US President Donald Trump has failed to reach an agreement with Russian ruler Vladimir Putin on halting strikes against Ukraine's energy infrastructure. However, Trump is trying to shift the blame for this failure onto President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he said on The Diary of a CEO podcast.
His words came amid Russia's four record waves of ballistic missile attacks, after US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff described Putin as a "humanitarian." Previously, US officials cut Kyiv off from US intelligence and lowered a speed cap on Starlink to pressure Ukraine into stopping strikes on Russia's oil refineries that bring Moscow revenue for its war.
Zelenskyy explained the behavioral pattern behind Trump's recent actions and statements. At first, Putin rejected his proposal for a ceasefire. Then, the US president blamed it all on him, explaining to his people that world fuel prices are rising because of him, which is not true at all, said the Ukrainian leader.
He pointed to the blocked Strait of Hormuz shipping chokepoint, not Ukraine’s refinery campaign, as the driver of higher prices.
He also noted that the volumes of diesel allowed by the US are insufficient to lower global oil prices.
Even so, Zelenskyy said he keeps a working relationship with Trump. What he will not accept is being cast as the villain in Russia’s war: by his account, the US president is rewriting the context, turning Ukraine’s leader into the target for a problem that starts in Moscow.
Earlier, experts said the diesel deal was unlikely to meaningfully lower diesel prices. For Putin, the agreement itself was a win.
A former senior State Department official says it hardly matters whether the fuel arrives, because Putin “has already achieved the result he wants,” with Trump believing he has a pre-election card that could move markets.
Drones attacked an oil and fuel pumping station of Russia’s Druzhba pipeline system in Tambov Oblast overnight on 20 October, setting a diesel tank on fire, Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported, citing locals. Druzhba, Russian for “friendship,” is a Soviet-era oil pipeline, about 4,000 km long, that carries Russian crude west to Europe, including through a branch that crosses Ukraine. The struck station is on its Russian section. Tambov Oblast Governor Yevgeny Pervyshov confirmed a fire at an unnamed enterprise in Michurinsk district after what he called a Ukrainian drone attack. The station lies about 400 km from the front line.
Ukraine has spent months striking the refineries, terminals, and pipelines that fund Russia’s war, and its Defense Ministry says the strikes have knocked out more than half of Russia’s refining capacity. Washington wants them stopped. US officials reportedly tied intelligence sharing to a halt in refinery strikes, and US President Donald Trump called their resumption “a disgrace.”
Russia’s regional alert system declared a drone threat at 03:38, Ukrainian military outlet Militarnyi reported. By 06:25, Exilenova+ said the Nikolskoye station was under attack, after Michurinsk had been under attack for several hours.
The Nikolskoye fuel pumping station in Russia’s Tambov region is under attack. pic.twitter.com/cA64vMgjsM
— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) October 20, 2026
Pervyshov said four Ukrainian drones were shot down over the region and no one was hurt. He did not name the site.
More footage from the Nikolskaya oil pumping station. Locals report that a tank containing diesel is on fire. pic.twitter.com/1jvbxSuGHo
— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) October 20, 2026
Ukraine has not commented. The General Staff’s 20 October list of overnight strikes does not mention Tambov Oblast.
The Nikolskoye station belongs to Transneft, Russia’s state pipeline operator. It stores and pumps crude oil and refined fuels, including diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel. The complex has three tank farms and two pumping stations, and it can move up to 300,000 tonnes a day, according to Current Time.
Ukrainian drones hit a station of the same hub in August 2025, and Ukraine’s General Staff said then that pumping on the pipeline had stopped completely.
Ukraine paused refinery strikes for three days after Trump announced an “energy ceasefire” on 11 October, while Russia fired 39 ballistic missiles at Ukraine’s grid. Since Kyiv resumed the strikes, drones have also hit an oil terminal and a fuel depot in St. Petersburg.
Kyiv reads other US moves as pressure too, from missed warnings of Russian ballistic launches to a Starlink cap that slows Ukrainian drones. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy told US senators he had offered a 30-day halt on refinery strikes in exchange for Patriot interceptors, but Trump’s envoys showed no openness.
The US has resumed sharing intelligence on Russian ballistic missile launches with Ukraine after a pause of several days, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told NBC News on 18 October. The blackout fell on days when Russia was firing ballistic missiles at Ukraine. Limits on the Starlink satellite service that Ukraine’s forces rely on remain in place, he said.
Russia has leaned on ballistic missiles in this month’s strikes on Ukraine’s grid, firing 39 in a single attack, and Ukraine is short of interceptors to stop them. Washington has used its support as leverage, reportedly telling Kyiv to spare Russian refineries or lose US intelligence and arms.
The sharing had been blocked for some period of time before it was restored, Zelenskyy said on Meet the Press.
“We are very thankful for this. Now it works,” he said.
Ukraine gets other intelligence from Europeans and dozens of other partners, he explained. But only the United States has the data that tells Kyiv when Russia launches ballistic missiles.
“We didn’t get it during ballistic attacks during three days,” Zelenskyy said.
A timely warning gives Ukraine’s air defenses extra minutes to prepare and lets authorities alert civilians, Liga noted. Late on 12 October, Russian ballistic missiles hit Kyiv before the air-raid alert reached people, with no advance data on launches from Russian territory. The next day, US President Donald Trump said Washington was still sharing intelligence. Two days later, Zelenskyy said Kyiv had received no US warnings of incoming ballistic missiles while it paused its strikes on Russian refineries at Washington’s request. That pause followed the energy ceasefire Trump declared on 11 October, which Russia never confirmed.
Starshield, the military version of Starlink, still cuts out above 161 km/h, Zelenskyy said, too slow for Ukraine’s interceptor drones to catch Russia’s jet-powered Shahed-type drones. NBC News, which aired the interview, separately reported that Starlink services had resumed at normal speed. He said Ukraine’s generals and government believe the order came from the US government and SpaceX carried it out, though he did not know who exactly made the call. Ukraine had instead asked SpaceX and Trump to open Starlink over Russia so it could hit ballistic missile launchers, he said.
“If [Trump] will personally decide to lift this decision, it will immediately work as it was before,” he said.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who appeared on the same show, called Zelenskyy’s charge “very reckless” and said Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had denied any administration role. Asked about the break in intelligence sharing, he said he did not know anything about it but that Zelenskyy should be “very careful about making statements like this that aren’t true.” Reuters had reported, citing three officials, that White House officials ordered the Pentagon to limit the service.
Asked whether Ukraine could win without the United States, Zelenskyy said it would be very difficult.
“But if the United States will support Putin, I mean, it’s unbelievable, it’s tragedy. It’s historic mistake and big tragedy,” he said.
He also said his team had received word that US negotiators wanted to meet, and that he had offered to meet in Brussels or London, hoping the US team would be ready this week.
The warnings are back, but they stopped once without explanation. Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s missiles still runs through decisions made in the US.
Ukrainian drones struck St. Petersburg’s oil terminal, a fuel depot, an Ozon distribution center, and a VK data center overnight, setting off fires across the city, monitoring channels reported. Russian outlet Meduza called it apparently the largest attack on the city and Leningrad Oblast since the war began. Russian officials acknowledged fires, damaged homes and substations, and power cuts.
Russia keeps fighting along the front while bombarding Ukrainian cities and the grid behind it. Ukraine’s long-range drones, in turn, target the oil exports and logistics that fund and supply that war, and Russia’s Baltic oil ports have been hit repeatedly this year. St. Petersburg is a symbolic place: Russia’s so-called second capital and Putin’s hometown.
Ukrainian forces struck the Petersburg Oil Terminal with FP-1 drones, starting a fire, Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said. The company described the terminal as one of the region’s largest, handling 12.5 million tonnes of petroleum products a year, including for export.
Piter port and oil facility in one shot pic.twitter.com/KfptwkhsDS
— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) October 18, 2026
St. Petersburg Governor Aleksandr Beglov acknowledged fires at the terminal and in four city districts, adding that Pulkovo airport had restricted flights. By morning, firefighters were still battling blazes at the terminal, the Ruchyi oil depot, and industrial warehouses in the Kolpinsky district, he wrote. He claimed one person was killed and five injured. Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported that the Ruchyi depot had been burning since the night.
An Ozon distribution center in Kolpinsky district caught fire after the attack, the company said, Russian independent outlet Astra reported. Astra’s open-source intelligence analyst described it as one of Ozon’s busiest fulfillment centers in northwestern Russia, covering up to 79,000 m².
Ozon in St. Peterburg pic.twitter.com/tA9iwRJf7d
— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) October 18, 2026
FP-1 drones also hit a VK data center in Novosergiyevka, Leningrad Oblast, causing serious damage, Fire Point said. VK acknowledged a drone attack on the site but claimed its services were working normally. Leningrad Oblast Governor Aleksandr Drozdenko claimed air defenses downed 145 drones over the oblast alone. He acknowledged damage to the data center’s transformer equipment and warehouse complex, and minor damage to the Vostochnaya substation. Two other substations in Yanino went offline, cutting power to about 20,000 people, he said.
A drone also hit the cable-stayed bridge over the Korabelny fairway, part of a toll highway linking the city’s north and south, Exilenova+ reported, adding that the extent of the damage was still being clarified. The channel also reported a fire near a Russian Aerospace Forces radar company outside the village of Kaporskoye.
To reach St. Petersburg, Ukrainian drones had to cover 1,000 km across four Russian regions guarded by air defenses and electronic warfare, said Serhii Beskrestnov, adviser to Ukraine’s president on defense technology.
“And these are not cruise missiles with special systems, these are drones that fly at speeds of up to 200 km/h,” he wrote.
The same night, Russia hit Ukraine’s grid again, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy counted 76 Russian strikes on energy since the ceasefire was announced. US President Donald Trump declared the truce on 11 October. Ukraine paused its refinery strikes for three days at Washington’s request, but Russia struck a Kharkiv power plant within hours and kept hitting the grid. Zelenskyy then said Ukraine was resuming strikes on Russian oil and would stop again only in exchange for more US interceptors for its Patriot systems. Trump called the renewed strikes “a disgrace” and said he found Zelenskyy “more difficult to deal with than Putin.”
Ukraine has hit the St. Petersburg area before. In July, drones set fire to Wildberries warehouses near the city. In August, Ukraine began striking Ozon hubs, starting in Samara Oblast. The hubs move dual-use goods such as electronics and drone components.
Russia has kept striking Ukraine’s energy sector throughout the week since US President Donald Trump announced an energy ceasefire, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 18 October. From overnight into Sunday, Russian drones and a ballistic missile hit substations, homes, and industrial sites from Odesa to Volyn. They killed civilians and left tens of thousands of families without power.
Russia fights along the front line while hitting cities and the grid behind it with drones, missiles, and glide bombs. Ukraine says Moscow plans up to 1,000 such munitions against 60 key infrastructure sites this winter, and jet-powered drones partly free it to concentrate missiles on fewer targets, the Institute for the Study of War assessed. With Graham Act penalties on hold and US sanctions on Russian diesel suspended, Russia faces no new US cost for its strikes on Ukraine’s grid. Protecting and restoring the grid falls to Ukraine’s air defenses and repair crews.
Zelenskyy counted 76 deliberate Russian strikes on energy and oil-and-gas facilities since Trump’s announcement. Overnight, Russia hit substations in Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi, and Odesa oblasts, he said. In the past week, Russia fired almost 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs, and 66 missiles, most of them ballistic, mainly to cause a blackout. His message was aimed at Washington.
“America must see that Russia is not taking steps in return for the lifting of sanctions or deals. On the contrary, they take every signal that they can make money as proof that their bet on war is working and they can keep fighting,” Zelenskyy wrote.
Overnight, Russia launched one Iskander-M ballistic missile and 180 Shahed-type drones, 26 of them jet-powered, the Air Force reported. Air defenses downed or suppressed 152 drones, but strikes hit 20 locations.
Strikes left about 24,000 consumers in Odesa Oblast without power, oblast head Oleh Kiper said. In Vinnytsia Oblast, the attack damaged critical infrastructure and forced emergency outages, oblast head Natalia Zabolotna wrote. Drones hit three energy facilities in Ternopil Oblast, one of them for the second time, and cut power to some consumers, oblast head Taras Pastukh said.
A Russian strike on Zaporizhzhia killed a 27-year-old woman and injured two others, including a 16-year-old, the State Emergency Service reported. In Poltava, an evening attack killed one person, injured four, and damaged 10 detached houses, city council secretary Kateryna Yamshchykova said.
A drone hit a high-rise in Odesa and set its roof on fire. A 13-year-old girl was hurt, city military administration head Serhii Lysak said, and Kiper put the number of injured at two.
In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Russian drones and artillery injured three people, oblast head Oleksandr Hanzha said. In Donetsk Oblast, Russian attacks killed seven civilians on Saturday, six of them in Sloviansk, oblast head Vadym Filashkin reported.
A morning drone strike set warehouse and production buildings ablaze at an enterprise in Manevychi, Volyn Oblast, oblast head Roman Romaniuk said. With heavy smoke blowing toward the town, Romaniuk urged residents to stay indoors, shut windows and doors, and switch off ventilation. A repeat strike set an enterprise in the district on fire again, the State Emergency Service said, adding that air tests found no dangerous concentrations outside the site. In Lviv Oblast, drone debris damaged a logistics warehouse and two houses, oblast head Maksym Kozytskyi said.
Polish military aircraft operated in Poland’s airspace twice during the attack, as the Government Security Centre warned residents of Lublin Voivodeship and later alerted Subcarpathian Voivodeship. In Lithuania, NATO jets failed to identify an object that apparently entered from Poland, Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas said.
Trump announced the energy ceasefire on 11 October, news that surprised Zelenskyy. A White House official said Russia was still weighing it. Hours later, Russia hit a Kharkiv power plant, and on 14 October it fired 39 ballistic missiles at the grid. Then Trump waived Graham Act penalties on buyers of Russian oil, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration wants 60 days to weigh the economic effects.
US President Donald Trump called Ukraine’s renewed strikes on Russian oil refineries a disgrace in an interview with Newsmax and questioned President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s will to settle the war on 15 October. His statements came after he made a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to allow Russian diesel back into the US ahead of the mid-term elections in the US.
Kyiv says its long-range strikes have knocked out more than half of Russia's refining capacity, one of the few levers it controls on Moscow's war income, according to Ukraine's Defense Ministry. This is part of efforts to reduce the aggressor's capabilities to launch assaults, including the latest, during which four Russian regions fired 39 Iskander-M, North Korean KN-23, hypersonic Zircon, and supersonic anti-ship cruise Oniks missiles, Zelenskyy said.
Earlier, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine stopped refinery strikes for three days to meet US wishes after Trump announced an “energy ceasefire” on 11 October. At the same time, Russia struck a Kharkiv heat-and-power plant within hours of the announcement, he emphasized.
Meanwhile, in the interview with Newsmax, Trump said Zelenskyy is only pushing world oil prices higher.
“Well, I think that’s a disgrace,” he said.
He added that Ukraine has other options: “There are a lot of targets that you can hit.”
At the same time, Trump didn't say a word about Russian strikes on Ukraine's civilian buildings and power infrastructure ahead of the winter.
The US leader said he is “not a big fan” of Zelenskyy. He claimed both sides “would like to see it end,” but that he finds Zelenskyy “more difficult to deal with than Putin.”
He also said that he believes the depletion of US ammunition stockpiles is linked to the aid provided to Ukraine under the Biden administration, rather than the war with Iran.
Ukraine has repeatedly offered to help the US counter Iranian drones during the operation. The New York Times reported that a Ukrainian team departed the day after the US made such a request.
Nevertheless, despite Kyiv’s offers and actions, Trump once again compared Zelenskyy to P. T. Barnum, the 19th-century American circus showman, saying that he received a tremendous number of Patriots and Tomahawks.
However, there is no public confirmation that Tomahawk missiles were transferred to Ukraine during the Biden administration.
By studying fire scars in ancient wood, many scientists have become convinced that Indigenous people transformed North America long before European colonizers arrived. M.R. O’Connor spends time with dendrochronologists, who study tree rings, and other experts to understand what they’re learning:
Anthropologist Omer Stewart, who began documenting Native American burning practices in the nineteen-thirties . . . found that Indigenous communities burned prairies to attract bison to fresh grass and to maintain oak “orchards” where food could be gathered. He became convinced that Native Americans had reshaped the geography, and in some cases the climate, of North American ecosystems. Their impact “was profound, in terms of the amount of land converted to agriculture, the species they hunted and fished, and most particularluthe way they shaped their world through the use of fire,” the naturalist Scott Weidensaul wrote, in his 2012 book The First Frontier. Weidensaul argued that early America “was fruitful beyond modern recognition, it was riotous in its natural wealth, but it was not wilderness.” The dendrochronologist Evan Larson, at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, made a similar claim: settlers encountered rich landscapes because Native Americans were tending them. “Whenever you’re talking about fire, you’re engaging with a central narrative around this untamed frontier and wilderness,” Larson told me. “In fact, that’s never been true. The early success of pioneers was already benefitting from the labor of somebody else.”
A porcelain fish survived the Russian strike that destroyed a room in the Kyiv apartment of Andrii Dubenko, a volunteer, dentist, and medic, his cousin Anna Danylenko wrote on Facebook and told UP Life, the lifestyle site of Ukrainska Pravda. Dubenko and two others were inside the nine-story building in Lisovyi masyv when the 13 October strike hit. It killed other residents.
The strike came during a ballistic attack aimed mainly at CHP-4, one of Kyiv’s main power plants, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, two days after Washington announced an energy ceasefire that Moscow never confirmed.
Dubenko, his girlfriend, and a 72-year-old aunt were inside when the blast hit, Anna told UP Life. Her family was lucky, she wrote, and the rule of two walls saved their lives. The rule tells anyone who can’t reach a shelter to keep at least two walls between themselves and the street, away from windows. Fifteen minutes after the blast, State Emergency Service rescuers lifted the three out in a basket, Anna wrote. The aunt comforted the girlfriend, telling her not to live in the past but to look to the future, Anna said.
“Just on Monday I was sitting in their cozy apartment, where I grew up, and now I’m looking into a hole that just two days ago was a window,” Anna wrote.
She gathered what was left of the tea set the family used for samovar tea while her grandmother was alive. “It was my anchor, the anchor of our family,” she wrote. The porcelain fish survived. Her mother used to play with it, and Anna now calls it the “fish of unbreakability.” UP Life likened it to the ceramic rooster that survived in a wrecked kitchen in Borodianka, Kyiv Oblast, in 2022 and became a symbol of Ukrainian resilience.
The family didn’t sleep that night. Firefighters were still putting out the blaze overnight, so they could only get back inside in the morning.
“Charred ruins, lots of water in the hallway, which burned out. People are throwing broken things out the window, down by the building. The smell of burning is everywhere,” she told UP Life.
The Trump administration is weighing looser sanctions on shadow fleet tankers that have hauled oil from Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, a US official said on 14 October, Reuters reported. An industry research group expects the change to do little for freight rates.
With Reuters calling high fuel prices a risk for Trump before the 3 November midterms, Washington has already eased sanctions on Russian oil and diesel this year and is now looking at the ships blacklisted for hauling sanctioned cargoes. In March, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a waiver on Russian oil at sea would bring Moscow no significant financial benefit, yet Russia’s seaborne oil income jumped by $890 million in the week to 15 March, Bloomberg data showed.
The talks center on letting “legal oil” sail on previously sanctioned vessels, the official said. Only crude or fuel free of US sanctions would qualify, not Russian or Iranian oil. Washington wants more crude and refined products moving out of the Gulf, the official added. Companies would need US Treasury approval to use the ships.
Research group Energy Aspects said US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in a video to the World Petroleum Congress in Riyadh, tied the easing to record freight rates. Those rates hit records after the Iran and Ukraine wars drove up inflation and left US crude too costly for Asian refiners, Reuters said. Energy Aspects itself expects the easing to do little for freight rates, since most tankers sanctioned over Russian or Venezuelan links have kept trading for the past three months.
The Energy Department said any relief would do nothing to help Russia ship its oil or refined products. Treasury referred questions to the Energy Department. Yet Reuters noted that both departments could face pressure to let these vessels carry Russian diesel, given Trump’s push to get it onto world markets fast.
Britain is pushing the other way. UK finance minister John Healey urged counterparts at International Monetary Fund meetings in Bangkok on 15 October to keep tough sanctions on Russia, “especially a tighter ban on shipping services” that keep Putin’s shadow fleet operating.
On 9 October, the US Treasury issued a license clearing Russian-origin diesel trade until 7 April 2027. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters it was a weak decision unworthy of Ukraine’s partners. Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Chuck Schumer, and Elizabeth Warren called it a “total betrayal of Ukraine.” Republican Senator Thom Tillis said there is “a legitimate case for saying the president’s not following the law.”
Trump then pressed Kyiv to spare Russian refineries and declared an “energy ceasefire” on 11 October. A White House official told Axios it covers only oil refineries. Neither side confirmed a similar announcement Trump made in mid-September, AAP reported.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on 13 October that contacts on the ceasefire were continuing and referred further questions to Trump, Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported. He claimed the diesel deal was “a very mutually beneficial item of Russian-American cooperation” that serves the interests of Russia, the US, and world energy markets, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.
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