The U.S. is back to feeding Ukraine advance warning of Russian missile strikes — and the only people who claim it ever stopped are the same officials who couldn't keep their story straight in the first place. That means American intelligence assets are once again being deployed in a war Congress never declared, with no exit strategy and no defined national interest, while the White House and its own bureaucracy publicly contradict each other about what's happening.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed Tuesday in Oslo that U.S. intelligence sharing on Russian ballistic missile attacks "works now," according to The Guardian, after what he described as a suspension last week. "Now it works. It's great," he said, adding that the early warnings "would save lives." His adviser, Serhii Beskrestnov, told the BBC last week that lives had already been lost because Kyiv wasn't receiving reliable U.S. warnings of incoming attacks.
Here's the rub: White House officials claimed there were no changes to intelligence sharing. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it "scandalous" to suggest Ukrainians were dying because the U.S. withheld intelligence. So either Zelenskyy and his own adviser are lying, or the White House is — and the facts on the ground speak for themselves. The intelligence tap was turned off, then quietly turned back on, and the permanent foreign policy apparatus simply worked around whatever the elected president's posture happened to be on any given day.
This is the pattern. Trump lifts sanctions on Russian diesel to lower fuel prices ahead of midterms, per The Guardian. Trump announces an energy ceasefire. Kyiv complies for several days; Russia ignores it entirely. Then Trump rounds on Zelenskyy, says Ukraine needs a "new president," and questions what the U.S. has gotten back for its support — "absolutely nothing," he said, per the BBC, "except grief, death and tremendous monetary loss." Yet the intelligence keeps flowing, the Starlink restrictions stay in place, and the Pentagon blocks Patriot interceptors that other countries already paid for, as The Guardian reported. The left hand and the right hand aren't just uncoordinated — they're working for different principals.
Witkoff has met Putin numerous times in Moscow and visited Kyiv only once. The EU's Kaja Kallas openly questioned whether U.S. negotiators were honest brokers. Zelenskyy floated a deal: stop hitting Russian oil refineries in exchange for Patriot missiles. No word on whether Washington bit.
The real question isn't whether intelligence sharing paused or didn't. It's who's running American foreign policy — the president the voters elected, or the bureaucracy that answers to nobody. When the White House says nothing changed and the foreign leader says it did, and the foreign leader is the one telling the truth, you have your answer.
