Trump said Ukraine and Russia agreed to stop hitting each other's energy targets. Zelensky says he isn't sure Russia will actually comply.
On the evening of September 14, US President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that Ukraine and Russia had supposedly agreed to halt strikes on each other's energy infrastructure: "Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian Energy Targets. Russia has agreed to do, likewise!" The trouble is that neither side has officially confirmed any such arrangement. About an hour later, President Volodymyr Zelensky responded that he was not convinced Russia would actually honor such a deal — and that uncertainty, more than Trump's post itself, is the real story here.
Zelensky made clear that Kyiv is open to a mutual pause on energy strikes — but only if partners can guarantee that Russian strikes genuinely stop, rather than simply taking a promise at face value. A source at Ukraine's energy ministry told the Kyiv Independent that Kyiv had received no official notification of any agreement to halt strikes. Volunteers Support Ukraine highlights this gap deliberately, so readers can see that a social media post and an actual agreement are not the same thing.
Trump's statement came on the heels of his earlier calls on Kyiv to stop striking Russian oil refineries — the US president has publicly linked those strikes to the sharp rise in global diesel prices, which have topped $6 a gallon for the first time. That same day, Trump wrote that the global diesel price surge was driven mostly by the Russia-Ukraine war rather than the situation around Iran. For Zelensky, that creates a delicate balance: pressure from an ally on one side, and reluctance to give up one of the few effective levers against Russia's war machine on the other.
Oil refineries and energy facilities have become one of the main battlegrounds of this dispute — Ukraine regularly strikes Russian refineries deep inside Russian territory, and Russia keeps hitting Ukraine's energy grid in response. Any genuine agreement on a mutual pause could theoretically give civilian infrastructure on both sides some breathing room, but as Zelensky's reaction shows, for now it remains a subject of negotiation rather than an established fact.
Volunteers Support Ukraine follows diplomatic signals like this closely, because they help determine how much longer — or shorter — the road to real peace will be. Whatever the outcome of talks around an energy truce, the organization keeps helping people whose lives the war has already upended, with whatever resources and means it has available, and will keep doing so until guarantees of peace become reality rather than a social media post.
