DISINFO: ABC: 2014 coup in Ukraine allowed CIA to turn it into a proxy shadow army
SUMMARY
A trickle of leaked military and intelligence secrets turned into a flood after the 2014 Euromaidan coup d’état, with current and former US and Ukrainian officials revealing to US media that Kyiv’s post-coup authorities gave away “key intelligence” to the CIA literally by the suitcase-full, and turned Ukraine's intelligence services into a shadow proxy army against Russia. In 2015, Valeriy Kondratyuk, a career spy then working as chief of the Ukrainian military's Main Intelligence Directorate, visited Washington to meet with senior American intelligence officials with luggage “stuffed with top-secret Russian military documents.” One former official told ABC news the information received was worth “hundreds of millions” if not “billions” of dollars. Officials said the CIA helped rebuild Ukraine’s intelligence services from the ground up as an anti-Russian proxy army, spending millions on training and equipment, new facilities, “including around a dozen secret forward-operating bases on the border with Russia,” and conducting “joint operations together around the world.”
RESPONSE
This is a disingenuous distortion of a report by ABC news about the US-Ukraine intelligence partnership, aiming to promote several recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives framing the Maidan protests as a Western-sponsored coup and the war in Ukraine as a proxy conflict aiming to destabilise Russia.
While some of the sentences and elements in this story appear in the original ABC report and have been confirmed by other sources - such as Valeriy Kondratyuk’s trip to the US, first reported by The New York Times in February 2024, many others don’t. For example, the original story never uses the words “coup” or “proxy”, contrary to what this disinformation story implies. Quoting Western legitimate sources while distorting their content to introduce a pro-Kremlin message as if it were part of the original story is a frequent pro-Kremlin manipulative technique.
The Maidan was not a coup, but a series of massive protests which ended with the escape of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich (see here, here, here and here for full debunking of this allegation). Claims about Ukraine as a Western proxy war are an attempt to deflect Russia’s responsibility for its brutal and unprovoked aggression against its neighbour (see here, here and here for full debunking of this allegation).