kyiv, Ukraine (AP) — Russia alone is responsible for the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday, promising to move forward. strikes against Russian oil refineriesdespite criticism from US President Donald Trump, who blamed it for high diesel prices and said it should be replaced.
The exchange comes as kyiv continues its campaign against infrastructure deep within Russia, with a drone attack on Sunday shutting down a data center run by Russian tech giant Yandex, the third strike against the company’s facilities in four days. Russia and Ukraine are engaged in a long-range air war while their armies remain largely stuck on the front lines, more than four and a half years later. The full-scale invasion of Moscow.
“Ukraine will be ready to stop hitting Russian oil refineries if Russia stops hitting our energy infrastructure,” Zelensky wrote on X.
“It is possible to stop strikes on energy infrastructure today, but (Russian President Vladimir) Putin does not want to do it,” he said, adding that any de-escalation must be reciprocal and backed by real guarantees.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha rejected Trump’s comments, writing Saturday evening that Zelensky was leading the country in a war for its independence. “He has the support of the Ukrainian people and he has the right to decide. The foreigner’s statements only confirm that he is doing his job well,” Sybiha wrote.
Trump said Saturday it was time to Ukraine will have a new presidentsuggesting Zelensky didn’t do enough to end the war and blaming him for high U.S. diesel prices
“I suggest they pick a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made a lot of deals and for some reason he never does,” Trump said.
The American president, who on Friday made an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Russia in an attempt to address high fuel prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, Zelensky has for weeks been urging Zelensky to stop strikes on Russian energy infrastructure.
He sought to blame Record price of diesel in the United States on Ukraine rather than the US-led war in Iran, which has driven up global energy prices. Ukrainian and European officials reacted with dismay to the diesel deal, saying it would help fund Russia’s war effort.
Ukraine hits third data center in four days
The Ukrainian drone attack on the Yandex data center in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow, caused outages in the company’s services, leaving users in dozens of Russian cities as well as in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia unable to order a taxi or access banking services, according to Russian independent media outlet Astra.
“As a result of the drone attack, the infrastructure of the Yandex data center in Vladimir was damaged. Data center operations were completely disrupted. There were no injuries,” said the Yandex Cloud Telegram channel, which provides operational updates on the availability of the service.
In Moscow, residents described disruptions to their daily tasks. Yandex Taxi driver Pavel Belyavskiy said he wasn’t sure the orders were coming and that on several trips he had to cancel after a long wait because he couldn’t reach the passenger.
“I would press the call button to contact them, but nothing happens,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do, so I’m just forced to cancel.”
Igor Mann said he went to check the status of an order on the Yandex Market shopping platform, but the page was unavailable and connecting via VPN did not help. “Nothing worked,” he said.
Another Moscow resident, Eduard Malyavko, said the outages had a “direct impact” and were not just a matter of “convenience.”
“It’s also about work,” he said, adding that it also concerns “health care and everything else.”
On Thursday, a drone attack knocked a Yandex data center offline in the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow. A day later, Ukrainian drones struck the company’s main data center in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, knocking it partly out of action, Yandex said.
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 the development of artificial intelligence in Russia.
Zaporizhzhia: death toll rises to 23
Separately, Zelensky said search and rescue operations had ended in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia after a Russian bombardment on Saturday, Ivan Fedorov, a former regional head and co-chairman of the regional defense council, said on Sunday.
Zelensky said 23 people were killed in the attack, including four children. More than 30 people were injured, Fedorov said, eight of whom are still hospitalized.
A man was killed and two women injured in a Ukrainian drone strike in the Russian border region of Bryansk, local officials said Sunday.
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Morton reported from London.
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