The Biden administration is sharing intelligence with Ukraine at a "frenetic" pace, U.S. officials said Thursday.
CNN sources said the intelligence, which involves information about Russian force movements and locations, typically is being provided to Ukrainian officials sometimes as quickly as within 30 minutes to an hour of its reception.
The administration has been criticized for not sharing battlefield intelligence fast enough with the Ukrainians, who have endured an unprovoked attack by Russia.
Despite the U.S. officials' comments, CNN reported that it's becoming increasingly difficult to maintain secure communications with Ukrainian officials.
Not only that, the U.S. is struggling to gather real-time intelligence with no one on the ground, and the apparent lack of military drones flying overhead, CNN reported.
Sens. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., both have said recently that they were concerned that intelligence wasn't getting to the Ukrainian military fast enough. One source told CNN that lawmakers were worried that the intelligence was being downgraded.
Sasse has alleged that "lawyers" and unspecific "technicalities" were holding up the flow of information, a charge a senior defense official said was inaccurate.
However, CNN reported that there were some indications the administration guidelines for sharing intelligence with Ukraine was amended as recently as this week.
House Republicans also accused the Biden administration of "withholding" intelligence from the Ukrainians.
The top lawmaker on the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., on Thursday said the intelligence being shared was not the real-time targeting data that U.S. troops might have been getting in places like Iraq.
"We are not providing the type of real-time targeting that you see our military having gotten in conflicts like in Iraq where instant to instant, we have UAV [unmanned aerial vehicles or drones], the unblinking eye as they say, watching the situation and giving that targeting data," Smith told MSNBC.
"We're not doing that because that steps over the line to making us participate in the war."
CNN sources said intelligence was being downgraded, but mainly to remove sensitive sources and methods.
A portal by which U.S. officials upload intelligence that the Ukrainians can then access in near real time has been set up in recent weeks. It's one of several channels through which intel can be exchanged.
Two CNN sources said some "game-changing" intelligence on Russian military positions is coming from commercial imagery.
Satellite images of Ukraine early this week showed horrific physical destruction caused by Russian forces, as well as the effects of war on Ukrainians either fleeing or remaining in their homeland.