How the CIA Helped Ukraine Pull Away from Russian Influence in 2014

I’ve heard a lot of conspiracy theories about how the CIA orchestrated Ukraine’s breakaway from Russia in the 2014 Euromaidan. Let’s debunk that nonsense with facts…

I shared this originally over at my Medium account. But I wanted to bring it over here for my Substack pals who aren’t behind the paywall over there. Cheers.

Licensed by the author from Envato Elements

Okay, let’s set the scene: late 2013, Kyiv.

It’s cold, gray, and the Christmas lights on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) do nothing to hide the tension in the air.

Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s president and Russia’s favorite errand boy, was supposed to be signing the EU Association Agreement. This would have been a big step toward a future that didn’t involve taking marching orders from the Kremlin.

Instead, in a move that surprised absolutely nobody who’s ever watched a Russian puppet in action, Yanukovych pulled a last-minute 180 and bailed on the deal.

The guy sprinted back to Moscow and dropped to his knees faster than you can say “gas discount.”

Fury followed. Ukrainians poured into the streets by the hundreds of thousands, waving European flags, chanting “Ukraine is Europe,” and letting the world know that they’d had enough of being Moscow’s junior varsity.

Contrary to some conspiracies, the CIA had nothing to do with Ukraine’s pivot toward Europe. This was the very real power of the people, fed up with a system where corruption wasn’t just tolerated, it was mandatory.

But the CIA did help Ukraine break its Russian ties after the decision was made.

Imagine the energy: university students, old babushkas, businessmen, priests, and veterans shoulder to shoulder, unified by the simple, dangerous idea that Ukraine should decide its own future.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin watched from behind frosted windows, sweating vodka and caviar.

For years, Russian security services, the FSB, GRU, you name it, had embedded themselves deep in Ukraine’s government, police, and even intelligence agencies. Russian-language TV was beaming Moscow’s propaganda into millions of homes in Ukraine.

Yanukovych’s inner circle was riddled with Moscow’s men. Putin, for his part, saw Ukraine as not just a buffer state, but a vassal; losing it was unthinkable.

But on the streets, none of that mattered. Ukrainians, many of whom had family on both sides of the Russian border, were voting with their feet. And the Maidan protests, soon dubbed “Euromaidan,” kept growing. What started as a college-kid protest over a trade deal morphed into a national movement demanding dignity, human rights, and an end to the country’s mafia state. By January, the square looked more like a fortified camp than a protest zone: barricades, makeshift kitchens, tents, and medics.

The state responded with riot police, batons, and, eventually, snipers. The world watched as peaceful protestors were gunned down in broad daylight. But instead of breaking the movement, Yanukovych’s violence hardened it.

The old playbook of fear simply didn’t work anymore.

Meanwhile, Moscow was throwing everything at the wall. Russian operatives tried to sow chaos, launch false-flag attacks, and even bribe or threaten protest leaders.

Moscow’s goal was simple: keep Ukraine in the Russian orbit at all costs. But something had fundamentally shifted. The old Soviet-era “brotherhood” rhetoric was ringing hollow. Ukrainians, from the Lviv barista to the Kharkiv taxi driver, had glimpsed the alternative…

The future was European rule of law, real elections, and a chance to break free from the kleptocracy.

That’s the spark that lit the fuse. The CIA didn’t hand out protest signs or write the chants. The West didn’t start Euromaidan, Ukrainians did, because they knew the status quo meant permanent poverty and servitude.

But the intelligence services in Washington, London, and Brussels were watching closely, quietly preparing for the mess that would inevitably follow if and when Moscow tried to take back what it saw as lost territory.

By February 2014, Yanukovych fled Kyiv in the dead of night, leaving behind a palace full of gold toilets and incriminating documents. Ukraine’s new government stepped blinking into the sunlight, suddenly in charge of a country with empty coffers, a hollowed-out military, and Russian spies practically running the SBU (Ukraine’s main intelligence agency) from the inside.

That’s when the real work began. Western agencies, particularly the CIA and, to a lesser extent, the FBI, would start quietly backing Ukraine’s efforts to purge its security services, rebuild its counterintelligence, and play catch-up in the shadow war that Moscow had already started.

But make no mistake: The West didn’t pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit. Ukrainians did it themselves, on a winter square, by refusing to be ruled by fear or dictated to by the “big brother” next door.

The CIA and FBI’s role was to help Ukraine keep what it had won.

Licensed by the author from Envato Elements

Operation Intelligence Uplift

So, Yanukovych is gone, the Maidan is covered in flowers and burnt tires, and the only thing left in his palace is a collection of gold-plated bathroom fixtures.

What did Ukraine inherit? Not so much a security service as a Russian listening post with a Ukrainian flag on the wall. The SBU, the police, the military… Everywhere you looked, there were Moscow’s fingerprints, and in some cases, Moscow’s actual agents.

That’s when the US initiated “Operation Intelligence Uplift.” Less James Bond and more the world’s most stressful episode of Extreme Makeover: Intelligence Edition.

The mission was to strip out the Russian bugs, boot the double agents, and build a security service capable of facing down the Kremlin’s best and worst at the same time.

No pressure.

That’s where the CIA and their Western partners quietly came in. Now, contrary to popular Russian propaganda, this wasn’t some black-bag operation where Langley took over the SBU and started running Ukraine from the shadows. The reality was way more bureaucratic, awkward, and a lot more frustrating.

First up, the Americans and their allies had to help Ukraine figure out who was actually loyal. At that point, most of the SBU’s top leadership had studied in Moscow, kept vacation homes in Crimea, or still had cousins “on business” in the FSB.

You couldn’t throw a drone in Kyiv without hitting someone who’d taken a call from a Russian “colleague” the night before. The SBU had, to put it mildly, an infiltration problem.

The solution started with a deep-dive internal audit: who’s talking to whom, who’s leaking, who’s got an unexplained Mercedes in the driveway. The CIA, along with Britain’s MI6 and a few low-profile partners from the Baltics and Poland (who’d had more than enough of Russia’s games), started running counterintelligence workshops, crash courses in vetting, and even lie detector marathons.

If you wanted to keep your badge, you had to prove you weren’t texting Moscow on your lunch break.

That was only the beginning. Western advisors set about rebuilding Ukraine’s intelligence training from scratch. Old Soviet handbooks went into the shredder, and out came new manuals focused on counterespionage, cyber defense, HUMINT (human intelligence gathering), and how to spot a Russian social media campaign before it goes viral.

The FBI, which usually doesn’t operate overseas, got in on the action too, especially on the law enforcement and cyber sides. They helped modernize Ukraine’s approach to criminal investigation, terrorism prevention, and internet forensics. With Russia running hybrid ops, like assassinations mixed with ransomware and disinformation, Ukraine needed tools that worked for the 21st century, not the Cold War.

And here’s a twist: the West didn’t just focus on defense. US and UK intel teams helped Ukraine go on the offensive, building the capabilities to monitor Russian troop buildups, track “little green men” sneaking into Crimea and the Donbas, and intercept Russian battlefield comms. In other words, the CIA helped Ukraine level up, fast.

But none of this was easy or quick. Purging the old guard meant mass layoffs, resignations, and more than a few quiet disappearances.

Some “ex” officers defected to Russia; others were flipped, and the Russians didn’t go quietly. They responded with cyberattacks, targeted assassinations, and propaganda campaigns trying to paint the new SBU as a nest of American puppets.

Throughout 2014 and 2015, Ukraine’s intelligence agencies suffered setbacks, including failed operations, compromised agents, and technology that was sometimes held together by zip ties. But with every mistake, the Ukrainians learned. Western partners kept the flow of training, funding, and equipment going, albeit quietly, and with plenty of political red tape.

The goal was not to turn Ukraine into a Western intelligence outpost; it was about helping the country build a modern, resilient security apparatus capable of resisting both direct Russian attacks and subtler, more insidious forms of sabotage.

Ukrainian operatives, many of whom were young, Western-educated, and fiercely patriotic, became the new core of the SBU and military intelligence. These were people who understood Moscow’s playbook but were no longer interested in following it.

By the time Russia rolled into Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Kyiv’s intelligence services weren’t perfect, but they were no longer blind.

The support from the CIA and its partners gave Ukraine just enough warning, just enough capability, to keep the fight going; and, eventually, to start hitting back.

Operation Intelligence Uplift was the turning point. It marked the moment when Ukraine stopped playing defense and started building the kind of security infrastructure that could stand on its own. It was an infrastructure that, as we’ve seen in the years since, would frustrate the Kremlin’s plans again and again.

Creating a Ukrainian Western Rope

Once Ukraine’s intelligence agencies had gotten a little less “Moscow branch office” and a little more “team Kyiv,” the next challenge was binding Ukraine to the West in a way that couldn’t be easily unwound by another Russian-friendly government, a coup, or some strategic gas pipeline squeeze.

This is what I call the “Ukrainian Western Rope.” It wasn’t just a safety net, but a sturdy, unbreakable tether to the Euro-Atlantic world.

First, intelligence-sharing pacts started popping up. Quietly at first, off the radar, and negotiated in smoke-filled rooms and windowless offices from Warsaw to Brussels to Langley.

Ukrainian analysts began working side by side with their Western counterparts, sifting through satellite imagery, intercepting comms, and (on more than one occasion) trading tips on how to spot a Russian mole or a fake social media account trying to start a panic in Kharkiv.

Second, Western governments began inviting waves of Ukrainian officers and officials to “study visits,” training programs, and yes, the occasional NATO exercise where nobody pretended the enemy was anyone other than Russia.

These trips did more than teach Ukrainians how to say “POTUS” with a straight face. They built real friendship connections that, when the pressure was on, meant you could pick up the phone and call someone in Berlin, Warsaw, or D.C., not just fill out a form and wait for the fax machine to hum.

Then came the reforms. At Western urging, and with more than a few bribes of military aid, funding, and public praise, Ukraine started cleaning up its judicial system, policing, border guards, and even its parliament.

None of this was easy. There was pushback from the old guard, constant Russian propaganda, and the usual parade of oligarchs insisting that “Ukrainian values” meant doing things the Soviet way. But, little by little, the gears started to turn. The West kept up the pressure, and the perks, because everybody knew this was a marathon, not a sprint.

Meanwhile, the US and EU began to weave Ukraine into their own security and economic systems, inch by inch.

Ukrainian IT pros and defense contractors started landing jobs with Western firms, and procurement contracts for everything from drones to radios were suddenly being signed in euros and dollars, not rubles. The message to Moscow was clear: The train is leaving the station, and Ukraine has a ticket.

Between 2016 and the full-scale invasion of 2022, US military and NATO forces trained the Ukrainian military, on the ground in Western Ukraine, in modern combined arms doctrine.

I interviewed Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the Donbas during this timeframe, and the consensus was that, after training with US troops, they wanted to join NATO.

These US troops would depart Ukraine in the weeks leading up to Russia’s February 2022 invasion.

Most importantly, this “rope” was designed to survive political whiplash. Whether it was Poroshenko, Zelensky, or even a future president nobody had ever heard of, Ukraine’s integration with Western intelligence, defense, and economic infrastructure would be almost impossible to reverse without causing a national crisis.

The more Ukraine modernized, the less anyone wanted to go back to the old ways, and the more public support there was for staying on the European track; even when it meant pain, reforms, and the occasional IMF-ordered austerity diet.

By late 2014 and early 2015, Ukraine’s Western Rope was already getting a workout. Russian tanks rolled into the Donbas, “little green men” were popping up in Crimea, and Moscow’s disinformation firehose was flooding every smartphone and TV in the country.

But thanks to those new Western ties, Ukraine was able to call for help and get it. Intelligence started flowing, secret shipments of weapons and equipment followed, and when Russia tried to shut off the lights (literally, in the middle of winter), the EU sent emergency supplies and engineers.

After Russia’s full invasion in 2022, the US went public with its military aid.

After all, the US had invested so much capital and intel into the new, free Ukraine that Biden allegedly told aides that “stopping Putin from taking Kyiv was his top priority.”

It’s thanks to this, along with the Ukrainian people’s fierce independence, that has kept Ukraine from falling to the invaders to this day.

Now, Zelensky is feeling the heat in Kyiv after signing a controversial new law that strips Ukraine’s two top anti-corruption agencies, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP), of their independence. The move hands both bodies over to the prosecutor general, an official handpicked by the president himself.

Thousands of Ukrainians, especially the country’s young and politically active, hit the streets in protest, holding up signs that read “shame,” “parliament is full of parasites,” and “corruption loves silence.” Even under the shadow of nightly Russian airstrikes, the crowds have only grown, marking the largest anti-government demonstrations since Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

Western backers haven’t exactly been subtle either; EU officials are demanding answers, warning that Ukraine’s prospects for EU membership hinge on a real fight against corruption. The NABU and SAP were, after all, set up in 2014 precisely to clean house and help Ukraine edge closer to Europe.

Their independence led to high-profile investigations and arrests, including the head of the Supreme Court. Now, critics fear presidential oversight will let powerful friends of the administration off the hook. For many Ukrainians, this feels like déjà vu, a return to the bad old days of government impunity. As one protester put it, “We don’t want to have to fight both Russia and our own government.”

Still, despite these recent challenges, Ukraine is now a powerhouse of innovation and technology; the necessities of wartime survival have supercharged its defense industries. After more than three years of war, Russia still only holds limited Ukrainian territory in the East and Crimea.

Ukraine lit the fuse, and the CIA helped it build a smarter bomb shelter… Quietly, effectively, and without fanfare.

That’s the beauty here: no headline US bombs dropped, just methodical espionage that turned Ukraine’s domestic revolt into a national defense posture. The CIA was involved in Ukraine’s move away from Russia, but in a support role only. To say otherwise takes the credit away from the Ukrainian people and gives it to the US, which is not only wrong historically, but it also diminishes the heroism of the Ukrainian people.

That’s it for today, friends. Did you know I have a YouTube channel where I talk about the Ukraine War and military technology? Subscribe if you found this breakdown helpful. There’s more over there!

And as always, Слава Україні!