Order by Hegseth to cancel Ukraine weapons caught White House off guard

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Order by Hegseth to cancel Ukraine weapons caught White House off guard
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Roughly a week after Donald Trump started his second term as president, the U.S. military issued an order to three freight airlines operating out of Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and a US base in Qatar: Stop 11 flights loaded with artillery shells and other weaponry and bound for Ukraine.
In a matter of hours, frantic questions reached Washington from Ukrainians in Kyiv and from officials in Poland, where the shipments were coordinated. Who had ordered the U.S. Transportation Command, known as TRANSCOM, to halt the flights? Was it a permanent pause on all aid? Or just some?
Top national security officials — in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department — couldn’t provide answers. Within one week, flights were back in the air.
The verbal order originated from the office of Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, according to TRANSCOM records reviewed by Reuters. A TRANSCOM spokesperson said the command received the order via the Pentagon's Joint Staff.
The cancelations came after Trump wrapped up a January 30 Oval Office meeting about Ukraine that included Hegseth and other top national security officials, according to three sources familiar with the situation. During the meeting, the idea of stopping Ukraine aid came up, said two people with knowledge of the meeting, but the president issued no instruction to stop aid to Ukraine.
The president was unaware of Hegseth’s order, as were other top national security officials in the meeting, according to two sources briefed on the private White House discussions and another with direct knowledge of the matter.
Asked to comment on this report, the White House told Reuters that Hegseth had followed a directive from Trump to pause aid to Ukraine, which it said was the administration's position at the time. It did not explain why, according to those who spoke to Reuters, top national security officials in the normal decision making process didn’t know about the order or why it was so swiftly reversed.
“Negotiating an end to the Russia-Ukraine War has been a complex and fluid situation. We are not going to detail every conversation among top administration officials throughout the process,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman. “The bottom line is the war is much closer to an end today than it was when President Trump took office.”
The cancelations cost TRANSCOM $2.2 million, according to the records reviewed by Reuters. In response to a request for comment, TRANSCOM said that the total cost was $1.6 million – 11 flights were canceled but one incurred no charge.
An order halting military aid authorized under the Biden administration went into effect officially a month later, on March 4, with a White House announcement.
The story of how flights were canceled, detailed by Reuters for the first time, points to an at-times haphazard policy-making process within the Trump administration and a command structure that is unclear even to its own ranking members.
The multiday pause of the flights, confirmed by five people with knowledge of it, also shows confusion in how the administration has created and implemented national security policy. At the Pentagon, the disarray is an open secret, with many current and former officials saying the department is plagued by internal disagreements on foreign policy, deep-seated grudges, and inexperienced staff.
Reuters couldn’t establish exactly when Hegseth’s office ordered the freight flights canceled. Two sources said Ukrainian and European officials began asking about the pause on February 2. The TRANSCOM records indicate that there was a verbal order from “SECDEF” – the secretary of defense – that stopped the flights and that they had resumed by February 5.
“This is consistent with the administration's policy to move fast, break things and sort it out later. That is their managing philosophy,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine officer and defense expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “That is great for Silicon Valley. But when you’re talking about institutions that have been around for hundreds of years, you are going to run into problems.”
The stop in shipments caused consternation in Kyiv.
The Ukrainians quickly asked the administration through multiple channels but had difficulty obtaining any useful information, according to a Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the situation. In later conversations with the Ukrainians, the administration wrote off the pause as “internal politics,” said the source. Ukrainian officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The shipping of American weapons to Ukraine requires sign-off from multiple agencies and can take weeks or even months to complete, depending on the size of the cargo. The majority of US military assistance goes through a logistics hub in Poland before being picked up by Ukrainian representatives and transported into the country.
That hub can hold shipments for extended periods of time. It’s not clear if the 11 canceled flights were the only ones scheduled that week in February, how much aid was already stockpiled in Poland and if it continued to flow into Ukraine despite the U.S. military's orders.
The revelations come at a time of upheaval in the department. Several of Hegseth’s top advisers were escorted from the building April 15 after being accused of unauthorized disclosure of classified information. The secretary continues to face scrutiny, including from Congress, about his own communications. Previously he’s attributed allegations of upheaval to disgruntled employees.
The canceled flights contained weapons that had long been approved by the Biden administration, authorized by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Reuters couldn’t determine if Hegseth or his team knew how the order to TRANSCOM would play out or that the order would be a substantial change in US policy on Ukraine. Three sources familiar with the situation said Hegseth misinterpreted discussions with the president about Ukraine policy and aid shipments without elaborating further.
Four other people briefed on the situation said a small cadre of staffers inside the Pentagon, many of whom have never held a government job and who have for years spoken out against U.S. aid to Ukraine, advised Hegseth to consider pausing aid to the country.
Two people familiar with the matter denied there was a true cutoff in aid. One of them described it as a logistical pause.
“(They) just wanted to get a handle on what was going on and people, as a result, misinterpreted that as: ‘You need to stop everything,’” said one.