President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky attends a joint news conference with U.S. President Donald Trump’s Special Envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner outside the Mariinskyi Palace following negotiations in Kyiv, Ukraine, on September 6, 2026. (Getty Images)
Only Russia is responsible for the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Oct. 11 as he vowed to press ahead with strikes on Russian oil refineries, despite criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump, who blamed him for high diesel prices and said he should be replaced.
The exchange came as Kiev pressed its campaign against infrastructure deep inside Russia, with a drone attack on Oct. 11 shutting down a data center run by Russian technology giant Yandex, the third strike on the company’s facilities in four days.
“Ukraine will be ready to stop striking Russian oil refineries if Russia stops striking our energy infrastructure,” Zelensky wrote on X.
“It is possible to stop strikes on energy infrastructure as early as today, but [Russian President Vladimir] Putin does not want to do so,” he said, adding that any de-escalation must be reciprocal and backed by real guarantees.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha pushed back on Trump’s comments, writing on X late on Oct. 10 that Zelensky was leading the country through a war for its independence. “He has the support of the Ukrainian people, and they have the right to decide. Statements from abroad only confirm that he is doing his job well,” Sybiha wrote.
Trump said on Oct. 10 it was time for Ukraine to get a new president, suggesting Zelensky has not done enough to end the war and blaming him for high diesel prices in the U.S.
“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does,” Trump said.
The U.S. president, who on Oct. 9 struck a deal with Putin to buy diesel from Russia in an attempt to address high fuel prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, has been urging Zelensky for weeks to stop strikes on Russian energy infrastructure.
He has sought to blame record U.S. diesel prices on Ukraine rather than the U.S.-led war in Iran, which has driven up world energy prices. Ukrainian and European officials reacted to the diesel deal with dismay, saying it will help pay for Russia’s war effort.
The Ukrainian drone attack on the Yandex data center in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow, caused outages across the company’s services, leaving users in dozens of Russian cities and in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia unable to order taxis or access banking services, according to Russian independent news outlet Astra.
“As a result of the drone attack, the infrastructure of Yandex’s data center in Vladimir was damaged. Operations at the data center have been completely halted,” said the Yandex Cloud Telegram channel.
A Moscow resident, Eduard Malyavko, said the outages had “direct impact” and weren’t just about “convenience.”
“It’s also about work,” he said, adding that they also affected “healthcare and everything else.”
Yandex, often described as Russia’s Google, runs the country’s most popular search engine and a wide range of digital services, and is heavily involved in Russia’s artificial intelligence development.
