US president Donald Trump pressed his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a call on Sunday to halt Kyiv’s strikes on Russian refineries over concerns that the attacks are exacerbating a global diesel shortage and pushing up prices, according to people familiar with the call.
The US president’s main message was about “diesel, diesel ... diesel” and urging Zelenskiy to order his military to cease their drone and missile attacks, a senior Ukrainian official who was on the call said.
Another senior Ukrainian official familiar with the call said that Trump emphasised he was very worried about the rising price of diesel and wanted to ensure Russian supplies could reach the global market to provide relief.
The White House could not immediately be reached for comment.
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Zelenskiy said in a statement after the call that it had been an “important conversation” and that his meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week “could change a lot”. His office said the meeting was expected to take place on Tuesday.
“There is diplomatic momentum,” he said without elaborating.
The call came hours after Ukraine hit Moscow with what Russian authorities said was the largest-ever drone attack on the capital, setting a large oil refinery ablaze and killing at least two people and injuring 20 others.
Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said air defence shot down 450 drones as they approached the capital.
Russia, in turn, continued its deadly missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian targets, hitting energy infrastructure, petrol stations, commercial warehouses and other businesses.
Trump claimed last Monday that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to refrain from striking each other’s energy facilities while attributing the global rise in diesel prices to the war rather than his conflict with Iran.
But Ukrainian officials later said that the US president had got ahead of himself and that no ceasefire had been agreed.
Zelenskiy clarified after Trump’s statement that Ukraine would honour a reciprocal ceasefire if the US and other partners could ensure that Russia did the same.
It is not clear whether the Trump administration has made similar requests to the Russian side to halt attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
Russia has not commented on Trump’s efforts to secure an energy ceasefire. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, is unlikely to agree before the end of this coming winter, when his forces are planning a devastating aerial bombardment of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, according to people briefed on his thinking.
The Russian president believes his forces will capture the remaining areas of the Donbas, a key frontline region in eastern Ukraine, and saw the air campaign as leverage to extract further concessions from Kyiv, the people said.
Putin said this month that he had ordered Russia’s armed forces to prepare a mass air-strike campaign in response to Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. “They are hitting ours. They’ll get an answer. That’s basically how it is,” he said.
Previous US efforts to broker a halt to attacks on energy infrastructure have failed.
Diesel has become a political liability for the president ahead of midterm elections, as infrastructure damage caused by his war with Iran and the Russia-Ukraine conflict squeezes supply, pushing prices to unprecedented levels in the US.
But a recent assessment by Ukraine’s KSE Institute found the US-Iran war had a far bigger impact on global diesel and oil and gas supplies than Ukraine’s drone strikes.
One senior Ukrainian official said they believed Trump could be holding up implementation of the sweeping Russia sanctions law he signed last week as leverage to persuade Ukraine to stop its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. But the official said that Trump could also use the sanctions as leverage against Russia to try to push Moscow to engage with Kyiv and restart direct negotiations.
The Trump administration has tended to favour using sanctions as instruments in negotiations rather than automatically implementing them.
Zelenskiy, who was travelling to New York on Monday, said in a statement: “Russia is not backing down from its escalation and is sending many signals that it is ready to expand the war.”
He urged allies to “continue pressuring” Moscow to end the conflict and argued that the Ukrainian drone and missile campaign was “part of the pressure that is actually working and the world can feel it”.
“But diplomacy must work in parallel,” he added.
Russia’s ruling United Russia party easily won a parliamentary election that Putin cast as a test of support for the war in Ukraine, the Central Election Commission said on Monday, after more than 95 per cent of votes had been counted.
United Russia party won 57.83 per cent of the vote, the commission said, up from 49.8 per cent which it won in 2021, the last time an election for the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, was held.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
