Rubio tells Zelensky nothing deliberately denied Ukraine as tensions with US grow

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to reassure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of US support for his country during a 45-minute call Tuesday amid friction between Kyiv and Washington over alleged gaps in intelligence sharing and throttling of Starshield access.Rubio was adamant that “nothing has changed” in the Trump administration’s posture towards Ukraine and claimed he used the call with Zelensky to clear up inaccurate media reports.“Look, I’m seeing a lot of things in the media that are not accurate, so let me clear those up as I did in my conversation with him,” Rubio told reporters in India.“[With] the Department of War, everything they’ve been doing with Ukraine remains the same.

That has not changed,” he said.“The second is intelligence-sharing.

The president made it very clear he’s ordered no such changes.”Shortly after President Trump’s Oct.9 call with Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin and the announcement of a diesel deal with the Kremlin, Ukrainian officials claimed that they weren’t receiving warnings from the US about Russian ballistic missile attacks targeting civilians.Trump had openly railed against Ukraine over its retaliatory attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, fueling suspicions that the US was reducing its assistance to the war-torn ally.Zelensky publicly said that Ukraine took ballistic missile fire from Russia three times last week without a heads-up from US intelligence.

Rubio insisted that wasn’t the result of a political decision, but was down to tech snafus.“I saw somebody associated with the Ukrainian government say that people in Ukraine are dying because the US is denying them information,” the secretary raged.“That’s scandalous, that’s outrageous.

That’s just simply not true.”“Our understanding is that to the extent that happened on the 13th and on the 18th, it was a technical matter,” he added.“It was not the result of any sort of US directive not to pr...