“It was no secret that the eyes and ears and brain behind any serious Ukrainian actions were the Pentagon. Here you go, all this has just been confirmed,” the analyst said.
The investigation, however, “is useful” since it “shows the train of thought of the American side.” At some point, Poletaev said, the US realized they couldn’t fully control Ukraine’s actions.
“They understood that the puppet they had on their hand was not entirely controllable. The puppet behaved as it saw fit,” he explained. The analyst emphasized that this dynamic is crucial for understanding the conflict’s progression and is indicative of situations “when the tail begins to wag the dog.”
https://www.rt.com/news/614985-nyt-report-pentagon-ukraine/
One important thing to keep in mind in light of this NYT report, is that it covers only the American side of the involvement, perhaps even as intentional smokescreen to conceal the more vicious British secret involvement in the war.
The NYT article presents only one side of the story, while the correct way to analyze the conflict’s trajectory is to understand that competing forces have exerted a push-and-pull influence at various stages of the game. One of the interesting ways this converges, evidenced in the NYT piece itself, is during the Kursk operation. The NYT piece mentions how the Kursk op reportedly came as a ‘total surprise’ to the American side, which felt betrayed by Kyrylo Budanov’s GUR, which allegedly planned the foray.
A foreshadowing had come back in March, when the Americans discovered that Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the HUR, was furtively planning a ground operation into southwest Russia. The C.I.A. station chief in Kyiv confronted the HUR commander, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov: If he crossed into Russia, he would do so without American weapons or intelligence support. He did, only to be forced back.
In fact, the Americans apparently considered it outright blackmail on Budanov’s behalf:
For the Americans, the incursion’s unfolding was a significant breach of trust. It wasn’t just that the Ukrainians had again kept them in the dark; they had secretly crossed a mutually agreed-upon line, taking coalition-supplied equipment into Russian territory encompassed by the ops box, in violation of rules laid down when it was created.
The box had been established to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Kharkiv, not so the Ukrainians could take advantage of it to seize Russian soil. “It wasn’t almost blackmail, it was blackmail,” a senior Pentagon official said.
But on whose behalf was this blackmail, really?
According to Russian Duma MP Alexander Kazakov, Budanov has long been an asset of the British:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/secret-history-bombshell-nyt-report