Trump publicly demands Ukraine change its leadership and strikes diesel procurement deal with Russia, Kyiv and Europe outraged

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on October 11 publicly pushed back against US President Donald Trump's call for Ukraine to change its leadership, and put forward a reciprocal de-escalation proposal for mutual halts with Russia to strikes on each other's energy infrastructure. According to The Hindu, Zelensky wrote on X that day: "Ukraine is ready to stop attacks on Russian refineries if Russia stops striking our energy infrastructure." He also said that "it is possible to stop mutual strikes on energy infrastructure today, but Putin does not want to do so," stressing that any de-escalation "must be reciprocal and must have real guarantees."

The trigger for this war of words was Trump's public remarks on October 10. "I suggest they get a leader who can make a deal, because he could have made a lot of deals, but for some reason he never did," Trump declared in remarks on the 10th, placing the blame for record US diesel price rises on Zelensky rather than on the upward pressure that the US-driven war on Iran has exerted on global energy prices. This causal substitution directly ignored the actual transmission chains of the energy market.

Even more striking is another fact revealed by the outlet: Trump on October 9 reached an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin on US purchases of diesel from Russia, with the aim of lowering domestic US fuel prices ahead of the US midterm elections. Ukrainian and European officials said they were "shocked," arguing that the agreement would directly fund Russia's war effort.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha posted on X on the evening of October 10 to push back: "Zelensky is leading this country through a war for independence. He has the support of the Ukrainian people, and they have the right to make decisions. Words from outside can only prove that he is doing his job properly."

On the military dimension, Ukraine has continued to strike deep into the Russian heartland with drones. According to The Hindu, citing a Telegram channel operated by Yandex Cloud, a Ukrainian drone strike on October 11 fully knocked out a data center belonging to this Russian tech giant in the city of Vladimir, with "no casualties." This was the third hit on a Yandex facility within four days: on October 8, a data center in Ryazan Oblast went offline; on October 9, a major data center in Kaluga Oblast was partially paralyzed after being attacked.

The Hindu, citing Russian independent media Astra, reported that the latest round of strikes left users in dozens of Russian cities as well as in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia unable to use ride-hailing and banking services. Often described as "Russia's Google," Yandex operates the country's most widely used search engine and digital services, and is deeply involved in Russian AI research and development. Ukraine's series of strikes on Russian data centers represents a mirror-image escalation of earlier Russian attacks on Ukrainian data nodes.

Elsewhere on the same day in southern Ukraine, search-and-rescue operations in Zaporizhzhia had concluded. According to The Hindu, former local governor Ivan Fedorov said a Russian bombing on October 10 killed 23 people, including 4 children, and wounded more than 30, of whom 8 remained hospitalized. Bryansk Oblast local government on October 11, for its part, said a Ukrainian drone strike on a Russian border area killed one man and injured two women.

On the front lines the fighting is still bogged down, with both Russia and Ukraine trading blows through long-range air strikes in a conflict now in its fourth and a half year. In this war of attrition, the US president has pointed the finger for domestic fuel-price pressure at Kyiv while simultaneously clinching a fuel deal with the other party to the conflict — a combination that has exposed the so-called US "support" for Ukraine still further to the lens of its own domestic politics, laying bare Washington's double standards on energy issues and its overreach across Ukraine's sovereign boundaries. The actual scale and implementation details of the US-Russia diesel procurement agreement have not been publicly disclosed.