March 31, 2025 | Sundance
New York Times – […] [F]or nearly three years before Mr. Trump’s return to power, the United States and Ukraine were joined in an extraordinary partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology whose evolution and inner workings have been known only to a small circle of American and allied officials.
[…] The idea behind the partnership was that America’s close cooperation with Ukraine would compensate for Russia’s vast advantages in manpower and weaponry. To guide the Ukrainians as they deployed their ever-more-sophisticated arsenal, the Americans created an operation called Task Force Dragon.
The secret center of the partnership was at the U.S. Army garrison in Wiesbaden, Germany. Each morning, U.S. and Ukrainian military officers set targeting priorities — Russian units, pieces of equipment or infrastructure. American and coalition intelligence officers searched satellite imagery, radio emissions and intercepted communications to find Russian positions. Task Force Dragon then gave the Ukrainians the coordinates so they could shoot at them.
The motive is clear for the New York Times to outline how the CIA is operating inside Ukraine to target the Russian Federation.
The operatives who leak to the NYT want distance between Trump and Putin. This admission of CIA involvement puts Trump in an awkward place.
The awkwardness expands, when you understand how the CIA is authorized to conduct these operations. The President, Biden, signed a “finding memo,” authorizing the CIA to conduct missile strikes into the Russian Federation.
Senator Marco Rubio as SSCI vice-chair and a Gang of Eight member, was ‘read in’ to that CIA authorization.
Senator Rubio is now Secretary of State facing Sergey Lavrov, and the Russians know exactly how these things are done.
On one hand, the NYT article spills the beans and informs the public. On the other hand, their reason for purposefully spilling the beans is to create a problem for Trump and Rubio, and possibly between Trump and Rubio.
It makes sense now why Secretary of State Rubio was the first Trump official to publicly say the United States was in a proxy war against Russia using Ukraine as the justification.
On the upside, this creates an opportunity for President Trump to distance himself from the prior administration and withdraw all CIA operatives and admitted/revealed U.S. military boots on the ground in Ukraine.
President Trump could use this revelation, now public and widespread, to reset the U.S-Ukraine dynamic and withdraw all elements of prior Biden authorization from the conflict.
Will he?