Ukraine will double down on attacking Russian oil refineries in response to a new policy of airstrikes by Moscow designed to force people to abandon Kyiv and other cities, but will not target civilians, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
Ukraine’s intelligence services has obtained documents showing that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had issued a “new doctrine” of military attacks on a much broader range of civilian targets ahead of this winter, Zelenskiy said.
“We saw documents and we know that they allow them to attack infrastructure, logistics, and especially to attack in the cities, in the villages, everywhere, roads, schools, hospitals,” Zelenskiy told Reuters in an interview. “To pressure people to leave the capital, leave different cities: this is the goal of the operation.”
Driving the shift in policy, Zelenskiy said, was Putin’s desire to appear strong at a time when his military was losing ground in a key frontline region and sustaining higher levels of casualties.
The Kremlin was not available to comment on Saturday. But in a statement urging foreign nationals to leave Kyiv, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow would continue to systematically hit targets in what it said were retaliatory strikes for Ukrainian attacks on Russia in recent months.
COUNTEROFFENSIVE IN DONBAS
Zelenskiy said a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive, code-named “Vivaldi”, had recaptured around 140 sq km (54 sq miles) of Ukrain’s eastern Donbas region and was still ongoing. Russia has said it must control Donbas in its entirety as a condition for any peace deal.
In recent weeks, US President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to revive talks to end the four-year-old conflict – Europe’s bloodiest since World War Two.
The US leader last month urged Ukraine to refrain from hitting Russian oil installations, saying that was sending global diesel prices surging.
But Zelenskiy, speaking as air raid sirens blared outside the gilded halls of the presidential offices, said he had received no indications from Russia that Putin was interested in peace talks, or discussing a ceasefire on energy infrastructure.
Over the past week, the Ukrainian capital has come under persistent attack by Russian drones and missiles targeting energy and telecoms assets, road and rail infrastructure. For the first time, Russia has targeted the bridges across the Dnipro river connecting east and west Kyiv.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine would react to the change in tactics by Moscow, but would not target civilian infrastructure indiscriminately.
“We have to respond in any way (we can). With their attacks on our energy, we have to respond on their energy. First of all, oil refiners etc: what gives money to them for this war,” Zelenskiy said in English. “But we will not respond, of course, just like them, on any civilian objects.”
SUPPORT FROM EUROPE
After the Trump administration invited Putin to attend a G20 summit in Miami in December and discussed business deals with Russian envoys, Zelenskiy urged Washington not to normalise relations with Russia before ensuring a return to peace.
Zelenskiy said he would be happy to meet Putin for peace talks at the G20, but he warned the US not to believe in “illusions” that Russia would simply end hostilities if it gained control of Donbas.
“It’s not fair just to normalise,” said Zelenskiy, dressed in his trademark black T-shirt and military-style jacket. Any resumption of economic and diplomatic ties with the West had to be in return for Russia ending hostilities, he said: “Because peace is more important than any kind of economy.”
While the US has proposed a resumption of trilateral talks in the coming weeks in the UAE, Zelenskiy noted that an exact date and location for the technical-level conversations had still not been set.
Ukrainian officials warn that Russia has stockpiled hundreds of ballistic missiles ahead of an expected winter onslaught against electricity and water infrastructure. Last winter, the worst of the war, Russian strikes left swathes of the country without electricity and heating for days at a time.
Since the summer, Moscow has also begun launching dozens of fast and relatively cheap jet-powered Shahed drones a day at Ukraine, whose air defence teams have struggled to cope because their interceptor drones were too slow to catch them.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine had been forced to rely heavily on its fighter aircraft – F-16s and MiGs – to down around 60% of the Russian jet-powered drones, but supplies of 20 mm ammunition for the planes were running low.
Kyiv was urgently working on other solutions – including boosting its electronic jamming capabilities, he said. In the second half of October, it would receive the first shipment of small, cheap air defence missiles capable of hitting the new Shaheds.
Last week, Zelenskiy said Ukraine was developing five models of new interceptor drones capable of downing the jet Shaheds. Fresh from a meeting with his defence chiefs, he said tests on two of those models showed a modest success rate of around 30%.
“We’ll have to scale it,” he said. “I hope that with all these things, with all these elements, we’ll find a way.”
