“Hundreds of Dead”: Inside the Fallout from Trump’s Ukraine Intel Pause

The U.S. decision to suspend the flow of military intelligence to Ukraine this week has aided the Russian advance along a critical part of the front, weakening the negotiating position of President Volodymyr Zelensky and killing many Ukrainian soldiers in recent days, according to five senior Western and Ukrainian officials and military officers familiar with the situation.

“As a result of this pause, there are hundreds of dead Ukrainians,” one of the officers told TIME in an interview on Friday in Kyiv, asking not to be named when discussing sensitive military operations. “The biggest problem is morale,” he added, as the armed forces of Ukraine are being left to fight without some of their best weapons systems, not as a result of Russian attacks but American pull backs. “It’s really causing an advantage for the enemy on the front line.”

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The U.S. stopped providing intelligence to Ukraine shortly after the Presidents of both counties, Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump, clashed in the Oval Office on Feb. 28. During the meeting, Zelensky questioned whether the Russians could be trusted to abide by any ceasefire. President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance responded by berating the Ukrainian leader on camera. “You don’t have the cards," Trump said. "You’re gambling with World War III.”

In the days that followed, the U.S. suspended military aid to Ukraine, including intelligence sharing. Questioned about that decision on Thursday, President Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, General Keith Kellogg, said the Ukrainians had “brought it on themselves.” The U.S. response to Zelensky’s position was “sort of like hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose," Kellogg said. "Got their attention." 

The impact for the Ukrainians has been most acute in the Russian region of Kursk, where the Ukrainian armed forces are struggling to hold a swath of territory that they seized in a shock offensive last August. That assault marked the first foreign invasion of Russian land since World War II, humiliating the Kremlin and drawing thousands of North Korean troops into the war to help Russia regain control of the area.

President Zelensky sees that region as a critical source of leverage in any future peace talks with the Russians. His aim is to trade parts of the Kursk area for Ukrainian land that Russia has occupied. “We will swap one territory for another,” Zelensky told the Guardian last month.

Since the U.S. halted intelligence sharing, however, the Russians have made swift advances in Kursk, aiming to cut off Ukrainian supply lines into the region, according to military officers and fresh maps of the battlefield produced by Deep State, an open-source intelligence organization. “If we do nothing, there will be huge consequences,” the co-founder of Deep State, Roman Pogorily, told local media on Tuesday. The main supply line for Ukrainian troops operating in Kursk is now “under constant attack,” he added. “It is impossible to move normally along it.” 

A source in the Zelensky government confirmed that operations in the region of Kursk have been worst affected by the loss of access to U.S. intelligence. “Not only Kursk, in all Russian territory there are problems now,” he says. The Ukrainians have lost the ability to detect the approach of Russian bombers and other warplanes as they take off inside Russia. As a result, Ukraine has less time to warn civilians and military personnel about the risk of an approaching airstrike or missile. “It’s very dangerous for our people,” the government source says. “It has to be immediately changed.”

Read More: Zelensky’s Oval Office Clash with Trump Draws Pride and Fear in Ukraine

The loss of U.S. intelligence has also hurt the ability of Ukrainian forces to launch long- and intermediate-range strikes against Russian targets. Some of those strikes have been conducted in recent years using an American weapon known as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS. When the U.S. first provided these weapons to Ukraine in 2022, it also began sending intelligence from U.S. satellites that allowed for precision strikes against Russian command centers far behind the front lines. “The satellites allow us to see what the enemy is hiding,” Oleksiy Reznikov, who was then Ukraine’s defense minister, said at the time. “The HIMARS allow us to destroy it.”

These capabilities have now been crippled without access to information from U.S. satellites. Even Maxar Technologies, a private space technology company headquartered in Colorado, has stopped sending Ukraine images from its satellites, according to two Ukrainian military officers familiar with the situation. Ukrainian forces have often used satellite images from Maxar to plan long-range strikes against Russia.

In an emailed statement to TIME on Friday, Maxar Technologies confirmed the disruption to service in Ukraine. “The U.S. government has decided to temporarily suspend Ukrainian accounts” in the system that the government uses to provide access to commercial satellite imagery. “Maxar has contracts with the U.S. government and dozens of allied and partner nations around the world to provide satellite imagery and other geospatial data,” it said. “Each customer makes their own decisions on how they use and share that data.”

Adding to the Ukrainian sense of abandonment, the group of Western “partners” who helped receive and process satellite intelligence at the military headquarters in Kyiv have departed, says the source close to Ukraine’s general staff. “There’s no one left,” he says, declining to be more specific in identifying what “partners” he meant.

Some European intelligence agencies have rushed to help fill the gap left by the Trump Administration. But it will take time for them to deploy, and they are not likely to make up for U.S. intelligence capabilities any time soon, two of the Ukrainian officers say. “We are really thankful to European partners,” one of them says. “This is the only one solid point that gives us any hope, because without this support, we cannot survive.”