Last Friday, Trump went further, waiving wide-ranging sanctions on Russia just two days before they were due to take effect.
Trump said the sanctions contained in the Graham Act (named after the former South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a vocal supporter of Ukraine who died in July) would hinder his efforts to broker peace. But for Kyiv and its supporters this was another alarming sign that the White House was siding with the Kremlin.
“What the Trump administration is doing is providing carrots to the Russians and sticks applied to the Ukrainians,” former US ambassador to Kyiv William Taylor told the BBC.
“It’s inexplicable and saddening.”
Kiriil Dmitriev, a senior Putin envoy, called it “an important and truly historic moment”.
For Moscow, this felt like a welcome return to the “spirit of Alaska”, a phrase much touted by Russian officials in the wake of the Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage in August 2025.
Adding to the impression that Trump is turning his back on Ukraine is the allegation – again not confirmed by Washington – that the US has restricted the flow of intelligence and interfered with Ukraine’s access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service.
Amid an escalation in Russia’s drone and missile war on Ukraine’s cities, Kyiv says advance warning provided by US satellite intelligence has been lacking.
“We didn’t receive it during ballistic attacks for three days,” Zelensky told NBC News.
On 12 October five Russian S-400 missiles hit Kyiv, reportedly before air raid sirens or mobile alerts had sounded.
The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, denied there had been any pause in intelligence sharing, blaming a “software problem” for the temporary lack of early warnings.
Similar uncertainty surrounds Ukraine’s access to Starlink.
A week ago, Ukrainian officials reported that the system was being throttled, with terminals unable to maintain connections at high speeds, making it harder for Ukraine’s military to intercept fast moving Russian drones.
Since the summer, Ukraine has struggled to cope with a wave of attacks by advanced, jet-powered drones.
It’s not clear where any order to limit Ukraine’s use of Starlink – or its military grade equivalent Starshield – originated. Reuters reported that it came from the White House.
Rubio said “no-one at the White House ordered anyone to slow down internet.”
But the fact that such suspicions surface so frequently points to the lack of trust that continues to infect US-Ukrainian relations.
Much of this has its roots in Donald Trump’s seemingly long-standing mistrust of Ukraine as a whole – and Zelensky in particular.
