Waging war by sponsorship, without losing soldiers, is not without risk. The commitment of the United States behind Ukraine is now well established. The surprise trip to this country, Sunday, May 8, of Jill Biden illustrated it symbolically. The wife of the American president met that of Volodymyr Zelensky, Olena Zelenska, in the city of Ouzhhorod, near the Slovak border. But, behind the political gestures and the regular announcements of new deliveries of military equipment by Washington, there is also an invisible war. The general public does not know the extent of intelligence sharing with Ukraine. For several months, thanks to its technological capabilities, the Pentagon has helped protect Ukrainian forces from enemy fire and helped them better target Russian positions.
From there to speak of direct implication in the attacks against Russia? Washington refutes any idea of co-belligerence. However, the distinctions become more blurred as one moves from theory to practice. the Moscow, flagship of the Russian fleet, would it have taken on water without American intelligence? The firing of a Neptune missile was certainly triggered by the Ukrainians, inflicting a humiliation on the Russian army. But on May 6, the Washington Post affirmed that this success would not have been possible without the prior contribution of the United States. Of what nature? Voluntary fog.
“Ukraine combines the information we and others provide with the intelligence it gathers itself, and they make their own decisions,” Defense Department spokesman John Kirby said. The latter responded, on May 5, to another revelation from the New York Times. According to the daily, the American army would have made it possible to locate and kill a dozen Russian generals. A spectacular figure. In Washington, the National Security Council announced that the presentation of the New York Times was « irresponsible » and misleading. The United States would not provide any information on the movements of senior Russian officers.
The sometimes surprising zeal of Joe Biden
This succession of revelations is not unanimous and risks accentuating Russian exasperation. Joe Biden even had to call the officials of the services concerned and the army to order. Coordinated or spontaneous, it betrays the unmentionable euphoria that seized part of the “blob”, the nickname given to the small circle of experts in foreign policy, with consensual views, beyond partisan lines. The war launched in Ukraine by Russia on February 24 is of great moral clarity, with an aggressor and an attacked. But this context and the escalation of deliveries of military equipment to kyiv (3.7 billion dollars) do not erase the questions about American strategy.
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