The energy ceasefire Donald Trump announced between Russia and Ukraine is heavily lopsided in Moscow’s favour and robs Kyiv of one of its most effective tactical measures. But it could be a step towards something better.
Crawling towards a ceasefire
When Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy was asked on Sunday about Donald Trump’s announcement of an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, he said it was “news to me”.
After speaking with Nato secretary general Mark Rutte, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and Finnish president Alexander Stubb, Zelenskiy voiced support for the proposal.
“Ukraine supports the ceasefire, and it is important that Russia support it as well. We are awaiting details from the American side,” he said.
Kyiv would support a ceasefire that halts attacks on all energy infrastructure, including the energy grid but Trump’s initiative is limited to both sides agreeing to stop attacking each other’s oil refineries. Ukraine has just one refinery, which has been hit numerous times, while Russia has 38, of which 21 have been targets for Ukrainian drone strikes.
Kyiv’s long-range strikes on Russian refineries have been among its most successful operations during the war, disabling up to 30 per cent of Russian refining capacity according to independent analysts. The strikes have led to fuel shortages in Russia and Vladimir Putin acknowledged this month that they had cost the country 1 per cent of its annual gross domestic product.
Trump last Friday trumpeted an agreement with Putin for the immediate release of 300,000 tons of Russian diesel, with a further 500,000 next month and one million tons in December. Trump hopes that the move will lower the price of the fuel, which has doubled since last year because of his war against Iran and has become a burden for Republican candidates facing midterm elections three weeks from tomorrow.
The day after he made the diesel deal, Trump told Zelenskiy to stop attacking Russian refineries, adding that Ukraine needed a new president. But while Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were meeting Ukrainian negotiators in Miami, Russia reported another strike on one of its oil terminals in Rostov-on-Don.
During the Miami meeting, which also included national security advisers from Germany, France and Britain and representatives from Nato and the European Union, the Americans reminded Ukraine that the US shares the intelligence that facilitates its drone targeting, according to Axios. And the Financial Times reports today that the US threatened to halt the sale to Nato of weapons for Ukraine if Kyiv did not stop attacking Russian refineries.
Witkoff and Kushner were due to fly to Moscow after the Miami meeting but they postponed the trip while they waited to see if Ukraine and the Europeans could get behind a new, unified proposal to put to Putin. This could see the halt on refinery attacks extended to all energy infrastructure, a step that would ease some of the suffering of Ukrainians as they face into winter with their electricity grid already depleted by Russian attacks.
Russia’s attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities and Ukraine’s long-range strikes inside Russia cannot move the line of contact on the battlefield, something that would require the kind of mobilisation of manpower neither side is planning. The kinetic phase of this war may be now entering its final weeks and the primary function of the drone and missile strikes is to gain advantage in the negotiations that will follow.
Trump’s unfair, unilateral and brutally imposed halt to strikes on refineries may be the first step, with a comprehensive energy ceasefire the necessary next move. That could open the way towards a full ceasefire before winter sets in, leaving Ukraine and Russia far from a negotiated peace but sparing the lives of many of their people.
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