Marta Gichko12:32, 08.03.25

President Zelensky sees the region as a key lever in potential peace talks with Moscow.

The US decision to suspend intelligence sharing with Ukraine has contributed to Russia’s gains on a critical front in the Kursk region. It has significantly weakened President Volodymyr Zelensky’s negotiating position and led to significant losses among the Ukrainian military.

Time reports this, citing five high-ranking Western and Ukrainian officials, as well as military officers familiar with the situation.

“There are hundreds of dead Ukrainians as a result of this pause,” said one officer, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue.

“The biggest problem is morale,” he said, emphasizing that the Ukrainian armed forces are forced to fight without access to some of their most important weapons systems not because of enemy strikes, but because of Washington’s shift in posture. “This really creates an advantage for the enemy on the front lines.”

President Zelensky sees the region as a key lever in potential peace talks with Moscow. His strategy includes a possible swap of parts of the Kursk region for temporarily Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. “We will exchange one territory for another,” he told the Guardian last month.

However, after the US stopped sharing intelligence, Russian forces quickly advanced into the Kursk region in an attempt to cut off Ukrainian supply lines in the region, military sources and the latest battle maps created by the open-source intelligence organization Deep State confirm.

“If we do nothing, it will have huge consequences,” Deep State co-founder Roman Pogorely told the media on Tuesday. He also noted that the main supply line to Ukrainian troops in Kursk is under constant attack: “It is impossible to move normally along it.”

A source in Zelensky’s government confirmed that it was the operations in the Kursk region that suffered the most due to the restriction of access to American intelligence:

“Not only in Kursk, there are problems all over Russia now. This is very dangerous for our people. This needs to be changed immediately.”

It is noted that Ukraine has lost the ability to promptly track the takeoff of Russian bombers and other military aircraft, which has significantly reduced the time it takes to warn the civilian population and the military about a possible airstrike.

Maxar Technologies confirms service disruptions in Ukraine:

“The U.S. government has decided to temporarily suspend Ukrainian accounts on a system used to access commercial satellite imagery. Maxar contracts with the U.S. government and dozens of allied and partner countries around the world to provide satellite imagery and other geospatial data. Each customer decides how they use and share that data.”

(C)UNIAN 2025