Loading ...NARRATIVE WHIPLASH : JEFF CHILDERS
Good morning, loyal C&C supporters, it’s Sunday! Which means, it’s time for your bonus edition. What was a bonus it is. Yesterday, the New York Times dished out the biggest narrative pivot in history, completely shattering the existing Ukraine war narrative and replacing it with something much closer to being true. It changes everything. It’s probably also another grenade tossed into the deep state’s bunker. Either way, it is literally unbelievable. But we’ll try. Today’s bonus edition is a special C&C Proxy War edition, just for you
Sometimes I sit down in the morning, with coffee number one warming in the belly, ready to write— but then I discover something earth-shattering in the overnight news that blows all my plans and thoughts right out of the Baltic. It happened this morning. Last night (weekend drop), the New York Times ran a magazine-style, multimedia extravaganza of an article —with chapters!— titled, “The Secret History of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War. “ Secret history is right! They just rewrote the entire story of the war, inverting forever the way the media relentlessly described it from Day One. It’s another massive declass. There’s no retreating back from this.
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I will copy and paste in the comments section
For over three years, the approved narrative was clear: plucky, brave, democratic Ukraine was fighting off the dictatorial Russian bear, armed with nothing but Javelins, courage, and arms-length Western ‘aid.’ But yesterday —and for the first time— the New York Times splashed a glossy, interactive confession, pivoting on a kopeck, and admitted that the U.S. ran the whole thing the whole time —the intelligence, targeting, logistics, even minute-by-minute battlefield strategy— while pretending in public it was Ukraine’s fight.
I’m not exaggerating. At all. Yesterday, the Times teased readers that its fresh exposé would reveal “through a secret keyhole, how the war came to today’s precarious place.” The article breathlessly confessed, “a New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” (Meaning, we believed the Times’ previous misinformation, but I digress.)
How intimately were we involved? “One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations,” the Times reported. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he goggled.
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? The story began like a Tom Clancy thriller. It opened with cinematic flair: a tale of black cars slipping through Kyiv’s shadowy streets, whisking two top Ukrainian generals out of the country — one of them Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi — ferried by British commandos under diplomatic cover, smuggled across the Polish border, and flown by C-130 to Clay Kaserne, a U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany. Waiting for them was Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps and “a star in the clandestine world,” who “proposed a partnership.”
A partnership made in Hell.
The partnership they concocted at Wiesbaden wasn’t “support.” It wasn’t “aid.” It was a joint command structure where the Americans supplied the intelligence, selected the targets, planned the offensives, provided the weapons, and managed the logistics — and the Ukrainians supplied the bodies.
They all agreed. The Times said, “soon, the Ukrainians — intelligence officers, operational planners, communications and fire-control specialists — began arriving in Wiesbaden.” And three dozen “American military advisers,” the Times reported, “were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting.”
“We became a small part, maybe not the best part, but a small part, of your system,” General Zabrodskyi told the Times. He recalled that General Donahue had assured the Ukrainians, “when you defeat Russia, we will make you blue for good.”
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To be clear, the Times thinks Biden’s secret-war-by-joystick was brilliant. Or at least, a brilliant effort. “It was a grand experiment in war fighting,” the Times grandly gushed, tellingly admitting that the Ukraine war was really “a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.” But this was no proxy war in the old-school sense. The proxies in this case were literally taking orders from a U.S. base in Germany.
The United States did everything except the infantry fighting.
Ukrainian soldiers were expected to “fire their howitzers without hesitation at coordinates sent by American officers in a headquarters 1,300 miles away.” Ukrainian infantry were expected “to blindly enter a village behind enemy lines based on intelligence relayed by a disembodied American voice pleading, ‘There’s nobody there — go!’”
They called it a partnership. But it was remote warfare by Playstation. The Ukrainians were the non-player-characters (NPCs) in Biden’s war to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.
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? The “partnership” was protected by lies, from top to bottom. The Americans internally debated what to call Russian targets, and landed on calling targets “points of interest.” A U.S. official explained, “If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not.’”
In other words, it was all clever wordplay. A bureaucratic fig leaf over an active kill chain.
The article proudly described how the arrangement worked. The Americans sent coordinates to Ukrainian troops on the ground, who then aimed their artillery at the “point of interest” and fired — often not even knowing what they were shooting at. General Donahue assured the Ukrainians, “Don’t worry. Just trust that when you shoot, it will hit it, and you’ll like the results, and if you don’t like the results, tell us, we’ll make it better.”
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One time, when an American general called Ukraine’s top commander Syrsky “to make sure he understood the plan, Syrsky responded, ‘I don’t agree, but I have my orders.’”
American orders.
As the war ground on, and the Ukrainians kept losing —under the Americans’ battle plans— the Americans began lobbying for ever more powerful weapons. After all, it wasn’t the Ukrainians begging, as was widely and mind-numbingly reported by the lying media. It was the Americans at Wiesbaden. “To give the Ukrainians compensatory advantages of precision, speed and range,” the Times disclosed, “Generals Cavoli and Donahue soon proposed a far bigger leap — providing High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS, which used satellite-guided rockets to execute strikes up to 50 miles away.”
According to Celeste Wallander, assistant SecDef, General Cavoli persuaded General Milley that “with HIMARS, they can fight like we Americans can, and that’s how they will start to beat the Russians.” In other words, we even picked which weapons the Ukrainians would fight with. To make sure they only used weapons as instructed, “to fire a warhead, HIMARS operators needed a special electronic key card, which the Americans could deactivate anytime.”
Later, when “new intelligence showed that the Russians had now moved critical installations beyond HIMARS’ reach,” the Times earnestly reported, American “Generals Cavoli and Aguto recommended the next quantum leap, giving the Ukrainians Army Tactical Missile Systems — missiles, known as ATACMS, that can travel up to 190 miles.”
In other words, the provocative, reckless, and insane strategy of striking “points of interest” deep inside Russia was an American idea.
The Ukrainians were merely the delivery system.
Biden bought it. “The unthinkable had become real,” the Times bluntly explained. “The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil. Provocative operations once forbidden were now permitted.”
According to the Times, for a while, under full American command and control, Ukraine was winning. So much so that a delighted General Zabrodskyi once gave General Donahue a “combat souvenir:” a tactical vest pulled off a slain Russian soldier. In return, Donahue gave Zabrodski “an ornamental shield — the 18th Airborne dragon insignia, encircled by five stars.”
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It was all fun and games. Then, things predictably veered sideways, and Biden’s Grand Experiment in remote proxy warfare began to unravel.
? It was going according to plan, the Times sadly said, “until it wasn’t.” The problem wasn’t the Russians, the Americans, or even the slowly draining numbers of trained Ukrainian military forces. No, the problem was one spotlight-hogging Vladimir Zelenskyy. With two y’s, for you’ve got to be kidding me, squared.
“Zelensky was hoping to attend the United Nations General Assembly,” the Times reported. “A showing of progress on the battlefield would bolster his case for additional military support. So the Ukrainians upended the plan at the last minute — a preview of a fundamental disconnect that would increasingly shape the arc of the war.”
Translation: Zelensky started making his own decisions —ones not approved by the Americans— and the war began unraveling.
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The Times rolled out a parade of Ukrainian dysfunction. For instance, and unsurprisingly, there was plenty of backroom politicking and infighting among the Ukrainian general staff.
Worse, the Ukrainians kept sending senior citizens to Germany for training. “The new recruits were old — mostly in their 40s and 50s. When they arrived in Europe, a senior U.S. official recalled, ‘All we kept thinking was, This is not great.’” The Americans begged their Ukrainian counterparts to lower the draft age from a minimum of 25 down to 18. The Ukrainians made noises of agreement but did nothing.
The Times described a growing tit-for-tat schism between the sides. “In the Ukrainians’ view,” the Times said, “the Americans weren’t willing to do what was necessary to help them prevail.” But “In the Americans’ view, the Ukrainians weren’t willing to do what was necessary to help themselves prevail. To one American official, it’s ‘not an existential war if they won’t make their people fight.’”
The Times said the Americans started shifting more and more decision-making to the Ukrainians. “We will step back and watch, and keep an eye on you to make sure that you don’t do anything crazy,” General Antonio Aguto —who’d relieved General Donohue— told the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainians promptly did something crazy.
The Ukrainians abused their newfound authority. The 2023 glorious spring offensive became an inglorious summer disaster after Zelensky overrode American generals and delayed the attack to wait for more supplies— giving Russia more time to dig in. Worse, Zelensky override American battle plans and opted for his own watered-down, three-pronged attack— instead of the single deadly thrust designed by US war planners.
Tellingly, the blame for the misguided decisions was laid squarely on the Green Sweatshirt by General Zabrodsky.
“As 2024 arrived and ground on,” the Times rued, “the Biden administration would find itself forced to keep crossing its own red lines simply to keep the Ukrainians afloat.” A senior American official told the Times, “We should have walked away.” A pungent whiff of regret.
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Chapter by chapter, page by page, the Times carefully unwound a protracted, highly detailed, revised history of the war. Action by action, battle by battle, anecdote by anecdote, the Grey Lady unloaded a novella of soldiers’ names, weapons specifications, towns and villages, and play-by-plays of particular battles, over a hilltop here and a slag heap there, along with the internal thought processes of both American and Ukrainian commands.
Though never saying so directly, and never attributing the intel, the Times clearly had unlimited access. Or, as I believe, the article was actually ghost-written by some U.S. intelligence agency with unlimited access.
? I have recounted this astonishing story with only a soupçon of skepticism, attempting to play it as straight as I could. Now allow my skepticism to blossom into full flower.
This was a limited hangout. A massive one. And it changes everything.
The author, Adam Entous, is a long-time deep-state asset at the Times, and before that, the Washington Post. He specializes in this kind of careful narrative pivot, the kind that always, without fail, paints the military and intelligence services as the white hats, bravely managing chaos while everyone else screws things up. The Times’ story never, for example, speculated about the legality of this unapproved war, its reckless nature, or its migraine-provoking disconnect from three years of media narrative enforcement.
The details are meant to dazzle, distract, and convince us that, this time, we are getting the real truth. No doubt much of it is true. Or at least, much truer than the nonsense they’ve been feeding for the last three years.
All in all, it was a HIMARS strike on the narrative that produced fantastic results. The old, agreed-upon Ukraine story just got flipped like an American tank flopping over in a muddy ditch in Bahkmut. Ukraine’s flag in bio defenders are now exposed as the gullible rubes they are.
For three years, the official narrative was pounded into our skulls like a war drum: Ukraine was fighting a courageous, independent war of self-defense, with Western nations politely cheering from the sidelines and shipping the occasional Javelin or HIMARS. Anyone who questioned that story was smeared as a Putin apologist, a conspiracy theorist, or worse.
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And then — poof! — yesterday, the same media that sold that narrative pivoted like a coked-up ballerina and frenetically admitted that actually, the U.S. has been running the whole war from a base in Germany since spring 2022. Whoopsies! Sorry we forgot to mention it.
Much more significant was what the Times didn’t say. It could fill volumes. First, we’ve been lied to the whole time— no surprise there. But second, and probably the hangout’s intended purpose, we are officially learning this was always a war between Russia and America— not Ukraine.
Therefore it is America’s war to settle. Even if they wanted to fully take over, the Ukrainians cannot survive on their own. Without us, who will feed them “points of interest?” Who will hand over targeting data? Who will renew the HIMARS keycards? The Europeans? Please. Don’t make me laugh.
The effects are incalculable. All this new intel completely absolved the Trump Administration. This is Biden’s war. It also undermined Zelensky, portraying him as an unreliable, emotional parasite who disobeyed his handlers. It should infuriate Congress, which was fed the same stupid narrative the rest of us were — and signed off on a humiliating $66 billion for a taxpayer-funded Grand Experiment in remote-controlled warfare.
It should also infuriate Europe.
One of the most glaring omissions in the Times’ glossy, novel-length confession was how conspicuously absent were any European voices. Aside from one anonymous intelligence chief bragging about the Americans being “part of the kill chain,” there wasn’t a single quote from Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, or Brussels.
This wasn’t NATO’s war. It wasn’t Europe’s war. It was Biden’s war — and now that the experiment has failed, as in every prior proxy war, the Americans will skip away, leaving the arrogant Europeans facing the refugee crisis, the reconstruction bill, and a destabilized border.
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The story upended the entire “Ukraine as victim” narrative. Though the Times didn’t come out and say it, it’s perfectly obvious the war was always about Biden’s objectives, not protecting Ukraine’s failed democracy. And they couldn’t resist dropping the tell — explicitly comparing Ukraine to America’s other U.S.-Russia proxy wars: Vietnam, Syria, and Afghanistan.
All of which tees Trump up perfectly. He can now broker a Vietnam-style peace agreement, sidelining the Ukrainians just like the Vietnamese were sidelined.
And, what about trust? Why now should we believe anything the military-intelligence complex and their compliant media lapdogs tell us? Another blow to the deep state.
It whiplashed Democrats. MSNBC anchors are now wearing neck braces. I can’t remember a narrative reversal this abrupt. Maybe the Pentagon Papers, but this feels much bigger.
? In the end, what the Times delivered yesterday wasn’t an exposé — it was a narrative obituary. The Grand Experiment is over. The war is hopelessly unwinnable. Ukraine is broke, broken, and bled dry.
But Trump is clean. He doesn’t own this failure — he outed it.
For months, leftwing critics sneered that Trump would be saddled with Biden’s war and the political damage from its inevitable collapse. Instead, the Times — of all places — just confessed this was never Ukraine’s war, and certainly was never Trump’s war. It was Cabbage-Patch Biden’s war all along, secretly run out of Wiesbaden, managed by American generals, paid for by American taxpayers, and now collapsed under a cluster bomb of exposed lies.
Trump didn’t inherit a war— He transparently exposed it by ripping off the mask. And in so doing, he’s opened up vast new political possibilities— to end it on his terms, correct the narrative, and humiliate the deep state in their own paper of record.
Tomorrow, Elon Musk arrives at CIA headquarters. But instead of fighting that battle, the Swamp creatures are now forced to scramble in a frantic effort at damage control. It’s history-making in real time.
MEANWHILE
Donald Trump ‘Pissed Off’ at Putin, Issues Threat OF OIL TARIFFS
But they will Talk soon and make it all better
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/donald-trump-reveals-why-hes-pissed-off-at-putin-issues-threat/ar-AA1BWEok
“Adam Entous” … (author)
Canadian, formerly with WaPo, then NYT.
Yet another “conspiracy theory” is proven correct!
The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine — The New York Times
This is the untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.
https://archive.is/NLYRh#selection-343.0-343.116