Trump's Russia-Ukraine Energy Truce Faces Skeptics — SkimNews
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- Zelenskyy said Ukraine is ready to halt strikes on Russian energy facilities if Moscow stops targeting Ukraine's energy systems, after a 40-minute meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.
- Ukraine has massively expanded deep strikes on Russia's oil industry, hitting refineries up to 3,000km from its border; a September 20 attack forced the Moscow oil refinery, which processed about 230,000 barrels of crude a day in 2024, to halt crude processing.
- Russia struck two petrol stations and other sites in Kyiv with jet-powered drones on Wednesday, killing one and injuring at least seven — the sixth Ukrnafta facility hit in recent weeks, the Ukrainian oil company said.
- Trump blamed Ukraine's strikes on Russian fuel-processing capacity for rising US diesel prices and asked Kyiv to stop hitting Russian diesel refineries — a move analysts tie to his slumping approval ratings ahead of November midterms.
- Trump's energy truce push directly contradicts his own administration's posture: Congress passed a bill this month granting him sweeping powers to impose sanctions on Russia's crude exports and steep tariffs on buyers of Russian energy.
- Zelenskyy asked Trump for additional Patriot air defence missiles — the only system capable of downing Russia's ballistic missiles — while the US Patriot supply is being depleted by the US-Israel war on Iran.
- Analysts Amanda Paul (European Policy Centre), Marnie Howlett (University of Oxford) and Christopher Pool (King's College London) were uniformly skeptical, citing Russia's history of breaking ceasefires and Trump's limited leverage over Ukraine's deep-strike campaign.
Why it matters: An energy truce would lower US diesel prices and ease pressure on Washington's strained Patriot missile supply, but analysts warn it would also preserve Russia's energy revenues and likely collapse given Moscow's history of breaking ceasefires. The proposal directly contradicts a Congress-backed bill giving Trump sweeping new sanction powers on Russian crude that he isn't using, leaving US Russia policy incoherent heading into winter.
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