Ukraine as a proxy war is the frame John Kiriakou applied to the 2022 Russian invasion within two months of its start, and the reason he was urging negotiations at a point when almost no one in Washington was.
The proxy-war frame (April 2022)
The assessment
His summary was that he saw nothing good on the horizon and that this was another of the situations every generation produces: the United States perfectly happy to pour money and weapons in, run it as a proxy war, in the knowledge that the Ukrainians cannot defeat the Russians. The object is to bog the Russians down — and the tired old saying that the United States is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, he said, “is actually true, and that’s what makes it so sad.”[1][2]
The end state he predicted
The end state he predicted was that Russia would end up with the Donbas and with Crimea and would probably destroy Mariupol and Odesa, with terrible loss of life along the way — and that since that was where it was going, it was better to open peace talks at once, even if it meant putting your tail between your legs and giving away something you would rather not.[3]
The money
On the day of the interview President Biden announced a further $800 million in weapons, a third tranche on top of the nearly $10 billion already sent. Kiriakou’s question was whether that was simply what the country now did instead of spending on roads, schools, bridges and airports.[4]
Why Putin
His explanation for the appetite is personal to Vladimir Putin: Washington never liked him, because he is independent — not mouldable the way Boris Yeltsin was, not a friendly the way Mikhail Gorbachev was. For a long time the assumption was that he would have to be lived with; the war looked like an opportunity not to, with the Ukrainians doing the work.[5][6]
What the CIA does in Ukraine
Training and access agents
Asked in 2022 what the conversations inside the agency would be, Kiriakou’s answer was training and materiel — secure communications, night vision goggles, sniper rifles, close-in equipment — running along two tracks: a great deal of paramilitary training for the Ukrainians, and a real focus on recruiting access agents to the Russian leadership.[6][7]
Where the agency sits
Asked whether the CIA collects on Ukraine directly or through allied services, Kiriakou described a direct presence at three levels. “It’s my understanding that there are CIA officers, senior CIA officers, stationed inside the Ukrainian intelligence service to provide support and liaison. And there are CIA officers on the ground with Ukrainian military or special forces units. In addition, we know that the CIA is training Ukrainian military officers here in the United States, at bases in Texas and I think North Carolina. So yeah — the CIA is getting the information directly from the horse’s mouth."[8][9]
"Effectively running the Ukrainian intelligence service”
Asked in August 2025 what the agency was doing in Ukraine, Kiriakou answered “by all accounts, the CIA is doing everything in Ukraine.” He qualifies his sourcing — he has been out for a long time but remains in touch with those circles — and reports that the agency is “effectively running the Ukrainian intelligence service. Not just advising, but either approving or disapproving of operations,” and running training both inside Ukraine and by bringing Ukrainian intelligence officers to the United States.[10][11]
He frames the commitment as open-ended for structural reasons rather than institutional ones: the agency supports policy rather than making it, so “until the president says we’re leaving Ukraine, their job is to provide everything they can possibly provide.”[11]
Who else could do the work
On whether anyone else could do the work, he separates the two functions. For classic espionage, “sure, they could be replaced by any number of services” — but not for paramilitary training, where he allows the SAS could substitute, the French probably could, and “the Israelis definitely could do it, but they’re bogged down.”[12][13]
What the paramilitary training is for
What the paramilitary training is actually for, on his reading, is what happens after any settlement: guerrilla warfare intended to bog Russia down for a decade. Put to him directly, he agreed — “I think that’s exactly what the point is. Yes.”[14]
The bases, and what happens if they are overrun
Put to him in December 2025 that the CIA maintained twelve bases along the Russian border, Kiriakou did not dispute the figure and addressed the consequence instead. His expectation was governed by the standing understanding between the American and Russian services rather than by the state of the war: they might overrun the bases and “they’ll likely expel those CIA officers, but I wouldn’t expect much more.”[15] The basis for that confidence is set out at the KGB denial cables — a gentleman’s agreement, in his account observed since at least the 1960s, that neither service harms or interferes with the other’s people.[16]
Why he thinks Ukraine cannot win
The judgement he gave two months into the war does not move over the following three years; what changes is the evidence he offers for it.
The manpower arithmetic
Kiriakou’s reason for thinking the war unwinnable for Ukraine is demographic rather than tactical. “The Russians have access to virtually unlimited ground troops … and artillery, because they’ve got the North Koreans, they have the Belarusians, there are reports of Chinese that have signed up to fight.”[17][18]
He cites reporting of roughly 31,000 Ukrainian combat deaths against perhaps double that on the Russian side, and notes the ratio does not settle anything: “Russia is far larger and more populous than Ukraine is … so this is not something that the Ukrainians can keep up for ever.”[18][19] What Kyiv is actually relying on, in his reading, is that Donald Trump has some sway over Vladimir Putin. “I don’t think he does — but I think they hope he does.”[19]
The domestic constraint (April 2024)
His military read in April 2024 was that the position was slipping: “the conventional wisdom is that the Ukrainians just cannot maintain this pace of war. They can’t hold the territory that they reclaimed from the Russians, the Russians are moving back in, good weather is upon us and that makes it easier for the Russians to move west.”[20]
The constraint he considered decisive was domestic. “The bigger problem is that the Republican party here in the United States has turned on Ukraine — whether it’s for ideological reasons or for economic reasons, the Republicans just don’t want to fund this thing any more.” He noted the shape of the aid package then before the House: another 61 billion dollars, “half of that … in the form of a loan, a loan that would be forgiven after the election.” His conclusion: “there’s no national desire any more here in the United States to keep funding this war … and at the same time Russia is so much bigger and so much stronger than Ukraine. The Ukrainians just don’t have the population to keep this thing going forever.”[21][22]
The state of the army by mid-2025
On the state of the Ukrainian army by mid-2025, he did not dispute the interviewer’s description of press-gangs sweeping men off the streets into units with no worthwhile training, and treated the collapse of the force as the more likely near-term outcome than any negotiated breakthrough.[23]
Whether the CIA presence changes anything
He has twice been asked whether the intelligence support alters the outcome, and twice said no. In August 2025 his view of the marginal value was blunt: “honestly, I don’t think there would be that much of a difference if the CIA weren’t there anymore,” because the war is winding down into a stalemate and any peace requires Ukraine ceding the ethnic Russian areas of the east and Crimea — “they just have to accept it.”[13][24]
In December 2025 he put the same conclusion at greater length. “But the Ukrainians are losing. This war is untenable. Every observer will tell you that the Russians control the line of demarcation, and in the end, CIA or no CIA, the Ukrainians are going to have to come to some kind of an agreement with the Russians. This is one of those situations where the CIA is not going to be able to win this thing for the Ukrainians.” What the support has bought, on his account, is time and Russian casualties: “CIA help may have delayed a Russian victory, may have cost the Russians more casualties — but it can’t go on forever.” The settlement he expects follows from that.[9][25]
The talks that did not happen
Istanbul, and the silence afterwards
In April 2022 Kiriakou noted what was absent: nobody in the administration or the government was so much as saying the words peace talks. There had been talks early on in Istanbul, which the United States did not attend and did not even encourage the Ukrainians to attend; they lasted three days, everyone went home, and no one raised the idea again.[26]
Chinese or Turkish mediation
In April 2024 he described a diplomatic offer standing since almost the beginning of the war. “The Russians, from very shortly after the start of the war, have been suggesting peace talks that would be brokered either by the Chinese or by the Turks. The United States and Ukraine have rejected that from the very beginning.”[20]