A US Army special operations leader recalled shuttering the US embassy in Kyiv before Russia’s invasion. Col. VanAntwerp said destroying sensitive information and clearing the office was a tough moment. VanAntwerp and his team had been on the ground in Ukraine to help train the Ukrainians. Just weeks before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a US special operations leader found himself unexpectedly shuttering America’s embassy in Kyiv. It was an unusual job, one for which US Army Col. Lucas VanAntwerp, then-commander of 10th Special Forces Group, had not specifically prepared, but that was the mission. In early 2022, Russian forces surrounded Ukraine, raising concerns it had plans to launch a full-scale invasion. US intelligence had assessed that Russia had moved military equipment and soldiers to borders along Ukraine, and the Ukrainians were preparing the troops and civilians for an attack. Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, bombarding Ukraine and launching assaults aimed at swiftly seizing Kyiv. Shuttering the embassy in those early days before Russia’s invasion began wasn’t as simple as turning off the lights and locking the doors. VanAntwerp and his team had to destroy any and all sensitive information to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Russian army.
“There is a part of you in the moment that’s like, ‘I don’t really know what I’m doing,'” VanAntwerp, now the director of US Army Special Operations Command’s Capability Development Integration Directorate, told BI during last week’s USASOC Capabilities Exercise at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
VanAntwerp got the call in early 2022 to shuffle his forces out of Kyiv. At that point, he and his team took over embassy security. He said that the 10th Special Forces Group had built trust with the Ukrainian military after long working with its operators since Russia’s initial invasion in 2014. The goal for the US special operations advisors stationed in the country had been to help Ukrainian operators break away from their Soviet-style approaches and adopt more Western-style methods, changing how the individual soldier and the critical non-commissioned officer make battlefield decisions. “I’m not going to say we transformed everything,” VanAntwerp explained, but “it was a big contributor to how they thought and how their SOF operated.” Empowered NCOs have given Ukraine combat and decision-making flexibility that is vastly different from Russia’s top-down approach that requires generals for battlefield decision-making, keeping them close to the front lines.
With an invasion looming, the amount of potentially sensitive materials in the embassy that needed to be swiftly removed was vast. Servers and computers were destroyed, and the personal effects of workers were tossed out. That experience in particular, VanAntwerp said, was eerie “because you’re still sitting there seeing pictures of people’s families on their cubicles, pictures of people’s kids.” When they wrapped, the office looked normal but empty. Once the embassy was cleared, the team went outside and watched the US flag come down. “It was probably one of the toughest moments of my military career, standing there watching that happen,” he said. Despite the unusual nature of this particular job, VanAntwerp explained that it’s often typical for special forces to fulfill roles that are sometimes out of the ordinary, particularly because of the relationships operators build with partners and allies.
That is a key aspect of SOF’s role in the US military, especially as it shifts from decades focusing on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency to great-power competition, with US rivals like China and Russia front of mind. Various SOF leaders have highlighted that operator presence around the world and the relationships that they have built are vital to success. VanAntwerp noted the importance of the partnership between the US and Ukraine, as well as between the US and Europe as a whole. “We’re able to tie all that together with a very small footprint, small signature,” he said, “and it really is all based on relationships.” Read the original article on Business Insider
