Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Mumbai on Tuesday that he had spoken directly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for 45 minutes and told him that nothing has changed in American support for Ukraine — and he flatly rejected the claim, pushed by an adviser to Zelenskyy, that Ukrainians are dying because the United States withheld intelligence. "There's nothing being deliberately denied to Ukraine," Rubio said as he kicked off his trip to India. "I think the important takeaway is that there has not been some deliberate political directive to go out and harm Ukraine."
Zelenskyy announced the call early Tuesday, saying he had held "a substantive conversation" with Rubio covering ballistic missile interceptors, early warnings of Russian attacks, and the restrictions on Starshield, the military version of SpaceX's satellite service, which the Ukrainian president said needed to be restored. Zelenskyy thanked Rubio and "everyone in America who supports fair approaches."
The call came after days of public accusations from Kyiv. Ukrainian officials said the capital once again received no early warning from the United States before it came under Russian ballistic missile attack on Sunday, the third time in recent days, and that Ukraine is still facing unexplained speed restrictions on Starshield. Zelenskyy went further on Monday in a virtual address to a bipartisan Congressional delegation: "All of this suggests that some political decision has been made to slow down support for us." He also accused Washington of delaying delivery of crucial ballistic missile interceptors, and an adviser of his argued that withholding intelligence is contributing to Ukrainian deaths.
"That's scandalous, that's outrageous, that's just simply not true. That's not accurate."
Rubio said he used the 45-minute call to address inaccurate media reports head-on. "I'm seeing a lot of things in the media that are not accurate," he said, insisting that U.S. military operations and support for Ukraine remain unchanged. He did acknowledge one narrow point: a batch of missile interceptors purchased for Ukraine by NATO allies under the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) programme may not yet have been delivered — but he stressed that any gap was not the result of a political decision. Reuters has reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has yet to authorize delivery of the latest PURL package, and that Washington had threatened to stop the PURL mechanism to press Kyiv to halt its deep strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, as President Donald Trump announced a Ukraine energy ceasefire with Russia.
The exchange lands on a day of heavy diplomacy around the war. Trump's negotiators, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were meeting Zelenskyy in Oslo on Tuesday alongside Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb, and Trump himself said on Monday that Zelenskyy should "get somebody else to negotiate," his latest public rebuke of the Ukrainian leader. Against that backdrop, Rubio's message in Mumbai was the administration's answer to Kyiv's charges: support has not been cut, nothing is being held back on purpose, and claims to the contrary are, in his words, "simply not true."
Follow ProfiloPolitics on Telegram for breaking news and updates: https://t.me/profilopoliticsnews