Zelenskyy Rejects Trump's Call for New Leader, Offers Refinery Strike Pause

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that Russia alone bears responsibility for the war. He offered to stop striking Russian oil refineries if Moscow stops hitting Ukraine's energy grid, according to ABC News. The offer followed remarks by President Donald Trump, who blamed Zelenskyy for high U.S. diesel prices and said Ukraine should find a new leader.

The exchange came as Ukraine kept up its long-range attacks on infrastructure deep inside Russia. A drone strike on Sunday shut down a data center run by the technology company Yandex, the third hit on its facilities in four days.

What Trump said and why

Trump said Saturday that it was time for Ukraine to get a new president, suggesting Zelenskyy has not done enough to end the war. He also blamed the Ukrainian leader for high diesel prices in the United States. In his words, Ukraine should pick someone "who can make a deal," because Zelenskyy "could have made many deals" and never does.

According to ABC News, Trump has pressed Zelenskyy for weeks to stop attacking Russian energy infrastructure. On Friday he struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Russia, an effort to ease fuel prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. ABC reported that Trump has tried to pin record U.S. diesel prices on Ukraine rather than on the U.S.-led war in Iran, which has pushed up world energy prices.

How Kyiv responded

Zelenskyy wrote on X that Ukraine would be ready to stop striking Russian refineries if Russia stops striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure. He said such a halt could happen as early as Sunday but that Putin does not want it. Any de-escalation, he added, must be reciprocal and backed by real guarantees.

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said late Saturday on X that Zelenskyy is leading Ukraine through a war for its independence. He said the Ukrainian people support him and have the right to decide who leads them. Sybiha added that statements from abroad only confirm Zelenskyy is doing his job well.

Ukrainian and European officials reacted to the U.S.-Russia diesel deal with dismay, according to ABC News. They said it will help fund Russia's war effort.

Drone strikes on Yandex data centers

The Sunday attack hit Yandex's data center in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow. The Yandex Cloud Telegram channel said the facility's infrastructure was damaged and operations were completely halted. No one was injured.

The Russian independent outlet Astra reported that the outage left users in dozens of Russian cities, as well as in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, unable to order taxis or use banking services. A drone attack on Thursday took a Yandex data center in the Ryazan region offline. A day later, drones hit the company's major data center in the Kaluga region and partly put it out of action, Yandex said.

Yandex is often described as Russia's Google. It runs the country's most popular search engine and a wide range of digital services, and it is heavily involved in Russian artificial intelligence development. ABC noted that Ukraine's strikes on data centers follow Russian attacks on data hubs in Ukraine.

Why it matters for fuel prices and the war

For U.S. readers, the dispute ties the war in Ukraine directly to the cost of diesel, which ABC described as at record levels. Trump's deal to buy Russian diesel and his demand that Ukraine ease its refinery strikes both aim at that price problem. Ukraine's offer puts a condition on any pause: Russia would have to stop attacking its power and energy systems as well.

The fighting itself remains largely a contest of long-range strikes. More than 4 1/2 years after Russia's full-scale invasion, ABC reported, the armies are largely deadlocked on the front line, while each side targets the other's infrastructure from the air.

Source: ABC News