Ukraine Resumes Russian Refinery Strikes After Ceasefire Fails

Ukraine will resume long-range drone strikes on Russian oil refineries, officials said, ending a brief pause in energy-infrastructure attacks after Moscow continued hitting Ukrainian power plants and killing civilians despite President Trump’s announcement of an “energy ceasefire,” according to OilPrice.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the Financial Times that Kyiv is restarting the campaign because Russia never actually stopped striking Ukrainian energy targets, according to Reuters. The reversal follows a string of Russian strikes on Ukrainian power infrastructure this week, including an attack on a Kyiv power plant that Ukrainian officials said arrived without warning and a separate wave of strikes that cut power to roughly 600,000 Ukrainians even as Moscow and Washington were negotiating a diesel supply arrangement.

“We’re done”

Ukrainian officials described the decision in blunt terms. “We’re done,” one official said of the attempt to hold off on refinery strikes while Russia kept targeting Ukraine’s grid, according to NBC News. The report describes mounting Ukrainian frustration with the Trump administration’s handling of the ceasefire push, which Kyiv officials say gave Russia a window to strike Ukrainian energy infrastructure without facing a matching response.

The episode underscores how fragile the energy-related de-escalation efforts have been. Just a day earlier, a Kremlin envoy had pointed to a diesel supply deal as evidence of expanding Russia-U.S. cooperation, a framing that now looks harder to sustain alongside Ukraine’s decision to resume offensive strikes on Russian energy assets.

What the strikes target

Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign has previously focused on refineries, fuel depots and export terminals supplying Russia’s military and its oil export revenue. Resuming the campaign restores a key pressure point Kyiv has used throughout the war: refinery outages that curb Russia’s ability to refine crude for both domestic fuel supply and export, cutting into the revenue that funds Moscow’s war effort.

Ukraine has also been investing in improving the reliability of its own defenses against similar Russian strikes. Kyiv’s push to deploy faster interceptor systems comes directly out of a string of deadly strikes, including one wave that killed ten people and intensified domestic pressure on officials to respond in kind rather than wait on diplomacy.

Diplomatic backdrop

The refinery-strike reversal lands alongside a broader set of diplomatic moves this week. Western allies have been pressing legal arguments under the law of the sea over Russian oil shipments, part of a wider effort to tighten enforcement around Moscow’s seaborne crude exports despite sanctions, as detailed in coverage of that push. Separately, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Chinese counterpart Wang Yi discussed Ukraine, Iran and Asian security during a regional meeting, a sign Moscow is working multiple diplomatic tracks even as the battlefield and energy-infrastructure fight continues, according to reporting on that meeting.

Neither the Kremlin nor the Trump administration had issued a detailed public response to Ukraine’s announcement at the time of publication. The resumption of refinery strikes effectively confirms that the “energy ceasefire” Trump had announced did not hold on the Russian side, based on Kyiv’s own account of continued Russian strikes on its power grid throughout the period the truce was supposed to be in effect.

Oil markets have historically reacted to Ukrainian refinery strikes with short-term volatility in Russian product flows, particularly diesel and gasoline exports, though the scale of any new disruption will depend on how many facilities Ukraine is able to hit and how quickly Russia can route around damaged capacity. Analysts will be watching Russian refinery utilization rates and export volumes over the coming weeks for signs of how significant the renewed campaign becomes.

This is a developing story. America Strikes will update as Kyiv, Moscow and Washington respond.