US intelligence sharing with Ukraine still intact despite PURL threat

Intelligence-sharing between the United States and Ukraine remains intact "for now," Ukrainian officials said, even as the Trump administration has pressed Kyiv to stop striking Russian oil refineries, the Kyiv Independent reported. The reassurance follows a Financial Times report that Washington had warned European officials it could halt the PURL procurement scheme supplying weapons to Ukraine unless the strikes stopped.

New reporting has disputed whether US envoys ever made that threat directly. Three people familiar with a Miami meeting between US and Ukrainian officials told Reuters, in an account carried by the Cyprus Mail, that envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner stressed "all that the US has done for Ukraine," including military and intelligence support, but did not threaten to cut it off if Kyiv kept striking refineries. That contradicts an earlier account, reported by the Kyiv Post citing a Ukrainian official who spoke to Axios, that the envoys had warned Trump would cut Ukraine's access to US intelligence unless the strikes stopped; a US official denied any such threat was made.

At the Miami meeting, Witkoff and Kushner told Ukrainian officials that President Vladimir Putin was not ready to negotiate an end to the war, and that a deal allowing Russia to export diesel could help restart three-way talks by "softening" Moscow's position, two people briefed on the meeting told Reuters. Under that deal, Russia will supply more than 2.25 million barrels of diesel to US and global markets, a move some US lawmakers say hands Moscow money to keep fighting without forcing concessions.

Trump defended the diesel deal on Monday as "the right choice for the American people," saying it would lower US fuel prices, though most independent experts say the war in Iran, not Ukrainian refinery strikes, is the main driver of higher costs. Trump has separately said Ukraine's attacks on Russian refineries are pushing up global fuel prices, and said on Saturday that Zelensky "could have settled this war many times."

US envoys Witkoff and Kushner have postponed a planned trip to Moscow while Washington waits for clarity on whether Ukraine and European governments will back a unified proposal for Putin, the Kyiv Post reported, citing Axios. A person close to the Kremlin told Reuters that Putin will only return to the table once he secures the remaining 11% of the Donbas, which he could present domestically as a victory; Ukraine says it will not cede further territory, though freezing the war along current front lines could form the basis of a deal.

The dispute over the refinery strikes has become entangled with a separate complaint from Zelensky, who said Ukraine received no advance warning before Russia fired ballistic missiles at Kyiv overnight on 12 October, despite intelligence-sharing remaining in place. Ukraine's air force said it had received no information about the missile launches and was investigating why.