The United States has rebuilt intelligence sharing with Ukraine—the flow of satellite data, targeting, and attack warnings—to its pre-freeze peak, according to Politico. That restored flow now sharpens Kyiv's long-range strikes inside Russia, and senators from both parties say it has strengthened Ukraine. The White House says President Donald Trump stays focused on ending the war.

Russia funds its invasion largely with oil money, and Ukraine has spent the past year burning that revenue at the source, sending drones against refineries far behind the front. Foreign backing has wavered across the war, and every US pledge now carries the question of whether it will hold.

The freeze that started with a White House blowup

The cutoff came after Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy clashed in the Oval Office on 28 February 2025. Days later, the White House froze weapons and intelligence to push Kyiv toward talks. It did not last. Washington restored the flow within about a week, after US-Ukraine talks in Saudi Arabia.

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What changed on the battlefield

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the renewed sharing has improved Ukraine's position.

"Everybody loves a winner and looks like Ukraine has turned the tide," said Republican Senator John Cornyn.

Better data, deadlier strikes

"Those strikes were supercharged," and became "significantly more effective when imbued with intelligence from the Americans," said George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War.

He tied the drone strikes on Russian energy sites to a plan to raise the war's cost for Moscow.

Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations said Ukrainian officials give Washington confident reads on what is happening in Moscow, not just inside the Kremlin. Warner said no one in the US defense establishment, himself included, expected Ukraine to reach this point a year ago.

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What the 2025 blackout cost

Euromaidan Press reported that losing the feed let Russian troops claw back territory in Russia's Kursk Oblast and left thousands of Ukrainians at risk of encirclement.

"As a result of this pause, there are hundreds of dead Ukrainians," one Ukrainian officer told.

Why the renewed backing is hard to unwind

The restored flow binds Washington to Ukraine's deep-strike campaign, making the tie harder for any ceasefire to sever. Agreement across party lines suggests the backing could outlast the next swing in American politics.

There is a reason Ukraine cannot simply blow up the launchers firing ballistic missiles at its cities. Russia's Iskander launchers are extremely hard to catch, and interfering with the missiles' production is nearly as difficult, presidential adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said on the national telethon, according to UNIAN.

The launchers survive by never staying still or coming within reach. Iskander launchers head to their firing positions only when a combat task is set, sometimes moving along forest roads for five hours to avoid detection by satellites, then deploying fast, firing, and fleeing.

They launch from 140 to 150 kilometers behind the front line, which is why catching one on the march or at its firing position is so hard.

The launcher is a fleeting target

Beskrestnov described a weapon designed to be gone before it can be hit.

"The deployment of the Iskander happens very quickly. Then the launch. The Iskander fires and then flees the position," he said.

The forest-road approach and the 140- to 150-kilometer standoff are deliberate. By staying beyond HIMARS' range and moving under tree cover to evade satellites, the launcher gives Ukraine almost no window to detect, target, and strike it before it fires and moves on.

Attacking the factories is hard too

Ukraine's other option, hitting production, faces its own obstacles. The missiles are made deep underground, where they are not easy to attack, Beskrestnov said.

He also claimed sanctions do not work well against the Iskander because it is "probably the only product made 100% from Russian resources and Russian electronics." That claim sits awkwardly against Ukraine's own documented findings.

Ukraine's sanctions commissioner, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, reported that an Iskander fired at Kyiv Oblast on 10 July held more than 140 foreign components, 62 of them American. Meanwhile, Ukraine's Defense Intelligence has said that without foreign parts, Russia cannot build the missile at all. Ukraine has repeatedly struck the plants making Iskander components, precisely because those production nodes are vulnerable.

The interception gap makes it worse

The launcher problem compounds the shortage of defenses against the missiles themselves. With Ukraine short of the Patriot interceptors that are the only reliable defense against Iskander ballistic missiles, and the launchers nearly impossible to catch, Russia can keep firing them at a pace Ukraine cannot fully answer, striking cities from safe forest positions deep behind the front.