Hey friends,
In January, I made a video about how the CIA was helping Ukraine target Russia’s oil refineries by targeting specific machinery or equipment that can’t be quickly replaced.
Imagine the CIA’s vast industrial knowledge painstakingly accumulated by cataloging decades of Soviet engineering, followed by twenty years operating in and around oil infrastructure in Iraq. The agency nerds know exactly which widget will put one of Putin’s refineries out for 10 weeks or longer.
Now, terrified about losing the midterm elections to those meek, commie, America-hating dems, (and oblivious to the fact that most Americans despise him), Trump is grasping at straws to bring fuel prices down.
I want to show you a chart I pulled out from my OSINT dashboard.
When Ukraine’s refinery campaign intensified in summer 2025, Brent averaged $71.04 in July. By August it was $67.87. By December, after months of repeated Ukrainian strikes against refineries, pipelines and export infrastructure, Brent was down to $62.54.
Wait, Wes! What the hell are you saying?!
That’s right, the average Brent price from August 2025 through February 2026, essentially the period covering the intensified Ukrainian refinery campaign before the Iran war, was only about $66.32 per barrel.
Then February 28 happens.
The US and Israel begin attacking Iran.
Brent’s February monthly average was $70.89.
In March it jumped to $103.13.
April averaged $117.29
The daily prices are even more dramatic. Brent was $71.32 on Friday, February 27, the day before the Iran war began. By March 6 it was $95.74. By March 18 it had reached $118.09, and on April 7 it hit $138.21.
But Trump either doesn’t have this easy-to-source information, or more likely, doesn’t have the capacity to understand that Ukraine’s refinery campaign against Russia doesn’t affect oil supply in the same way the Iran blunder has.
So now, the Trump administration has warned Ukraine that if it keeps hitting Russian oil refineries, American intelligence support could be on the table.
Strangely, Trump seems to actually believe that if Ukraine stops hitting Russian oil today, then diesel prices will immediately drop thus securing his party a resounding victory in four weeks at the polls.
But the Gulf oil fiasco he created? Nah, that’s totally under control. Beautiful even. The most under-control oil situation in the history of the world.
This is a dangerous situation for Ukraine to be in. Trump has wrongly put Ukraine, (actually Zelensky more explicitly) in the middle of his political fight; and we all know Trump will play dirty.
He even said, as I’m typing this, that Ukraine should oust Zelensky, which Russia immediately applauded.
So what about that CIA targeting intel?
How bad would it be for Ukraine if Trump pulled the plug?
Well, unlike Trump’s frequent exaggerations, it’s not hyperbolic to say the United States runs the most capable intelligence machine humans have ever built, with spy satellites, signals collection, reconnaissance aircraft, cyber operations, legions of analysts, and a targeting infrastructure that took four generations, an unholy amount of money, and a Lovecraftian blood pact with Cthulhu to assemble.
Ukraine has leaned on that machine for the entire war.
But let me start by saying this is NOT a kill switch.
Some outlets are reporting that Washington pushes a button, Ukraine’s drones start wandering around western Russia like drunk, syphillitic Russian conscripts looking for a house of ill repute.
I think that assumption gives the United States too much credit and Ukraine too little.
Let’s look at the Ryazan oil refinery. It’s been sitting in roughly the same spot since the Soviet Union. You can find it on commercial satellite imagery, Russian corporate filings describe its processing units, every map on Earth knows where it is, its workers carry smartphones, and Ukraine has already hit it before.
Kyiv doesn’t need the CIA to confirm that the refinery exists.
The harder question is what Russia moved around it last night.
The experiment we already ran
The details of the latest warning are disputed.
Axios reported that during talks in Miami this week, a Ukrainian official said Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner warned Kyiv that Washington could cut its intelligence access if Ukraine kept ignoring American requests to stop attacking Russian refineries.
A US official denied any threat was made, saying the envoys described America as a reliable partner and urged Ukraine to avoid steps that “hurt American consumers.”
The Financial Times has reported on the same friction, and on Ukraine’s intention to keep striking regardless.
I’m less interested in litigating the exact sentence someone used in a Miami conference room than in the leverage itself, because we’ve already run this experiment once.
In March 2025, the Trump administration paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine, and for several days we got to see what went dark.
WaPo reported that American support ranged from strategic intelligence about Russian intentions all the way down to the tactical information used to build strike packages for Ukraine’s long-range attacks; AKA my CIA widget analogy at the top.
But the support goes a bit deeper than that.
US intelligence helped Ukraine understand Russian jamming and decoys, track Russian naval activity in the Black Sea, and generate the precise coordinates that weapons like HIMARS depend on.
Think of targeting as a ladder of questions that gets harder with every rung:
Where’s the refinery? Commercial imagery answers that one in about five minutes.
Which processing unit came back online after last week’s strike? Now you need somewhat fresh imagery.
Where did Russia move the nearest surface-to-air missile battery, which radar switched on this morning, and did anyone reposition electronic warfare along the drone’s route? That’s harder still, and it gets nastier when you ask which air-defense sites have already fired tonight and are now empty, whether mobile interceptor teams are moving toward the target, and whether somebody put up a decoy next to the damaged unit.
That top half of the ladder is the stuff that turns a grid square on a map into a strike package, and the United States is extraordinarily good at it.
When I was a grunt, the S2 shop would brief us off a map overlay, and every infantryman learned fast that yesterday’s overlay was ancient history. The intelligence that kept you alive was whatever had changed since breakfast.
But let me ask you this…
Do you think Kyiv endured the 2025 intel blackout, shrugged its shoulders, and thanked uncle Don when he magnanimously turned it back on?
Fuck no.
Ukraine realized that American intelligence could become political leverage, so Ukraine and its European partners spent the next year making sure Washington would never again be the only switch on the wall.
Many Eyes, Different Owners
France may have gone further than most people realize.
