WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to reassure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of US support for his country during a 45-minute call Tuesday amid friction between Kyiv and Washington over alleged gaps in intelligence sharing and throttling of Starshield access.
Rubio was adamant that “nothing has changed” in the Trump administration’s posture towards Ukraine and claimed he used the call with Zelensky to clear up inaccurate media reports.
“Look, I’m seeing a lot of things in the media that are not accurate, so let me clear those up as I did in my conversation with him,” Rubio told reporters in India.
“[With] the Department of War, everything they’ve been doing with Ukraine remains the same. That has not changed,” he said. “The second is intelligence-sharing. The president made it very clear he’s ordered no such changes.”
Shortly after President Trump’s Oct. 9 call with Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin and the announcement of a diesel deal with the Kremlin, Ukrainian officials claimed that they weren’t receiving warnings from the US about Russian ballistic missile attacks targeting civilians.
Trump had openly railed against Ukraine over its retaliatory attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, fueling suspicions that the US was reducing its assistance to the war-torn ally.
Zelensky publicly said that Ukraine took ballistic missile fire from Russia three times last week without a heads-up from US intelligence. Rubio insisted that wasn’t the result of a political decision, but was down to tech snafus.
“I saw somebody associated with the Ukrainian government say that people in Ukraine are dying because the US is denying them information,” the secretary raged. “That’s scandalous, that’s outrageous. That’s just simply not true.”
“Our understanding is that to the extent that happened on the 13th and on the 18th, it was a technical matter,” he added. “It was not the result of any sort of US directive not to provide advance warning of a strike, and we are providing the same warnings to them now that we always have.”
Rubio emphasized that Trump is “frustrated” because “he doesn’t like to be blamed for things that aren’t true.”
US intelligence about Russian ballistic missile attacks is much more sophisticated than European intelligence, Zelensky explained to NBC’s “Meet The Press” over the weekend.
Ukrainian officials also claimed that its access to the Starshield satellite internet network appears to have been throttled from speeds above 100 miles per hour, which has undermined drone operations. Both the Trump administration and SpaceX boss Elon Musk have denied a deliberate slowdown.
But the top agenda item during Zelensky’s call with Rubio was Ukraine’s desperate pleas for more interceptors after Kyiv reportedly ran out of Patriot missiles last year.
“[What] President Zelensky has been talking about is that he’s been trying to buy interceptors, and I understand so does every other country in the world,” Rubio said. “It’s probably the most in-demand product right now in the defense field.
“So when a country doesn’t get interceptors from the United States, it’s not because we’re denying. We have our own needs,” he added. “There’s nothing being deliberately denied to Ukraine.”
Zelensky thanked Rubio for the call and revealed plans to touch base with America’s top diplomat again.
The call came ahead of Zelensky’s planned meeting with Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff and European allies in Oslo, Norway for another round of peace talks aimed at ending the bloody war. After those talks, Witkoff will head to Russia, where he is expected to present a new proposal to Putin.
Fellow special envoy Jared Kushner is believed to have contracted the flu and is not expected to attend in person.
