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But a New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.
An early proof of concept was a campaign against one of Russia’s most-feared battle groups, the 58th Combined Arms Army. In mid-2022, using American intelligence and targeting information, the Ukrainians unleashed a rocket barrage at the headquarters of the 58th in the Kherson region, killing generals and staff officers inside. Again and again, the group set up at another location; each time, the Americans found it and the Ukrainians destroyed it.
Farther south, the partners set their sights on the Crimean port of Sevastopol, where the Russian Black Sea Fleet loaded missiles destined for Ukrainian targets onto warships and submarines. At the height of Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensive, a predawn swarm of maritime drones, with support from the Central Intelligence Agency, attacked the port, damaging several warships and prompting the Russians to begin pulling them back.
But ultimately the partnership strained — and the arc of the war shifted — amid rivalries, resentments and diverging imperatives and agendas.
The Ukrainians sometimes saw the Americans as overbearing and controlling — the prototypical patronizing Americans. The Americans sometimes couldn’t understand why the Ukrainians didn’t simply accept good advice.
On a tactical level, the partnership yielded triumph upon triumph. Yet at arguably the pivotal moment of the war — in mid-2023, as the Ukrainians mounted a counteroffensive to build victorious momentum after the first year’s successes — the strategy devised in Wiesbaden fell victim to the fractious internal politics of Ukraine: The president, Volodymyr Zelensky, versus his military chief (and potential electoral rival), and the military chief versus his headstrong subordinate commander. When Mr. Zelensky sided with the subordinate, the Ukrainians poured vast complements of men and resources into a finally futile campaign to recapture the devastated city of Bakhmut. Within months, the entire counteroffensive ended in stillborn failure.
The partnership operated in the shadow of deepest geopolitical fear — that Mr. Putin might see it as breaching a red line of military engagement and make good on his often-brandished nuclear threats. The story of the partnership shows how close the Americans and their allies sometimes came to that red line, how increasingly dire events forced them — some said too slowly — to advance it to more perilous ground and how they carefully devised protocols to remain on the safe side of it.
Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited. American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting. Military and C.I.A. officers in Wiesbaden helped plan and support a campaign of Ukrainian strikes in Russian-annexed Crimea. Finally, the military and then the C.I.A. received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.
In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.
It was also a grand experiment in war fighting, one that would not only help the Ukrainians but reward the Americans with lessons for any future war.
Inside the U.S. European Command, this process gave rise to a fine but fraught linguistic debate: Given the delicacy of the mission, was it unduly provocative to call targets “targets”?
Some officers thought “targets” was appropriate. Others called them “intel tippers,” because the Russians were often moving and the information would need verification on the ground.
The debate was settled by Maj. Gen. Timothy D. Brown, European Command’s intelligence chief: The locations of Russian forces would be “points of interest.” Intelligence on airborne threats would be “tracks of interest.”
“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,’” one U.S. official explained.
The way the system worked, Task Force Dragon would tell the Ukrainians where Russians were positioned. But to protect intelligence sources and methods from Russian spies, it would not say how it knew what it knew. All the Ukrainians would see on a secure cloud were chains of coordinates, divided into baskets — Priority 1, Priority 2 and so on. As General Zabrodskyi remembers it, when the Ukrainians asked why they should trust the intelligence, General Donahue would say: “Don’t worry about how we found out. 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.”
At the White House, Mr. Biden and his advisers weighed that argument against fears that pushing the Russians would only lead Mr. Putin to panic and widen the war. When the generals requested HIMARS, one official recalled, the moment felt like “standing on that line, wondering, if you take a step forward, is World War III going to break out?” And when the White House took that step forward, the official said, Task Force Dragon was becoming “the entire back office of the war.”
Mr. Zelensky was hoping to attend the mid-September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. A showing of progress on the battlefield, he and his advisers believed, would bolster his case for additional military support. So they upended the plan at the last minute — a preview of a fundamental disconnect that would increasingly shape the arc of the war.
The Ukrainians were already exerting pressure on the ground. And the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.
That same month, U.S. intelligence overheard Russia’s Ukraine commander, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, talking about indeed doing something desperate: using tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the Ukrainians from crossing the Dnipro and making a beeline to Crimea.
Until that moment, U.S. intelligence agencies had estimated the chance of Russia’s using nuclear weapons in Ukraine at 5 to 10 percent. Now, they said, if the Russian lines in the south collapsed, the probability was 50 percent.
The planning for 2023 began straightaway, at what in hindsight was a moment of irrational exuberance.
Ukraine controlled the west banks of the Oskil and Dnipro rivers. Within the coalition, the prevailing wisdom was that the 2023 counteroffensive would be the war’s last: The Ukrainians would claim outright triumph, or Mr. Putin would be forced to sue for peace.
“We’re going to win this whole thing,” Mr. Zelensky told the coalition, a senior American official recalled.
To accomplish this, General Zabrodskyi explained as the partners gathered in Wiesbaden in late autumn, General Zaluzhny was once again insisting that the primary effort be an offensive toward Melitopol, to strangle Russian forces in Crimea — what he believed had been the great, denied opportunity to deal the reeling enemy a knockout blow in 2022.
And once again, some American generals were preaching caution.
At the Pentagon, officials worried about their ability to supply enough weapons for the counteroffensive; perhaps the Ukrainians, in their strongest possible position, should consider cutting a deal. When the Joint Chiefs chairman, General Milley, floated that idea in a speech, many of Ukraine’s supporters (including congressional Republicans, then overwhelmingly supportive of the war) cried appeasement.
Several weeks later, at a meeting in Kyiv, the Ukrainian commander had locked General Cavoli in a Defense Ministry kitchen and, vaping furiously, made one final, futile plea. “He was caught between two fires, the first being the president and the second being the partners,” said one of his aides.
The red lines kept moving.
There were the ATACMS, which arrived secretly in early spring, so the Russians wouldn’t realize Ukraine could now strike across Crimea.
And there were the SMEs. Some months earlier, General Aguto had been allowed to send a small team, about a dozen officers, to Kyiv, easing the prohibition on American boots on Ukrainian ground. So as not to evoke memories of the American military advisers sent to South Vietnam in the slide to full-scale war, they would be known as “subject matter experts.” Then, after the Ukrainian leadership shake-up, to build confidence and coordination, the administration more than tripled the number of officers in Kyiv, to about three dozen; they could now plainly be called advisers, though they would still be confined to the Kyiv area.
The Russian offensive exposed a fundamental asymmetry: The Russians could support their troops with artillery from just across the border; the Ukrainians couldn’t shoot back using American equipment or intelligence.
Yet with peril came opportunity. The Russians were complacent about security, believing the Americans would never let the Ukrainians fire into Russia. Entire units and their equipment were sitting unsheltered, largely undefended, in open fields.
The Ukrainians asked for permission to use U.S.-supplied weapons across the border. What’s more, Generals Cavoli and Aguto proposed that Wiesbaden help guide those strikes, as it did across Ukraine and in Crimea — providing points of interest and precision coordinates.
The White House was still debating these questions when, on May 10, the Russians attacked.
This became the moment the Biden administration changed the rules of the game. Generals Cavoli and Aguto were tasked with creating an “ops box” — a zone on Russian soil in which the Ukrainians could fire U.S.-supplied weapons and Wiesbaden could support their strikes.
At first they advocated an expansive box, to encompass a concomitant threat: the glide bombs — crude Soviet-era bombs transformed into precision weapons with wings and fins — that were raining terror on Kharkiv. A box extending about 190 miles would let the Ukrainians use their new ATACMS to hit glide-bomb fields and other targets deep inside Russia. But Mr. Austin saw this as mission creep: He did not want to divert ATACMS from Lunar Hail.
Instead, the generals were instructed to draw up two options — one extending about 50 miles into Russia, standard HIMARS range, and one nearly twice as deep. Ultimately, against the generals’ recommendation, Mr. Biden and his advisers chose the most limited option — but to protect the city of Sumy as well as Kharkiv, it followed most of the country’s northern border, encompassing an area almost as large as New Jersey. The C.I.A. was also authorized to send officers to the Kharkiv region to assist their Ukrainian counterparts with operations inside the box.
The unthinkable had become real. The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.
Longstanding policy barred the C.I.A. from providing intelligence on targets on Russian soil. So the administration would let the C.I.A. request “variances,” carve-outs authorizing the spy agency to support strikes inside Russia to achieve specific objectives.
Mr. Austin would later recount how he contemplated this manpower mismatch as he looked out the window of his armored S.U.V. snaking through the Kyiv streets. He was struck, he told aides, by the sight of so many men in their 20s, almost none of them in uniform. In a nation at war, he explained, men this age are usually away, in the fight.
Mr. Zelensky had already taken a small step, lowering the draft age to 25. Still, the Ukrainians hadn’t been able to fill existing brigades, let alone build new ones.
Mr. Austin pressed Mr. Zelensky to take the bigger, bolder step and begin drafting 18-year-olds. To which Mr. Zelensky shot back, according to an official who was present, “Why would I draft more people? We don’t have any equipment to give them.”
To one American official, though, it’s “not an existential war if they won’t make their people fight.”
General Baldwin, who early on had crucially helped connect the partners’ commanders, had visited Kyiv in September 2023. The counteroffensive was stalling, the U.S. elections were on the horizon and the Ukrainians kept asking about Afghanistan.
The Ukrainians, he recalled, were terrified that they, too, would be abandoned. They kept calling, wanting to know if America would stay the course, asking: “What will happen if the Republicans win the Congress? What is going to happen if President Trump wins?’”
In his last, lame-duck weeks, Mr. Biden made a flurry of moves to stay the course, at least for the moment, and shore up his Ukraine project.
He crossed his final red line — expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia — after North Korea sent thousands of troops to help the Russians dislodge the Ukrainians from Kursk. One of the first U.S.-supported strikes targeted and wounded the North Korean commander, Col. Gen. Kim Yong Bok, as he met with his Russian counterparts in a command bunker.
The administration also authorized Wiesbaden and the C.I.A. to support long-range missile and drone strikes into a section of southern Russia used as a staging area for the assault on Pokrovsk, and allowed the military advisers to leave Kyiv for command posts closer to the fighting.
In December, General Donahue got his fourth star and returned to Wiesbaden as commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa. He had been the last American soldier to leave in the chaotic fall of Kabul. Now he would have to navigate the new, unsure future of Ukraine.
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A dachshund lost in Australia is still alive after more than a year, and still apparently wearing her pink collar. But she has proved elusive to recapture.
The tale begins in November 2023 when a couple took their pet miniature dachshund, Valerie, to Kangaroo Island off the coast of Adelaide. But Valerie escaped from her pen and rushed off into the bush.
The couple scrapped their plans and searched for their pet for five days with the help of locals before finally giving up and returning to their home in New South Wales.
“It was like finding a needle in a haystack,” Valerie’s owner Josh Fishlock told the “Today” show in Australia.
(Yes, the Australian island where Valerie went missing is called Kangaroo Island. Its Aboriginal name is Karta Pintingga, meaning “island of the dead.” Given Valerie’s predicament, we’re going to stick with Kangaroo Island.)
Now, more than a year after Valerie’s disappearance, hope has sprung. “Based on firsthand accounts and video evidence, we now know that Valerie is alive,” Kangala Wildlife Rescue said in a statement on social media last week. She was spotted about 10 miles from where she disappeared, in Stokes Bay, and was identified, in part, by her pink collar.
Efforts are now underway to rescue the dachshund, but that has proved difficult. “She runs at the first sign of humans or vehicles and despite the best efforts of dedicated island locals, Valerie has been impossible to catch,” the wildlife rescue said.
“We are using surveillance and various trapping and luring methods in the area she was last seen to try and bring her home,” the statement said. “This is a tiny dog in a huge area, and we will need help from the public to report any sightings and a lot of luck.”
On Thursday, a man who identified himself as “Jared, one of the Kangala team members that’s involved in the rescue mission for Valerie,” offered a heartening update in a video update: “We have seen her. We’ve managed to narrow down the search area to one specific point.”
“We were initially skeptical, but we kept getting more and more sightings,” Mr. Fishlock told “Today.”
Her other owner, Georgia Gardner, told The Guardian: “She was not a very outside, rough-and-tough dog. To think that she even went one night outside in the rain, oh my gosh. To think that she’s gone a year and a half is incredible.”
While the first image of a dachshund might be of a cute little wiener dog, the breed has some real survival skills.
“Dachshunds aren’t built for distance running, leaping, or strenuous swimming, but otherwise these tireless hounds are game for anything,” the American Kennel Club says in its description of the breed. “Bred to be an independent hunter of dangerous prey, they can be brave to the point of rashness.”
The wildlife rescue said, “We hope to be able to update you all with an amazing outcome.”
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On Saturday, Hamas gunmen paraded three skeletally thin Israeli hostages for a propaganda video in which they were forced to thank their captors before their handover to the Red Cross. One of the hostages, Eli Sharabi, returned to Israel to learn that his wife, Lianne, and their teenage daughters, Noiya and Yahel, had been murdered on Oct. 7.
It was heartbreaking and grotesque. Other hostages are reported by The Times to have spent their captivity bound, tortured, deprived of food and denied medical care for shrapnel wounds and other injuries. Some have barely seen sunlight in nearly 500 days.
By Monday, Hamas had declared that it was postponing the release of additional hostages “until further notice,” claiming Israeli violations of a six-week truce agreement. Hours later, President Trump warned that “all hell is going to break out” if Hamas didn’t release all remaining hostages by noon on Saturday. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel warned that Israel would resume “intense fighting” if hostages were not released by that time. Trump also warned Jordan and Egypt that he would cut off American aid if they refused to accept Gazan refugees, adding that those refugees may not have the right to return to Gaza.
The president’s threats are long overdue. Anyone who thinks that Hamas can be allowed to continue to torture Israelis, tyrannize Palestinians and remain the ruling power in Gaza, free to someday set fire to the region again, needs to be disabused of the idea. That goes especially for Arab states like Qatar and Egypt that depend on U.S. protection and largess even as they have harbored Hamas leaders or failed to stop the group from arming itself to the teeth before Oct. 7.
The administration should give the region a choice between two possible options. One is that Gazan civilians leave the territory, principally to neighboring Egypt, so that Hamas and its labyrinth of tunnels can more thoroughly be destroyed by a renewed Israeli offensive without risk to innocent life. Israel should not reoccupy the Strip, and the return of those civilians to Gaza must never be closed off. But it should also depend on those civilians forswearing allegiance to Hamas, along with a de-Hamasification program for Gaza that bars former Hamas members from any positions of power and that publicly exposes their apparatus of repression against ordinary Gazans.
The second option is that Hamas’s chieftains be pressured by their patrons into exile, so that Gazans might rebuild their lives under better leadership. This is what happened in 1982 when the Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat and his minions were forced out of Lebanon to exile in Tunis. Exile is much better than Hamas’s cruel rulers deserve, but it’s an option that spares a lot of bloodshed.
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A vigilante phenomenon has been playing out on the open web for almost a decade: Content creators in the U.S. pose as minors on dating apps and websites, then target the people who message them. Many of these vigilantes, commonly known as pedophile hunters, were inspired by “To Catch a Predator,” a popular television series that ran until 2007. The “hunters” have copied the show’s format, exposing their targets on social media.
But in the past two years, a growing number have gone a step further and violently attacked the targets in their videos, a New York Times analysis has found.
In one of the most brutal cases, a masked man who referred to himself online as “realjuujika” allegedly broke into the home of a 73-year-old man in Pennsylvania last year, then tied him up and beat him with a hammer.
Realjuujika, at one point, turns to the man and says, “You will probably die tonight.” When the footage was streamed online weeks later, viewers cheered the violence.
The man was hospitalized, according to police reports, and needed surgery to stop the bleeding in his brain. The attack was part of a small, but disturbing trend that has spread on social media and attracted millions of viewers.
This content is popular in online circles that feature crude and hypermasculine material intended to cater to young men. Some hunters have hundreds of thousands of followers, and claim to make a living from their videos. They offer exclusive footage to paying viewers and sell merchandise with their slogans and logos. At least one has a paid sponsorship deal.
With the growth of internet platforms that claim to embrace free speech, the hunters have been buoyed by the ability to publish their videos with few restrictions.
Websites like the crowdfunding network Locals and the livestreaming site Kick have amplified the hunters’ content, unlike many larger social media platforms, which have restricted it.
Child predators are some of the most universally reviled people in the country. That has helped pedophile hunters shield themselves from public scrutiny of their actions. Often, the hunters post chat logs that they allege show their targets soliciting sex from people posing as minors, and in some cases law enforcement has worked with them to arrest and prosecute their targets.
In October, students at Assumption University in Massachusetts allegedly lured a 22-year-old man to campus, called him a predator and chased and attacked him when he tried to escape, according to a police report. After reviewing the man’s Tinder messages, officers said the man had thought he was meeting an 18-year-old student, not a 17-year-old, as the students had alleged.
Two weeks later, fraternity members and pledges at Salisbury University in Maryland allegedly posed as a 16-year-old on Grindr, a dating app used primarily by gay men. They invited a man to an off-campus apartment, where they restrained him, called him slurs and broke one of his ribs. The age of consent in Maryland is 16.
Pedophile hunters once had a restrained presence online, navigating the rules and regulations of mainstream websites to avoid being banned. Many lost their accounts in August 2022, when YouTube updated its policies to remove their videos unless law enforcement was involved in their operations.
Within months, however, the content found a new home on social media platforms known for their loose moderation like Rumble, Locals and Kick. They also grew an audience on X after Elon Musk bought it, and promised “maximum free speech under the law.”
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The White House said Tuesday that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to cease fighting in the Black Sea and to hash out the details for halting strikes on energy facilities. It would be the first significant step toward the full cease-fire the Trump Administration had been pushing, but it still would fall short of that goal and it remains unclear how and when this limited truce would be implemented.
Both Ukraine and Russia confirmed the agreement, although it appeared to come with some serious caveats on the part of Moscow. In a statement about the talks, the Kremlin said it would honor the agreement only after its state agriculture bank is reconnected to the international payment system and restrictions are lifted on “trade finance operations,” which are some of the penalties imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
In a statement about the U.S.-Russia talks, the White House appeared to agree with at least some of the conditions, saying it “will help restore Russia’s access to the world market for agricultural and fertilizer exports, lower maritime insurance costs, and enhance access to ports and payment systems for such transactions.”
The agreements came after three days of intense negotiations in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, during which delegations from Ukraine and Russia met separately with U.S. mediators.
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Israel launched airstrikes on Saturday at sites in southern Lebanon that it said were linked to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, hours after rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel for the first time in months.
The Israeli military said that it had shot down three rockets from Lebanon, and there were no reports of casualties. The volley was the first of its kind since last November, when Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire brokered by the United States and France.
The November truce charges the Lebanese government with preventing Hezbollah and other armed groups from operating against Israel. Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon despite the truce, arguing that it is cracking down on militants violating the cease-fire.
And while the agreement initially stipulated a full Israeli withdrawal by late January, Israeli forces still control five points inside Lebanese territory.
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Thousands of Israelis gathered on Wednesday outside the Parliament building in Jerusalem to call for a renewed cease-fire deal in Gaza and to protest political moves by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including firing the head of the Shin Bet intelligence agency.
The broad sense of national solidarity over the war in Gaza, which was set off on Oct. 7, 2023, by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, appears to be fraying. Critics accuse Mr. Netanyahu of placing his political survival and bolstering his right-wing government ahead of the country’s best interests.
The Israeli leader appears to be emboldened by the broad backing of President Trump, who has shown little opposition to his approach in Gaza. Despite its strong support for Israel, the Biden administration periodically pushed Israel to do more to avoid civilian casualties in the territory and to alleviate the humanitarian crisis there.
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For weeks, Israel and Hamas had been locked in fruitless negotiations to extend the fragile cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and exchange more Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
The talks stalled because Hamas refused to release significant numbers of hostages unless Israel promised to permanently end the war — a commitment Israel would not make unless Hamas agreed to give up power in Gaza.
Now, Israel appears to have returned to war in an attempt to crush Hamas’s hopes of retaining control of the territory.
The Israeli government said that the resumption of airstrikes was intended to expedite the hostages’ release by putting Hamas under more pressure to compromise. The government’s domestic critics said the strikes actually endangered the hostages since they foreclosed any immediate chance of their negotiated release.
Israel’s heavy aerial attacks on Gaza early on Tuesday stopped short of an immediate ground invasion. But they could develop into a full ground operation if Hamas refuses to give up control of Gaza, according to two Israeli military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has already reaped domestic rewards from the strikes. Hours after they began, a far-right party rejoined Mr. Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, bolstering the government’s fragile majority in Parliament, weeks after it left the alliance to protest the initial truce.
Critics said that the return to war was mainly an attempt to shore up Mr. Netanyahu’s fragile coalition ahead of a tight vote in Parliament on a new national budget. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right lawmaker who quit the government in January in protest of the cease-fire deal, led his party back into the coalition on Tuesday, praising the military action as “the right, moral, ethical and most justified step.”
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2
Just yesterday, the ban of famed* fediverse rabbit photographer pieguy from the Super Dimension Fortress Lemmy News community expired, thus re-enabling him to engage with the community once more. Sources have indicated that pieguy intends to return to the News community with increased silliness that is sure to bring mild laughter to those who stumble upon his posts.
When reached for comment, pieguy gave the reply of "I.A.N.S.I.A.D.T." Analysts have so far been unable to decode the meaning of this abbreviation and are asking the community to provide any hints towards this or any future /c/news plans pieguy may have.
* The fame of this individual is potentially disputed.
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The United States began to carry out large-scale military strikes on Saturday against dozens of targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, according to local news reports and two senior U.S. officials, the opening salvo in what American officials said was a new offensive against the militants.
Air and naval strikes ordered by President Trump hit radars, air defenses, and missile and drone systems in an effort to open international shipping lanes in the Red Sea that the Houthis have disrupted for months with their own attacks. The Biden administration conducted several similar strikes against the Houthis but largely failed to restore deterrence in the region.
U.S. officials said the bombardment, the most significant military action of Mr. Trump’s second term, was also meant to send a warning signal to Iran: Mr. Trump wants to broker a deal with Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but has left open the possibility of military action if the Iranians rebuff negotiations.
U.S. officials said that airstrikes against the Houthis’ arsenal, much of which is buried deep underground, could last for several days, intensifying in scope and scale depending on the militants’ reaction. U.S. intelligence agencies have struggled in the past to identify and locate the Houthi weapons systems, which the rebels produce in subterranean factories and smuggle in from Iran.
But it is unclear how a renewed bombing campaign against the Houthis would succeed where previous American-led military efforts largely failed.
Since the Hamas-led assault on Israel in October 2023, Houthi rebels have attacked more than 100 merchant vessels and warships in the Red Sea with hundreds of missiles, drones and speedboats loaded with explosives, disrupting global trade through one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
The Biden administration tried to chip away at the ability of the Houthis to menace merchant ships and military vessels without killing large numbers of Houthi fighters and commanders, which could unleash even more mayhem into a widening regional war that officials feared would drag in Iran.
But the Houthis, who are backed by Iran and act as the de facto government in much of northern Yemen, largely discontinued their attacks when Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire in Gaza in January.
The Houthis have also threatened to resume attacks against Israel if the Netanyahu government halts the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
The Houthis’ spokesman, Mohammed Abdulsalam, said on social media on Jan. 22 that supporting the Palestinian cause would remain a top priority even after the cease-fire in Gaza. The Houthis have said they would stop targeting all ships “upon the full implementation of all phases” of the cease-fire agreement.
But at the same time, the Houthis warned that if the United States or Britain directly attacked Yemen, they would resume their assaults on vessels associated with those countries. Evidence recently examined by weapons researchers shows that the rebels may have acquired new advanced technology that makes their drones more difficult to detect and helps them fly even farther.
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Niantic, the company behind the runaway hit Pokémon Go, said Wednesday that it has agreed to sell its video game business for $3.5 billion to Scopely, a company owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
Scopely was acquired for $4.9 billion in 2023 by the Savvy Games Group, which was launched a year earlier by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund to lead its push into video games, including e-sports. The Saudi government has said it will invest $38 billion in video games by 2030 through the Public Investment Fund.
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Friedrich Merz, the likely next chancellor of Germany, announced on Friday that he had secured the votes to allow for extensive new government spending, including for defense, clearing the way for a stunning turnabout in German strategic and fiscal policy before he even takes office.
The measures would lift Germany’s hallowed limits on government borrowing as they apply to military spending. It would exempt all spending on defense above 1 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product from those limits, and it would define “defense” broadly to include intelligence spending, information security and more.
Effectively, that would allow Germany to spend as much as it can feasibly borrow to rebuild its military.
The Green Party posted on X that the agreement would immediately provide Ukraine with 3 billion euros in support, and that the deal “finally takes the challenges of the future seriously.”
“There will no longer be a lack of financial resources to defend freedom and peace on our continent,” Mr. Merz said, adding: “Germany is back. Germany is making a major contribution to defending freedom and peace in Europe.”
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Ukraine Says It Would Support a Cease-Fire With Russia as U.S. Resumes Military Aid
(www.nytimes.com)
Ukraine said it would support a Trump administration proposal for a 30-day cease-fire with Russia, an announcement that followed hours of meetings on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia where the United States agreed to immediately lift a pause on intelligence sharing and resume military assistance to Kyiv.
The announcements on Tuesday, in a joint statement after the talks in Jeddah, came hours after Russian officials said Ukrainian drones had targeted Moscow in the largest attack of the war on the Russian capital. There was no immediate comment from Russia, which did not have officials at the talks.
In the statement, the United States and Ukraine acknowledged that the terms of any cease-fire would be subject to Russia’s approval.
At the conclusion of the meetings, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the agreement now puts the pressure on Russia to end the war.
The United States has been pursuing talks separately with Russia and with Ukraine. There has been no public indication that Russia would accept an unconditional, monthlong cease-fire. And President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has signaled that he will demand concessions — such as ruling out membership in NATO for Ukraine — before agreeing to any halt in the war, which began in 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and has killed or wounded more than one million soldiers on both sides.
The joint statement on Tuesday said the United States and Ukraine also agreed to conclude “as soon as possible” a deal to develop Ukraine’s critical mineral resources — an agreement that was put on hold after the Oval Office clash. That joint venture is intended to “expand Ukraine’s economy and guarantee Ukraine’s long-term prosperity and security,” the statement said.
It added that the United States and Ukraine also discussed humanitarian relief efforts that would take place during a cease-fire and the exchange of prisoners of war.
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Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Shara, appealed on Sunday for calm and for unity as he moved to reassure the nation after days of clashes that a monitoring group said had killed hundreds of people.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace,” he said from a mosque in Damascus, according to video that circulated online. “We call on Syrians to be reassured because the country has the fundamentals for survival.”
The violence erupted last week between fighters affiliated with Syria’s new government, headed by Mr. al-Shara, and those loyal to the ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad. Scores of civilians have been killed, according to two war monitoring groups, along with combatants on both sides of the conflict.
Mr. al-Shara’s remarks on Sunday came as fresh fighting was reported in the countryside of the coastal Latakia and Tartus provinces. A spokesman for the Defense Ministry, Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, told state media that government forces were combing the countryside for armed fighters loyal to the deposed Assad regime.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has monitored the Syrian conflict since 2011, said that government forces were attacking with drones, tanks and artillery on Sunday. In other areas, it said, government forces were searching for armed groups affiliated with the deposed regime’s military.
The clashes have centered in the coastal provinces, where much of the country’s Alawite religious minority — which dominated the ruling class and upper ranks of the military under the Assad government, and included the Assad family itself — live. That has raised fears of a renewed sectarian conflict in the country.
More than 1,000 people have been killed in Tartus and Latakia provinces since the fighting erupted last week, the observatory said early on Sunday. About 700 civilians were included in that figure, most killed by government forces, it said. The information could not be independently verified.
Another monitoring group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, reported earlier that government security forces had killed some 125 civilians. The group had not yet updated its casualty figures on Sunday. It said that men of all ages were among the casualties and that the forces did not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The violence has been the worst since the Assad government was ousted in early December by rebels who became the country’s new leaders. It presents a major test of the new government’s authority and ability to unify the country, which has deep sectarian divisions after more than 13 years of civil war.
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As it moves to transform U.S. relations with Russia, the Trump administration is talking with Moscow about readmitting potentially scores of Russian diplomats into the United States after years of expulsions.
But the good-will gesture, which would be reciprocated by Moscow, could be a kind of Trojan horse, experts and diplomats warn, as the Kremlin is likely to dispatch spies posing as diplomats to restore its diminished espionage capabilities within the United States.
Both sides say the move could pave the way for a broader peace agreement to end the war in Ukraine.
The renewed access, combined with Mr. Trump’s courtship of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, could spell opportunity for the Kremlin’s espionage apparatus at a time when Moscow’s operations against the West have grown more brazen [sic], according to intelligence experts and former officials.
The Trump administration has installed several officials sympathetic to Moscow’s worldview, raising questions about whether it will continue to prioritize counterintelligence operations against Russia. And the appointment of the political operative Kash Patel and the conservative media personality Dan Bongino atop the F.B.I. promises upheaval in the force whose counterintelligence division tracks Russian spies.
“If I were sitting in Yasenevo or Lubyanka and targeting Americans, I would be rubbing my hands with glee,” said Paul Kolbe, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, referring to the headquarters of Russia’s foreign and domestic intelligence services.
The potential expansion of the Russian diplomatic footprint in the United States comes as Russia’s intelligence services have grown more brazen [sic] in their operations against the West.
Experts say the Kremlin would be eager to reverse a decade of U.S. action against its intelligence operatives working under diplomatic cover.
If expanded diplomatic ranks are tapped for espionage on both sides, Russia is expected to have an inherent advantage. Moscow is very aggressive about placing intelligence operatives under diplomatic cover abroad, said a former senior U.S. diplomat with Russia expertise.
It is also easier for Russian agents to operate in the United States than it is for U.S. officials to function in an authoritarian, wartime Russia, said Mr. Kolbe, who served for 25 years in the C.I.A.’s operations division.
“The Russian diplomatic presence will be heavily loaded with intelligence offers aiming to penetrate the American government and businesses,” he said. “They will have far more access and freedom of action than American diplomats in Moscow, who will contend with 24/7 physical and technical surveillance and harassment.”
The U.S.-Russia relationship deteriorated sharply after the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Obama closed Russia’s waterfront properties in New York and Maryland because the Russians used them to evade American surveillance by having conversations on the beach, U.S. officials said.
Mr. Trump’s disruption of the federal work force could also benefit the Kremlin, Mr. Kolbe added.
“All the factors that create potentials for walk-ins or recruitment,” including political disaffection, ideological sympathy, money problems or being angry at bosses seem to be in play now, he said.
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It remains to be seen how far President Trump’s embrace of Russia and abandonment of traditional allies will go. But “the West” may be gone.
For decades a core objective of the Soviet Union was to “decouple” the United States from Europe. Decoupling, as it was called, would break the Western alliance that kept Soviet tanks from rolling across the Prussian plains.
Now, in weeks, President Trump has handed Moscow the gift that eluded it during the Cold War and since.
Europe, jilted, is in shock. The United States, a nation whose core idea is liberty and whose core calling has been the defense of democracy against tyranny, has turned on its ally and instead embraced a brutal autocrat, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Gripped by a sense of abandonment, alarmed at the colossal rearmament task before it, astonished by the upending of American ideology, Europe finds itself adrift.
The emotional impact on Europe is profound. On the long journey from the ruins of 1945 to a prosperous continent whole and free, America was central. President John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963 framed the fortitude of West Berlin as an inspiration to freedom seekers everywhere. President Ronald Reagan issued his challenge — “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” — at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987. European history has also been America’s history as a European power.
But the meaning of “the West” in this dawning era is already unclear. For many years, despite sometimes acute Euro-American tensions, it denoted a single strategic actor united in its commitment to the values of liberal democracy.
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The C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe said on Wednesday that intelligence sharing with Ukraine had been paused alongside military aid to pressure its government to cooperate with the Trump administration’s plans to end the country’s war with Russia.
A U.S. official said the pause stopped all military targeting information from being shared with Ukraine. A senior Ukrainian official said the pause in sharing would make strikes on Russian forces more difficult, but Kyiv’s military had access to other satellite imagery.
The pause also affected some intelligence about advance warning of drone and missile strikes that Russia has been carrying out against military and civilian targets, according to a person briefed on the pause.
“Everything that came from the Defense Department has stopped,” said Valeriy Kondratiuk, the former head of HUR, one of Ukraine’s intelligence services. “This mostly concerns the exchange of imagery. This isn’t critical because European companies have their own satellites, but not all these are focused on military dislocation and movements, which is important.”
The C.I.A. has a sizable presence in the country, where it has working alongside the Ukrainians to help with targeting.
Some of the officers have been deployed to Ukrainian bases, where they review lists of potential Russian targets that the Ukrainians are preparing to strike, comparing the information that the Ukrainians have with U.S. intelligence to ensure that it is accurate.
The C.I.A. has also helped the Ukrainians build at least three secret signals-intelligence collection bases, which the Ukrainians use to intercept Russian communications, reducing their dependence on the United States for intelligence.
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Mr. Trump had insisted he wanted “payback” for past U.S. aid to Kyiv, shifting America’s alliance with Ukraine to a nakedly mercantile footing.
Mr. Trump has called the Ukrainian president a “dictator” and falsely said that Ukraine had started the war, though the conflict began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
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The United States sent $50 million in condoms to Hamas. Diversity programs caused a plane crash. China controls the Panama Canal. Ukraine started the war with Russia.
Except, no. None of that is true. Not that it stops President Trump. In the first month since he returned to power, he has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance distortions, conspiracy theories and outright lies to justify major policy decisions.
“One of the biggest presidential powers that Trump has deployed is the ability to shape his own narrative,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton history professor and editor of a book of essays about Mr. Trump’s first term. “We have seen repeatedly how President Trump creates his own reality to legitimate his actions and simultaneously discredit warnings about his decisions.”
Stephanie Grisham, who served as a White House press secretary in the first term, once recalled that Mr. Trump would tell aides that “as long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.” And that trickled down to the staff. “Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as though it were in the air-conditioning system,” she wrote in her memoir.
Mr. Trump’s blame-the-victim revisionism over Ukraine in recent days has been among the most striking efforts to translate his alternative reality into policy. Over the course of several recent days, he said that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia in 2022 and called the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections,” while absolving President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, an actual dictator who had invaded his neighbor. He went even further on Friday, saying, “It’s not Russia’s fault.”
By undercutting public sympathy for Ukraine, Mr. Trump may make it easier for him to strike a peace agreement with Mr. Putin giving Russia much of what it wants even over any objections by Mr. Zelensky or European leaders. Since Mr. Zelensky is a dictator responsible for the war, this reasoning goes, he deserves less consideration.
One of Mr. Trump’s claims about Ukraine offers a case study in his mythmaking. He said that the United States has provided $350 billion in aid to Ukraine, three times as much as Europe, but that much of the money is “missing” and that Mr. Zelensky “admits that half of the money we sent him is missing.”
In fact, the United States has allocated about a third of what Mr. Trump claimed, even less than Europe, and none of it is known to be missing.
Once Mr. Trump makes an assertion, those who work for him — and want to keep working for him — are compelled to tailor their own versions of reality to match his. Even if it requires them to abandon previous understandings of the facts.
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For decades, influential thinkers on the left have criticized American soft-power programs, covert operations and military presence abroad as parts of a particularly American form of imperialism: one that subverts the popular will of other countries’ citizens to serve the interests of the U.S. government and multinational corporations while also producing dangerous consequences — unfettered presidential power, diminished civil liberties — at home.
Mr. Trump’s allies have borrowed liberally from this argument while turning it on its head. They have been using it to justify new frontiers of executive power and the extraordinary empowerment of Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual.
As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk has accused U.S.A.I.D. of “money laundering” and has reposted claims that the agency’s government-backed, democracy-promotion programs are “a C.I.A. front.” During her confirmation hearings, Tulsi Gabbard, the new director of national intelligence, criticized covert operations to arm proxies in Syria and “regime change wars” across the Middle East.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, has blamed the war in Ukraine on the foreign policy establishment’s “strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion.”
The Center for Renewing America, a think tank that was until recently led by Russ Vought, Mr. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, has joined in, too. A paper the group published this month accused the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-funded organization created during the Reagan presidency to support democracy and civil society abroad, of being a “tool for neoconservative nation-building.”
None of this is without precedent in the politics of Mr. Trump, who has revived a long dormant strain of Republican skepticism of foreign interventions. Mr. Trump criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a candidate in 2016, and he considered rolling U.S.A.I.D. into the State Department early in his first presidency. He also inveighed against the country’s intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. after he came under investigation late in that election for his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials.
But Mr. Trump’s second administration has gone further, embracing specific narratives about nefarious motives behind humanitarian aid and covert operations that were long the province of the left, even as his advisers denounce the same programs as hotbeds of “far left activists.”
Mr. Trump has put the left in the awkward position of defending institutions and policies it once criticized.
“USAID is/was a radical-left political psy op,” Mr. Musk wrote in a Feb. 3 post on X citing Mr. Benz.
To make this case, Mr. Benz has marshaled the decades-old work of left-wing journalists and scholars, such as the historian Alfred McCoy, whose research on the C.I.A. and U.S.A.I.D.’s role in heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia earned the ire of the C.I.A. in the early 1970s.
Mr. McCoy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was not familiar with Mr. Benz’s work, but said he had noticed a modest uptick in sales of his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,” since Mr. Benz cited him this month.
Mr. McCoy, who was shot at by U.S.-backed guerrillas while investigating U.S.A.I.D. in Laos in 1971, said that applying his work from that era to the agency now was a mistake. In the post-Cold War period, “I would venture that U.S.A.I.D. is as good if not better than any of the others that are out there,” he said, and cutting it would be “a tragedy for the people affected.”
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Comments by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance raised fears among attendees [of the annual security conference in Munich] that under the new administration the United States. might [sic] align with Russia and either assail Europe or abandon it altogether.
The presence of American troops has been the underpinning of 80 years of peace in Western Europe since the end of World War II. But in a speech in Warsaw on Friday, before his arrival at the conference, Mr. Hegseth warned European leaders they shouldn’t assume that the United States will be there forever.
Later in the day, at the Munich conference, Mr. Vance delivered an even scarier message for many European attendees: The enemy he sees isn’t Russia or China, but Europe itself.
Mr. Vance set about attacking European nations for using what he called undemocratic methods to restrain far-right parties that in some cases have been backed by Russia. He argued that the continent needed to recognize the desires of its voters, stop attempting to moderate disinformation in undemocratic ways and instead allow such parties to thrive as the will of the people.
Mr. Vance hit out in particular at Romania, where the country’s constitutional court in December canceled a presidential election that an ultranationalist backed by an apparent Russian influence campaign looked poised to win. The election has been rescheduled for May.