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The United States is sending billions of dollars in military equipment to Ukraine, including heavy artillery, drones and anti-tank missiles. Administration officials have publicly listed these contributions, in practice up to the number of bullets. But they are much more cautious when describing another crucial contribution to the success of Ukraine’s battlefield: intelligence about the Russian military.
Information on the location and movements of Russian forces is flowing into Ukraine in real time and includes satellite imagery and reports collected from sensitive US sources, according to US and Ukrainian officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the co-operation.
“The intelligence is very good. He tells us where the Russians are so we can hit them, “said a Ukrainian official, using his finger to imagine a pantomime of a bomb falling on his target.
The United States is not at war with Russia, and the aid it provides is aimed at defending Ukraine against illegal invasion, Biden officials said. But in practice, US officials have limited control over how their Ukrainian beneficiaries use military equipment and intelligence.
This risks provoking the Kremlin to retaliate against the United States and its allies, and heightens the threat of direct conflict between the two nuclear powers.
The administration has developed guidelines on intelligence sharing, which has been calibrated to avoid escalating tensions between Washington and Moscow. Provided to intelligence-level staff at work, management has imposed two broad bans on the types of information the United States can share with Ukraine, officials said.
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First, the United States cannot provide detailed information that would help Ukraine assassinate Russian leaders, such as top military officers or ministers, officials said. Valeri Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, and Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, for example, would fall into this category.
This ban does not apply to Russian military officers, including generals, several of whom died on the battlefield. But a senior defense official said that while the US government has “limited itself to strategic leadership on paper”, it has also chosen not to provide information on Ukraine’s location to the generals.
The United States is not helping them “actively kill generals of all kinds,” the defense official said.
The second category of prohibited intelligence sharing is any information that would help Ukraine attack Russian targets outside Ukraine’s borders, officials said. This rule is intended in part to prevent the United States from becoming a party to the attacks that Ukraine may launch on Russia. These concerns prompted the administration to suspend earlier plans to provide fighter jets supplied by Poland that Ukraine could use to carry out attacks on Russian soil.
The United States has provided intelligence that helped Ukraine sink a Russian warship
US officials have not discouraged Ukraine from undertaking these operations alone.
Ukraine must “do everything necessary to defend itself against Russian aggression,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told a congressional committee last month. He added that “the tactics for this are their decisions”.
Blinken made the remarks after Ukrainian authorities said unexplained fires and explosions against sensitive targets in Russia were justified without taking responsibility for them.
In addition to the limited categories of intelligence sharing, the United States has a rule against providing what officials call “targeting information” to Ukraine. The United States, officials said, will not tell Ukrainian forces that a particular Russian general has been spotted at a particular location, and then say or help Ukraine hit it.
But the United States will share information on the location of, say, command and control facilities – places where Russian senior officers often meet – as it could help Ukraine defend itself, officials said. If Ukrainian commanders decide to strike the facility, it will be their call, and if a Russian general is killed in the attack, the United States would not direct it, officials said.
Not targeting Russian troops and places, but providing intelligence that Ukraine uses to help kill Russians may seem like a distinction. But legal experts say the definition of targeting provides meaningful legal and political guidance that can help the United States demonstrate its non-conflict, even when dumping military equipment in Ukraine and setting off a fire hose for intelligence.
“If the United States provides information on targeting a foreign country and we are closely involved in targeting decisions, we direct those forces and they act as a proxy for us,” said Scott R. Anderson, a former staff member of the department who served as legal counsel. the US Embassy in Baghdad. “This can be seen as approaching the line of actual attack on Russia, at which point Russia can respond reciprocally.
“Focusing on intelligence is different from other types of intelligence sharing for that reason,” added Anderson, who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Ukraine’s sinking of Moscow, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, illustrates how the United States can provide useful intelligence that, while indirect, risks pushing the country deeper into the war.
In April, Ukraine spotted the ship off its coast. The information provided by the United States helped to verify his identity, according to officials familiar with the matter.
The United States regularly shares with Ukraine intelligence on Russian ships in the Black Sea that have fired missiles at Ukraine and could be used to support an attack on cities such as Odessa, a senior defense official said. But the official stressed that intelligence was not “specific information for targeting ships”. The information is intended to help Ukraine build defense. Ukrainian authorities may have decided that instead of hitting Moscow, they should take steps to strengthen defenses around Odessa or evacuate civilians.
“We have not provided Ukraine with specific information to target Moscow,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in a written statement. “We did not take part in the decision of the Ukrainians to strike the ship or in the operation they carried out. We had no preliminary information about Ukraine’s intention to steer the ship. The Ukrainians have their own intelligence capabilities to track and direct Russian naval ships, as they did in this case.
But in the absence of United States intelligence, Ukraine would find it difficult to steer the warship with the confidence needed to spend two valuable Neptune rockets that were in short supply, according to people familiar with the strike.
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The sinking of such an important ship, which had the ability to defend itself against anti-ship missiles, was a humiliation for Russian President Vladimir Putin and one of Ukraine’s most dramatic successes in the war so far, analysts say. In line with intelligence-sharing rules designed to avoid escalating the conflict in Putin’s eyes, Biden administration officials have repeatedly stressed that they did not directly assist Ukraine in the attack.
On Friday, a day after The Washington Post and other news outlets revealed the US role in the Moscow bombing, Biden made separate calls to CIA Director William J. Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a senior administration official, said. The president made it clear he was upset by the leak and warned that it was undermining the US goal of helping Ukraine, an administration official said.
Paul Sone, Ashley Parker and Tyler Pager contributed to this report.
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