Throttling of mobile internet system will affect Kyiv’s air defences more than its strikes on oil refineries. Now Zelenskyy must be hoping that US intel holds

In Ukraine the situation was already jittery enough. Donald Trump has been inventing ceasefires and buying Russian diesel to shore up his flagging popularity, while a sinister new wave of faster, jet-powered drones are breaking through Kyiv’s stretched air defences. Casualties are rising as the weather turns.

Overnight, Russia bombed three power plants that supply Kyiv, aiming to cut off heating and electricity to the city. According to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for a second night in a row no warning came from Ukraine’s western allies of the incoming ballistic missiles – and so no air raid alert was issued.

President Zelenskyy’s allies must show the Russian president that American perfidy won’t alter the course of a war the Kremlin is losing

When Donald Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of re-entering the White House last year, no one with any depth of insight into the conflict believed him. But Mr Trump took his own words seriously enough to feel the lack of a ceasefire as an affront to his self-image as a master dealmaker. After a period when it seemed that Kyiv’s European allies had steered the US president away from pro‑Kremlin partisanship, he has reverted to the grotesque view that Ukrainian capitulation is a necessary precondition for peace.

These are the perilous circumstances in which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met Andy Burnham on Wednesday in Downing Street. In recent days, the US president has called for a change of government in Ukraine. He claimed that a partial ceasefire had been agreed, while Russia escalated its bombardments. According to Mr Zelenskyy, the latest missile strikes have come without the intelligence warnings from the US that have, in the past, facilitated self-defence. There have been reports of Ukrainian soldiers losing access to the Starlink satellite network, controlled by Elon Musk, the US tech oligarch. This raises suspicion of coordinated pressure to tip the scales in Russia’s favour after many months when Mr Putin’s forces have failed to deliver significant advances and his country’s economy has been suffering from the effect of Ukrainian missile and drone counterstrikes.

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Outage of terminals managed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX comes as Russia launches ballistic missiles at Ukraine without any advance warning from US

Ukraine’s military has suddenly had its access to Starlink satellite internet terminals restricted as the Trump administration has increased pressure on Ukraine to halt long-range strikes on Russia’s oil industry immediately.

The terminals, which are distributed and managed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are a key component of Ukraine’s military operations and the sudden restrictions on the terminals travelling at high speeds on Tuesday evening led to the failure of several combat missions, said an adviser on military technology to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Firms turning crude oil into the ‘workhorse’ fuel stand to gain most despite economic fallout from record prices

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Days after Donald Trump announced a deal to import Russian diesel into the US in an effort to lower soaring pump prices, the world’s energy watchdog has warned that the global fuel shortage will drag into 2027.

Trump’s temporary sanctions reprieve was criticised for offering “too little, too late” to temper the sky high pump prices triggered by the shutdown of war-damaged refineries in the Middle East and Russia – once the world’s second-largest diesel exporter behind the US.

Special forces officer Serhii Kuznetsov denies involvement in the 2022 blasts that left pipelines badly damaged

A Ukrainian soldier led a team of divers that, acting on the order of state authorities, laid explosives on the bed of the Baltic Sea to blow up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, a court has heard.

On the opening day of his trial in the German city of Hamburg, Serhii Kuznetsov, who was a special forces officer with the Ukrainian military at the time of the pipeline attacks in 2022, was accused by prosecutors of being an accomplice to war crimes by attacking civilian infrastructure, causing an explosion, damaging property and disrupting public services.