Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine’s ballistic-missile warning system was working again Tuesday, Oct. 20, while U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said U.S. policy was unchanged and cited a possible technical cause for missed alerts.
Ukraine’s presidential office said the system provides advance notice of Russian ballistic attacks. It said Zelenskyy and Rubio discussed intelligence, missile interceptors, early warnings, Starlink and Starshield in a morning phone call, and agreed to speak again. Rubio said the call lasted 45 minutes.
Rubio said President Donald Trump had ordered no change to intelligence-sharing policy and that Ukraine was receiving the same warnings as before. He said a technical issue might explain missed warnings on Oct. 13 and Oct. 18. Zelenskyy had told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Oct. 18, that intelligence sharing had been blocked for a period and later resumed. The public statements do not establish whether the interruption affected intelligence more broadly or only missile alerts, or what caused the missed warnings.
In Oslo, Zelenskyy met Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb, and joined a meeting with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff; Trump envoy Jared Kushner took part online, the presidential office said. Støre described the talks as constructive and said Witkoff would take proposals developed by European and U.S. colleagues to Russian leaders. The office said the discussions also covered security guarantees, sanctions, reconstruction and European security. It said Ukraine had offered to avoid strikes on sensitive Russian energy infrastructure if Russia stopped attacking Ukrainian energy sites, but Russia rejected the proposal. Støre said the talks followed the principle that nothing about Ukraine should be decided without Ukraine.
TASS reported Wednesday, Oct. 21, that Witkoff met Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. The agency said Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov described Moscow as prepared in principle to rejoin three-party discussions near Nov. 10, with postwar security arrangements for Russia and Ukraine on the agenda.
