WASHINGTON: Over the past couple of weeks, America’s Ukrainian partners have been riding a roller-coaster of President Donald Trump’s making. The low point was the disastrous blow-up in the Oval Office between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which led to the US cutting off military aid and intelligence sharing until the Ukrainians were “ready for peace”.

In recent days, after US-Ukraine meetings in Saudi Arabia, things may seem better. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz appear to have somewhat mended the relationship and have a ceasefire proposal to present to Moscow. Most importantly for the Ukrainians, this has come with a reopening of the taps on military assistance and, above all, on intelligence.

The problem is that, on issue after issue, Trump changes course on a whim. And given the Kremlin’s apparent insistence that any ceasefire include a halt on US military assistance, the Ukranians are living under a Sword of Damocles.

You may think the key resource for the Ukrainian military is hardware: Artillery shells, tanks, armoured personnel carriers, cruise missiles, air-defense missiles. And yes, those are all crucial. 

But what really put my heart in my throat was the stoppage of intelligence sharing.

Why is that flow so vital? How would stopping it again affect the Ukrainians’ ability to hold off Russia’s more powerful military?

When I was supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2011, we conducted a complex operation in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi’s military. The dictator had threatened to massacre rebels in the eastern part of Libya, swearing he would make the streets of Benghazi run with blood. 

So the United Nations Security Council requested that NATO institute a no-fly zone over the entire country to negate Gaddafi’s advantage in air power; create a maritime arms embargo so he could not be rearmed from the sea; and conduct airstrikes to prevent him from slaughtering civilians.

This was a major undertaking, and included strikes led by the US with support from 14 NATO countries, Sweden (...