Trump announces Ukraine energy ceasefire without consulting Zelenskyy, sparking diplomatic row

Donald Trump posted a declaration on Truth Social on Sunday that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to stop attacking each other's energy infrastructure, effective immediately. He offered no explanation of how the deal came about or what it would entail. Volodymyr Zelenskyy learned about it the same way the rest of the world did—through the president's social media account. "News to me," the Ukrainian leader said when asked about the ceasefire. He added that he would accept such an arrangement if Putin agreed to it as well, but he wanted to know when it would actually begin.

The announcement arrived at the end of a week of escalating friction between Washington and Kyiv. On Friday, Trump had lifted sanctions on Russian diesel exports, a move he said would lower fuel prices ahead of November's US midterm elections. Zelenskyy responded with fury, calling the decision weak and warning that it would hand Putin billions of dollars to wage war more aggressively. Trump fired back on Saturday, telling Zelenskyy to "damn well stop" bombing Russian oil refineries and suggesting Ukraine needed different leadership. Zelenskyy rejected the demand, saying that any halt to strikes on Russian energy targets had to be reciprocal—Moscow would have to stop its own attacks first—and backed by real consequences for Russia from its allies.

By Sunday, there was no sign the Kremlin was honoring Trump's ceasefire. Russian drones flew throughout the day, Zelenskyy said, and airstrikes continued. Among the targets was thermal power station No. 5 in Kharkiv. Over the course of the week, Russia had struck more than 200 Ukrainian electricity generation and transmission facilities, along with seventeen hits on gas and oil infrastructure. On Saturday alone, Russian bombing killed twenty-three people in the city of Zaporizhzhia, including four children, and damaged a five-storey apartment building in the frontline town of Sloviansk.

Ukrainian officials pointed out the asymmetry at the heart of Trump's demand. The White House was asking Kyiv to surrender its most effective weapon—long-range strikes on Russian oil complexes, warehouses, and data centers that had dealt serious blows to Russia's economy—without extracting any corresponding concessions from Moscow. Oleksandr Merezhko, head of Ukraine's foreign affairs committee, accused Trump of siding with Putin and said the pressure campaign resembled the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, the notorious agreement that carved up Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He warned that Trump's threat to cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine would "blind" its air defense systems and amount to complicity in what he called Putin's genocide.

The row had begun when Ukrainian negotiators were meeting in Florida with Trump's representatives, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. When news of the sanctions lift broke, the Ukrainians left early. "It felt like a trap," one official told the Kyiv Independent. Zelenskyy spent Sunday on the phone with allied leaders—Canada's Mark Carney, Poland's Donald Tusk, the European Commission's Ursula von der Leyen, Britain's Andy Burnham, France's Emmanuel Macron, and Finland's Alexander Stubb—shoring up support and coordinating a response. Britain's Downing Street said Burnham had reiterated complete solidarity and that the two leaders agreed to maintain pressure on Russia and strengthen sanctions, despite Trump's efforts to weaken them.

Zelenskyy said he was willing to accept Trump's demands and hold elections, but only if Putin agreed to a total sixty-day ceasefire. He laid blame for Europe's largest war since 1945 squarely on Russia. "It is possible to stop strikes on energy infrastructure as early as today, but Putin does not want to do so," he said. The Financial Times reported that the US was threatening to halt the weapons procurement system supplying Ukraine unless Kyiv halted deep strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. The New York Times reported that US officials had offered the Kremlin economic incentives for a ceasefire, including the release of billions in frozen Russian sovereign assets and a revisited plan to sell parts of Russia's energy company, Lukoil, to Middle Eastern investors, some with business ties to US negotiators.

This was the most serious public rupture between Washington and Kyiv since Trump had berated Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last year. The bitter exchange exposed a fundamental disagreement about how the war should end and who should bear the cost of ending it.