U.S. has ramped up special operations personnel in Ukraine

And the world's second-most important story continues to unfold mostly out of the spotlight

There is a much larger presence of both CIA and U.S. special operations personnel and resources in Ukraine than there were at the time of the Russian invasion in February, my colleagues Ken Klippenstein and Jim Risen are reporting. 

The flow of U.S. assets into Ukraine came after personnel and CIA contract assets were rushed out of the country at the start of the invasion, as the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Kyiv would fall in a matter of days or weeks. 

Risen and Klippenstein report: 

When it became clear that the agency’s predictions of a rapid Russian victory had been wrong, the Biden administration sent the clandestine assets that had been pulled out of Ukraine back into the country, the military and intelligence officials said. One U.S. official insisted that the CIA only conducted a partial withdrawal of its assets when the war began, and that the agency “never completely left.”

Yet clandestine American operations inside Ukraine are now far more extensive than they were early in the war, when U.S. intelligence officials were fearful that Russia would steamroll over the Ukrainian army. There is a much larger presence of both CIA and U.S. special operations personnel and resources in Ukraine than there were at the time of the Russian invasion in February, several current and former intelligence officials told The Intercept.

Secret U.S. operations inside Ukraine are being conducted under a presidential covert action finding, current and former officials said. The finding indicates that the president has quietly notified certain congressional leaders about the administration’s decision to conduct a broad program of clandestine operations inside the country. One former special forces officer said that Biden amended a preexisting finding, originally approved during the Obama administration, that was designed to counter malign foreign influence activities. A former CIA officer told The Intercept that Biden’s use of the preexisting finding has frustrated some intelligence officials, who believe that U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict differs so much from the spirit of the finding that it should merit a new one. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment about whether there is a presidential covert action finding for operations in Ukraine.

The pair also report that intelligence analysts badly underestimated the damage done to the Russian military by corruption inside its own military industrial complex. My own guess is that such a critique might have hit a bit too close to home. The graft embedded in our system is perhaps not so extraordinary, but we spend more than $800 billion a year on our defense budget, so we can paper over plenty of corruption and still come out with the most lethal fighting force in world history. Russia spends around $70 billion, so they have less room for error. 

And they now appear to be rapidly collapsing along huge swaths of their front lines. Corruption plays into this, too: When a system is held together purely by self interest, with no higher value driving it, when it starts to come apart, it can come apart in an instant, as everyone positions to save themselves and grab what they can. 

Where this goes next is the most important question facing the world, given the very real risk of global nuclear war. 

The second most important question facing the world in the short term is the threat of a new pandemic. The mainstream press has largely dismissed the possibility that Covid-19 leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, but the scientific community is not at all so sure. Despite it remaining very much an open question, the U.S.-based organization at the center of the question, EcoHealth Alliance, just recently got a brand new grant for high-risk research from the NIH. That came just weeks after they had a previous sub-grant terminated for failure to turn over critical documents and lab notebooks requested as part of an investigation into the origin of the pandemic. My new story on that is here.