Will Trump’s pause on U.S. intel and weapons for Ukraine deliver Zelenskyy and Putin nearer to peace, or additional away? | USAEMALL.com

The CIA chief confirmed Wednesday that the Trump administration had paused not only the flow  of military hardware and financial support to Ukraine, but also vital intelligence gathering that has helped Kyiv anticipate and block incoming missile and drone attacks and effectively target Russia’s invading forces. The U.S. military’s European Command has also said shipments of arms that were already on their way — approved by the Biden administration but not yet delivered — have been paused.

The pause is part of President Trump’s abrupt shift in policy on Ukraine, which has seen the White House adopt rhetoric closely aligned with Russia’s narrative justifying the three-year war on its smaller neighbor, and Mr. Trump’s bid to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to accept a ceasefire deal that could involve significant concessions by Kyiv.

Speaking Thursday at a Council on Foreign Relations event in Washington moderated by CBS News’ Margaret Brennan, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Russia and Ukraine Keith Kellogg defended the intelligence cutoff as a necessary wake up call to Kyiv of the White House’s determination to forge a peace deal.

“The best way I can describe it is like hitting a mule with a two-by-four across their noses — we got their attention,” he said. “But it’s a pause, it’s not an end. It’s then up to them.”

Kellogg did not play down the severity of the measure, but said it would not have taken Kyiv by surprise, as “they were warned this was coming. I told them.”

“If you take away support like that, of course it’s important,” said Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army, adding: “But that’s why it was done.”

Trump administration officials have said Vladimir Putin will also have to make concessions to bring about a ceasefire, but those have not been outlined by the White House to date. To even engage in real negotiations on a potential ceasefire agreement, Mr. Trump has made it clear that he wants Zelenskyy to first give the U.S. access to a major share of Ukraine’s mineral resources.

Why Ukraine says security guarantees are essential

Zelenskyy’s reluctance to sign an economic deal thus far, without clear guarantees that it would come with a commitment from the U.S. to help defend Ukraine from further Russian attack, appeared to enrage Mr. Trump during their chaotic Oval Office meeting on Friday. The White House has repeatedly suggested that American business investment in Ukraine, with U.S. workers on the ground, would, by default, shield the country from Russian aggression, and Mr. Trump has said himself that he trusts Russia to keep any promises it makes.

Ukraine and America’s European allies do not trust Putin’s Russia. They note that as the Biden administration warned of Russia’s looming invasion at the beginning of 2022, top officials in Moscow insisted repeatedly that they had no such intentions.

“I am certain that there is no risk of a large-scale war. … We do not intend to take any aggressive actions. We will not attack, raid or invade Ukraine,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said about a month before Putin ordered the full-scale invasion, sparking the bloodiest conflict on European soil since World War II.

Given that recent history, Ukraine’s former Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze told CBS News on Wednesday that any talk of a ceasefire with Russia now, without clear security guarantees from the West, would only give Putin time to regroup and rearm his strained military, and then to reinvade.

Could a Ukrainian “goodwill gesture” get Trump on board?

“We are interested in peace, but we are definitely interested in something that would be guaranteed as a peace, and that would not be used by the Russian Federation as a pause to remobilize and to attack with a tsunami wave over Ukraine and also over European countries,” Klympush-Tsintsadze told CBS News in Kyiv on Wednesday. 

After Zelenskyy’s dressing-down at the White House, Ukrainian officials — including Zelenskyy himself — made it clear they were still willing to sign an economic agreement with the U.S.

“I think the only thing that that deal is potentially going to give us is a discussion on another deal,” Klympush-Tsintsadze said, suggesting the economic agreement could serve as a framework, “and the possibility to engage the United States. … It’s a goodwill gesture with hope that it would translate into the U.S. standing with good against the evil.”

Russia, Europeans stress, has shown no willingness so far to bend on any of its maximalist demands that Ukraine cede the roughly 20% of its territory currently occupied by Putin’s forces. The Kremlin has repeatedly ruled out agreeing to any European peacekeeping forces helping maintain a truce. 

Russia’s attacks on Ukraine continue

Far from any signs of détente, Russian missiles, bombs and explosive drones have continued falling on Ukraine.

Overnight, the attacks intensified. The eastern city of Krivy Rih, President Zelenskyy’s hometown, was targeted by a Russian ballistic missile. In a post on social media, Zelenskyy said among the damaged buildings was a hotel full of aid workers, including some U.S. and British volunteers. At least 30 people were injured in the attack and four killed, Zelenskyy said, adding that none of those killed were from the U.S. or U.K.

“Unfortunately, I do not see the readiness of the Russian Federation to really engage,” Klympush-Tsintsadze said, noting that “every single night” Ukraine has faced Russian bombardment. “That is not something that is showing goodwill of terminating these attacks.”

What Ukraine wants, what Russia wants

Klympush-Tsintsadze said she hoped an agreement with the Trump administration on minerals “would give us the possibility, hopefully, to come to a real peace settlement,” but she cautioned that “a peace settlement that would not have security provisions on the side of our partners would barely hold with the Russian Federation.”

“We’ve been there before,” she said, stressing that when Russia first attacked her country 11 years ago, sending in forces to seize the Crimean Peninsula while denying their presence, Moscow claimed it was because “NATO is expanding,” but she said at the time Ukraine was “a totally neutral and non-aligned, non-block country.”

“And then all the other lies that the Russian Federation has been coming up with against the Ukrainian people, just because they don’t want us to exist. They just want to exterminate us as a nation and as a country, and that’s their goal. So, in order for us to reach peace, we would have to see the way to that peace settlement — which definitely comes through a ceasefire, but not necessarily ends with a ceasefire.”

Moscow has defended its aggression against Ukraine for more than a decade as a justified reaction to the U.S.-led NATO alliance’s territory inching toward Russia’s western border. That expansion began in the wake of the communist Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, with former Soviet bloc republics choosing to join the Western alliance to ensure their own security. 

Ukraine has expressed interest in joining the NATO alliance for over 20 years, and it has cooperated with NATO as a neutral partner for about that long, but it was not given a clear path to membership — largely due to many members worrying it would be seen as a provocation by Russia — until after Putin launched his full-scale invasion in 2022.

In 2023, with the war well underway, then-President Biden said he didn’t believe Ukraine was “ready for membership in NATO,” adding that he didn’t see unanimity among the alliance’s members “about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now, at this moment, in the middle of a war.”

President Trump’s administration has ruled out Ukraine joining the alliance and launched unilateral negotiations with Russia. That direct Washington-Moscow dialogue and the lack of any clear demands by Mr. Trump for concessions from Putin have stoked fears in Kyiv and Western European capitals about the White House’s commitment to both the NATO alliance and to securing a ceasefire in Ukraine that looks like anything other than humiliation and capitulation for pro-Western Zelenskyy.

Russia insists it wants to end the war it started in Ukraine, and Mr. Trump has said he believes Moscow on that point. Speaking Thursday to reporters in Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov doubled down on the Russian narrative, pushed since Mr. Trump engaged in talks with Putin, that Europe, to a greater degree than Washington, is to blame for the conflict’s enduring nature.

Peskov said that while the U.S. under Mr. Trump “is not a friendly country to us at the moment, the United States is a country with which we are now trying to revive and restore our bilateral relations.”

That is not the case, he made clear, of America’s NATO allies in Europe. 

Ukraine seeks Europe’s support, but hopes the “United States will stand for democracy”

Peskov cited remarks by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who called Wednesday for Europe to boost its collective military capabilities and assume more responsibility for the continent’s defense — as President Trump has demanded — as evidence that “France is really looking for a continuation of the war.” He said Macron had suggested that “France is ready to use its nuclear weapons for security purposes and so on,” claiming the French leader had issued “a claim to nuclear leadership in Europe, that is, it is very, very confrontational.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday called Macron’s remarks “a threat to Russia,” while dismissing European suggestions that it is in fact Russia which poses a threat to security on the continent, calling that “stupid” and “delirious nonsense.”

Macron did reference atomic weapons in his Wednesday night address, saying France’s “deterrent capabilities” had helped to protect the country “much more than many of our neighbors” who do not possess such weapons. He did not mention plans to bolster France’s nuclear deterrent specifically, but said that as the Trump administration signals less willingness to come to its European allies’ defense, he would consider requests from nations such as Germany to extend “the protection of our allies on the European continent by our deterrent.”

As Europe grapples over how to ensure its own defense from future Russian or other threats, Ukrainians will be hoping the continent’s leaders move quickly to boost their own defenses against Russia’s current, ongoing assault.

France was quick to confirm it would continue sharing its intelligence with Ukraine after the U.S. cutoff, with Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu saying: “Our intelligence is sovereign. We have intelligence that we allow Ukraine to benefit from.”

“We are hoping that all the great… warm political will of the European nations will also, as urgently as possible, will translate in upscaling their defense engagement with Ukraine,” Klympush-Tsintsadze told CBS News. “They’ve given a lot. They have much more limited capacities than the United States, but we hope that they will be able to invest in Ukrainian defense capacities, that they will be able to upscale their defense production, that they will help us also to procure weaponry in order for us to stay strong while Russia has not given up on their plans to just destroy us.”

She made it clear that Ukraine would also continue working toward an agreement with Mr. Trump.

“We are to try to get the message across to the American public. I think that this is also very important, and I’m sure that President Trump really cares about the support that he enjoys back in the United States, and I hope that he hears also his citizens [saying] why this is important, and why it is expected that the United States will stand for democracy, will stand for freedoms.”

contributed to this report.