Die Trennung: Einblick in die sich auflösende Partnerschaft zwischen den USA und der Ukraine

https://archive.is/4rXS1

archive.today webpage capture Saved from

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/30/world/europe/ukraine-war-us-russia.html

nytimes

The Separation: Inside the Unraveling U.S.-Ukraine Partnership
Adam Entous

By Adam Entous

Adam Entous conducted more than 300 interviews over more than a year with government, military and intelligence officials in Ukraine, the United States, Britain, Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Turkey.

Dec. 30, 2025

The train left the U.S. Army depot in the west of Germany and made for Poland and the Ukrainian border. These were the final 800 miles of a trans-Atlantic supply chain that had sustained Ukraine across more than three long years of war.

The freight on this last day in June was 155-millimeter artillery shells, 18,000 of them packed into crates, their fuses separated out to prevent detonation in transit. Their ultimate destination was the eastern front, where Vladimir V. Putin’s generals were massing forces and firepower against the city of Pokrovsk. The battle was for territory and strategic advantage but also for bragging rights: Mr. Putin wanted to show the American president, Donald J. Trump, that Russia was indeed winning.

Advertising their war plan, the Russians had told Mr. Trump’s advisers. “We’re going to slam them harder there. We have the munitions to do that.” In Washington, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, had been talking about munitions, too, testifying to a Senate appropriations subcommittee that those earmarked for Ukraine by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. were “still flowing.”

Three months earlier, in fact, Mr. Hegseth had, unannounced, decided to hold back one crucial class of munitions — American-made 155s. The U.S. military’s stocks were running low, his advisers had warned; withholding them would force the Europeans to step up, to take greater responsibility for the war in their backyard.

Day after day, then, thousands upon thousands of 155s earmarked for Ukraine had lain waiting on pallets at the ammunitions depot. The American commander in Europe, General Christopher G. Cavoli, had fired off email after email, pleading with the Pentagon to free them. The jam had been broken only after intervention from Jack Keane, a retired Army general and Fox News contributor who was friendly with the president.

But on July 2, as the train approached the Ukrainian border, a new order came in to the U.S. military’s European Command: “Divert everything. Immediately.”

Exactly why the liberated shells had been taken captive again was never explained. In the end, they waited for just 10 days, in a rail yard near Krakow. Yet to U.S. military officers who had spent the last three and a half years fighting to shore up the Ukrainian cause, the interrupted journey of the 18,000 shells seemed to encompass the entirety of America’s new, erratic and corrosive role in the war.

“This has happened so many times that I’ve lost count,” a senior U.S. official said. “This is literally killing them. Death by a thousand cuts.”

A worker handling a 155-millimeter artillery shell, a key munition provided to Ukraine, at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania last year.

Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It was to hold back the Russian tide, perhaps even help win the war, that the Biden administration had provided Ukraine with a vast array of increasingly sophisticated weaponry. The Americans, their European allies and the Ukrainians had also joined in a secret partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology, its workings revealed earlier this year by The New York Times. At stake, the argument went, was not just Ukraine’s sovereignty but the very fate of the post-World War II international order.

Mr. Trump has presided over the partners’ separation.

The headlines are well known: Mr. Trump’s televised Oval Office humiliation of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in February. The August summit with Mr. Putin in Alaska. The furious flurry of diplomacy that led to the Mar-a-Lago meeting on Sunday with Mr. Zelensky, the latest high-stakes but inconclusive negotiation in which the fate of Ukraine has seemed to hang in the balance.

It is still unclear when, and if, a deal will be reached. This is the chaotic and previously untold story behind the past year of head-spinning headlines:

The Ukraine specialists at the Pentagon afraid to utter the word “Ukraine.” Mr. Trump telling his chosen envoy to Russia and Ukraine, “Russia is mine.” The secretary of state quoting from “The Godfather” in negotiations with the Russians. The Ukrainian defense minister pleading with the American defense secretary, “Just be honest with me.” A departing American commander’s “beginning of the end” memo. Mr. Zelensky’s Oval Office phone call, set up by the president, with a former Miss Ukraine.

This account draws on more than 300 interviews with national security officials, military and intelligence officers and diplomats in Washington, Kyiv and across Europe. Virtually all insisted on anonymity, for fear of reprisal from Mr. Trump and his administration.

Mr. Trump had scant ideological commitment. His pronouncements and determinations were often shaped by the last person he spoke to, by how much respect he felt the Ukrainian and Russian leaders had shown him, by what caught his eye on Fox News.

Policy was forged in the clash of bitterly warring camps.

Mr. Biden had left the Ukrainians a financial and weapons nest egg to cushion them for an uncertain future. Mr. Trump’s point man for peace negotiations presented him with a plan to maintain support for Ukraine and squeeze the Russian war machine.

But that strategy ran headlong into a phalanx of Ukraine skeptics led by the vice president, JD Vance, and like-minded officials he seeded at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration. In their view, instead of squandering America’s depleted military stocks on a sinking ship, they should be reapportioned to counter the greatest global threat: China.

A cold wind — what one senior military officer called “a de facto anti-Ukraine policy” — swept through the Pentagon. Time and again, Mr. Hegseth and his advisers undermined, sidelined or silenced front-line generals and administration officials sympathetic to Ukraine.

Against that backdrop, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Hegseth and other subordinates wide latitude to make decisions about the flow of aid to Ukraine. On several occasions, when those decisions brought bad press or internal backlash — as with the 18,000 shells — Ukraine-friendly commentators at Fox stepped in and persuaded the president to reverse them.

Even as Mr. Trump bullied Mr. Zelensky, he seemed to coddle Mr. Putin. When the Russian stiff-armed peace proposals and accelerated bombing campaigns on Ukrainian cities, Mr. Trump would lash out on Truth Social and ask his aides, “Do we sanction their banks or do we sanction their energy infrastructure?” For months, he did neither.

But in secret, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military, with his blessing, supercharged a Ukrainian campaign of drone strikes on Russian oil facilities and tankers to hobble Mr. Putin’s war machine.

Day to day, Mr. Trump was inconsistent. But he was still a deal maker determined to broker a deal — and convinced that, in the calculus of leverage, the advantage lay with the stronger. Both sides fought a war within the war, to shape the president’s perceptions. “They look invincible,” he told aides in May after seeing footage of a military parade in Moscow. Three weeks later, after Ukraine mounted an audacious covert drone operation inside Russia, Mr. Zelensky sent a parade of aides to the White House with his own victory message: “We are not losing. We are winning.”

Yet on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, Mr. Trump kept pushing the Ukrainians deeper and deeper into a box. What he underestimated was the Russian leader’s refusal to budge from his demands.

The origin point of this story was the president’s belief in what he saw as his personal connection to Mr. Putin. On the campaign trail, he had promised to broker peace quickly, perhaps even before taking office. After he won the election, European and Middle Eastern leaders began calling, offering to help smooth the way for talks with the Russians during the transition.

Mr. Trump’s aides knew he was eager to get started, but they were also aware of the shadow that outreach to Russia had cast over his first term. Then, several aides’ undisclosed contacts with the Russians before the inauguration had become part of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump took to bitterly calling it “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.”

This time, his aides decided, they needed official cover.

“Look, we’ve been getting all kinds of outreach,” Mr. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told his Biden administration counterpart, Jake Sullivan. “We’d like to go ahead and start testing some of these, because Trump wants to move quickly.”

And so Mr. Waltz made a request, never before reported, for a letter of permission from Mr. Biden.

A Ukrainian tank that was struck by a drone a few miles from the Kursk region of Russia.

Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times

More on this subject from other reputable sources:

—
– N-tv (C+): [Trump successfully framed?: Experts: Attack on Putin residence was almost certainly a lie by Russia](https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Experten-Angriff-auf-Putin-Residenz-war-ziemlich-sicher-eine-Luege-Russlands-id30188255.html)
– ZDF (A-): [Lavrov: Ukraine wanted to attack Putin’s residence](https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/ausland/lawrow-angriff-putin-residenz-ukraine-krieg-russland-100.html)
– Daily Maverick (B): [Peace hopes dented as Russia says Ukraine tried to attack Putin residence](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-12-29-peace-hopes-dented-as-russia-says-ukraine-tried-to-attack-putin-residence/)
– Berliner Zeitung (B-): [Lavrov: Ukraine attacked Vladimir Putin’s residence with drones – Zelensky reacts](https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/lawrow-ukraine-hat-putin-residenz-mit-drohnen-angegriffen-li.10011968)

—
[__Extended Summary__](https://www.reddit.com/r/newswall/comments/1pxxv92/) | [FAQ & Grades](https://www.reddit.com/r/newswall/comments/uxgfm5/faq_newswall_bot/) | I’m a bot

People can blame Trump all day, atleast he isn’t pretending to support Ukraine like Biden did – was terrified to send weapons in fear of “escalating war”. And to be honest, Obama didn’t want to send any weapons to Ukraine either, Trump was the first president to approve javelin and other weapon sales to Ukraine, which then used to defend itself against the Russian invasion. Democrats held off on aid till the last minute, then it was waaay too late, and EU is whole another beast – massive resources dwarf Russia , but can’t help Ukraine without US… keep waffling around since day one.