Did CIA's Secret Aiding of Ukraine's Refinery Strikes Do More Harm to Ukraine Than Russia?
Spoiler alert: Yes, it did. But maybe that was the plan all along.
The new year brings us revelations that the CIA has been secretly teaching Ukraine how to hit Russia’s “Achilles’ heel” by targeting specific oil refineries which were selected by CIA analysts as having parts difficult to source and replace.
NYT clarifies:
“A C.I.A. expert had identified a type of coupler that was so hard to replace or repair that a refinery would remain offline for weeks.”
Most intelligent people had already long-assumed this was the case, though many of us had bet on MI6 being the leading agency behind such strikes. At the end of the day, it’s nearly the same thing, as the West’s intel agencies are generally one overlapping arm of the global deep state managed by the same interests—one need only to research the history of the CIA’s foundation to understand this fact.
Not surprisingly, the new revelations include the fact that Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s “shadow fleet” tankers were likewise aided by the CIA.
Kyiv was using its explosive-laden long-range naval drones to blow holes in the ships, opening a new front in the war to cut off Russia’s largest source of funding and strengthen its negotiating position at US-led peace talks.
According to US and Ukrainian officials, the CIA was authorised to assist Kyiv’s military in these efforts, despite the risk of angering Putin’s regime.
The problem is, these attacks have done little more than make the situation worse for Ukraine, not Russia. They have resulted in Russia’s own escalation, for instance the current hellacious licking that Odessa is getting, both to its port infrastructure as well as energy grid.
There’s a reason it was Zelensky who recently cried uncle first, begging for an “energy truce” in order to halt the much more painful strikes on his own country’s assets. As such, all that this CIA campaign has done is accelerate Ukraine’s demise, which I suppose we can thank the CIA for doing.
There are a few other considerations. Firstly, as always we must at least be somewhat wary of these ‘revelations’ from Western rags with their infamous ‘anonymous sources’ because they always come at such convenient times wherein the elites are pulling their hair out at US and Russia’s growing rapprochement. It’s therefore easy to imagine a potential motive for faking these stories, in order to cause fractures between the US and Russia.
It’s also a little peculiar that such a ‘bombshell’ revelation came precisely at the moment that Ukraine apparently attempted to attack Putin’s residence, setting off a firestorm amongst Russian officials. One can likewise see the potential attempt to link the CIA’s covert aiding of Ukraine on the refinery strikes to the strikes on Putin’s residence in order to drive a stake in US-Russian relations.
The foiled attack on Putin’s residence, by the way, is quite interesting given that the West denied it in full at first, but as soon as Russia began to present evidence of it, the tune quickly changed. Now Western rags claim that the drones were headed to the same region of Putin’s residence, but to a military site ~50km away.
Russia apparently is taking it more seriously than initially thought, given that they have now presented to the US the captured data chip of one of the shot-down drones which allegedly has the flight and targeting data said to prove the drone’s terminal target was in fact Putin’s residence.
Note the below unprecedented video where Russian intelligence chief, head of the GRU Igor Kostyukov, hands over the flight controller to military attachés from the US embassy in Moscow:
MOMENT MoD hands over KEY data to US representatives
‘Decryption of navigation controllers… unequivocally CONFIRMED that target of attack was Russian President’s residence in Novgorod region’
Military Intelligence Chief Igor Kostyukov transfers info to America
Decrypted flight plan data from Kiev drone HANDED OVER to US
MoD confirms transfer to rep. of military attaché's office at US Embassy in Moscow
Many now believe that the reason Russia is following such a formal protocol is because Russia is setting the legal precedent to sharply escalate attacks against the Kiev regime in 2026. I leave it to you to decide if that is true or not; personally, I’m skeptical, but it’s a possibility worth noting in case something does happen.
Armchair Warlord enumerates this idea:
The Russian government is HIGHLY legalistic and is likely seeking to state a basis for a considerable escalation in strikes and military operations in the coming year. They've had ample grounds to do this for some time - this incident is simply convenient to latch onto.
Getting back to the CIA story, there is one other noteworthy thing to mention.
It is the Brian Berletic-championed idea that the Trump administration and the US in general are clearly not a friend of Russia, and are doing everything in their power to undermine, sabotage, and subvert Russia while pretending to seek peace.
While this is likely true to a large extent, it does generalize and overly simplify things somewhat. It is inaccurate to view the entire US ruling class, bureaucracy, deep state, and the rest of the administrative organs, as one unified monolith. In reality, there are many long-established competing interests, and places where the deep state has entrenched itself beyond reach of Trump’s somewhat lackadaisical attempts to uproot it.
That’s not to say it isn’t useful to sometimes generalize by blanketly suggesting the US means harm to Russia, because in the spirit of averages, one would have to admit that is more so the case than the contrary. But for those seeking more nuanced and granularized understandings of the dynamics at play, such generalizations become somewhat inadequate.
One example is we can say that the Pentagon and CIA are again at odds in their objectives as they have famously been in the Middle East and elsewhere, where Pentagon-armed-and-trained forces often did battle against CIA-sponsored ones. However, when you pull back far enough, you realize even such distinctions, and such seeming incompatibilities, ultimately end up playing in the US empire’s favor anyway.
Example from 2024:
Almost all of life can be trivialized or particularized depending on how far you zoom into the given point of focus, or how much you scale out or abstract the idea for the sake of a given point or argument. In this case, it may be true that the Pentagon was trying to pull back support from Ukraine under Hegseth’s new Monroe Doctrine-like pivot, while rogue operators within the CIA are clearly determined to keep the war brewing for geopolitically expedient reasons. That being said, pull back your view far enough and such hair-splitting distinctions become moot, as it all somehow still manages to create the overall favorable conditions for the continuation or even expansion of US imperial hegemony.
In short, neither mode of analysis is entirely wrong. There’s good chance that different factions within the US do have different cross-purposes, but overall, they will always strive to seek the US’s primacy and ascendancy at the expense of everyone else.
WHILE THE PENTAGON PAUSED UKRAINE, THE CIA RAN THE WAR
Publicly, Washington hesitated. Quietly, Langley went to work.
According to a New York Times investigation, U.S. military aid to Ukraine froze in March 2025 after Trump ordered a halt. Weapons stalled. Intelligence sharing slowed. The Pentagon pulled back.
The CIA didn’t.
Granted a carve-out, the agency warned the White House that a full cutoff would endanger American officers already inside Ukraine. Exemption approved. Operations continued. Then they escalated - covertly.
With ATACMS strikes off the table, the CIA pivoted to Ukrainian-built drones, supplying targeting intelligence for hits on Russia’s war economy: oil refineries, explosive-chemical plants, and Moscow’s shadow oil fleet.
Not symbolic strikes - precision hits on components that can’t be easily replaced.
Early attempts fizzled. Russian jamming ate drones alive. So in June, CIA and U.S. officers redesigned the campaign. Fewer targets. Smarter ones. Result: refineries offline for weeks and up to $75 million a day in estimated losses. Gas lines followed.
No U.S. weapons shipped. No public fingerprints. Just intelligence, math, and deniability.
Trump reportedly liked it. Pressure without headlines. Pain without escalation.
What does this mean?
America didn’t abandon Ukraine - it split the war in two. The Pentagon paused. The CIA improvised. And while Congress argued, Langley found something that works.
This is how modern wars are sustained now: quietly, bureaucratically, and just plausible enough to deny.
If the Pentagon and CIA were working fully hand-in-hand, the Pentagon would have never suspended its strike permissions, would have flooded Ukraine with Tomahawks and ATACMs and allowed strikes deep into Russian territory. But in reality, it’s clear top US military brass wanted an off-ramp and de-escalation, while the CIA had a far bigger appetite for risk, given their unique luxury of ‘plausible deniability’.
But the point of all this quibbling is to say that Russia recognizes that the US is not a monolith and has competing factions within it. As such, any broad and simple-minded calls for Russia to cut-off the US entirely, or stop its “foolish rapprochement” based on these new revelations miss the plot, as Russia knows any major superpower like the US will never be able to act in full accordance with one unified vision, particularly a superpower wracked by parasitic deep state factions like growing tumors.
Hence, Russia should continue its measured and wary approach in continuing the current political inroads despite attempts by various factions to undermine this. In short: don’t take it personal. Nothing is black and white, and the political processes, back channels, and other partnership-building initiatives Russia has fostered of late stand to reap far more benefits than liabilities, even in spite of the other side’s feeble attempts to stick a shiv in Russia’s back. That being said, no one’s saying Russia should fall to its knees or genuflect to the US.
Some last interesting items.
As Rob Lee reports, a new analysis by CIA cutout Radio Svoboda has found that Russia has taken far fewer casualties-per-kilometer in 2025 than in 2024:
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Speaking of casualties, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin gave some interesting figures:
He confirms the lopsided body exchanges everyone has been reporting on for months, stating that Russia has so far handed over to Ukraine over 12,000 AFU bodies, while Ukraine has returned only ~200—a ratio of 60:1.
Don’t forget this statement from Russian Ambassador Rodion Miroshnik from two months ago, that Russia still stores “an enormous amount” of Ukrainian corpses that Ukraine does not even want to take back.
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Thank you, Simplicius, for shining a steady light on what has to be the gravest crime committed this century: NATO's Ukraine Disaster.
Isn't the West lucky that we have adults in charge in Russia. The CIA certainly doesn't give value for money