Trump’s cutoff of intelligence is a far more serious blow to Ukraine than the pause in weapons delivery announced earlier. Since very early in the war, Ukraine has relied on America’s vast system aerial surveillance. In this arrangement (well described here) information collected by the huge array of U/S.satellites, drones, signals intercepts, drones and AWACS flying just outside Ukrainian airspace, is fed to thousands of analysts in the “five eyes” intelligence allies (U.S., U.K. Canada, Australia, New Zealand) who scan images depicting almost every inch of Russian-held territory in extraordinary detail, searching for targets which is then fed into the Ukrainian networks controlling artillery, missiles, etc. Without it, the Ukrainians will be essentially blind. Just to make sure there is no back-door leakage, Washington has explicitly banned Britain from passing on any intelligence derived in whole or in part from U.S. assets. Moreover, there is another kind of intelligence controlled by Trump that could pose equally severe problems for Zelensky. As a former White House official reminded me recently, “Trump now has the entire intelligence archival record of whose been good and whose been bad in Ukraine, and everywhere else for that matter.” He was referring specifically to the rampant corruption among the ruling clique in Kyiv. Those files must be copious. As noted by Seymour Hersh, former CIA director William Burns confronted Zelensky on the issue in a meeting early in 2023, handing him a list of thirty five egregiously venal officials to be dealt with. Zelensky did fire ten of them, but showed no interest in pursuing the matter further. The Biden Administration had no desire to dent the image of their T-shirted pet, and apparently made no further complaints. Other western governments have been equally anxious to run cover for the thieves in Kyiv. As my brother Patrick Cockburn has reported in The i newspaper, “When an Italian bank rejected a deposit in cash of hundreds of millions of dollars by a well-connected Ukrainian, it was praised privately by the Italian government for doing so, but told to keep it a secret.” But Trump, as Zelensky has already discovered, is a very different and infinitely more ruthless character, ready and perfectly willing to ugly truths in public. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Spoils of War, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2025 Andrew Cockburn |