In Ukraine, the cold is coming – and that cruel chill goes for U.S. relations, too

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Michael Bociurkiw is creator of the World Briefing report on Substack and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

On Monday night in Kyiv, the missiles came before the sirens. As the strikes hit, my phone filled with messages from friends in the capital: missiles were landing with no air raid alert, and some were stuck sheltering in metro stations. A rocket hit a four-storey warehouse, and Mayor Vitali Klitschko said transport infrastructure had been struck.

Within minutes, people on the ground were asking the question now hanging over this war: Had Washington already stopped sharing its intelligence?

On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that Ukraine had received no prior warning from its western partners about the attack. Washington and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha insist U.S. intelligence-sharing continues. But the fact that Ukrainians are even asking shows how far things have fallen. For the first time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine faces the extraordinary prospect of having to defend itself not only against a larger aggressor, but against pressure from its most powerful backer: the United States.

On Friday, while Ukrainian negotiators were meeting U.S. envoys at one of the President’s golf courses in Florida, Donald Trump was striking a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to bring nearly five million tonnes of Russian diesel onto world markets, with sanctions waived the same day. That directly contradicts a law he signed just a month ago, which meant to punish buyers of Russian energy. He then suggested it may be time for an election, and a new leader, in Ukraine. He announced a ceasefire on energy infrastructure that Kyiv says it was not told about in advance. And according to the Kyiv Independent, U.S. officials warned senior Ukrainian commanders that intelligence-sharing and weapons flowing through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List program would be cut off if they struck Russian refineries.

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Cheap Russian diesel may be a smaller part of the story. Russian pro-war bloggers are already speculating that the relief could extend to equipment needed to repair damaged refineries – the machinery that funds Russia’s war.

All of this makes last year’s televised Oval Office dust-up look tame. This is pressure being applied directly onto the officials running Ukraine’s war, and it amounts to nothing less than interference in how a sovereign country defends itself. Kyiv was effectively told to hold its fire under a truce it didn’t agree to, that Moscow broke almost immediately.

Within hours of Mr. Trump’s ceasefire announcement, missiles struck Kharkiv’s thermal power plant. “Putin does not read Truth Social,” Mr. Zelensky observed dryly. And on Tuesday, Russian missiles struck Kyiv’s combined heat and power plant, also reportedly without warning.

For Ukraine, the timing could hardly be worse. The winter cold has come early, before central heating has been switched on, and Russia knows exactly which targets will make it hurt: the power plants and heating facilities Ukrainian families need to survive it.

Odesa, quieter than Kyiv but still under fire, keeps absorbing people from harder-hit regions. At the Mriya Family Centre, children from families fleeing areas closer to the front line have been streaming in. Staff are scrambling to find the funds to keep the generator running through the winter. In the capital, officials are all but advising those who can leave to do so before the cold sets in.

For Canada, the stakes are concrete. Ottawa has put more than US$830-million into PURL. If Washington makes those deliveries conditional on protecting Russian refineries, Canadian taxpayers will in effect be underwriting a policy of shielding Mr. Putin’s war economy.

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The stakes reach the gas pump too. Canada imports most of the refined fuel it doesn’t make itself from the United States – nearly 80 per cent of it last year – and Ottawa banned Russian petroleum products in 2022. But sanctions leak. In 2025, a CBC investigation traced gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from an Indian refinery that processes large volumes of Russian crude to refineries and terminals in eastern Canada. Once Russian diesel is moving freely through U.S. supply chains, it can be blended, relabelled and shipped north.

Ottawa can’t control an unpredictable Mr. Trump, but it can decide not to be a bystander. It should close the refining loophole and require proof of origin for imported fuel, American shipments included. It should tell Washington, publicly, that PURL money is not given to be used as leverage against Ukraine. With its European partners, it should prepare to fill any intelligence gap, including through commercial satellite imagery, where Canadian firms are world leaders. And it should announce that allies who want diesel without funding a war have a reliable supplier in Canada.

Canada was the first G7 country to ban Russian oil. It should not be the last to notice that the rules of this conflict are being rewritten before our eyes.