The United States tries to find a way out of the Ukraine mess

Despite CIA and NATO personnel being deployed in Ukraine and NATO weapons constantly flowing to the country, Ukrainian troops have been increasingly outgunned by DPR/LPR military groups backed by Russia, acknowledges the NYT.

The newspaper names a number of reasons behind the Ukrainian Armed Forces' failures, including limited time for training to use sophisticated NATO weapons; huge losses among the "most battle-hardened" and well-trained Ukrainian forces; and certain limits to the expertise of the CIA, which is traditionally focused on counter-intelligence, among other matters.

"This is the fault of Hollywood," says Johnson. "There's always the assumption that all these CIA personnel are really some terrific people. They've got magical training capabilities. They don't. The CIA hasn't won a single insurgent war in the last 40 years, except going back to supporting the mujahedeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

They're hoping to try to recreate that miracle. But again, the problem is the people who are assigned militarily to this kind of CIA activity are either retired, special forces, special operations personnel who had to get out because they were either physically unable to perform according to military standards, or it's people who've always wanted to do that kind of thing but really have had no special training in it."