Shane Harris writes:

Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky have never enjoyed a warm relationship, or even a stable one. But last week, it hit a new low. Trump called on the Ukrainian people to elect a new president, describing Zelensky as “more difficult to deal with” than Vladimir Putin. He accused Zelensky of prolonging Ukraine’s war with Russia. “He says he wants to settle, but he doesn’t,” Trump told Newsmax, without mentioning that it was Putin who started the war nearly five years ago. “Zelensky is not a good guy for us to deal with.”

The two leaders may find themselves at a personal nadir, but all the while, the U.S. intelligence community has shown no letup in its fight to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression. Armed with information that the U.S. provides, Ukraine’s military has launched strikes deep inside Russia. And U.S. spy satellites provide early warning about incoming missiles and drones. Among U.S. personnel on the ground, “the CIA is in the lead,” a retired senior officer who travels frequently to Ukraine told me. If anything, the Ukrainians, with the CIA’s help, have gotten too good at hurting Russia for Trump’s taste.

The administration’s policy is deeply conflicted, and perhaps no one understands that better than John Ratcliffe, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He has a foot in two worlds: advising a president who’s continuously at odds with Ukraine’s leadership, and running an agency that’s essential to Ukraine’s war for survival. One intelligence officer in the Baltics, who works closely with the Americans to counter Russian influence, told me that, though you’d never know it from Trump’s rhetoric, the CIA’s operations are now “much more aggressive” than they were during the Biden administration.

The Ukrainians don’t see Ratcliffe as their advocate. They know he works for a mercurial boss, and that if Trump were to follow through on his recent threat to halt intelligence support unless Ukraine stops attacking Russian oil refineries, Ratcliffe would carry out the order. But Ratcliffe came into office promising, with Trump’s support, to return to the agency’s roots of espionage and clandestine operations. For now, that battlefield still extends to Ukraine. The CIA helped build the modern Ukrainian intelligence apparatus after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Partly owing to that long history, officials in Kyiv said they trust Ratcliffe to tell Trump the truth about the war, and not simply what the president wants to hear.

More than a dozen current and former intelligence officials I spoke with in the U.S. and Europe described Ratcliffe, who served as the director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term, as clear-eyed about the threat Russia poses not just to Ukraine, but to the United States and its allies. [Continue reading…]