Trump: Kyiv, Moscow Agree to Halt Energy Strikes

Russian drones struck Kyiv gas stations again overnight into September 15, less than a day after US President Donald Trump announced that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to stop targeting each other’s energy infrastructure. The announcement touches Serbia directly: the European Union must renew sanctions against 2,600 Russian individuals and companies by September 22, and the outcome of that dispute in Brussels, like the fate of any energy truce in Ukraine, shapes the terms under which the region, Serbia included, buys oil and gas.

Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Monday, September 14, that a deal had been reached.

“Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian energy targets. Russia has agreed to do the same!” Trump wrote, adding that the global rise in diesel prices is being driven mainly by the Russia-Ukraine war, not by Iran.

Neither Kyiv nor Moscow has officially confirmed any such agreement. A senior Ukrainian energy official, whose identity the Kyiv Independent did not disclose, said he had not heard of any energy truce. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky responded on Telegram about an hour after Trump’s post, saying he was not confident Russia would actually stick to a deal.

“If our partners are ready to ensure that Russia truly does not strike our electricity grid, other energy facilities, critical infrastructure and food logistics, then of course we are ready to ensure a corresponding halt to our own strikes,” Zelensky wrote, adding: “The war must end. A step toward de-escalation on critical infrastructure could be a first step toward peace. We are waiting for details from our partners.”

Trump’s post came a day after he directly blamed Zelensky for rising diesel prices, including in the United States, where the price hit a record 6.23 dollars a gallon, or 1.65 dollars a liter, over the weekend. “There are plenty of other targets. Don’t hit the diesel fuel,” Trump told reporters at the time, arguing that the problem “isn’t being caused by the Middle East” but by the Russia-Ukraine war. The remark came a week after Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Kyiv and Moscow in another attempt to bring the two capitals closer together.

Kremlin makes no promise of restraint in return

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov welcomed Trump’s call on Kyiv at a press briefing on September 14, but did not promise that Russia would halt its own strikes.

“Of course we welcome any call on the Kyiv regime to stop attacking civilian economic infrastructure,” Peskov said, as reported by the independent Russian outlet Meduza. Asked whether Russia was ready to show the same restraint in return, he did not answer directly, saying only that Russian forces would continue operations across Ukraine.

Peskov, in a statement carried by China’s Xinhua news agency, added that “all countries can use their leverage over Kyiv” to push it toward greater flexibility, which he said would be a significant contribution to the settlement process.

The strikes did not stop that same night

Even as Trump announced the deal, Russian forces kept attacking Ukraine. Overnight into September 15, Russia launched 200 Shahed-type drones, including jet-powered versions, Ukraine’s air force said. Air defenses shot down or jammed 187 of them.

In Kyiv, drones hit two Ukrnafta gas stations, one in the Holosiivskyi district around 8:39 a.m. and another in the Darnytskyi district around 6 a.m., along with a data center and warehouses in two other city districts. One man died in hospital from his injuries, and seven people were wounded, two of them seriously, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

Klitschko had already described the shortage of air defense systems protecting gas stations on September 11, on the sidelines of the Yalta European Strategy conference, when he said:

“The question of protection is a question of air defense… unfortunately we have a shortage of interceptors, the kind that work against drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. That’s where the problem lies.”

The Kyiv Independent repeated that quote in its report on the morning strike of September 15 as well, even though it was not made in response to that attack, because it describes the same shortfall Kyiv faced again that morning.

Eleven dead across Ukraine

Across Ukraine, local authorities reported at least 11 people killed and 64 wounded over the previous 24 hours. The Chernihiv region was hit hardest, where a strike on agricultural warehouses in Pryluky killed three people and wounded 15, along with the Donetsk region, where Russian forces struck settlements 32 times, killing three and wounding 12. There were also dead and wounded in the Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

Near the Polish border, in the Volyn region, a Russian strike set a diesel locomotive on fire that night, though no one was hurt. Two days earlier, on September 13, a Russian drone hit a locomotive on the Kyiv-Warsaw rail line, just two kilometers from the Polish border.

Ukraine’s response, in Syzran

Ukrainian forces struck the Syzran refinery, part of Russian state oil giant Rosneft, that same night, Ukraine’s General Staff said. The strike hit the AVT-6 primary crude processing unit as well as a tank farm at the plant.

That is a separate strike from the one Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, confirmed three days earlier, on September 12, when drones hit an FPV drone factory near Taganrog. The two attacks should not be conflated: they were carried out on different days against different targets, even though both belong to the same Ukrainian campaign against Russian oil infrastructure and drone production.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov commented on the strikes by claiming that, had the Americans not walked away from the Anchorage agreement, Russia and Ukraine “would already have gone a year without war.”

Next meeting, no confirmed date yet

Zelensky said he plans to raise the energy truce, along with a possible halt to strikes at sea, at a potential meeting with Trump in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session between September 21 and 23, should the two presidents’ schedules align. Until then, the question of the European Union’s September 22 sanctions deadline also remains open, one that directly shapes the terms under which the whole region, Serbia included, buys oil and gas while the war in Ukraine continues.