The United States temporarily paused military aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine for less than two weeks, during which Russia was able to conduct a quick and successful offensive in Kursk.
Ukrainian forces launched a surprise offensive last August, capturing Kursk, a Russian border town. They have held the territory ever since, though they have incrementally lost ground since the peak of the occupation.
Ukraine held an estimated 514 square miles of Russian territory at its high point on Aug. 24, 2024, but as of March 12, Russian forces had retaken slightly more than 70%, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
George Barros, an expert with ISW, acknowledged that “correlation is not causation,” citing Ukraine’s continual but incremental losses in Kursk over the last several months. However, he said he’s “pretty confident that the intelligence cutoff expedited the Ukrainian decision to do a fighting withdrawal out of Kursk, and I’m sure that the Russian forces exploited it.”
The Trump administration decided to pause military aid and intel sharing with Ukraine after President Donald Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 28 went sour.
The two leaders were supposed to sign a long-term economic agreement, but their conversation in the Oval Office devolved into a heated argument about security assurances from the U.S. to ensure Russia adheres to a ceasefire if it agrees to it.
Days after the meeting, U.S. officials acknowledged that the altercation inspired the president to pause military aid and intel sharing.
Trump’s Russia-Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, argued last week that the Ukrainians “brought [the pause] on themselves” due to Zelensky’s behavior during the meeting.
U.S. and Ukrainian officials met in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday to discuss the Trump administration’s efforts to end the war.
At the conclusion of the meeting, they issued a joint statement announcing that Ukraine had “expressed readiness to accept the U.S. proposal” for an immediate 30-day ceasefire and that the U.S. “will immediately lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume security assistance to Ukraine.”
Between the Oval Office meeting and the Jeddah engagement, Russian forces were able to retake about 110 square miles of territory in Kursk. They retook the city of Sudzha over the last couple of days, and Russian President Vladimir Putin visited an outpost there on Wednesday.
If Russia retakes all of Kursk, it will “reverberate in the domestic politics of both countries — reducing Zelensky’s stature and enhancing Putin’s,” Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, predicted.
“A full retreat from Kursk will, unfortunately, also remind Ukraine’s military backers that Kyiv is capable of risky gambles that don’t pay off,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Lt. Gen. Apti Alaudinov, the Akhmat Special Forces Commander in Russia’s military, said on Thursday that he believes Russia will completely push Ukraine out of Russian territory “in the next few days,” according to Russian state media Tass.
The ISW, which produces daily battlefield assessments of the war, pointed out an “interesting correlation between when the Russians intensified their campaign in Kursk and launched a new counteroffensive to push the Ukrainians out, [and] they likely exploited the intelligence sharing cut off. It doesn’t mean, however, that the Ukrainians wouldn’t ultimately have been pushed out of Kursk had there not been an intelligence sharing cutoff,” Barros added.
He noted that the U.S. withholding intelligence, specifically real-time tactical targeting information, affected Ukraine’s ability to carry out attacks on Russian forces and supply lines, which are not stationary, and defend against Russian attacks.
“When you cut off the intelligence sharing, you degrade a force’s ability to use artillery or other strike systems to be able to hit them,” Barros said. “And so when you shoot, you’re less likely to kill as much stuff, and it enables the enemy to be able to also accumulate and prepare and gather for a counterattack, without you necessarily even being able to see it or know about it or effectively respond to it once the attacks have already been conducted.”
With the U.S. pushing both sides to pursue a diplomatic ending to the conflict, both sides are expected to try and improve their ground positions to use as leverage during negotiations.
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A senior aide to Putin, Yuri Ushakov, said on Thursday that Russia would not accept the U.S.’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire, saying it’s “nothing more than a temporary respite for the Ukrainian military,” though Ukrainians have shared that concern for years about ending the conflict.
Zelensky has accused Putin of breaking more than two dozen ceasefire agreements between Ukraine and Russia over the last decade since Russia annexed Crimea.
