To accuse Trump of turning on Ukraine only because high gasoline prices have angered voters would be too charitable. His hostility goes far beyond that.
A reporter asked Donald Trump on Tuesday if he was prepared to cut Ukraine off in retaliation for its long-range attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure. “No, we haven’t,” he insisted. “We help them.”
If that is still the case, the president increasingly resents it. The White House is actively considering another pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv, according to Semafor’s Shelby Talcott. “Trump is pretty pissed off,” one unnamed administration official said. “He could order it.”
If CBS News’ reporting is accurate, he already has.
“The U.S. may have intentionally withheld early warnings this week of Russian strikes on Ukraine,” the outlet’s Wednesday report read. For two consecutive days, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that his country “received no advance warning from our partners” ahead of Russia’s ballistic missile barrages on Kyiv and other Ukrainian population centers. Ukrainian officials told CBS that they did not believe Trump, accusing “the U.S. instead of ‘playing’ with the system” that helps Ukraine preserve civilian life.
In a related development, Ukrainian forces suddenly lost access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet provider this week. “Kyiv relies on the satellite internet network, known as Starshield, which is paid for by the Pentagon,” the New York Times reported. “That led Ukrainian officials and analysts to surmise that the restrictions had come from Washington, as President Trump is locked in his latest feud with Ukraine’s leadership.”
That’s a reasonable guess. Throttling Ukraine’s access to Starlink would severely hinder its ability to launch the medium- and long-range strikes targeting Russia’s oil facilities and refineries, which are only the Trump administration’s latest source of frustration with Zelensky’s government. Moreover, the pattern we’re witnessing fits with previous episodes in which Musk’s internet provider’s performance mirrored the Trump administration’s mercurial outlook toward Ukraine.
The Financial Times’ Ukraine-based reporter Christopher Miller described the crushing sense of betrayal overcoming Ukrainians today amid the indications that the United States has once again turned its back on them and their cause of national survival:
The mood in Ukraine is grim today. There's frustration and outrage here in Kyiv towards the Trump administration over what Ukraine's government, the troops and society believe is a deliberate attempt on the part of Washington to force Ukraine to capitulate to Russia – by… https://t.co/CTe9TssEeY
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) October 14, 2026
Americans and the Trump administration deserve to be confronted with the moral atrocity in which they are increasingly complicit.
The Ukrainian people are the victims of this war, not its perpetrators. That simple historical fact eludes some in this administration, so it must be restated again and again. Posterity’s record must also reflect our understanding that Ukraine’s aggressive neighbor is attempting to swallow it up because it sought to join the community of liberal Western nations. It looked to the United States and Europe when it sought greater integration with the European Union. And that, not some illusory promise of future NATO expansion, was the reason why Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for the second time.
Throughout its war of conquest, Russia has been responsible for atrocities the likes of which the world had not seen for over 70 years. Russian forces indiscriminately bomb Ukraine’s cities, not because of Moscow’s lack of precision munitions but as a tactic. Its soldiers have massacred Ukrainian civilians. They deploy rape as a weapon of war. They separate children from their families with the aim of brainwashing them into fighting against the country of their birth. Moscow engages in ethnic cleansing both in Ukraine’s captive territories and inside the Russian Federation (Russia’s minorities are disproportionately represented among the dead on Ukraine’s battlefields), and it has set out to eradicate Ukraine’s culture and language.
Russia does all this and more not just because Putin has some special contempt for Ukraine, although he certainly does. The conquest of Ukraine was designed to set the stage for acts of war against the West.
We’ve seen plenty of those recently as Russia’s well-laid plans have come a cropper. Russia has sent drone swarms deep into Poland to test NATO’s response. It is behind potentially catastrophic terrorist plots targeting civilian aircraft in Germany. It executes airstrikes on the passenger trains that carry Western dignitaries in and out of Ukraine. According to the Justice Department, Moscow set out to recruit Americans on American soil to conduct acts of sabotage and assassinations on the Kremlin’s behalf. And according to some reports, Russia is preparing to mount attacks on NATO countries either via the sea or overland with the aim of confronting the alliance with an existential crisis — one that might break the alliance if it failed to respond with the requisite vigor.
Putin’s Kremlin isn’t just Ukraine’s enemy. It’s America’s enemy. To accuse the Trump administration of turning on Ukraine only because high gasoline prices have angered American voters would be too charitable. This White House’s hostility toward the Ukrainian people and their chosen representatives extends well beyond that. Whatever it is that drives the Trump administration’s animosity toward Ukraine, that hostility represents a grotesque moral failing. It isn’t just strategically incomprehensible; it betrays America’s values and traditions.
With just 19 days to go before the midterm elections, Republican partisans aren’t going to want to hear that. But they should reserve some of their resentment for the administration that has led honest observers to merely acknowledge the evidence of their own eyes. We’ve seen the Trump administration fall out with Zelensky only to revise that opinion when its outreach to Putin yields nothing. We may see that again. But the public’s patience with the administration’s manic-depressive relationship with Ukraine should be exhausted by now.
While the world is focused on helping Ukraine fight its war of survival, the Trump administration is at war with itself.