The Daily - The Incomplete Picture of the War in Ukraine

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

In the nearly four months since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States has been giving officials in Kyiv a steady stream of intelligence to aid them in the fight.But what is becoming clear is that the Ukrainians are not returning the favor.Guest: Julian E. Barnes, a national security reporter for The New York Times covering the intelligence agencies.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: American intelligence agencies know far more about Russia’s military than about Ukraine’s war strategy, officials say.The outcome of battles for key cities in eastern Ukraine could prompt the country’s Western allies to start rethinking their goals.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. Over the past several months, the United States has been giving Ukraine a steady stream of intelligence to aid them in the war against Russia. But what is becoming clear is that the Ukrainians are not returning the favor. Today, national security reporter Julian Barnes on what the Ukrainians are not telling the Americans and what that might mean for the future of the war.

It's Monday, June 13th. So Julian, you cover the American intelligence agencies, and recently you've been reporting on the war in Ukraine. So tell me what you've been reporting on the war in Ukraine. So tell me what you've been finding. This is such an unusual war. It's really different than conflicts we've seen in the past for the main reason that we have a huge amount of information. We have daily press briefings from the United States and the uk talking about the movements of russian troops we have think tanks producing reports on what they are seeing on the ground and we have an explosion of commercial satellite imagery that can show you the

movements of russian troops their advances their fall fallbacks. And of course, there's also the social media aspect. And there are lots of images of Ukrainians firing anti-tank missiles and exploding Russian armor. Yeah, you feel like you're there with these things, right? Yeah, you do. And you really feel like you can understand the war. But as I was looking at this, you know, I became uncomfortable, nervous that I was getting an incomplete picture. You know, what we are all seeing is Ukrainian success, these great victories by undermanned military. The Ukrainian army that none of us would have known or thought would be that strategic or prepared

has been remarkably effective against a much bigger, much more mighty army. They were the little engine that could. Improbable victory after improbable victory. And at the same time... The U.S. says it has evidence that this invasion has been a strategic disaster for Russia. We were seeing this image of failure on the Russian side. A 40-mile-long Russian convoy headed to the capital Kiev appeared to stall Tuesday. Long logistics trains.

Parts of the convoy reportedly running out of gas and food. Massive casualties. Russian military casualties are reportedly mounting as ground advances slow. Captured soldiers. Combat losses. Russia's iconic warship, the Moskva, sank yesterday. Russia suffered a big loss here when Ukraine destroyed a pontoon bridge. A military that didn't know how to fight. British officials say it's another sign that Russia's war has gone awry.

In some ways, we hear a lot more about Ukrainian successes and Russian failures than we do the opposite. And a lot of that has to do with the kind of information and really the lack of information that we're getting from the Ukrainian side. It's so interesting hearing you say this, Julian, because I remember noticing that same pattern when I was in Ukraine all those weeks that, you know, we would get a press release from the Russian Ministry of Defense and we would look at it and say, well, obviously that's not right. You know, we can't really use that. But then we get a press release from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. And we'd also think, hold on a second, that's not right either. So I remember feeling very frustrated at the official information coming out of Ukraine in a lot of ways to be able to say what's going on out there. You know, it was hard to tell.

It's interesting that you say that. I sat down with Mason Clark of the Institute for the Study of War. That's a Washington think tank that has done really important work on the Ukraine invasion. They make the maps the New York Times uses to track the invasion. Oh, interesting. Interesting. And they look at social media posts. They look at satellite imagery. But they also look at those press releases that you talked about. And Mason told me that once a city in Ukraine stops getting mentioned in one of these press releases after a few days, that's a bad sign. And he kind of makes a mark as possible loss of territory. It's not definitive information, but it's evidence. And the bottom line here is that Kiev touts its victories, but is silent on its losses. Right. So, Julian, as a reporter, how do you try to fill in those intelligence gaps? How do you try to make sense of that? Well, as I was wrestling with this issue of the imperfect information that we in the press had, that the think tanks had, I went to officials inside the intelligence agencies and I started asking the same question about this imperfect information.

And, you know, what was surprising to me is they said they have the same problem. You know, they also don't have a full picture. You know, we heard the director of national intelligence last month say this in a hearing. You know, she said that they have more insight on the Russian side than the Ukrainian side. I guess that's just really shocking to me because I always assumed that the U.S. military, you know, knew what was going on on the Ukrainian side because the U.S. gave the Ukrainians all of this intelligence about Russia. I made the same assumption. It's unprecedented the amount of intelligence

that's flowing from the United States to the Ukrainians. You'll remember the U.S. is giving the positions of Russian command posts information that has allowed the Ukrainians to target them and kill Russian generals. Right. The U.S. has helped in finding Russian ships in the Black Sea. That led to the sinking of the Russian flagship. Also, you know, the sheer amount of

money the U.S. is pushing to Ukraine. There is $26.6 billion in military aid going to Ukraine this year. Wow. That would make the Ukrainians the fifth largest military budget in Europe. It's a huge amount of money. That's amazing. It is amazing. And so that kind of intense partnership made me assume that the information flows both ways, that the Ukrainians were sharing. Right. So, Julian, explain to me here

what exactly Ukraine is not telling the U.S. I mean, where is the U.S. blind here exactly? Well, let me start with what they are telling the United States. You know, they're fairly clear about their strategic goals, the big picture, what they want to achieve. They want to push Russia back out of the country, back to the lines of control that existed in February before the invasion started. But what they're not talking about is the daily operations. So these are really the plans that Ukraine has for its army that can tell us how they're going to achieve those strategic goals. For example, in the Donbass region, where most of the fighting is going on now, are they going to pull the troops out? Are they going to fight to the last man? We don't know. We don't know where the troops are headed or what they plan to do. And for most of the war, we haven't even known how many troops

are dying, what the casualties are. So explain why Ukraine would not want to share that kind of information. Look, Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, are trying to project strength. They believe projecting strength and an ability to win is vital to the war effort. He's trying to convince his people, he's trying to convince the world that they can defeat Russia. And to explain their operations, their plans, has the risk of showing weakness. And when you're talking to the United States, there's billions of dollars of aid on the line. And you don't want to risk that. You don't want to show an operation that might seem like you're conceding defeat. It's so important to the Ukrainians to project this will to fight, this will to win. And there are cases where the U.S. doesn't want to know what the Ukrainians intend to do.

Take that example of the Russian generals who were killed. The U.S. provides the location, but in order to not escalate the war, they don't want to advise the Ukrainians on what to do next. They just want to give the information and say, hey, that's all we did. It was the Ukrainians who launched the attack that killed everyone there. Right. The U.S. has been finger wagging at Ukraine for years about operational security and the need to run a very tight ship. They've been teaching the Ukrainians how to do this. And now, of course, the Ukrainians are doing it.

And they're saying, we're going to keep our operations secret. Julian, is this normal? I mean, is it normal that an ally would withhold information like this? Well, this is a totally unusual situation. We haven't had a war like this. We haven't had a war where the U.S. is funneling billions of dollars publicly, where they're providing actionable intelligence on an hourly basis, and there are no U.S. troops on the ground. Take the Iraq war, right? We're sending even more money there, but we had troops

fighting. And so when the Iraqis were planning their operations, they did it in consultation with the U.S. government, right? And every move the Iraqi made was reviewed by the U.S., prompted by the U.S. The few times they did their own operations and surprised the United States, you know, they were like, wait, why are you doing that? You know, but that's a different war. The U.S. was fighting alongside, and we're not fighting alongside. We are cheering from the sidelines. And that's led to a situation where the U.S. is not seeing the full picture. Right. And the implications of that are massive for the United States. We'll be right back. So, Julian, why does it matter that Ukraine is withholding this intelligence?

What are the stakes of the U.S. not having it? It matters because of all of that aid, all of that military assistance. We don't know how much Ukraine can absorb, how quickly they can absorb it, where they need it most, what will be the most effective help at the current time. And, you know, as my colleague, TM Givens-Neff, has reported, we're giving them equipment that they don't know how to use. Right. We talked about this pair of high-tech binoculars, right, that comes with English language manuals

that they have to use Google Translate to try to figure out how to do. And the problem could only get worse when the rocket artillery that President Biden has promised, when that arrives on the front line, that could well be a game changer. But are they going to know how to use it? Do they have the right people in the right place to make that as effective as possible right away? I don't know if we know that. So that's one example. But also, when it comes to the money that the U.S. is giving, I would imagine if I'm the U.S., I would want to know where exactly that money's going. I mean, I would want some accountability for it. Yes. You do want to know that. You want to know that to make sure it's being used as effectively as possible,

that you are giving money to the right things for the right equipment, for the right kind of aid. And so the more you can know, the better you can target that. Now, look, the Ukrainians give a list regularly of the kind of stuff they want. And the Pentagon has a pretty rigorous process for going over that and figuring out what they're going to send and what they're not going to send, what the Ukrainians can really use. But it could be that much more effective if you knew what the operations were going to look like in the weeks and days to come. And there's another problem here, right, which is that if the Ukrainians don't tell the U.S. what they're about to do, then the U.S. does not have a clear picture of the war and where the war is going. Right. And the picture we do have is starting to shift. The Ukrainians have been struggling enough recently

that even President Zelensky has started to acknowledge it. We see him visiting the front lines, talking about the terrible conditions there. He's finally acknowledging the number of casualties and just how much Ukrainian territory has been taken by Russia. Rosy picture, not looking quite as rosy at this point. Not quite as rosy. And meanwhile, Russia is consolidating control in the parts it's captured.

They're rebuilding the canal to bring water into Crimea. They're reconstructing rail lines. They're trying to change the country code on the telephones. They are solidifying control over the chunk of Ukraine that is their strategic goal. And look, if the Ukrainian strategy in Donbass fails, if the army falls, it's not hard to imagine the Russian troops rolling forward, moving further west, going back to that original, larger strategic goal of gobbling up more of the country. And if Ukraine falls, and we're all surprised, ultimately that will be framed as a U.S. intelligence failure, right? Sounds familiar. We should have seen it coming, and as a U.S. intelligence failure, right? Sounds familiar. We should have seen it coming and we didn't.

Right. And it's worth mentioning here that at the beginning of this war, the U.S. intelligence agencies were criticized by lawmakers for predicting that Kiev would fall in just three days. Right. I remember. Not understanding the ferocity of the Ukrainian resistance, the effectiveness of their fighting force. And the lawmakers said, look, if you had gotten that right, maybe aid would have flown

faster and we would have gotten more stuff in. And, you know, we could at the next stage of the war be at a similar place. How come you didn't predict this? And look, this is what intelligence agencies do. They make predictions. But those predictions are only as good as the data that goes into them. The more data you have, the better the prediction. And in this case, have, the better the prediction. And in this case, we're missing some critical data. Julian, given all of this, I have to wonder how much patience the U.S. Congress and the U.S. people will have for sending billions of dollars to Ukraine in funding. I mean, won't at some point Congress just say, we're done? Historically, that would be accurate. That's kind of why this current phase is so important,

because, you know, it's possible that future aid will depend on how well they're doing. You know, nobody likes to put good money after bad. It becomes harder to make another massive package of aid if the first one wasn't effective. Right. So, Julian, we started this conversation talking about how much information there was out there about the war in Ukraine and how that kind of made us feel like we knew what was happening, but we don't. Tell me where you are in your thinking now after all of this reporting. In every war, there is hubris. And the hubris here is about information, about this idea that we have perfect information. perfect information. Everyone always thinks that with technological advances

that we get a better understanding of war. We can see a drone strike. We can watch a video of an anti-tank missile destroying some armor. We have satellite imagery that gives us daily updates about a war. But it's a bit of an illusion. The fog of war still exists.

We still have imperfect information. And that applies to all of us. And when I do my job, I need to be humble about what I know and what I don't know. Julian, thank you. Thank you. On Sunday, Russian forces appeared to be closer to encircling Severodonetsk, a strategic city in the Donbass region. Russian forces appeared to be closer to encircling Severodonetsk, a strategic city in the Donbass region.

A governor in the region said the city may be completely cut off within days. President Zelensky has called Severodonetsk the key to the fight for control of eastern Ukraine. But he recently acknowledged that Ukraine had suffered heavy losses there and said the city was, quote, dead. He has not said, however, whether his army would stop defending it. We'll be right back. Thank you. deadlock on the issue. The agreement, which was proposed by 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats with the support of President Biden, includes expanded background checks for buyers under 21, which would give authorities time to check their juvenile and mental health records. It also provides funding

for mental health services, school safety resources, and for states to implement so-called red flag laws that allow authorities to confiscate guns from people deemed to be dangerous. Overall, the agreement is narrow and falls short of the kinds of broader reforms that Democrats have long championed. But it is the only proposal on gun legislation that may have the bipartisan support needed to become law. However,

aides cautioned that until the legislation is finalized, its fate remains uncertain. Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nowetzki and Carlos Prieto, with help from Michelle Bonja and Eric Kropke. It was edited by Michael Benoit, Anita Batajow, and M.J. Davis-Lynn. Contains original music by Dan Powell and was engineered by Marian Lozano. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.