When Donald Trump announced on 14 September that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to stop striking each other's energy infrastructure, it sounded like the first real pause in the long-range strike war. Within hours, both sides had hit energy targets again. Three weeks later, the agreement exists only in the announcement: Ukraine's drone campaign against Russian refineries deepened through September, and Moscow kept striking Ukraine's grid ahead of winter.
An agreement that neither side had signed
Trump set out the claimed deal in a Truth Social post on 14 September: Ukraine had agreed not to hit Russian energy targets, Russia had agreed to do likewise, and the world's diesel price rise was mostly caused by the war rather than events around Iran. The announcement did not survive the day. Within about two hours, a Russian attack knocked out power in the southern city of Kherson, and on the same day Ukrainian drones struck the Syzran oil refinery in Russia's Samara region.
Neither capital endorsed the American version. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov effectively denied any deal had been reached, calling the idea "a very good idea" and leaving it there. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was, unusually, close to the Kremlin's reading: Kyiv called it a strong American proposal, but one Ukraine would accept only as a reciprocal arrangement — it stops hitting Russian refineries when Russia stops hitting Ukrainian energy infrastructure. People familiar with the Kremlin's position told the Financial Times the announcement was premature, and that Vladimir Putin would not accept such a deal because winter attacks on Ukraine's energy system give him leverage over Kyiv. Ukrainian commentator Denys Davydov, in his update the same day, reached a similar conclusion: no verifiable ceasefire existed, and none was being observed.
The refinery campaign did not pause
September's strike tempo rose after the announcement. According to open-source assessments, Rosneft's Saratov refinery has been offline since 11 September, the Syzran attack knocked out its partially repaired CDU-6 distillation unit, and damage forced the Yaroslavl YANOS refinery to shut a partially repaired AVT-3 unit. On 20 September, a drone attack forced the Moscow oil refinery to halt crude processing, Reuters reported, citing industry sources; the plant processed about 230,000 barrels of crude a day in 2024.
A strike then forced the Novoshakhtinsk refinery in the Rostov region to suspend operations — an attack Zelenskyy publicly confirmed, saying Ukraine had also hit a facility in Perm and a defence enterprise in Ulyanovsk. Ukraine's armed forces later said their drones struck the Ilsky refinery in the Krasnodar region, which Kyiv says produces fuel for the Russian army; Russian regional authorities reported three people killed and two injured there. The campaign has caused sporadic fuel shortages inside Russia.
Russia continued the mirror-image campaign against Ukraine's grid. After one overnight attack on 22 September, residents of seven Ukrainian regions were left without electricity, and an employee of the regional utility Zaporizhzhiaoblenergo was killed. Whatever was announced on 14 September, neither side behaved as if a truce existed.
A dispute over diesel
The argument is also about why Ukraine strikes at all. Trump publicly called on Zelenskyy on 13 September to stop attacking Russian oil infrastructure, arguing the damage was driving a global diesel shortage, and returned to the subject in a 20 September phone call people familiar with it described to the Financial Times as dominated by diesel. That framing is contestable: US Energy Information Administration data showed American diesel prices broadly stable across the period, and Ukraine's targets are overwhelmingly refineries supplying Russia's domestic market and military. Kyiv's answer is that the campaign imposes real costs on Moscow — repair bills, lost refining capacity and pressure on the fuel supply that moves Russia's army. Zelenskyy, meeting Trump in New York during the UN General Assembly, held that line: Ukraine is ready for an energy ceasefire, but a reciprocal one.
The 14 September episode shows how this war is now fought on two levels at once. Truces can be declared in a social media post, but refineries in Saratov, Syzran, Yaroslavl and Moscow do not stop burning because of one — and Ukraine's grid does not stop taking hits either. Until an energy ceasefire comes with verification and consequences for breaking it, announced pauses should be read the way Kyiv and Moscow both read the last one: as claims, not as quiet.
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