US authorities shared intelligence with Ukraine that was used for strikes on military facilities near Moscow and on the oil refinery in Kapotnya. This was reported on June 24, 2026 by the Financial Times, citing sources.
According to the newspaper, Western allies urged Washington to continue providing such information to Kyiv. FT links this to a shift in the US approach after recent contacts between the American and Ukrainian leaderships.
Sources cited by the paper say that during a dinner at the G7 summit last week, US President Donald Trump had a long conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. As the Kyiv Independent reported, citing a senior Ukrainian official, Trump was “extremely impressed and encouraged” by Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia and advised Kyiv to act more boldly.
After that meeting, Zelensky said, according to FT, that Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had “for the first time responded positively” to the issue of licenses for Patriot air defense systems. The Ukrainian leader also said Trump planned to ask US defense companies to organize licensed production of anti-aircraft missiles in Europe and Ukraine.
“[Russia] certainly will not achieve the goals it set on the very first day [of the war]. It may never even be able to achieve militarily the goals it is now demanding in negotiations,” Rubio said earlier.
FT notes that as recently as March, US intelligence believed Russia held the advantage in the war, but that assessment has now changed sharply, according to the paper. The newspaper also says Vladimir Putin had previously tried to influence Trump’s position through phone calls ahead of major summits, but a conversation before the G7 meeting had no such effect: at the summit Trump said that “Russia should make a deal.”
According to FT, Moscow’s dissatisfaction with US actions has been growing since the summer of 2025. The Kremlin, the newspaper says, believed US special envoy Steve Witkoff had misread Russia’s position before the Putin-Trump meeting in Anchorage, and that the differences between the sides were greater than initially assumed. A day earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the US was “apparently stepping away from its claim to the role of an objective mediator” and continuing a course of increasing sanctions pressure on Russia.