As the Ukrainians had been wanting by means of their scopes in order to search out their targets, the Russians had begun pinpointing their location utilizing the glare of the glass, and had been taking pictures high-energy lasers into them, damaging the snipers’ eyesight.
The two sides had been squaring off in shut proximity. In early 2014, Russia had already invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula. Shortly thereafter, pro-Russia insurgents in the jap Donbas area started a grinding secessionist warfare towards Kyiv.
Russian troops quickly entered the fray. So, quietly, did the CIA.
As the battle strains hardened in Donbas, a small, choose group of veteran CIA paramilitaries made their first secret journeys to the frontlines to fulfill with Ukrainian counterparts there, based on former U.S. officers.
CIA paramilitaries quickly concluded that, in Russia and its proxies, the company was dealing with an adversary whose capabilities far outmatched the Islamist teams that CIA had been battling in the post-9/11 wars. "We learned a lot real quick," says a former senior intelligence official — together with in regards to the Russians’ laser-blinding methods. "That s*** wouldn’t happen with the Taliban."
Since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine final month — which remodeled a long-simmering, attritional battle into an explosive, all-out warfare — the Ukrainian navy has defied predictions of a fast collapse, holding key cities towards the Russian advance and inflicting punishing losses to Russian troops and materiel.
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