Polish PM cites intelligence of Russian plan to target border crossings
Trump, under pressure from rising fuel prices at home, on Sunday publicly called on President Volodymyr Zelensky to halt Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries, saying the U.S. told Zelensky that Ukraine needs to stop hitting diesel fuel in Russia amid rising diesel prices.
“Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing,” Trump said. “He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia, let him go after targets but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage of diesel fuel.”
It remained unclear how much pressure Trump is willing or able to bring on Zelensky to cease the attacks. After the Trump administration trimmed U.S. support for Ukraine, Kyiv has become more reliant on Europe for war funding. The United States still supplies intelligence and, via Elon Musk’s Starlink, critical communications for Ukraine’s military.
The dueling long-range campaigns — Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities and Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure — illustrate how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, advancing toward a sixth year, is entering a dangerous new phase as each side deploys more weapons with longer range that are affecting neighbors and allies. Russia is increasingly poking European countries, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with covert attacks and threats, treating their territories — which serve as production centers and logistics routes for Ukraine — as fair game for targeting. Ukraine, for its part, is developing longer-range drones and missiles that have damaged Russian energy infrastructure, including a gas plant in the Arctic almost 2,000 miles from Ukraine struck last week.
On Sunday morning, a Russian jet-powered drone struck a Ukrainian passenger train at Yahodyn station, just over one mile from the Polish border. Ukrainian Railways said no one was injured because of a timely warning from a Ukrainian team monitoring the skies for threats. Shortly before, a train carrying security advisers from the United Kingdom, Germany and France, along with former state leaders including former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, had passed through the same stretch of track on the way to the Yalta European Strategy Conference in Kyiv.
The diplomatic train departed earlier than expected “as part of real-time adjustments to train schedules due to the constant threat of Russian strikes,” according to a Ukrainian Railways statement on the Telegram messaging app. Bildt said the train he was on had received an evacuation warning but could proceed to the border crossing.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a Sunday briefing that Poland had intelligence of the Russian plan to try “to disorganize, paralyze, and perhaps also destroy Ukrainian border crossings.” “The escalation on the part of the Russian Federation has become a fact, and its examples are getting closer to our border,” Tusk said during a special briefing.
After the trip, Johnson, a longtime champion of Ukraine, urged allies to support Ukraine with air-defense supplies and financial resources through the transfer of Russian frozen assets. “I don’t know what warped logic drove Putin to blow up a stationary Ukrainian locomotive on the Polish border this morning. What we can say for sure is that this is the kind of random and senseless attack Ukrainians are enduring every day—even on civilian railways,” Johnson said Sunday on X.
In recent months, Russian forces have stepped up their aerial campaign, launching thousands of drones and hundreds of missiles that have struck many civilian targets including trains and gas stations. President Zelensky said Russia launched 78 missiles and around 2,100 drones, a significant share of them jet-powered, in around-the-clock attacks on Ukrainian cities over the past week, damaging railway and energy infrastructure, gas stations, and residential buildings.
The introduction of faster jet-powered drones has complicated Ukraine’s air defenses, which had developed interceptor drones designed for earlier, slower craft. An international shortage of interceptors for Patriot missile systems has left Kyiv struggling to down incoming barrages of Russian ballistic missiles, raising concerns about attacks on energy infrastructure before winter.
Ukraine has been waging a parallel long-range strike campaign against Russian oil refineries, warehouses, and military-industrial plants in an effort to deplete Moscow’s war chest and cripple the sectors underpinning its economy. In August, Russia’s refinery industry processed 3.8 million barrels of oil a day, a sharp drop from the 5 million barrels a day it handled the same month a year earlier, according to Energy Aspects, a data and analysis firm.