US officials tell CNN agencies are sharing battlefield intel with Ukrainian leadership at a “frenetic” pace, even as difficulties with getting the info to them in a timely manner pile up. The main issues are a lack of drones able to fly within Ukrainian airspace to get a read on Russian and Belarusian troop movements as well as a need to launder the data as to avoid revealing sources and methods. This stands in contrast to how operations were conducted against Middle Eastern targets in past years. “We are not providing the type of real-time targeting that you see our military having gotten in conflicts like in Iraq where instant to instant, we have UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles or drones), the unblinking eye as they say, watching the situation and giving that targeting data,” Rep. Adam Smith, the Dem chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said on MSNBC Thursday. “We’re not doing that because that steps over the line to making us participate in the war.”
Meanwhile even disgraced former General Michael Flynn is trying to gently disown his love of his former master Vladimir Putin in an op-ed in Western Journal “It was a horrible mistake that Russian President Vladimir Putin made. He overestimated his popularity. While it is true that in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk he has about 51 percent support, in my assessment, he expected that level of support across the entire country of Ukraine. Clearly, that support never materialized,” writes Flynn, who clearly would have been writing a different piece had more success materialized for Russia on the battlefield. A week ago Flynn was much more both-sides-y, writing that Biden had ignored “Putin’s legitimate security concerns, and legitimate ethnic problems in the Ukraine.”
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