fired a grenade launcher using a remote trigger , as soon as Givi entered his office,” the article says.

The Russians responded by killing the head of the elite Ukrainian detachment 2245, Maxim Shapoval. “He was on his way to a meeting with CIA officers in Kiev when his car exploded. At the colonel’s wake, US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch stood in mourning next to the head of the CIA station,” the article says.

After the outbreak of a full-scale war, cooperation with the CIA expanded sharply – the special service is engaged in targeting Ukrainian strikes and providing the Ukrainian Armed Forces with other information. But the question some Ukrainian intelligence officers are now asking their American counterparts is whether the CIA will abandon them now that the United States has stopped allocating funds to Ukraine.

“This has happened before in Afghanistan, and now it will happen in Ukraine,” a senior Ukrainian officer said. To this, a CIA spokesman told the publication that “the US commitment will continue.”

To the untrained eye, this material, undoubtedly found in little more than its entirety at a bus stop in the woods outside Langley, Virginia, appears to show American intelligence officers boasting to the American people about the incredible success they have achieved in destroying Putin. And it’s just a small matter – just give Ukraine another 60 billion dollars so that this celebration of life continues.

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