Donald Trump called Ukraine's resumed strikes on Russian oil refineries "a disgrace" in a Newsmax interview aired Thursday, framing the attacks not as a wartime military tactic but as an assault on global fuel prices. "All he's doing is making the world oil price higher," Trump said of Zelenskyy, adding that targeting diesel refineries was "not doing a good service for the world." The statement collapses a complex battlefield calculus — Ukraine striking the revenue engine of its invader — into a single consumer metric. The backdrop is the disintegration of Trump's self-declared "energy ceasefire," which neither Russia nor Ukraine had agreed to. Last week, Trump eased sanctions on Russia in exchange for Moscow releasing large volumes of diesel onto global markets — a move widely read as an attempt to suppress US fuel prices ahead of the midterm elections. Zelenskyy publicly rejected the arrangement, arguing it bankrolled Russia's ongoing full-scale invasion while delivering zero security guarantees to Kyiv. Ukraine then resumed refinery strikes after concluding the ceasefire was a fiction. Trump's hierarchy of concerns is now explicit. "I'm not a big fan of Zelenskyy," he told Newsmax. "I think I find Zelenskyy to be more difficult to deal with than Putin." This is a sitting US president publicly ranking the leader of an invaded democracy as more troublesome than the invader — a statement that, regardless of negotiating context, sends a signal to every capital watching. The Starlink disruption this week sharpened the picture further. Ukraine reported that Starlink satellite services were suddenly restricted, hobbling drone strike missions and air defenses. Zelenskyy said he felt "personally betrayed" by Trump. UK Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said his US counterpart Pete Hegseth assured him the system was restored, though the cause of the disruption remained unclear. Whether deliberate or accidental, the incident demonstrated how a single private infrastructure provider can alter battlefield dynamics with a configuration change. Europe moved to fill the credibility gap. At an EU summit in Brussels, European Council President António Costa told Zelenskyy that Ukraine could "count on us not only to support you in war" but also on the path to EU membership. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen promised a 22nd round of sanctions against Russia, saying the EU had supported the energy ceasefire "but we have seen that Russia did not respect it, not a single minute." Polish PM Donald Tusk posted directly: "YOU ARE NOT ALONE." The continental rally was unmistakable. The European solidarity message, however, carries its own contradictions. The promise of new sanctions comes weeks after the EU lifted sanctions on two prominent Russian oligarchs at the request of France and Luxembourg — a move that undercuts the deterrence posture. And the Kremlin, for its part, accused Ukraine of "derailing US peace efforts" by resuming refinery strikes, a framing that mirrors Trump's own. Moscow and Washington are, functionally, reading from the same talking points on who bears responsibility for the ceasefire collapse. The structural picture is this: Trump has made cheap fuel his metric of success, and any actor who disrupts that metric — including a country fighting for survival — becomes the antagonist. Ukraine's leverage in the war (its ability to impose economic pain on Russia through refinery strikes) is now reframed as a problem for American consumers. The war itself, more than four and a half years in, has produced zero progress toward peace under Trump's stewardship. What it has produced is a transactional framework in which the invaded party is expected to subordinate its military strategy to the invading party's commodity output.
