President Donald Trump said Saturday that Ukraine should choose a new president, delivering his sharpest public break yet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and demanding an end to Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure. Speaking to reporters at the White House on October 10, Trump said, “I suggest they get a new leader who could make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does,” adding, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”
Trump paired the leadership demand with an attack on Kyiv’s refinery strikes, which he blamed for pushing global fuel prices higher. “He better damn well stop,” he said of the strikes, claiming they had created “a world problem” affecting American farmers and ranchers. Ukraine regards the strikes as a legitimate campaign to degrade Moscow’s capacity to finance the war, a position European officials continue to support.
The remarks landed one day after Trump announced a deal with Vladimir Putin to bring Russian diesel into American and global markets, with a Treasury general licence authorizing Russian diesel transactions through April 7, 2027. Trump said on Friday that Russia would immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, followed by 500,000 tons in November and a million tons “immediately thereafter,” with another 3 million tons to follow depending on refinery conditions. The announcement came after a phone call with Putin that was initially scheduled to discuss a suspected plague case in Russia.
Zelenskyy, through the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, called the diesel arrangement “a weak decision, unfortunately, a weak decision by strong partners,” and warned that easing sanctions on Russian fuel hands Moscow revenue for weapons, drones and recruitment. The criticism was sharpened by timing: Trump’s announcement came as his envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were meeting Ukrainian officials about a proposed war settlement, which Zelenskyy said made his team feel used “as a smokescreen.”
On Sunday, Zelenskyy answered Trump’s demand on the refinery strikes directly, writing on Telegram that Ukraine would be ready to stop strikes on Russian refineries if Russia stops striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure, insisting that any de-escalation steps be mutual and backed by genuine guarantees. The offer frames the refinery campaign as Kyiv’s reciprocal leverage rather than an expendable concession, and comes as European officials continue to support the strikes as a legitimate campaign to degrade Moscow’s war financing.
Trump also claimed Ukraine had lost 30 percent of its territory and that more than two million people had been killed, figures that were not independently substantiated. He maintained the war would never have started had he been president in 2022. The intervention is political, not institutional: Washington has no mechanism to select or remove Ukraine’s elected president, and Kyiv has held no presidential election since the 2022 invasion. European officials said they would maintain sanctions and support for Ukraine, setting up an open divergence between Washington and European capitals on both the war’s endgame and the sanctions architecture.