Ukraine did not receive a warning from the US about an impending Russian missile attack on Sunday evening, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, reviving concerns that Washington is withholding intelligence to bully Kyiv into capitulating to Moscow. Yuri Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force, said on television on Monday morning that Ukraine had not received a warning before a Russian missile barrage hit power plants in Kyiv at about 11pm. Earlier, a Ukrainian government official had told the Guardian the US had not warned the capital about the impending missile strike.
Ukraine did receive a warning before a subsequent strike, at 3am, Ihnat added. Zelenskyy is grappling with recent US moves benefiting the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. On Friday, Donald Trump waived a sweeping package of sanctions on Russia, telling Congress the pause on the legislation, named after the late senator Lindsey Graham and passed by both chambers, was in the national interest.
Ukraine has also complained of slowed deliveries of PAC-3 air defence missiles from the US. The US president wrote on Truth Social on Sunday: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one. I am in the process of negotiating peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.
He said: “We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearisation. If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it.” For years, the US has warned Ukraine before Russia launched ballistic missiles, giving authorities several minutes to sound alarms and allow civilians to reach shelters before the strikes hit. However, Ukraine has said it was not warned on at least three days in the past week before missiles were launched, amid a public quarrel between Zelenskyy and Trump.
Speaking in the early hours of Monday on a trip to Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said: “If it happened last night, I don’t know exactly. I know a few nights ago there was a software problem involving their early warning system.” US officials have not previously mentioned a software glitch in the early warning system. In at least one case, Ukrainian officials had been told that bad weather over southern Russia had obscured preparations for the missile launch.
Rubio said the military’s European Command was looking into the strikes. The US has maintained plausible deniability as services and programmes provided to support Ukraine have suddenly begun to fail. The Trump administration has denied that it throttled services in Ukraine for Starlink, the satellite internet service run by Elon Musk that is used both on offensive drones and anti-air weapons by Ukraine.
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