CIA Trained Ukraine Special Forces, Snipers Battling Russians

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played a key role in training Ukrainian snipers who complained that Russian forces helping separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014 had been trying to blind them, Zach Dorfman reported for Yahoo News.

Photo Insert: The Ukrainian military has claimed to have killed three Russian major generals, including at least two who were reportedly eliminated by sniper fire.

CIA paramilitaries said as the Ukrainians were looking through their scopes in order to find their targets, the Russians had begun pinpointing their location using the glare of the glass, and were shooting high-energy lasers into them, damaging the snipers’ eyesight.

The two sides were squaring off in close proximity. In early 2014, Russia had already invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula. Shortly thereafter, pro-Russia insurgents in the eastern Donbas region began a grinding secessionist war against Kyiv.

The CIA needed to make quick adjustments, recalled former officials. Officials were forced to develop new modes of secure communications systems so paramilitaries could “communicate and then move before you get the direction-finding from the Russians” and “they start[ed] rocketing the crap out of you,” recalled the former senior official.

CIA assembled a special working group to solve the tradecraft challenges that arose from working in eastern Ukraine. The environment was unique, where “Moscow rules” — that is, the need for extreme operational care, because of the Russians’ counterintelligence capabilities — converged with an active war zone.

The CIA eventually fixed the problems with the sniper rifles and rendered useless Russian eavesdropping on the communications.

Since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine last month — which transformed a long-simmering, attritional conflict into an explosive, all-out war — the Ukrainian military has defied predictions of a rapid collapse, holding key cities against the Russian advance and inflicting punishing losses to Russian troops and materiel.

The Ukrainian military has claimed to have killed three Russian major generals, including at least two who were reportedly eliminated by sniper fire. Business Insider reported that another major general was killed on Mar. 16 in a Ukrainian counterattack.

The CIA program operated for years, according to former officials. But even if the CIA’s cadre of paramilitary trainers are no longer in Ukraine, the effect of the agency’s training programs — both in the U.S. and on Ukraine’s eastern front — “cannot be overestimated,” said the former senior CIA official.

These elite units trained by the agency have created “a strong nucleus” for Ukraine’s larger military forces today, according to this official. Courage can be contagious, notes the former official. So then, empowered by their comrades’ victories, “you get people that are charging to the sounds of the gunfire.”

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