Europe scrambles to aid Ukraine after US intelligence cutoff

Ukraine’s allies in Europe are rushing to fill the void left by the Trump administration’s decision to pause its intelligence sharing with Kyiv. It isn’t going to be easy.

The U.S. has provided Kyiv with everything from signals intelligence, satellite imagery and targeting data used to strike Russian positions during the three-year war.

Now, it will likely fall to other intelligence heavyweights within the NATO alliance — Britain, France and to an extent Germany — to pick up the slack. But they are unlikely to be able to replicate the scope and scale of the sprawling U.S. intelligence community.

“I’m not sure that European countries can really bridge this gap,” said a European official familiar with the capabilities of allies, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the continent’s security arrangements.

The U.S. intelligence community, which spans 18 agencies, vastly outguns any of its European counterparts, particularly in the realms of satellite technology and analytic capacity.

“It’s really a matter of mass,” said Jim Townsend, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO during the Obama administration. “We have more analysts and more systems and in some ways, some more exquisite systems.”

The pause on intelligence sharing has added to the distress in Europe over how to fend off Russia as the Trump administration has been increasingly conciliatory toward Moscow and antagonistic toward Ukraine — including halting arms transfers to Kyiv.

Confusion reigned in the wake of the announcement on Wednesday, with Ukraine’s defense minister acknowledging on Thursday that the country had not yet received details on how intelligence would be restricted. The European official said Thursday that it was “still puzzling” how far the ban extended.

The U.S. intelligence relationship with Ukraine has been carefully nurtured over a decade. Washington has a broad range of tools at its disposal, from signals and human intelligence to satellite capabilities, that have played a decisive role in alerting Ukraine about Moscow’s plans to invade in 2022, and defending against the onslaught of Russian missiles.

The National Security Council declined to comment when asked about the scope of the pause on intelligence sharing, and whether it applied to information that could be used for defensive purposes.

“Turning off intelligence is the most damaging and hostile decision,” said Camille Grand, former assistant secretary general for defense investment at NATO. “Cuts in weapons supply will take a few months to have a massive impact and can be partially mitigated by the Europeans. If the intel denial is not a pause, it will have consequences in the short term,” he said.

NATO allies have been discussing how to handle the U.S. announcement of the intel-sharing pause with Ukraine. One person familiar with those discussions said NATO members are not prohibited from sharing some U.S intelligence with Ukraine, though such sharing could be very limited, as allies don’t want to jeopardize existing relationships with Washington or one another.

One NATO official emphasized that the American suspension of arms shipments and intel sharing with Ukraine is being described to allies as a temporary measure until Washington sees some movement in talks to end the war, and they are under no pressure from the Trump team to reduce or curtail their own work with Ukraine on either intelligence sharing or arms shipments.

Still, the Daily Mail reported Wednesday that the United States had ordered the U.K. to stop sharing American intelligence previously cleared to be shared with Ukraine. (A British official declined to comment on the reporting.)

France’s Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu said Thursday that French intelligence was “sovereign” and that the country would continue to share intelligence with Ukraine. He did not provide details on what sort of intelligence France is sharing with the Ukrainians.

The effects of the U.S. intel halt are already being felt.

U.S. satellite company Maxar, one of the leading providers of commercial satellite imagery to Ukraine, has blocked Ukraine’s access to its services, which are used by Ukrainian troops to study the terrain of the battlefield and plan strikes on Russian positions.

In a statement, Gia DeHart, a spokesperson for Maxar, said that the U.S. government has suspended Ukrainian access to the company’s Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery program, which is provided under a U.S. government contract.

Without U.S. intelligence, the Ukrainians also have far less real-time, over-the-horizon knowledge of Russian military formations, movements and logistics.

“We now have less information about what’s happening on the other side of the front line,” said Mykola Bielieskov, an analyst with Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies. “We have some of our own indigenous capability from human intelligence sources, but U.S. intelligence was very valuable in keeping us informed,” he said.

Ukraine is particularly worried about any interruption in warnings about Russian missile attacks.

“With anti-ballistic missile defense every second is important,” Bielieskov said. “You need military-grade satellite intelligence to detect a missile launch.”

On average since the start of the war, Russia has fired 24 missiles a day at Ukraine. There are lulls, possibly due to Moscow’s production challenges, but there are days when up to a hundred missiles can be launched targeting critical infrastructure and residential areas in Ukraine’s cities.

“This is going to impact our cities and could result in mass destruction,” said Ukrainian lawmaker Maryana Bezuhla, who until recently served on the parliamentary defense and intelligence committee.

The intelligence sharing pause will also deprive the Ukrainian armed forces of targeting data when firing U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets. “We can still fire them but we’re shooting half-blind,” Bielieskov said.

Asked if any European countries can substitute for the now-suspended intelligence, Bielieskov, said “only partially, fully no.”

The intelligence pause is already fueling longer-term questions in Europe as to whether the continent can continue to rely on U.S. military and intelligence support to underpin its security.

Konstantin von Notz, chair of the German parliament’s intelligence oversight committee, is calling for the establishment of a European spy network, cautioning that the continent can no longer continue to rely on U.S. intelligence support.

“We need a European intelligence cooperation format — call it ‘Euro Eyes’ — to ensure that strong states can exchange information swiftly and securely on clear legal grounds,” von Notz said in an interview with POLITICO published Friday. “There is no way around increasing our own intelligence capabilities in the future.”

Jack Detsch contributed to this report.