The White House’s directives against Kyiv

Yesterday, Reuters published an exclusive report stating that the order to slow down the flow of communications and information provided by Starshield on the Ukrainian front came from the White House. The news comes from two U.S. officials and several European officials (who spoke on condition of anonymity), who said that the order reached the Pentagon, which carried it out, given that Starshield is the ‘military arm’ of Starlink – a company owned by Elon Musk – managed by the U.S. Department of Defense. The White House has denied this – an official source told Reuters: “No such request has ever been made by President” Donald Trump; the Pentagon has not issued any statements, with the only comment coming from Musk, who said on Wednesday that he does not manage Starshield, the SpaceX project that utilises the Starlink satellite constellation and provides intelligence to governments and security clients, notably the Pentagon.

In fact, we currently know that the sharing of intelligence with the Ukrainians by the United States – a vital exchange: the Americans are practically the only ones providing early warning of Russian missile attacks on Ukrainian cities and, through Starshield, enabling Ukrainian drone units to operate from the front line – has been slowed down by the Trump Administration, but the precise responsibility for the decision has not been established.

This episode bears a strong resemblance to what happened at the start of last summer, when US arms supplies to Ukraine were suspended. On that occasion too, President Trump claimed to be unaware of the suspension – even though the arms that had already arrived in Germany and Poland and were ready for delivery were also held up (the PURL system had not yet been introduced; since last autumn, this system has required Europeans to purchase arms from the United States and then deliver them to Kyiv). The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, called the U.S. President to request an explanation and the resumption of deliveries, but Trump also told him that he did not know who had taken the decision. The reconstructions that have since emerged are not yet entirely complete, but essentially the decision was taken unilaterally by the Pentagon, specifically by Under-Secretary Elbridge Colby, who had carried out a review of US arsenals and, finding them depleted, had requested that supplies to the Ukrainians be suspended (Colby has also been reviewing the US commitment in Europe in recent months; the report is due to be published by the end of the year: when articles and analyses appear predicting a partial withdrawal of troops and investment from our countries, it is this process that is being referred to). How the Pentagon was able to make such a significant decision—as with everything concerning Ukraine, every suspension, delay or change of heart is measured in terms of the number of people killed by the Russians—without consulting the White House remains unclear, but it is evident that the chain of command within this Administration is at the mercy of whims, ideologies and falsehoods circulating at all levels of government.

The latest evidence came in the last few hours, with the interview Trump himself gave to the conservative broadcaster Newsmax. The president described the Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries as “a disgrace”, taking a swipe at the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, of whom he is “not a big fan” (he says he gets on better with Vladimir Putin: we’d already noticed that), and he blamed this war on previous Democratic administrations, specifically that of Barack Obama, who “made sure” the Ukrainians “ceded Crimea” (Trump describes the peninsula as being surrounded “on all four sides by the ocean”: who knows where he thinks it is) and that of Joe Biden, who sent Tomahawk missiles in abundance and now there are none left – as is well known, these missiles were unfortunately never actually delivered, and if they have run out, it is because they were used inefficiently against Iran. Trump gives no credit whatsoever to the Ukrainians’ extraordinary resistance; on the contrary, he claims that the Russians made tactical errors in 2022 and thus became bogged down in the mud and failed to conquer Ukraine.

These false beliefs have led the Trump administration to abandon its Ukrainian ally, which cannot stop defending itself and must therefore carry on, without despair, without pretending it can count on an America that no longer exists.