Best thing you'll read all weekend, on CIA-HUR cooperation. I'll highlight the key bits below: nytimes.com/2024/02/25/wor…
CIA "put in the plumbing" for a massive partnership with HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence, around 2015, after Poroshenko's election and the appoint of Gen. Valeriy Kondratyuk, formerly the head of CI at SBU, as HUR chief.
One instant payoff was that Ukrainians were more adept at recruiting Russians than Americans were:
Though the tradecraft had to be acquired, as the Ukrainian services were still at a nascent stage of conducting foreign operations. This is great (and hilarious) anecdote about Operation Goldfish:
One constant throughout this war -- and remember, it's a war that began a decade ago -- is that Ukrainians are quick studies. A full relationship solidified in six months because HUR was a treasure trove of actionable intel on Russia.
People have marveled at HUR's capability to penetrate deep inside of Russia. But the capability was always there. What wasn't, until recently, was Washington's enthusiasm for such operations. I've heard Kondratyuk tell this story before -- and how Brennan apologized later.
CIA says "no," so you do it and don't tell them beforehand. Guess who took part in this mission into occupied Crimea? It went sideways, but the Unit 2245 team made it out alive; one operative even killed the son of an FSB Vympel general. The operative's name: Kyrylo Budanov.
The op cost Kondratyuk his job as head of HUR. But it elevated Budanov's career. And HUR didn't slow down. Here we have attribution that they killed "Motorola" and "Givi," two pro-Russian heavies from the 2014/2015 era in Donbas.
More hiccups with the Obama White House, but never mind. Joint CIA-HUR ops continued. They even led to this beaut, in which HUR tricked a GRU officer into giving up intel about Fancy Bear, the GRU hacking unit that leaked DNC, DCCC and Podesta emails to WikiLeaks.
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Quite a lot of revisionism now. But Miller helped lead the CIA team and is a registered Republican. Note, too, the self-evident conclusion that it was not possible to determine the full impact of the influence operation on American voters. Intel practitioners were a lot more careful and judicious than cable news pundits in 2016-2017. nbcnews.com/politics/natio…
One of the sleights of hand Gabbard, et al. are pulling is to conflate in the popular imagination the compromise of “election infrastructure” and vote altering with the hack-and-leak operation targeting the DNC, DCCC and Podesta. The latter was ratified in Mueller’s grand jury indictments of the dozen GRU officers from Units 26165/74455. The former was never alleged in any ICA, although the Senate Intel Committee investigation, overseen by Marco Rubio, noted Russian attempts to “probe” election infrastructure and some successful efforts to exfiltrate voter data from multiple states, albeit without any impact on the election outcome itself. Case in point:
Note ODNI's rendering of the highlighted text. Someone reading only that rendering might reasonably conclude the Russians didn't use any cyber means at all to meddle in the 2016 election -- unless that someone were provided a specific definition of what was being downplayed here. The PDB's highlighted text provides that definition: "manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure." Literally the next sentence attests to Russia "probably" using cyber means to hack into campaign party servers -- which it did, and then leaked such data via Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks, with the intent of influence the American electorate.
Darren Beattie, the MAGA appointee who dismantled the State Department’s counter-disinformation program, “is married to a woman whose uncle has taken several roles in Russian politics and once received a personal ‘thank you’ message from Vladimir Putin.” archive.ph/Q818Z
You really cannot make this up: “The funny thing is just about every Western institution would improve in quality if it were directly infiltrated and controlled by Putin,” [Beattie] wrote in September 2021.
“Beattie has deleted disparaging tweets about Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, having previously claimed his now-boss attended ‘gay foam parties.’” Cc: @SecRubio
Nice story in @DelfiEE on how Russia paid young "protestors" 1,000 rubles (10 euros) each to stand outside eleven embassies of EU nations in Moscow before the May 9th parade: delfi.ee/artikkel/12037…
Payments were likely made with mobile app transfer on-site after the event. A list of those who responded to calls in chat groups was compiled so that the police would know whom not to detain. Screenshots not in the article below but shown to me demonstrate this fee-for-service arrangement:
Despite many central streets in Moscow being closed due to preparations for May 9th, participants were able to move freely from one embassy to another. How do you like that?
I've been emphasizing lately the unintended consequences of Trump's headlong embrace of Russia -- consequences not wholly undesirable for Russia. While it's wonderful for Moscow to see an American president so eager to realign with Russia's strategic interests, and so keen to denigrate and alienate American allies in that re-alignment, smarter figures in the Kremlin realize the hazards of such an embarrassment of riches. A helpful constant in this administration's rush to give Putin everything all at once is that the worst capitulationist ideas are being stress-tested in the media and in the GOP almost as soon as they're invented -- and often *before* the Trump administration has agreed on whether or not they're feasible. One of ideas these is that the U.S. will recognize Crimea as Russian territory.
As you might expect, this was Steve Witkoff's proposal, which is to say it was Vladimir Putin's. Dim Philby isn't so much an envoy as an unblinking relay of Putin's maximalist demands, all of which he presents to Trump as eminently reasonable, if not accomplished facts. (Recall Witkoff's lie that Russia was in full control of the Ukrainian regions it "annexed," regions Witkoff doesn't know the names of, when it is in full control of none of them.) The "Krym Nash" brain fart, I'm told, happened without any inter-agency coordination or buy-in from the principals, least of all Marco Rubio, who is at odds with Witkoff on this and on much else, regardless of the flattering tweets he is obliged to post about his scandalous colleague. Now notice this little nuance in the WSJ story cited above:
"Senior State Department official," indeed. You can almost hear the whirr of the backpedal in that paragraph. Giving up Crimea in a de facto or de jure capacity is a non-starter for Ukraine, as any junior State Department official can tell you. Zelensky could never sell it domestically even if he wanted to (and he doesn't) because the the political blowback would be severe and almost certainly unite opposition to both the policy and his presidency in a way that would make the resistance he experienced over the Steinmeier Formula look coy. (This might even result in a far more nationalistic and hawkish political figure to emerge as frontrunner for the Ukrainian presidency; exactly the opposite of what the Putin-Vance-Carlson triumvirate has been angling for.)
America's "washing its hands" of Ukraine-Russia talks can mean several things. First and foremost, it would mean ending this Witkoff/Rubio fandango to attain (or impose) a Russia-favorable peace deal of some kind, which reportedly would include de facto ceding occupied territory to Moscow. But what else does an American walk-away entail? Some unresolved questions below:
1. It is a near certainty that no additional military aid packages will come from this administration once the Biden-era ones run out. But does that mean Trump will refuse to sell weapons and ammunition directly or indirectly to Ukraine? Does it mean he will actively slap end user restrictions on European countries from buying American kit for the express purpose of donating it to Ukraine? (Even Rubio alluded to Ukraine's right to bilateral agreements with other countries.)
Right now, Germany continues to supply Kyiv with Patriot missiles. Long-range air defense is one of three critical areas in security assistance where Europe cannot yet compensate for the absence of American platforms, the other two being rocket artillery and howitzer ammunition. So new European aid packages featuring U.S.-made hardware seriously matter. Does Trump's pivot to Moscow include his limiting U.S. arms exports to Europe, something that would grievously harm the American arms industry beyond the harm Trump already inflicted on it with his attacks on transatlanticism, NATO, etc.? Between 2020 and 2024, Europe overtook the Middle East as the largest region for U.S. arms exports for the first time in two decades. Now, this government is clearly not above economic own goals, but it'll nonetheless be interesting to see how it sells a new dawn with Russia -- one without a concomitant peace -- as the price worth paying for crippling the American military-industrial complex.
2. Does Trump lift some or most sanctions on Russia in the absence of a peace deal? He might in pursuit of rapprochement, but even here he'll find it difficult to give Putin everything he wants with the stroke of a pen. Some of the toughest sanctions, including those on Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas, are tied to Congressional notification/approval, thanks to Biden. Trump would also face some headwinds from Republicans on the Hill, who would not be happy with sanctions relief in exchange for nothing.
Moreover, Europe gets a vote.
SWIFT, which Moscow wanted its agricultural bank reconnected to as a precondition for a ceasefire, is based in Brussels. EU sanctions legislation is by consent. So far, there has been *no* indication the EU is considering lifting sanctions on Russia, whatever D.C. says, does or agrees to. The opposite, in fact, is the case: the EU has been discussing ways to increase sanctions on Russia in coordination with the UK: archive.ph/qsVfc