The CIA's secret training program[/B] in Ukraine helped Kiev prepare for the Russian invasion, according to exclusive information from Yahoo News.
As reported, the Ukrainian snipers had a problem: the Russian forces in eastern Ukraine were trying to blind them.
As the Ukrainians were looking through their scopes to find their targets, the Russians had begun to pinpoint their position using the glow of glass and were firing high-energy lasers, damaging the snipers' vision.
The two sides were in close proximity. By early 2014, Russia had already invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula. Shortly afterwards, pro-Russian rebels in the eastern Donbas region launched a separatist war against Kiev.
Russian troops soon joined the battle. So did - quietly - the CIA.
As the battle lines in Donbass grew increasingly hard, a small, select group of CIA paramilitary veterans made the first secret trips to the front lines to meet with their Ukrainian counterparts there, according to former U.S. officials.
The CIA paramilitaries soon concluded that, in Russia and its allies, the agency was facing an adversary whose capabilities far exceeded the Islamist groups with which the CIA fought in the post-9/11 wars.
"We learned a lot very quickly," says a former senior intelligence official - including the Russians' laser-blinding techniques. "This sh... wouldn't have happened with the Taliban."
Since Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine last month - which turned a long simmering conflict into an explosive, all-out war - the Ukrainian military has defied predictions of rapid collapse, holding key cities against the Russian advance and inflicting punishment and casualties on Russian troops and materiel.
The Ukrainian army claimed to have killed three Russian generals, including at least one who was reportedly wiped out by sniper fire - Yahoo News could not verify this, regardless of whether the Russian commanders were killed by CIA-trained troops.
At least part of the Ukrainian forces' fierce resistance is rooted in a covert CIA training program "run" from Ukraine's eastern fronts, former intelligence officials tell Yahoo News.
The initiative was described by more than half a dozen former officials, who all requested anonymity to speak freely about sensitive intelligence matters.
As part of the Ukraine-based training program, CIA paramilitaries taught their Ukrainian counterparts sniper techniques:
- How to handle U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles and other equipment.
- How to avoid the digital tracking used by the Russians to pinpoint the location of Ukrainian troops, which they had left vulnerable to artillery attacks.
- How to use covert communication tools.
- How to remain undetected in the war zone while moving Russian forces and rebel groups away from their positions.
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