Former top Ukrainian commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi confirms existence of joint U.S.-Ukrainian command center in Germany

Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the former commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, has confirmed the existence of a joint U.S.-Ukrainian command center in Wiesbaden, Germany, where Kyiv’s military operations were planned in coordination with Western allies.

“There was a lot of talk about Wiesbaden last week,” Zaluzhnyi wrote in a Facebook post. “This command center truly became our secret weapon with our partners for planning operations and identifying the resources needed to carry them out. And I’ll lift the veil a bit on how it came to be.”

According to Zaluzhnyi, the center was originally established in April 2022 in Stuttgart to coordinate the rapidly growing flow of military assistance to Ukraine. It later moved to Wiesbaden, where its role evolved.

“We realized we needed a joint operational center with our partners to assess weapons and equipment needs based on planned operations,” he wrote. “This became especially urgent in the summer of 2022, when some partners began to question the necessity of certain weapons and ammunition for the front lines in Ukraine.”

That realization, Zaluzhnyi said, led to the creation of a command center that would analyze planned Ukrainian operations and determine needs in line with NATO standards. The effort, he added, was made possible “thanks to the support of the United Kingdom.”

“At that center, we planned operations, conducted war games, determined what the Ukrainian Armed Forces needed, and relayed those requirements to Washington and European capitals,” Zaluzhnyi wrote.

He described the command center as “an excellent coordination mechanism” for military planning and shared a photo of a meeting with American and British officials in Ukraine in August 2023.

Zaluzhnyi’s remarks came just over a week after The New York Times published a report stating that U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s military operations over the past three years had been much deeper than previously understood. The article detailed the role of the Wiesbaden command center, where American military personnel worked closely with Ukrainian counterparts — including helping to select targets.