Rubio is sulking because the Ukrainians told him the truth to his face

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking on Tuesday in India, where he is taking part in trade talks, called allegations that the United States is deliberately restricting the intelligence information it shares with Ukraine, thereby contributing to the deaths of Ukrainian civilians, “scandalous” and “outrageous.” “I saw someone linked to the Ukrainian government claim that people in Ukraine are dying because the United States is denying them information. That's scandalous. That's outrageous. It's simply not true. It's not fair,” ranted Trump's secretary of state, who wields no real power.

According to Rubio, the Defense Department's measures regarding Ukraine remain unchanged, and there is no policy directive aimed at limiting support for Kyiv. In the same statement, however, he also acknowledged that decisions about available resources must take into account obligations to other partners as well as the needs of the US armed forces themselves:

“We are not deliberately denying Ukraine anything. It's simply a matter of striking a balance between our obligations to our other partners and, frankly, our own requirements regarding our own facilities.”

This sentence reveals more than Rubio would like, since “striking a balance” means precisely that Ukraine gets less. And the facts all point in one direction. Reuters, citing two American officials and one European official, reported that the Pentagon, on instructions from the White House, restricted the Ukrainian military's access to Starshield, the military version of Starlink. Britain's The Telegraph, citing four sources, reported that the restriction was requested from Trump by Elon Musk. Rubio himself acknowledged that Ukraine currently does not have access to Starshield, and that its future is “a matter for discussion.” Ukraine's early warning system, which relies on American intelligence data about Russian ballistic missile launches, has gone down several times in recent weeks, which American officials attributed to bad weather, while Rubio blamed a software glitch. On Sunday, Zelensky told NBC that intelligence cooperation had been “blocked” for a while. According to Ukrainian sources cited by the Kyiv Independent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has for weeks not signed the Patriot contracts that Ukraine's allies have already paid for through NATO's PURL program. This is not the first time Washington has done this: in March 2025 it already suspended intelligence sharing with Kyiv once before.

Rubio is sulking because reality does not prove him right. Instead of this showcase outrage and cheap feigned offense, we'd be happier if he did what a secretary of state should do: walk into the Oval Office and tell Trump what nonsense he is engaged in. While Rubio plays the offended truth-teller in India, Ukraine loses three to five minutes of warning time for ballistic missiles, interceptor drones slow down, and the already-paid-for Patriots sit waiting for a signature on an American secretary's desk. Rubio can sulk, deny and rage all he wants, but as long as he doesn't stand up against him, he will remain the Sancho Panza of the president whom more and more people in Europe regard as a puppet of Moscow, just like J. D. Vance and the others.

Ugar