Ukraine has restarted long-range drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, disregarding pressure from US President Donald Trump just days before the American midterm elections, according to The Guardian. Russian state media reported that Ukrainian drones set the Kstovo refinery in Nizhny Novgorod oblast alight overnight into Sunday, shortly after a large strike on a Rosneft-owned refinery in Samara oblast. The renewed campaign follows reports that Kyiv had bowed to White House requests to halt such attacks.
Why it matters
The strikes test how far Ukraine can pursue its own military strategy while depending on US support. They also land at a sensitive political moment in Washington, where fuel prices have become an election issue and Trump has publicly blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for rising global energy costs. The Guardian notes that Trump lifted US sanctions on Russian diesel last month. Separately, the Kremlin has opened a terrorism case over a Ukrainian attack on an oil facility, according to ABC News, underscoring how the refinery campaign is feeding into legal and diplomatic escalation as well as the battlefield.
Conflicting accounts of a pause
The Wall Street Journal had reported that Ukraine yielded to White House pressure and stopped targeting Russian energy infrastructure. Ukrainian officials gave the Kyiv Independent a different account, saying they never accepted a request from Jared Kushner, the US president's son-in-law, to suspend refinery strikes for 30 days. According to The Guardian, Kremlin officials said the raids resumed on Friday and complained that Kyiv was now "simply ignoring" US wishes.
Zelenskyy has framed the strikes as unavoidable retaliation. He said Moscow runs an unrelenting campaign of drones and ballistic missiles against Ukrainian cities' power facilities, and that four Ukrainian regions were struck overnight, cutting electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes. Writing on Telegram, he said the intensity of the attacks is very high and that Russia is trying to make the most of Ukraine's shortage of ballistic missile interceptors. Kyiv endured outages of eight to ten hours on Sunday after a key thermal power plant was damaged.
Battlefield claims and a humanitarian truce
Zelenskyy also presented figures he said show Russia's costs mounting. He stated that 54,400 Russian military personnel were killed or wounded in October, the highest monthly total since the full-scale invasion began. He added that Ukraine retook 96.2 sq km (37 sq miles) of territory last month, 10.4 sq km (4 sq miles) more than Russia captured, and concluded that "Russia is losing." These are Ukrainian presidential claims as reported by The Guardian and have not been independently verified.
The refinery strikes came as a six-day local ceasefire in the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky expired on Sunday night. The truce, brokered by US first lady Melania Trump, ran from 27 October to 1 November. Ukraine's human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, confirmed it had ended and described it as an important step in joint humanitarian work. Hundreds of residents were reunited with relatives in northern Ukraine over the weekend, and both sides called the evacuation effort a success.
Ukrainian observers said Russian forces used the pause to strengthen their positions and rotate out hungry, exhausted troops garrisoned in Oleshky, which sits on the left bank of the Dnipro River opposite Kherson, the city Ukraine retook in autumn 2022. Those observers expect a renewed Russian assault. Pope Leo said on Sunday he hoped cooperation between the two sides in carrying out the ceasefire, the most significant since 2022, would encourage broader peace efforts, expressing hope that it would strengthen their willingness to engage in dialogue.
Talks involving Russia, Ukraine and the United States are expected later this month. Kremlin officials said Sunday that Vladimir Putin is open to speaking with Zelenskyy by phone, but that European leaders backing Ukraine should not take part in such a call. A wider breakthrough looks unlikely: Putin's demands are unchanged, including that Ukraine cede all of the eastern Donetsk oblast, which Russia has failed to capture since 2014, along with additional territory in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces that the Kremlin does not control but claims to have annexed.
Watch whether Ukraine sustains the refinery campaign through the US midterms and whether the reported trilateral talks produce any direct contact between Putin and Zelenskyy.
