The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, stated this Sunday the 11th that only Russia is responsible for the war in his country. He said that Ukraine would suspend attacks on Russian oil refineries if Moscow stops attacking the Ukrainian power grid, after the U.S. President Donald Trump blamed him for the high diesel prices and stated that it is time for Ukraine to have a new leader.
The exchange of accusations occurred as Kyiv intensified its campaign against infrastructure inside Russia, with a drone attack on Sunday that paralysed a data center operated by the Russian technology giant Yandex, the third attack on the company’s facilities in four days.
“Ukraine will be ready to stop attacking the Russian oil refineries if Russia stops attacking our energy infrastructure,” Zelensky wrote on X.
“It is possible to halt attacks on energy infrastructure today, but Putin does not want to do so,” he said, adding that any de-escalation must be reciprocal and backed by real guarantees.
The Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Andrii Sybiha, rebutted Trump’s comments, writing on X late Saturday that Zelensky was leading the country in a war for its independence. “He has the support of the Ukrainian people and they have the right to decide. Statements coming from abroad only confirm that he is doing his job well,” Sybiha wrote.
Trump said on Saturday that it was time for Ukraine to have a new president, suggesting that Zelensky has not done enough to end the war and blaming him for the high diesel prices in the United States.
“I suggest that they find a new leader who can seal deals, because he could have closed many deals and, for some reason, never does,” Trump said.
The U.S. president, who on Friday reached an agreement with Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Russia in an effort to tackle high fuel prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, has been pressuring Zelensky for weeks to suspend attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure.
He sought to attribute the record diesel prices in the United States to Ukraine, rather than the war led by the United States in Iran, which raised global energy prices. Ukrainian and European authorities reacted to the diesel deal with consternation, saying it would help fund Russia’s war effort.
A Ukrainian drone attack paralysed a data center operated by Yandex, the Russian tech giant, the company said on Sunday. It was the third attack on the company’s facilities in four days as Kyiv expands its campaign against infrastructure inside Russia.
The attack on the data center in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow, caused outages across all Yandex services, leaving users in dozens of Russian cities, as well as in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, unable to request taxis or access banking services, according to the independent Russian news agency Astra.
Russia and Ukraine are engaged in a long-range air war, while their armies remain virtually paralyzed on the front line, more than four and a half years after Moscow’s large-scale invasion. Ukrainian strikes follow Russian attacks on data centers in Ukraine.
“As a result of the drone attack, the Yandex data center infrastructure in Vladimir was damaged. Operations at the data center were completely halted. There were no injuries,” reported the Yandex Cloud Telegram channel, which provides operational updates on service availability.
On Thursday, a drone attack left a Yandex data center offline in the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow. A day later, Ukrainian drones hit the company’s main data center in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, leaving it partially inoperable, Yandex reported.
Yandex, often described as Russia’s Google, runs the country’s most popular search engine and a broad range of digital services, as well as being heavily involved in the development of artificial intelligence in Russia.
In another location, Zelensky said that search and rescue operations had ended in the city of Zaporizhzhia, in the south of the country, after a Russian bombardment on Saturday, said Ivan Fedorov, former regional head and co-chair of the regional defense council on Sunday.
Zelensky stated that 23 people were killed in the attack, including four children. More than 30 people were injured, Fedorov said, and eight of them remain hospitalized.
A man was killed and two women were injured in a Ukrainian drone attack in Russia’s Bryansk border region, local authorities said on Sunday.
