January 3, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - While the United States government poses as “pursuing peace” with Russia regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is now admitted that the US is overseeing a “supercharged” campaign targeting “Russian oil facilities and tankers” aimed at crippling Russia’s economy and its fighting capacity.
The revelation should come as no surprise. The campaign of long-range aerial drone strikes conducted deep inside Russian territory as well as maritime drone strikes taking place both within the Black Sea and far beyond it - in the Mediterranean Sea and off the coast of West Africa - requires intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities (ISR) only the US possesses.
Not only has the US made essential ISR available for these attacks, but both the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and at least the US Navy have been implicated in assisting directly in these attacks.
A New York Times article from early 2025 titled, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” would admit in regards to repeated maritime drone strikes carried out across the Black Sea that:
…the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.
If Ukraine was incapable of conducting their own maritime drone strikes along the coasts of Crimea, it most certainly would not have been able to conduct strikes much further abroad, meaning that more recent strikes carried out far beyond the Black Sea almost certainly required as much or more direct US involvement.
This has now been confirmed by a more recent NYT article.
Titled, “The Separation: Inside the Unraveling U.S.-Ukraine Partnership,” the article at first attempts to portray the administration of current US President Donald Trump as undermining Ukraine amid continued conflict with Russia. But the article then admits that just beneath the facade of “peace negotiations,” the US has actually escalated what has always been a US-instigated and US-led proxy war against Russia fought merely through Ukraine.
The article admits:
“Even as Mr. Trump bullied Mr. Zelensky, he seemed to coddle Mr. Putin. When the Russian stiff-armed peace proposals and accelerated bombing campaigns on Ukrainian cities, Mr. Trump would lash out on Truth Social and ask his aides, “Do we sanction their banks or do we sanction their energy infrastructure?” For months, he did neither.
But in secret, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military, with his blessing, supercharged a Ukrainian campaign of drone strikes on Russian oil facilities and tankers to hobble Mr. Putin’s war machine.”
This dovetails with reports from October 2025 that US intelligence agencies were assisting Ukraine in aerial drone strikes on Russian energy production facilities deep inside Russia. The NYT article also mentions “tankers,” implicating the US in the series of recent maritime drone strikes carried out on Russian-linked tankers worldwide.
The NYT article explains further:
“In June, beleaguered U.S. military officers met with their C.I.A. counterparts to help craft a more concerted Ukrainian campaign. It would focus exclusively on oil refineries and, instead of supply tanks, would target the refineries’ Achilles’ heel: A C.I.A. expert had identified a type of coupler that was so hard to replace or repair that a refinery would remain offline for weeks. (To avoid backlash, they would not supply weapons and other equipment that Mr. Vance’s allies wanted for other priorities.)”
And that:
“The energy strikes would come to cost the Russian economy as much as $75 million a day, according to one U.S. intelligence estimate. The C.I.A. would also be authorized to assist with Ukrainian drone strikes on “shadow fleet” vessels in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Gas lines would start forming across Russia.”
In other words - the US launched attacks on Russian energy production inside Russia as well as conducted maritime drone strikes on tankers moving Russian hydrocarbons wherever the US could find them - all of this politically laundered through Washington’s Ukrainian proxies - attacks Ukraine itself would be incapable of conducting on its own.
President Trump Helped Start War with Russia, and is Helping Escalate it
While US President Donald Trump has repeatedly depicted the ongoing conflict in Ukraine as “Biden’s war,” it was actually precipitated and prosecuted by a combined effort spanning the Obama, first Trump, Biden, and now second Trump administrations.
It was under the Obama administration that the US violently overthrew the Ukrainian government after years of attempted “color revolutions” stretching all the way back to 2004.
It was under the first Trump administration that lethal military aid began flowing publicly from the US to Ukraine - a policy option the RAND Corporation in its 2019 paper “Extending Russia” admitted would likely lead to, “more Russian aid to the separatists and an additional Russian troop presence,” policymakers hoped in turn would overextend Russia in the same way America’s proxy war with the Soviet Union had in Afghanistan.
The paper also inferred that providing lethal aid to Ukraine could ultimately lead to a large-scale conflict ending in, “disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows,” and that it might even lead to, “a disadvantageous peace” for Ukraine in the end - all of which has now since taken shape.
Considering the role each US administration has played since 2014 in provoking and expanding this conflict, it should come as no surprise that President Trump simply picked up right where both his predecessors and he himself had left off last.
US “Peace Negotiations” vs. Division of Labor
The very idea that the US now suddenly seeks to end a proxy war of its own design is itself a key function of perpetuating it even further.
In February 2025 US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would deliver a directive to European nations in Brussels demanding they increase defense spending to 5% of their respective GDPs, “double down” on arming and backing Ukraine, expand their defense industrial bases, prepare the European public for “spending more on defense,” as well as preparing “European and non-European troops” for deployment inside Ukraine.
All of these demands were made under the framework of what Secretary Hegseth himself called a “division of labor,” within which Europe would take up a greater role in Washington’s proxy war with Russia while the US committed greater resources for an equally unnecessary confrontation with China in the Asia-Pacific region.
No part of this directive suggested a genuine desire to end the conflict in Ukraine - but rather an attempt to either freeze it under a Minsk 3.0-style ceasefire or otherwise pass the majority of the cost and risk of continuing the conflict onto Washington’s European proxies.
Since then, the US and Europe have posed as “splitting,” enabling European politicians to depict themselves before the European public as “abandoned” by the United States and thus left with no other alternative but “spending more on defense.”
In fact, in a New Year’s Eve address, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz would literally say, “for us Europeans this means that we must defend and assert our interests much more strongly by ourselves,” exactly as Secretary Hegseth ordered European leaders to do in early 2025 under his “division of labor” framework.
Under any "division of labor,” the overall project is not being “abandoned” by any participant - rather, various aspects of the project are assigned to different participants. The project at hand for the US is its continued decades-spanning pursuit of global domination. The US is merely feeding Europe into its proxy war with Russia to a greater extent and at greater risk to Europe than ever before.
The US has and will continue to oversee the entire conflict, making all major decisions - as it has done from its military command center in Wiesbaden, Germany - and making available unique ISR capabilities only the US possesses to continue its proxy war with Russia - simply swapping out its exhausted Ukrainian proxies with fresher European proxies.
The fact that the United States has escalated its proxy war with Russia through attacks it itself is planning and carrying out merely under the guise of a “Ukrainian” campaign, proves America’s actual intentions regardless of its empty rhetoric regarding “peace.”
The US Proxy War with Russia is Key to Containing China
In the background of Washington’s ongoing war on Russia is a much larger and more urgent policy of confronting and containing China - an imperative that necessitates continued pressure on China’s allies in Moscow.
Much of Washington’s strategy in confronting and containing China is based on a combination of maritime “distant blockades” imposed by a now completely reconfigured anti-shipping-centric US Marine Corps, attacks and disruptions along China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) land routes, as well as the degradation of Russian energy production that could sustain China’s economy and warfighting capacity even if the former two options are successfully implemented.
Laid out in detail in a 2018 US Naval War College Review paper titled, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” the US would impose a maritime blockade against Chinese shipping across the Asia-Pacific region including in the Malacca Strait, the South China Sea, and in and around the waters of the island province of Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea.
The paper also discusses the necessity to disrupt China’s BRI which serves as alternative routes circumventing possible US maritime blockades. At one point in the paper it is suggested that the US could demand BRI partner nations to shutdown pipelines for the duration of any US-imposed action - and any failure to comply would result in US “air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action.”
It should be noted that since the paper was published in 2018, the US has already begun carrying out strikes-by-proxy against BRI infrastructure, including on a Myanmar-China pipeline the paper used specifically as an example.
The 2018 paper then mentions Russia, noting that existing and expanding pipelines could allow China to adapt to any attempt by the US to impose a maritime oil blockade on it. While no measures are proposed on how to mitigate Russian oil exports to China in the 2018 paper - since then - the US has successfully provoked a large-scale protracted proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
As the NYT has recently reported, the US has begun conducting a large-scale strike campaign against Russian energy production inside Russia as well as targeting Russian maritime energy exports - part of a US blockading policy that is also targeting Russian-Chinese ally Venezuela in Latin America and Iran in the Middle East - a policy that has already seized ships bound for China itself.
Because the US seeks to continue encircling and containing China, and degrading Russian energy production (and Russia’s utility as a Chinese ally in general) is a key prerequisite in doing so, the US is almost certainly not going to end its proxy war against Russia.
Instead, it will continue, possibly even escalate its campaign striking Russian energy production inside Russia, Russian pipelines, and maritime oil shipping, and gradually expanding operations to set the stage for similar operations aimed at China directly.
Thus, Washington’s “peace negotiations” amount to empty rhetoric, drowned out by America’s own actions through its Ukrainian and European proxies in a war that seeks to set the stage for an even larger, more dangerous confrontation with China.
Russia and ultimately China’s ability to counter not only US proxy warfare, but also the tools it uses to set the stage for it - including America’s uncontested global information dominance and the inability of potential US proxies to defend their information space against US political capture - will determine whether or not US policy is blunted and stopped or allowed to draw the rest of the world into the destructive conflict currently consuming both Russia and Europe.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
