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Ukraine launched one of its largest-ever aerial assaults against Russia on Sunday, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy publicly warned President Trump that siding with Moscow would be a “historic mistake.”
Ukraine’s attack, which involved more than 1,000 drones, hit a key oil export terminal in St. Petersburg and targeted a major VK data center in the Leningrad region. One person was killed and five others were wounded in the St. Petersburg attack, which sparked fires at the Petersburg Oil Terminal and the city’s Ruchyi oil depot, Russian authorities said.
It was not clear whether the Leningrad data center had actually been hit.
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Mr. Zelenskyy suggested that the Ukrainian attacks, launched amid growing tension between Kyiv and the Trump administration, were direct retaliation for Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure over the past week.
Mr. Trump announced a so-called energy ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia on Oct. 11, a supposed agreement that effectively collapsed immediately as Russia quickly resumed its strategy of attempting to crush Ukraine’s power generation capacity and other infrastructure.
Mr. Trump also recently announced a deal to lift restrictions on Russian diesel exports. The administration said the move is aimed at lowering global energy costs that have skyrocketed because of the Iran war. That deal prompted public criticism from Mr. Zelenskyy, which in turn led to a brief interruption in some American intelligence sharing with Kyiv, the Ukrainian president said.
Intelligence sharing has now resumed, Mr. Zelenskyy said.
“We are very thankful for this,” he said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Now it works.”
Mr. Zelenskyy said Ukraine still faces slowdowns in connection speeds to Starshield, the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink internet service.
Those slowdowns have prompted speculation in national security circles that the Trump administration may be trying to pressure Ukraine to end the war, or perhaps even punishing the nation because of Mr. Zelenskyy’s public criticism of the U.S.-Russia diesel deal. In recent days, Mr. Trump has also put new U.S. economic sanctions against Moscow on hold.
Despite all that, Mr. Zelenskyy said he wants to work with Mr. Trump.
“We want to trust him,” he told NBC News. “I hope that he will change his decisions, because I think that it’s all mistakes, and it will not help us, and it will not help United States.”
In a series of social media posts ahead of that interview, Mr. Zelenskyy did not directly address the latest Ukrainian attacks on Russia but seemed to justify them.
“Since the American president announced the energy ceasefire a week ago, Russia has deliberately attacked Ukraine’s energy and oil and gas sectors 76 times,” Mr. Zelenskyy said. “In total, over this past week, the Russians have attacked Ukraine with almost 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs, and 66 missiles, most of them ballistic. The main targets of these strikes are energy facilities. The Russians are trying to cause a blackout.”
The Russia-Ukraine war is now well into its fourth year. Mr. Trump vowed to end the conflict quickly after taking office in January 2025, but his administration has struggled to facilitate even a partial ceasefire, let alone a lasting peace deal.
Starshield, Russia diesel deal in spotlight
Last week, Ukrainian drone operators lost some connection speed after restrictions were imposed on battlefield use of the country’s U.S.-made Starshield communication terminals.
In Washington, lawmakers from both parties have questioned whether the Trump administration ordered those restrictions in response to public criticism by Mr. Zelenskyy and others of the U.S.-Russia deal to relax sanctions on Russian diesel exports.
A U.S. military official familiar with Starshield’s technical details said the network’s speeds for military use push the equipment’s limits, and data limits are controlled by higher U.S. military headquarters.
Those headquarters manage the technical challenges of providing sufficient bandwidth with the available satellites to ensure troops have the necessary communications support, the official said, asking to remain anonymous because of the work’s sensitivity.
Mr. Zelenskyy told NBC News on Sunday that Ukraine believes the decision to slow down Ukraine’s Starshield access was made after a “message from [the] American government.”
The U.S.-Russia diesel deal is at the center of rising tensions.
Top Trump administration officials pushed back Sunday on the notion that the U.S. is throwing Russia an economic life raft. Energy exports are Moscow’s chief source of revenue.
“It’s not an economic lifeline,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “Russia today exports a lot of oil. That’s what they want to export. We have very tight sanctions on Russian oil. The tightest ever we put on last fall, meaning they’re large companies, all their Russian exporters cannot export oil.”
“What the president’s move has done was for diesel fuel, which is what the world is short right now, and Russia exports today zero diesel,” Mr. Wright said. “This is an incentive to Russia, that if they can reduce the conflict with Ukraine, they can get an energy ceasefire or reduce the conflict such that they have diesel to export, we’ll allow it to flow to world markets.”
Over the weekend, Mr. Trump temporarily called off new sanctions that would have increased tariffs on Russian goods, including energy, by up to 500%. He also waived the bill’s provision to apply tariffs of up to 100% on goods from countries that buy Russian energy, such as China and India.
• John T. Seward and George Caldwell contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.
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