Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave Reuters an interview on Saturday, as air raid sirens blared outside the gilded halls of the presidential offices, and the headline was a proportionate response doctrine of his own. Ukraine, he said, will double down on attacking Russian oil refineries in response to what he described as a new Russian policy of airstrikes on a far wider range of civilian targets — but it will not hit civilians itself.
Ukrainian intelligence has obtained documents showing Vladimir Putin issued a “new doctrine” ahead of winter, Zelenskyy 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,” he told Reuters. “To pressure people to leave the capital, leave different cities: this is the goal of the operation.” The Kremlin was not available to comment; the Russian Foreign Ministry, in a statement urging foreign nationals to leave Kyiv, said Moscow would keep hitting targets in what it called retaliation for Ukrainian attacks in recent months. Both sides deny deliberately targeting civilians.
Driving the shift, in Zelenskyy’s account, is that Putin wants to appear strong while his military loses ground in a key frontline region and takes higher casualties. And here is the logic of the reply, stated plainly: “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. But we will not respond, of course, just like them, on any civilian objects.” Refineries are where the war’s revenue lives. Schools are not. That is the whole distinction.
That fighting back includes a ground war going Ukraine’s way, Zelenskyy said: a counteroffensive code-named “Vivaldi” has recaptured around 140 sq km (54 sq miles) of the eastern Donbas region and is still going. Russia has said it must control Donbas in its entirety as a condition of any peace deal. The Trump administration has sought in recent weeks to revive talks to end the four-year-old war, Europe’s bloodiest since World War II.
There is one awkward audience for the refinery plan: Washington. President Donald Trump last month urged Ukraine to refrain from hitting Russian oil installations, saying it was sending global diesel prices surging. Zelenskyy said he has seen no indication from Russia that Putin is interested in peace talks or in a ceasefire on energy infrastructure — consistent with Putin’s recent rejection of any strike truce. Kyiv’s position, then, is that the diesel-price problem and the not-having-lights problem are solvable at the same location.
On diplomacy, Zelenskyy was careful. The Trump administration has invited Putin to a G20 summit in Miami in December and has discussed business deals with Russian envoys; Zelenskyy said he would be happy to meet Putin at the G20, but warned against “illusions” that Russia would stop if it got Donbas. “It’s not fair just to normalize,” he said of restoring economic and diplomatic ties: “Because peace is more important than any kind of economy.” The U.S. has proposed resuming trilateral talks in the UAE in coming weeks, though no date or venue for the technical-level conversations is set.
The winter threat is specific. Ukrainian officials warn Russia has stockpiled hundreds of ballistic missiles for an onslaught on electricity and water infrastructure; last winter, the worst of the war, strikes left swathes of the country without power and heating for days. The past week brought persistent drone and missile attacks on Kyiv’s energy, telecoms, road and rail assets — and for the first time, strikes on the bridges across the Dnipro River connecting east and west Kyiv, part of the campaign that hit a second bridge on Saturday. Since summer, Russia has launched dozens of fast, cheap jet-powered Shahed drones a day, and Ukraine’s interceptor drones are too slow to catch them: F-16s and MiGs now down around 60% of the jet Shaheds, Zelenskyy said, but 20 mm ammunition for the planes is running low. Kyiv is boosting electronic jamming and expects its first shipment of small, cheap air defense missiles capable of hitting the new Shaheds in the second half of October.
Ukraine is also developing five new interceptor-drone models for the jet Shaheds. Fresh from a meeting with his defense chiefs, Zelenskyy said tests on two showed a success rate of about 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.”
Offense got one flourish. Ukraine announced the first combat use this week of its domestically made FP-7 ballistic missile, with a range of around 250 km (155 miles), and Zelenskyy said he had called the manufacturer, Fire Point, to hurry along the longer-range FP-9, which the company says could hit Moscow. “I said to them, where is my FP-9?” he recounted, with a grin. “We need the FP-9. And the FP-9 will be (ready) this autumn, I’m sure.”
He also argued that Russia’s recent drone incursions and hybrid attacks in Europe are meant to intimidate European publics and erode support for Ukraine — accusations Russia calls baseless hysteria — and that some European leaders are toughening up. Then the budget math: after talks in Brussels this week, Ukraine unlocked funding for the drones it needs at the start of 2027, and officials are working with European partners to plug a $27 billion hole in this year’s defense budget, via reallocating Ukraine’s own resources, bilateral aid and “money credits” from next year’s slice of a €90 billion EU loan. “We will close this (gap),” Zelenskyy said. “I think this is absolutely a big success for our country.”
The interview, taken as a whole, is a hedging portfolio. Missiles of your own in case the talks stall, loan tranches in case the budget gaps, 30%-effective interceptors in case the Shaheds keep coming — and one binary bet it does not hedge at all: that burning refineries in Russia changes the war faster than blackouts in Kyiv do.