It’s been an open secret that the United States has been the top country aiding Ukraine financially and militarily since the original Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Now the US again leads with military assistance With over $17 billion in donated funds, military equipment, and economic assistance to Ukraine, while NATO and EU countries have been far more stinting in their aid, doing just enough not to be accused of doing nothing.  It is also not a surprise that the US has been sharing intelligence on Russian troop movements and dispositions since last year. The US may have been over-sharing a bit too.  As US intelligence watched a slow build-up of Russian troops on its border with Ukraine, it went past sharing and started making predictions. For months the administration breathlessly announced that an invasion would occur at any moment and then undermined its own assertion by not behaving as if that invasion would in fact occur by whipping the EU into rushing weapons to Ukraine,(or doing so ourselves) and imposing the sanctions on Russia it believed would prevent the invasion. It eventually caused a minor rift between the US and Ukraine which asked the administration to back off the “imminent threat” language because it was causing panic in Ukraine with civilians fleeing and money moving out of the country as early as November 2021.  Presumably, Zelensky was looking at the same intel the US was looking at and coming to different conclusions about when the invasion would occur.

Then the administration announced that it had Russia’s war plans in its possession and confidently asserted that it would begin on a certain date that came and went without an invasion and still the US did not move to sanction Russia or flood Ukraine with weapons to defend itself with.

In hindsight, it begins to appear as if the White House believed that the threat of un-named sanctions and urgent and repeated “We see what you’re doing” pronouncements would be enough to deter an invasion by Putin. On February 24th of this year, that miscalculation was decisively proven as tanks rolled into Ukraine.

In April 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed for the first time that the US had been providing intelligence to the Ukrainian government and its armed forces to help them repel the Russians at all costs.

He was asked by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton from Arkansas during a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee whether the US was supplying intelligence to Ukraine, specifically in the Donbas region or Crimea.

Austin then confirmed that the US was indeed providing vital intelligence to Ukraine “to conduct operations in the Donbas” but did not mention Crimea. According to him, the US provides useful information and intelligence to the Ukrainian Armed Forces in their fight.

“As that fight migrates more to the Donbas region, we will adjust our information content and flow as required,” Austin continued.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, brief the media on Afghanistan, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Aug. 18, 2021. (U.S. Department of Defense, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons). Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Secretary_of_Defense_Lloyd_J._Austin_III_and_Army_Gen._Mark_A._Milley,_chairman_of_the_Joint_Chiefs_of_Staff,_brief_the_media_210818-F-CN170-044.jpg
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, brief the media on Afghanistan, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Aug. 18, 2021. (U.S. Department of Defense, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

An unnamed senior defense official who spoke with CNN also stated that the Ukrainians were receiving US intelligence in real-time. Another US defense official spoke with NBC and claimed that the US was specifically giving intelligence regarding Russian missile strikes and vital information about where and when they would strike. This gave the Ukrainians a very big window of time to move their military equipment to another location so that they would not get destroyed. Furthermore, this also gave the Ukrainians more time to move their air defenses to defend against the missile strikes and prevent the air defense equipment themselves from getting destroyed.