Russia hit Ukraine's power stations and grid more than 200 times last week and killed more than 150 people, Zelenskyy said in his address on 11 October. One cruise missile on a five-storey block in Pryluky on 7 October killed 22 people, five of them children. Trump declared an "energy ceasefire" on Sunday, a ceasefire that was a mere figment of his imagination. Overnight into Wednesday Russia fired more than 39 ballistic missiles and 120 drones at Kyiv and Kharkiv, killed six people and cut power to 600,000. However, when officials in Washington applied pressure this week, it applied it to Kyiv, not Moscow.

Trump said on Saturday he had told Zelenskyy, "don't hit the refineries because that's a world problem," and that it was "time for Ukraine to get a new president". This is despite the rise in diesel prices being entirely the fault of Donald Trump's war on Iran, not Ukraine's defence against an invading Russia.

The day before his request, he had announced a deal with Putin for Russian diesel, with the Treasury waiving sanctions on it until April 2027, three weeks before the midterms and with diesel at record prices at the pump. Over the weekend U.S. officials told their Ukrainian counterparts, in explicit terms, that intelligence sharing was about to stop, and that the scheme through which European allies buy American weapons for Ukraine, Patriots included, could be suspended. The condition was that Ukraine stop hitting Russian energy.

Russian ballistic missiles then hit Kyiv two nights running with no warning from Ukraine's partners. On Tuesday night they struck the Darnytska thermal plant and a nine-storey block, killing two people and injuring 21. "Once again, no advance warning from our partners," Zelenskyy wrote on Wednesday.

Trump, asked on Tuesday whether the regime had stopped sharing intelligence, said "No, we haven't. We help them, but we're really helping them get to a final answer." European and Ukrainian officials say the warnings may have been withheld on purpose, and that the American explanation for the missed launches was bad weather. The threat was made at the weekend and the warnings stopped on Tuesday.