EXPERT INTERVIEWS — The U.S. has temporarily stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine, the latest blow to U.S. support for Kyiv following last week’s Oval Office clash between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed the “pause” on Wednesday morning, and national security advisor Mike Waltz said the halt, in addition to the suspension of further military aid deliveries to Ukraine, will only be lifted once a date for peace talks with Russia is set.
Ukraine relies on U.S. intelligence assistance to select Russian targets for weapons, including U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and U.S. Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), as well as to prepare for Russian attacks. There are reports that some informal intelligence sharing may be continuing, but not for “time-sensitive or high-value intelligence.” The intelligence curbs appear to apply to both U.S. government and commercial assistance; American aerospace company Maxar Technologies confirmed it had disabled access to its satellite imagery for Ukraine, and the National Geospatial Agency said it “temporarily suspended access” of Ukraine to the system that provides commercial satellite imagery purchased by the U.S.
Retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy on Ukraine and Russia, acknowledged the pain these moves would have on Ukraine, but claimed that the Ukrainians “brought it on themselves,“ at a Council on Foreign Relations symposium on Thursday, referring to Zelensky’s confrontation with Trump at the White House, which he called “entirely preventable.”
Kellogg described the halt to U.S. intelligence sharing and military aid deliveries as a “forcing function” to alter Ukraine’s approach and push them towards negotiations.
The Cipher Brief turned to two members of its expert network to assess the impact of the pause in the sharing of intelligence: John McLaughlin, a former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Edward Bogan, a former CIA Operations Officer.
McLaughlin warned of the ramifications of what he called the “shocking” move to limit intelligence flows to an ally actively in a war. “Those of us who've been involved in sharing intelligence are having trouble getting our heads around this,” he said. “You don't do this to a partner who is involved in a fight.”
“There are very clear, long standing policies within the intelligence community to share intelligence with partners when there's threat information to them," Edward Bogan, a former Senior CIA Operations Officer said. "In this instance, this is clearly an ally, clearly a friend we've been supporting for quite a long time."
McLaughlin and Bogan spoke with Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski. Their conversations have been edited for length and clarity. You can also watch the full interviews on The Cipher Brief YouTube channel.
THE EXPERTS
The pause in intelligence means that we are limiting the visibility of the battlefield for the Ukrainians. Not clear to what extent or how long. It sounds from the reporting as though what’s been limited is the kind of intelligence that applies to what we would call current intelligence, the sort of thing that applies to what is happening at the moment, either on the outgoing side, that is targeting of Russians, or the incoming side, that is to say the Ukrainians’ ability to see the Russians on the battlefield, to see how they're moving, to see what their strength is and so forth. It sounds like they've stopped the kind of thing that is used in day to day combat.
It’s shocking to hear the United States saying that it is limiting intelligence to an ally, a partner, someone we've supported up till now, because there's nothing we can do to limit Russian intelligence on Ukraine. They will keep their intelligence missions flowing fully, and it exposes Ukraine to Russian weaponry and targeting at a time when their ability to retaliate is diminished.
So, those of us who've been involved in sharing intelligence are having trouble getting our heads around this. You don't do this to a partner who is involved in a fight. In fact, thinking back to when I used to array our priorities, your number-one priority was always to support our forces in combat or the forces of allies in combat. That had to be ahead of everything else because you're talking essentially about protection of life. I suppose we are trying to emphasize that it's limited, but it's just not done when a partner is in battle.
This is also really difficult to implement. Specific guidance is needed from the director or headquarters because not all of the sharing is done in the field. A lot of it is done remotely, particularly for sensitive signals intelligence. The people who are in charge of actually passing that intelligence would need very specific instructions about what to pass and what not to pass. If they're not given those instructions, they've got to make some very difficult decisions, which would be hard, both practically and morally. You've been accustomed to supporting an ally whose lives are in danger – and you have to decide, well, what am I going to hold back and with what consequences? And I think that's a very difficult position to put people in.
That said, of course there are things that we may not be giving them routinely anyway. There’s a category of intelligence that maybe has never been on the table because of its sensitivity. But the important thing is, with whatever we're giving them, something is coming away and how you make those decisions and how you implement those decisions strikes me as very, very hard to do in a way that is sensible and morally comfortable.
There are certain things that only the United States can provide in terms of volume and precision and sensitivity and speed. We are the big guy on the block for all of that.
Now that said, remember the “Five Eyes” countries – Britain is one of the Five Eyes countries along with Canada, New Zealand and Australia and the United States. And Britain has access to a great deal of our intelligence, particularly on the signals side, the interceptions and so forth. They see almost without restriction. I don't know how they will respond to this directive from the United States; I would think that they ignore it. In other words, given that both [French President Emmanuel] Macron and the British Prime Minister [Keir] Starmer have said that they are open to the idea of putting their troops on the ground [in Ukraine] as part of some peace agreement yet to be created, I would think the British would want to be providing whatever they've got.
That doesn't make up for what the United States does, but here's what it does do: it opens up a breach between us and the British. We have two Five Eyes partners here who share almost everything, with one saying we're holding back and the other, the British, will have to decide whether they're going to follow our lead or not.
I might also add that Canada is part of the Five Eyes agreement. I don't know precisely what Canada provides to Ukraine, but I'm sure it's substantial. And again, it opens up a kind of odd negotiation or breach with the Canadian partners.
There are only two things that operate at a fundamental level in international affairs: one is fear and one is trust. Trust is the hardest thing to get. You get it through cooperation, through long relationships, through putting your hand in the fire together with people. This administration so far is using mainly fear and sanction, which is what you do with adversaries and as part of deterrence. It seems to me we are running a real risk of breaking trust with our partners around the world.
[The pause] may not be exclusively focused on actionable intelligence, but that certainly seems to be the primary focus – the ability for us to support kinetic activities in real time against Russia and against their support networks. And that's both in Ukrainian territory and in Russian territory. So for us to remove the targeting support that allows for real-time kinetic effects against the enemy is a pretty significant withdrawal. And it has an immediate effect on the war-fighting capability. It doesn't remove it; it just reduces it. The question of how much, that would have to be figured out by the people who are actually doing the kinetic solutions themselves. But the effects are pretty substantial, in that it removes us from the fight in the most meaningful way possible.
I would hope that we would still stand by our duty-to-warn policies, and when there's incoming threats, that we share the information that allows our partners to defend themselves and take the actions they need to protect their civilian population. It's not clear from the public pronouncements how deep this goes – is it, 100 % no cooperation on anything? I would hope that's not the case. But there are very clear long standing policies within the intelligence community to share intelligence with partners when there's threat information to them. In this instance, this is clearly an ally, clearly a friend we've been supporting for quite a long time.
This is incredibly hard [for intelligence officers] when you're on the ground, because the relationships you form are real. They're battle-tested, in the trenches sometimes. So those relationships are deep and long standing and it, and it hurts. But at the same time, we have to follow the instructions from Washington. And you have to weather through that – and “weather through that” is hard in an instance like this, but it's something that because of that long standing relationship that we built up over time, each side has a bank account with the other, and we invest in that over time and build that up. And sometimes the bank account drains a little bit, and right now that's what's happening. And the question is going to be: how much damage is done, and how far into the red do we get?
And when you have the kinetic activity from Russia as we saw overnight, with all those ballistic missiles and, all those Shahed [drones] flown against critical infrastructure, that drains the account pretty fast, because we need to be there helping them, every step of this way.
Over time, what was a transformational relationship can become a transactional relationship. And it can get worse from there as well. It could become no relationship at all, over time. And that's the risk, depending on how long this lasts. We have had a transformational relationship with the Ukrainians in both directions in a lot of very interesting ways over the last 11 years. And we don't want to lose that. And I understand there's major policy discussions going on. But there's an enormous amount of people fighting for their lives every day, and they have been for years.
For three years of this full-scale invasion, we have picked a side. I understand the need to end the bloodshed and to end the war. At some point, it has to end. But to suddenly take a seemingly neutral position has pretty significant effects, obviously to the Ukrainians and also the signals it sends to the Russians. So this is a time of quite a bit of change in the last six weeks in terms of how we're engaging in this war and in our policy space.
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