The U.S. Secret Service provided information to Ukrainians that allowed them to kill several Russian generals near the front lines, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed U.S. officials.
Washington has provided Kyiv with detailed information on troop movements, locations and other details of the Russian military's mobile command centers. The Ukrainian forces, taking advantage of this information and combining it with their own, especially interceptions of Russian telecommunications, thus launched artillery strikes and other attacks that resulted in the death of senior Russian officials, according to the publication.
"We want to see Russia weakened to such an extent that it can no longer do things like invading Ukraine," -US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin
Neither the Pentagon nor the White House responded when Reuters and the French news agency tried to contact them for comment on the Times.
The Ukrainian government claims that its forces have killed about 12 Russian generals.
In early March, the municipality of Novorossiysk in southern Russia confirmed that General Andrei Sukhovetsky, deputy commander of the 41st Army, had fallen "heroically" in Ukraine.
NYT sources did not want to specify how many Russian generals were killed because of information provided by Washington to Kyiv.
On Monday, the Pentagon officially announced that the head of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, had gone for "several days" last week to the front in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, thus implying that a top Russian was near the battlefields.
However, the Pentagon did not confirm the Ukrainian allegations that Valery Gerasimov was injured.
An adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry said on Sunday that several senior Russian officials had been hit when an "explosion" occurred in Izium, adding that the head of the Russian General Staff was on the spot. But another Ukrainian official said the top Russian officer was not injured.
US intelligence assistance, which Washington has confirmed but did not elaborate on, adds to the multibillion-dollar military aid it has provided to the Ukrainian military in a much more transparent manner, including anti-tank weapons and ammunition, and, more recently, heavy artillery, helicopters and UAVs.
"We want to see Russia weakened to such an extent that it can no longer do things like invading Ukraine," US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on April 25.
Source: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ, The New York Times
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