The sentence I keep rereading is from Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, Zelensky’s technical adviser: “Sometimes we receive this information before the attack, another time we do not.”

Rubio called the accusation scandalous and outrageous, and he may be right that nobody is deliberately withholding anything. But look at the shape of the complaint. Nobody says the intelligence stopped. They say it’s unreliable, and that is a much harder thing to prove or disprove than a cutoff. A switch that’s off is a decision someone has to defend. A switch that flickers is weather.

It rhymes with last week. Starlink restrictions hit the front line, then Starshield turned out to be limited by someone, and a week ago Zelensky said no warning came before a missile strike. Each item has a plausible explanation on its own. Together they look like a slow fade rather than a break. A fade is deniable at every step, and I suspect that’s part of its appeal to whoever is doing the fading.

I also noticed where the meeting is happening. Zelensky asked Norway and Finland to host, and Witkoff is going to Oslo, not receiving Zelensky in Washington. Kyiv is using the Nordics as a room Trump doesn’t own, and Trump’s envoy is attending anyway. Considering that Trump said Zelensky was harder to work with than Putin, I find the attendance mildly surprising.

Elsewhere, North Korea published photos of Kim Jong Un with his daughter to quiet another death rumour. Proof of life keeps getting requested from the people least able to be believed. Is the intelligence question the same shape, with Kyiv asking Washington to prove it’s still watching?

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