Kyiv, Ukraine – On Sunday, a top Russian security official in Moscow lauded dozens of servicemen who used an abandoned natural gas pipeline as a tunnel to infiltrate a Ukraine-occupied area in the western Russian region of Kursk.
“The lid of a boiling cauldron is almost closed! Good job!” Dmitry Medvedev, who served as president and prime minister before becoming deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, wrote on Telegram.
But a Ukrainian serviceman deployed in Kursk offered a starkly different version of how the Russians barely got out of the pipeline on Saturday – only to be reportedly killed en masse.
“Some suffocated right [in the pipeline], some turned back. About a hundred came out in our rear, split into two groups and were almost immediately ambushed by our special forces. And [also killed by] a massive squall of artillery,” Evhen Sazonov wrote on Telegram.
However, the Ukraine-occupied area of Kursk shrank last week as Russians retook several villages and farms and moved to encircle Kyiv’s forces in the town of Sudzha.
In part, that happened because United States President Donald Trump suspended military aid to Ukraine – including the sharing of data from reconnaissance satellites, according to a former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces.
The suspension “affects the organisation of warfare in Kursk for Ukraine’s armed forces”, Lt Gen Ihor Romanenko told Al Jazeera.
Trump froze the aid on March 3, five days after a spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House over the latter’s alleged “ingratitude” to Washington.
The suspension also included the delivery of all weaponry and ammunition commissioned by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, that was in transit in Europe.
In the 1990s, the West urged Kyiv to destroy most of its Soviet-era weaponry and ammunition, and only two-fifths of the arms Ukraine uses these days have been domestically manufactured.
Kyiv is adamant that Trump’s decision will only benefit Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war effort.
“We count on the US aid. I think the suspension of this aid would help Putin,” Zelenskyy said on March 3 during an emergency meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Kursk is by far not the only place where Ukraine is facing potential disasters.
Without the satellite data, Ukrainian air defence forces have less time to detect and respond to the launch of swarms of Russian drones that attack civilian areas, Romanenko said.
The drones that distract air defence forces are routinely followed by missiles launched from Russian bombers whose liftoff is also detected by US military satellites, he said.
The lack of satellite data also translates into Kyiv’s diminished capabilities to send its long-range drones to strike military sites, airstrips, ammunition and fuel depots deep inside Russia and in Russia-occupied Ukrainian regions.
“We partially try to solve this by using our data and the data from our allies, the real ones,” Romanenko quipped, referring to the United Kingdom and France – nations that are still aiding Ukraine.
On Sunday, Ukrainian drones attacked a Russian oil refinery in the Volga River region of Samara that sits more than 900km (560 miles) east of the border and produces fuel for fighter jets and bombers.
The attack was pinpointed and did not hit residential areas, according to Russian and Ukrainian media reports.
On Tuesday, Ukraine attacked Moscow with drones, killing at least two people.
But the aid freeze will affect the most crucial element of Ukraine’s defence of residential areas – the Patriot air defence systems that shoot down most of Russia’s cruise and ballistic missiles.
Ukraine has no stockpiles of missiles for Patriots that cost several million dollars each and are produced only in the US.
Since March 3, Russia has launched hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles.
Trump is ‘rotten to his very core’
Some everyday Ukrainians feel gutted by the aid freeze and Trump’s reported demands to recognise the occupied Ukrainian regions as part of Russia.
“Every time I hear explosions, I think – how many more [Patriot] missiles do we have left? When is the roof of my house going to collapse?” Mariya Minchenko, a 27-year-old ambulance paramedic, told Al Jazeera, referring to two massive bombings of Kyiv since March 3.
Standing outside a kindergarten in central Kyiv before picking up her two children, she said her colleagues noticed a spike in the number of heart and panic attacks among the elderly during and after the bombings. “4am is our darkest hour, and now it’s way worse than before” the aid freeze, she added.
“Trump is not just a bad president, he’s a bad human being, rotten to his very core,” Minchenko said.
Ukrainian arms developers have long been trying to wean off Western weaponry.
They boosted the development and production of inexpensive drones that dominate today’s battlefield, largely replacing the traditional, much pricier artillery and tanks.
Ukrainian developers also found themselves on the cutting edge of the development of electronic jamming systems that make enemy drones lose contact with operators and crash.
The area is completely independent of US military aid, according to Yaroslav Filimonov, the CEO of Kvertus, a Kyiv-based company that churns out thousands of advanced jamming systems a month.
“Our enemy is strong, they have strong brains, they’re quick to copycat and scale up our findings,” he told Al Jazeera. “But we win with quality, not quantity.”
Despite the freeze, Kyiv can boast a tiny victory on the eastern front line.
Last week, Ukrainian forces regained the town of Kotlyno near the strategic city of Pokrovsk, where a third of Russian attacks took place in February, according to Oko Gora, an analytical Telegram channel.
The move prevented the Russian takeover of a strategic highway that leads to the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Observers attribute the success to Major-General Mykhailo Drapatyi, who became a new land forces commander in November and managed to streamline coordination between military units.
He “didn’t just stabilise the situation, but regained tactical initiative,” military analyst Dmitry Snegiryov said in televised remarks on Monday.
