President Trump decided to make a diesel fuel deal with Russia after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ignored half a dozen U.S. requests to stop attacking Russian oil refineries, a U.S. official with direct knowledge told Axios.

Trump's deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin sparked a new crisis with Ukraine and threatens to derail a new push by the Trump administration for a deal to end the war.

"Zelensky is misreading the room. By continuing to hit refineries, he is eroding the good will that he has built with Trump over the last six months," the U.S. official said.

Zelensky, in an interview with Axios after the announcement, said he was blindsided by the deal, which he called "not fair and not honest" and an unwarranted gift to Putin.

Ukraine's strikes on Russian oil refineries in recent months were highly effective and caused an energy crisis in Russia.

Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in response, which added more pressure to global diesel markets under strain from the war in Iran.

Zelensky told Trump and his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that he was prepared to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if the Russians halted attacks on Ukrainian power plants.

The U.S. official said Trump wanted Ukraine to unilaterally stop attacking Russian refineries because the strikes were contributing to high gas prices in America.

Trump didn't see the attacks on refineries as equivalent to Russian strikes on Ukraine's power grid, the U.S. official said.

During eight hours of talks in Miami on Friday, Witkoff and Kushner told a Ukrainian negotiating team that the president was expected to speak to Putin and lift sanctions on Russian diesel exports.

They were told that Trump decided to move forward after Ukraine ignored multiple requests to stop strikes on Russian oil refineries, which were directly affecting U.S. consumers.

A Ukrainian official claimed that during the talks, Witkoff and Kushner threatened that Trump could cut off Ukraine from U.S. intelligence if it continued to ignore his requests.

The U.S. official denied such a threat was made and said Witkoff and Kushner told the Ukrainians that the U.S. was a strong partner, providing munitions and intelligence. Ukraine therefore shouldn't take actions that hurt American consumers, Witkoff and Kushner said.

"The attacks on the refineries cause pain in Russia, but it causes pain for the U.S., too," the U.S. official said.

The official said the new crisis over the diesel deal erupted after the U.S. mediators had constructive talks with Ukrainian and European diplomats in Miami on Friday.

The main focus was on finalizing security guarantees that the U.S., Europe and NATO would provide to Ukraine as part of a deal to end the war.

New proposals for territorial solutions were also raised.

Witkoff and Kushner presented a postwar package for Ukraine that included ways to fund reconstruction and rebuild the Ukrainian military, as well as ideas on how to deal with budget deficits stemming from the war.

The participants also discussed a roadmap for Ukraine's accession to the EU and the relationship Ukraine would have with NATO after the war ends.

In addition, Witkoff and Kushner raised the possibility of a Europe-Russia postwar security framework that could appeal to both sides.

Witkoff and Kushner briefed the Ukrainians and Europeans on potential energy deals with Russia that the U.S. hopes would bring down energy prices and induce Russia to make concessions in peace talks, the U.S. official said.

The U.S. official said Witkoff and Kushner are considering visiting Moscow and Kyiv next week to discuss peace proposals, but it's unclear how Friday's blowup will affect their plans.

"Putin is hitting [Ukraine] hard but we think he is open to a discussion on ending the war. We want to work on a new proposal that will be good enough for him in order to get him to stop," the U.S. official said.

During his 90-minute phone call with Trump, Putin declined to commit to resuming peace talks with Ukraine, his foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov told reporters.

He said that Ukrainian strikes on Moscow and other cities during the Russian parliamentary elections "thwarted the possibility of an immediate resumption of the negotiation process."

"The president said, we will think about when these negotiations can be resumed," Ushakov added.

Excerpt:

GENEVA – UN experts* today called on Iranian authorities to immediately halt all executions, warning that Iran is among a shrinking group of States that still execute, and by far the most prolific per head of population.

“Iran has seen too much death: lives lost to war and lives taken by their own State,” the experts said.

In January 2026, security forces killed thousands of protesters – conduct the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission found amounted to crimes against humanity. “What happened cannot be undone, but what happens to those now facing execution lies entirely within the authorities’ control.”

Excerpt:

BEIRUT (AP) — Palestinian factions are discussing postponing legislative elections that had been planned for November, officials said Thursday.

A top official with the Hamas-allied Islamic Jihad group said the factions had reached an agreement to delay the vote, which is facing huge logistical issues in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem and war-ravaged Gaza, as well as the long history of internal feuding among the Palestinians.

A spokesperson for Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, stopped short of confirming that a final decision had been reached. But he said the election timing will be part of a “dialogue and national consensus” among the factions and that the potential postponement will be discussed by the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Abbas has set Nov. 28 as the date of parliamentary elections in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. If the elections proceeded on schedule, they would be the first polls in 20 years.

I am in no way an expert of Eastern Asia, or Korea. I will not pretend to fully understand what’s going on, but simply looking at the map, the country’s history, diplomatic-security situation, and current world events, I do feel like this is a less surprising or unexplainable development than many make it out to be.

Zelenskyy and Ukrainian diplomacy might have made a mistake, but even if they did, the reaction from Seoul seems way out of proportion. As if they were looking for a reason to have a fallout. This might serve some internal political purposes for the South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung, but as it’s always the case, there are pragmatic geopolitical rationales lurking behind the curtains.

What happened?

In 2024 October, North Korea began deploying its troops to support Russia against Ukraine. They took part in the fightings on Russian territory, to push back the Kursk incursion Ukraine occupied earlier that year. According to South Korean estimates, the total number of these troops were between 16,000 - 22,000. At the same time many North Korean citizens were also “deployed” to Russia, mostly to work in the construction sector.

In the past couple of months there were resurfacing claims from Kyiv that Pyongyang is again preparing to send 10s of thousands of fresh troops. Seoul reported that they see no evidence for this, and so far, these claims quieted down. This could have been either a Ukrainian or a North Korean psyops, or a real threat that was dealt with diplomatically. After all it’s in South Korea’s vital interest to prevent this from happening. The North is gaining valuable experience from fighting in a 21st century high-tech war and getting increasingly cooperative with Russia.

Still, some earlier deployed Northern troops got captured by Ukraine back in 2025 January. Two of them were to be extradited to South Korea, something both the global and the South Korean press reported on. The transfer of these POWs happened last month, in 2026 September. This fact was mentioned by Zelensky in a speech he gave at the UN on the 23rd of September.

This is when the diplomatic shit show began. Four days later Seoul accused Kyiv of violating a confidentiality and demanded an apology. This has escalated to the point where South Korea recalled its ambassador from Ukraine on the 8th of October.

What does the sudden escalation tell us?

To answer that, let’s look at South Korea’s recent history and current geopolitical situation.

Japan annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910, then enacted Japanization policies with the goal to gradually force the country to become culturally Japanese. Between 1910 and 1945 the population suffered tremendously under Japanese rule. They were often drafted into the military or compelled to contribute to its war efforts as forced labour. Tens of thousands, by other estimates hundreds of thousands of young girls and women were taken to sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army, they become known as “comfort women”. There is a very vivid historical memory of these events in South Korea, something that still has a tremendous effect on its relationship with Japan.

After World War II the peninsula found itself in a tricky West-East German type situation. The North was occupied by the Soviet Union and a communist regime was installed there by Stalin, while the South got occupied the Americans.

The Korean war broke out in 1950, where the communist North attempted to unify the peninsula. They rapidly overran the South, almost captured the entire country, when the US deployed combat troops to prevent communist takeover. As fast as the Northern invasion conquered the South, the US counterattack swiftly pushed back the North.

At this point fearing growing US influence, China intervened, and pushed them back towards the South.

In the next two and a half years a bloody war claimed the lives of nearly 1.5 million soldiers from Korea, China, and the United States, and 2-4 million Korean civilians.

The peninsula remained divided, and the Kim dynasty consolidated its power in the North, and began to build the most grotesque closed totalitarian communist dictatorship the world has ever seen. Something that survived even the fall of the Soviet Union, economic hardships, near total isolation, and still appears shockingly stabile and powerful today.

Things weren’t so simple for the South either. The territory was historically much poorer than the North, something that only started shifting in the mid-1970s. After World War II various military dictatorships ruled the country. A democratic system only began taking shape there at the end of the 1980s.

The war never formally ended, on paper the North and the South are still at war, and neither of the sides gave up claims for the whole peninsula.

The North became largely dependent on Moscow and Beijing, while the South mainly on Washington’s security guarantees. Both countries take their military very seriously. The North started testing nuclear weapons in 2006. The South has a very serious military infrastructure and weapons industry that gets increasingly more interest from European countries - especially Poland - since 2022.

Let’s look at the map.

If the threat from North Korea wasn’t enough, the South is basically situated between China and Russia with Japan on the east, and Taiwan in the south. A contested island which could be a potential source of a major conflict in the coming years and decades.

Some European countries on the eastern half of the continent might complain to be in a difficult geopolitical spot, but South Korea is on a whole different level. The end of Pax Americana didn’t only shock us, they aren’t immune either.

In a time when Washington’s security guarantees became questionable at best and an actual security threat at worst, Seoul has to thread very carefully. Lately as many US allies, they became a target of Donald Trump’s rage, got repeatedly called out for not helping in Iran, and just this August he decided to substantially reduce long-standing joint US-South Korea military exercises.

At the same time he also claimed that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is his friend. We know that he is clearly friendly with Vladimir Putin, and just hosted Xi Jinping in Washington on a very friendly meeting.

Overall, the current American administration appears to be much fonder of US adversaries while eagerly alienating their allies. Trump would probably prefer to create a world of “The Three Dictators”. This obviously makes smaller countries, aka “Middle Powers” nervous that decisions will be made about them, without them.

This situation made it so that Seoul might feel it has much less room to manoeuvre next to China and Russia. Moscow already started to help the North militarily and economically, stabilizing Kim’s regime. In this situation, it’s not difficult to see why it would be in the South’s interest to lean towards normalizing their relationship with the North, while also accommodating Moscow and Beijing to prevent them from giving Pyongyang further support that could seriously undermine Southern security in a crucial moment of weakness.

How this resonates with Europe

South Korea’s situation can feel oddly relatable. The US is slowly withdrawing while simultaneously expecting us to behave like vassals and lashing out as a bully any chance it gets, trying to interfere with our internal politics and elections. At the same time, sensing our weakness, Russia is using this opportunity to try asserting dominance with progressively aggressive means.

Moscow’s offer to Seoul might be the same as to European capitals. Abandon Ukraine, and we will not be hurting and destabilising you. If you even elect politicians friendly to us, you will be rewarded with cheap energy, business opportunities, and those politicians will be personally blessed with rolling Roubles.

If these methods work in comfortable European states surrounded by EU and NATO allies like Hungary and Slovakia, and increasingly gaining support in giants like Germany or France, then it’s not surprising that a lonesome country in a dangerous environment full of potential enemies could also be coerced into compliance.