At first, the Obama administration’s military assistance was tightly circumscribed. The aid was calibrated to avoid aggravating Moscow, but some former officials believe it put Kyiv in an impossible position, with the U.S. support setting Russia on edge while being insufficient to actually help Ukraine deter or fight an invasion.
“I didn’t think the numbers of Javelins or the things they were talking about weren’t really going to make any big difference, and weren’t going to stop Russia from invading,” said Jeffrey Edmonds, a Russia expert who served on the NSC from 2014 to 2017. “And they weren’t going to change things in the east.”
There was “cognitive dissonance” over the policy, Edmonds said. “Because I understand the moral argument, but I also understand the argument that, well, why would you want to give these things if it’s just going to increase the chances that Russia does something?”
But, partially spurred by Congress, as well as the Trump administration, which was more willing to be aggressive on weapon transfers to Kyiv, overt U.S. military support for Ukraine grew over time — and with it the risk of a deadly Russian response, some CIA officials believed at the time.
Policymakers “would always say, ‘If we do X thing, if we give the Ukrainians X system, how are the Russians going to react?’ And our answer would always be, ‘You can’t look at any one thing in isolation,’” recalled the first former CIA official. “And we might look and say, ‘Well, it’s just a few hundred MANPADs [man-portable air-defense systems] or a few hundred Humvees,’ but it’s missing the point that the Russians are taking all of this stuff in the aggregate, and they’re drawing this picture of this ever-increasing relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine.”
By last summer, the baseline view of most U.S. intelligence community analysts was that Russia felt sufficiently provoked over Ukraine that some unknown trigger could set off an attack by Moscow, the former official said. (The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.)
U.S. military support to Ukraine wasn’t the ultimate driver of Moscow’s decision to invade, according to Edmonds, the former NSC Russia staffer; it was Putin’s desire to resettle “the bigger security architecture in Europe. Ukraine was just the proximate cause of that.”
Some type of renewed Russian assault on Ukraine may have been inescapable, Edmonds said.
“I would never underestimate President Putin’s risk appetite on Ukraine,” CIA Director William Burns said at a public event last December.
But the U.S.’s ballooning military support for Ukraine, no matter how well intentioned, or reflective of American liberal-democratic principles, had become self-fulfilling, “like a snowball rolling down a hill,” even as the danger of Russian attack grew, or this policy itself increased that danger, said the former CIA official.
“We had given all the warnings, all the caveats” on Ukraine to policymakers, said the former official. “And it was pretty clear that U.S. foreign policy, regardless of administration, was just going to keep rolling forward.
“It’s gutting, but it is what it is.”
src: click (Yahoo News, 28.04.2022)
edit: Es gibt aber natürlich auch wieder gute Nachrichten:
Mehr US-Soldaten in Syrien stationiert als bisher bekannt
Das US-Verteidigungsministerium korrigiert seine bisherigen Angaben: Rund 2000 amerikanische Soldaten sollen sich im Land befinden. Zuvor war stets von 900 Einsatzkräften die Rede.
src: click (Die Presse)
Gut, sowas kann bei einer Buchhaltungsprüfung schon mal durchrutschen.
edit2: Unfassbar, die US haben soeben Agency in Syrien eingestanden. Die haben tatsächlich eigene Interessen dort. src: click
