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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. Administrative officials have publicly enumerated these contributions, practically down to the number of bullets. But they are far more cautious when describing another key contributor to Ukraine’s success on the battlefield: information about the Russian military.
Information on the location and movements of Russian forces is flowing to Ukraine in real time, and includes satellite imagery and reports sourced from sensitive US sources, according to US and Ukrainian officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to cooperate describe.
“The intelligence is very good. It tells us where the Russians are so we can hit them,” said a Ukrainian official, using his finger to simulate a bomb falling on its target.
The United States is not at war with Russia, and the aid it is providing is intended to defend Ukraine against an illegal invasion, Biden officials have stressed. But in practical terms, US officials have limited control over how their Ukrainian beneficiaries use military hardware and intelligence.
This risks provoking retaliatory measures by the Kremlin against the United States and its allies, and increases the risk of a direct conflict between the two nuclear powers.
The government has drawn up guidelines for sharing information aimed at avoiding tensions between Washington and Moscow. The guidance given to working-level intelligence personnel has established 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 kill Russian leaders such as top military officers or ministers, officials said. For example, Valery Gerasimov, the Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, and Sergei Shoigu, the Minister of Defense, would fall into this category.
This ban does not extend to Russian military officers, including generals, several of whom died on the battlefield. However, a senior defense official said that while the US government “limits itself to strategic guidance on paper,” it also chose not to provide the generals with location information on Ukraine.
The United States “does not actively help them kill generals of any kind,” the defense official said.
The second category of prohibited intelligence exchanges is any information that would help Ukraine attack Russian targets outside Ukraine’s borders, officials said. This rule is partly intended to prevent the United States from becoming involved in attacks that Ukraine might launch into Russia. Those concerns prompted the government to shelve previous plans to deploy fighter jets, supplied by Poland, that Ukraine could have used to launch attacks on Russian soil.
The US provided information that helped Ukraine sink a Russian warship
US officials have not stopped Ukraine from conducting these operations itself.
Ukraine should “do whatever is necessary to defend itself against Russian aggression,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a congressional committee last month. He added that “the tactics for doing this are their choices.”
Blinken made his remarks after Ukrainian officials said unexplained fires and explosions against sensitive targets in Russia were warranted without taking responsibility.
In addition to the restricted categories of intelligence sharing, the United States has a rule that prohibits providing what officials call “targeted information” to Ukraine. The United States will not tell Ukrainian forces that a specific Russian general has been sighted in a specific location and then tell or help Ukraine defeat him.
But the United States would share information about the location of, for example, command and control facilities – places where Russian senior officers often stay – as it could help Ukraine in its own defence, officials said. If Ukrainian commanders decided to attack the facility, that would be their decision, and if a Russian general had been killed in the attack, the United States would not have targeted him, officials said.
Not targeting Russian troops and locations, but providing intelligence that Ukraine is using to kill Russians may seem like a distinction without distinction. But legal experts said the definition of targeting offers useful legal and political guidance that can help the United States demonstrate that it’s not a party to the conflict, even as it pours military gear into Ukraine and turns on an intelligence agency fire hose.
“When the US is providing targeting information to a foreign party and we are closely involved in targeting decisions, we direct those forces and they act on our behalf,” said Scott R. Anderson, a former state department official who is the legal counsel for the US Embassy in Baghdad was. “This could be viewed as approaching the limit of an actual attack on Russia, at which point Russia could arguably respond in a reciprocal manner.”
“For this reason, targeting information is different from other types of information sharing,” added Anderson, who is now a Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Ukraine’s sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, shows how the United States can provide helpful intelligence that, albeit indirectly, risks drawing the country deeper into the war.
In April, Ukraine spotted the ship off its coast. Information provided by the United States helped confirm her identity, according to officials familiar with the matter.
The United States routinely exchanges information with Ukraine about Russian ships in the Black Sea that have fired missiles at Ukraine and could be used in support of an attack on cities like Odessa, a senior defense official said. However, the official emphasized that intelligence information is not “specific target information on ships”. The information is intended to help Ukraine build a defense. Ukrainian officials could have decided that instead of attacking the Moscow River, they should take steps to increase protection around Odessa or evacuate civilians.
“We have not provided Ukraine with specific targeting information for the Moscow River,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in a written statement. “We were not involved in the Ukrainians’ decision to attack the ship, nor in the operation they conducted. We had no prior knowledge of Ukraine’s intention to attack the ship. The Ukrainians have their own intelligence capabilities to track and attack Russian naval ships, as they did in this case.”
But without the intelligence from the United States, Ukraine would have struggled to attack the warship with the confidence to use up two valuable Neptune missiles that were in short supply, according to people familiar with the attack.
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The sinking of such an important ship capable of defending itself against anti-ship missiles was a humiliation for Russian President Vladimir Putin and one of Ukraine’s most dramatic successes in the war to date, analysts said. In accordance with intelligence-sharing rules, which Putin believes are intended to avoid escalating the conflict, Biden administration officials have repeatedly stressed that they did not directly support Ukraine in the attack.
On Friday, the day after the Washington Post and other news organizations revealed the US role in the Moscow strike, Biden called CIA Director William J. Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a senior Administrative Officers, named separately at. The president made it clear he was upset about the leaks and warned they would undermine the US goal of helping Ukraine, the government official said.
Paul Sonne, Ashley Parker, and Tyler Pager contributed to this report.