Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Donald Trump’s Russia-Ukraine energy truce never had the gas to get going in the first place. Within days of the U.S. president’s Monday declaration that Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to stop attacking each other's energy infrastructure, Ukrainian drones struck one of Russia's largest oil refineries hard enough to all but completely halt its operations. Thursday's attack damaged a crude distillation unit responsible for roughly 40 percent of the processing capacity at the 300,000-barrel-a-day Slavneft-YANOS refinery in Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow.
Another unit at the same plant was already undergoing repairs following an August drone strike. This refinery alone produced around 4 million tonnes of diesel in 2024. You can hardly blame the Ukrainians.
State energy firm Ukrenergo said the day before Kyiv’s drone assault on Yaroslavl, Russian attacks damaged energy infrastructure and caused outages across six Ukrainian regions. Whatever Trump announced on Monday, neither side seemed particularly incentivized to listen. After all, why should they?
Trump’s concern for Russian and Ukrainian energy facilities is rooted squarely in an American problem. The president’s hasty declaration came days after average diesel prices climbed above $6 a gallon across the country as sorely needed oil and petroleum products struggle to make it out of the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. Over the weekend, Trump claimed he’d told Volodymyr Zelensky to stop "knocking out diesel fuel" in Russia, arguing that Ukrainian strikes on refineries were contributing to a global shortage.
In reality, Zelensky had said Ukraine was prepared to stop only if Washington could ensure that Russia genuinely did the same. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called an energy moratorium a "very good idea," but Moscow attached its own demands, including protection for Russian seaborne energy exports and sanctions relief. When none of those conditions was met, strikes began again.
The latest episode of Trump’s commands falling on deaf ears comes hot on the heels of his envoys Kushner and Witkoff enjoying a tour of the Kremlin and Kyiv. They spent more than three hours with Putin on September 5, on what was Witkoff's eighth trip to Moscow since Trump returned to office. The visit produced one modest result: Putin paused strikes on Kyiv for three days while Ukraine agreed not to hit Moscow.
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