Donald Trump’s decision to import Russian fuel to the US represents a remarkable about-face from the president.
Just three weeks ago, Trump signed legislation to authorise fresh American sanctions and tariffs on nations that import Russian oil and gas.
Now, Trump says, Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to supply hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel fuel to the US and world markets in the coming months.
US President Donald Trump has said he thinks “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president” as he responded to Volodymyr Zelensky’s criticism of the US diesel deal with Russia.
The Ukrainian president warned a new deal to release millions of tonnes of Russian diesel into the US would provide Moscow with money to continue its war against his nation, calling it a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump told reporters outside the White House on Saturday that Zelensky “wants to make problems for the world” by continuing to authorise attacks on Russian refineries.
"I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president."
US President Donald Trump hits out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, criticising him for targeting Russian refineries and saying he should be replaced.
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Donald Trump agreed to buy diesel from Vladimir Putin after Volodymyr Zelensky ignored his requests to stop bombing Russian oil refineries, sources have said.
Mr Trump announced on Friday that Putin would “immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to the American and global marketplace”, followed by another 1.5 million tons before the end of the year.
The US president is facing pressure from voters over the cost of fuel before November’s midterms as diesel prices have soared around 70 per cent since he launched a war against Iran. On Friday, a gallon of diesel cost $6.28, up from $3.68 a year ago.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has rediscovered the vocabulary of peace at the precise moment his army is taking Ukraine apart, one bridge and one power station at a time.
On September 25, addressing Russian journalists, he said that every proposal for settling the four-and-a-half-year war remained on the table, then attached the condition that empties the offer of content. “We are ready for talks and to wrap them up as soon as possible, but on conditions acceptable for the Russian people,” Putin said. Moscow would first assess what served its own interests.
Ukrainian and European officials are set to meet US President Donald Trump’s envoys in Miami on Friday to discuss “new ideas” to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelenskyy confirmed the meeting on Thursday evening, after a Russian attack on buses killed 30 civilians in the frontline city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine.
Before the strikes in Kramatorsk, a Russian missile hit a five-storey apartment block in the northern Chernihiv region, killing 22 Ukrainians, including five children.
Donald Trump is considering a deal with Vladimir Putin to reopen the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s special envoy, reportedly held talks with Russian officials to discuss American investment in the pipeline to profit from energy flows to Europe once the war ends.
The pipelines delivered gas to Germany from Russia before it invaded Ukraine.
As Ukraine’s European backers deal with myriad challenges at home — violent student protests in France, the rise of right-wing forces in Germany and a mounting fuel crisis across the continent — Russian President Vladimir Putin is counting on a collapse of European support for Kyiv in the coming months, Russian and European officials and analysts say.
Brussels and Kyiv speak gushingly of their bond in public, but rhetoric can’t change increasingly harsh financial realities. On Wednesday, it was reported that the European Union had rebuffed Ukraine’s request for additional financial support for 2027 on top of loans agreed earlier this year. As Kyiv struggles even to obtain money already pledged by the EU, cracks are emerging in Ukraine’s key international alliance.
It’s history’s first robotic airborne landing operation. Last week, Ukraine dropped grenade- and machine gun-firing robots behind Russian lines to assault logistics and command bunkers for ground troops moving quickly against positions at the front, threatening the fortress belt city of Sloviansk, dealing what some analysts interpret as a major blow to Putin’s strategy to take eastern Ukraine.
South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung has threatened to take unspecified “further action” if Ukraine does not issue a public apology for revealing that two North Korean prisoners of war had been sent to the South.
Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky made the disclosure to the UN general assembly last week, angering Seoul, who said the move was meant to stay secret.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha on Thursday described the situation as a “diplomatic misunderstanding”, adding that Kyiv was “working” to resolve it.
Odd. But probably not an accident.
BOROVE, Ukraine—This summer, a small crowd gathered around six freshly exhumed human skeletons protruding from the ground on the edge of a sunflower field in Ukraine.
They didn’t belong to victims of Russia’s war on Ukraine, but to Poles massacred by Ukrainian ultranationalists who briefly allied with Nazi forces in World War II.
The discovery of burial sites like the one here has long eaten away at relations between the neighbors. Kyiv has lionized the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known in Ukraine as the UPA, as freedom fighters who fought both the Soviets and Germans, but they are remembered in Poland for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Poles near the two countries’ modern-day borders.
It felt like the last day of summer. On a Sunday afternoon in late September, people in Kyiv strolled through the city’s botanical gardens, admiring the late-flowering dahlias. Later, the terraces in the Podil area – a neighbourhood full of bars, patisseries and bookshops – filled up with customers in search of a cocktail.
The idyll was an illusion. As the day darkened, the air defence began its rumble and boom. When a projectile fell with an explosive smack on a bar table, the drinkers flinched and then laughed. It was only a conker from the chestnut tree overhead. Nursing a glass of rosé, writer Myroslav Laiuk talked about the picnic he and his wife had had the previous evening, in a park in the Obolon district – prosecco in proper glasses, cheese and charcuterie. Then a drone was shot down above their heads. Very pretty, he said, with a smile. Shooting stars. Time to make a wish.
Western governments and technology firms have spent four years pouring targeting software, combat data, and cheap autonomous drones into Ukraine. The war has made the country the world’s largest live laboratory for military artificial intelligence. That is not a metaphor Kyiv rejects. Mykhailo Fedorov, then a senior digital and defense official, said the mission was to make Ukraine “the world’s tech R&D lab.”
The resulting risk is real. The evidence supports a proliferation problem: systems, data, and know-how moving faster than the rules meant to contain them.
DAUDZEVA, Latvia—Wearing strips of red tape on their helmets, Danish soldiers stealthily moved through the pine forest and then, unleashing a firestorm, overran a position held by Spanish troops.
“Todos muertos”—“everyone is dead”—quipped one of the Spanish soldiers, relaxing under an armored vehicle that raised its cannon to signify it had been destroyed.
The Danish mechanized infantry company role-played the enemy in this month’s exercise by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s brigade that has been deployed to protect Latvia from nearby Russia.
Well kids, they won't let you save your own country but you'll be allowed to save someone else's.
White people are useful, sometimes. https://t.co/ux3ZloQaFQ
— Kellie-Jay Keen (@ThePosieParker) September 22, 2026
Donald Trump is expected to confront Volodymyr Zelensky over strikes on Russian oil refineries in New York on Tuesday.
The US president reportedly warned the Ukrainian leader on Sunday that the attacks were exacerbating a global diesel shortage and causing prices to surge.
Diesel prices, which on Monday hit $6.51 (£4.80) a gallon, up 76 per cent from a year ago, have spiked dramatically since the US and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb 28
