Ukrainians have gotten used to awful news. But even by their standards, the past several days have felt dismal. Russian missile strikes are pounding Ukrainian cities relentlessly. Donald Trump announced a deal last week to buy Russian diesel fuel. Then came reports about disruptions in U.S. support to Ukraine, including the Starlink communication system. Together, these developments have caused alarm in Kyiv on a scale rarely seen since the start of the war.

The only letup in the gloom appeared on Friday, when Ukrainians had a chance to imagine their tormentor, Vladimir Putin, aboard his presidential plane, seething as it circled over Moscow, unable to land in his own capital. A swarm of Ukrainian drones had forced the closure of the city’s airports that day—all four of them—as Putin flew home from a trip to Turkmenistan. His plane, known as the Flying Kremlin, does not appear to have been the target. “It was purely coincidental,” a military officer familiar with the operation told me. “Just a matter of chance.”

Still, to many Ukrainians, it tasted briefly of revenge, and it showed that their military still has ways to hurt Russia’s economy and its leader, even if Trump decides to abandon them. On Tuesday night, nearly 500 drones attacked Moscow, again prompting the closure of its airports, according to the city’s mayor. Such methods may not be enough to force Putin to negotiate. But they allow Ukraine, if it chooses, to stay in the fight and keep up the pressure on Moscow to come to the table.

Since early last month, Ukrainian drones have interfered with air traffic over the Russian capital almost every day, a version of a military operation code-named M&Ms, which The Atlantic first reported in August. The operation does not rely on U.S. technology or intelligence, two of its architects told me. Instead, it uses drones produced in Ukraine and equipped with AI guidance systems to bring the war to Russia. (Both sources spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans.)

Such homegrown innovations could give Ukraine leverage in any future peace talks. But they do not bode well for the global state of aviation safety. Not since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have airports and airplanes looked more vulnerable. The Houthi rebel group, which is backed by Iran, launched two salvos of missiles and drones this weekend at the main airport in Riyadh, killing more than a dozen people and wounding hundreds. A week earlier, the U.S. Air Force evacuated a dozen bombers from an air base in England, reportedly due to a threat from Iranian drones.

The spread of these weapons has made such attacks far cheaper and easier to stage. In early August, German authorities discovered a suspected Russian drone at an airport near Leipzig, apparently armed with explosives and prepared to blow up a Ukrainian cargo jet. A month later, Russian drones targeted Zelensky’s plane as it took off from Moldova on the way to Norway. “That is the reality he lives in,” Norway’s prime minister, who first reported the apparent attempt on Zelensky’s life, said.

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Many world leaders now live in that reality, even Putin. On the day of his diverted flight to Moscow, the Russian leader spent 90 minutes on the phone with Trump, who announced after their call that the United States would buy millions of barrels of Russian diesel. To protect that deal, Trump urged Ukraine to stop bombing Russian oil refineries. Zelensky has reluctantly complied in recent days. But his military has intensified attacks on other sensitive targets, which could prove no less disruptive for Russia’s economy and the lives of its people. The spate of attacks on Russian data centers in the past week has made that clear.

Since October 8, Ukraine has bombed at least four Russian data centers, a class of targets it previously avoided. The attacks caused widespread outages of online services, including some of Russia’s most popular banking, delivery, map, and taxi apps. At Moscow’s airports, Ukrainian drones forced authorities to cancel 345 flights last week alone, according to a tally kept by Echo of Moscow, a Russian news outlet. “The Russian sky is becoming extremely dangerous,” Zelensky said on September 1, when he announced the start of the campaign to disrupt air traffic in Russia. “Civilian aviation has no place amid drones.”

The two architects of this campaign told me that it is only just getting started. So far, Ukraine has used long-range drones to clog the airspace around Russian airports without striking them directly. In one incident this weekend, debris from a downed Ukrainian drone reportedly fell on the airport in Sochi, causing a fire at an administrative building. Zelensky has not yet allowed his military to proceed with the original plan for operation M&Ms, which called for much more aggressive tactics.

According to the authors of the plan, the more ambitious version would use AI-guided drones to circumvent Russian air defenses and hit airports in Moscow and other cities. These drones will soon be manufactured at scale, one of the authors of the plan told me.

Although Trump has intervened to secure supplies of Russian diesel, he has said nothing about the recent attacks on Russian airports and data centers. On the contrary, when he first called on Zelensky last month to stop bombing Russian oil refineries, he tempered his demand with an invitation for Ukraine to bomb something else. “There are plenty of other targets,” Trump said.

[Read: Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies]

But the same holds true of Ukraine. Last month, when Zelensky began the M&Ms operation, Russia intensified its bombing of civilians, launching regular daytime strikes against apartment blocks, schools, and academic institutions. Such attacks serve no military purpose other than to terrorize the population. The most recent casualty report from the United Nations said that the Russian bombing campaign reached “a new level of intensity” last month, killing at least 200 civilians and injuring 1,234 from September 1 to 24, when the report came out.

At this stage in the war, the escalations cut both ways. No matter what new weapons and tactics Ukraine deploys, Russia can always answer with more brutality. Trump no longer seems interested in stopping that cycle of violence. He has shifted from the role of mediator between warring sides to a dealmaker with the Russians, and that presents Zelensky with a stark choice: accept Trump’s and Putin’s demands to end the war on Russia’s terms or find new ways to continue fighting, with or without American support.

At the start of this year, when Ukrainian officials first offered Zelensky the M&Ms plan, he deemed it too dangerous. It called for as many as 1,000 drones to attack Moscow’s airports every day, making it impossible for civilian flights to operate. Zelensky allowed his defense minister at the time, Mykhailo Fedorov, to continue developing the AI-enabled drones required for the operation. But Zelensky kept a tight rein on their deployment, insisting that Fedorov minimize the risk to travelers, the two designers of the plan told me.

My first report about the operation, published on August 20, led to an intense public debate about its morality. Many in Ukraine and allied Western countries noted that Russia has shown no qualms about bombing the innocent. “It’s not fair for one side to break all the rules of war while the other side holds back,” a senior European official told me of Zelensky’s hesitation.

One of the architects of the plan told me that public pressure contributed to Zelensky’s decision to announce the start of the campaign on September 1. In a video address released that day, he called for all international airlines to stop flying to Russian airports. “Ukraine does not threaten civilian aviation as such—not a single civilian aircraft,” he said. “There will simply be drones in Russia’s skies on a scale that has to be taken into account.”

At the time, Ukraine did not have the means to act on Zelensky’s threat, one of the officials behind the operation told me. The military lacked the enormous fleet of specialized drones required to shut down Moscow’s airports for an extended period of time, he said. In response to Zelensky’s declaration, only one foreign carrier, Air Tanzania, briefly suspended flights to Moscow. Larger airlines, such as Emirates and Flydubai, continued as normal. “We didn’t follow through,” the Ukrainian official told me in frustration.

Ukrainian arms manufacturers are still developing the specialized drone fleet, which relies on an AI-enabled technique known as map matching to identify targets and decide when to strike, the second person behind the plan told me. He said Ukraine first used this new type of drone in combat in mid-September, when a handful of them struck targets in the Russian-occupied region of Donetsk. They have not yet been deployed at scale against Russian airports, he added.

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Instead, the Ukrainian armed forces have used other weapons to achieve a similar effect. Rather than targeting airports directly, drones need only to appear in the sky around Moscow, forcing Russian authorities to cancel flights or close runways until the threat subsides. One adviser to Zelensky called it a “side effect” of Ukraine’s regular drone strikes against various targets in Russia. Zelensky prefers this approach because it does not involve targeting civilian aircraft. “That would be piracy,” the adviser, who has not been involved in the operation known as M&Ms, said. “The president doesn’t want to allow that.”

His approach has still been disruptive for travelers in Russia. According to the tally from Echo of Moscow, the city’s airports restricted flights, on average, for more than three hours a day during the first full week of this month. On Friday, when Putin’s plane could not find a place to safely land in the capital, at least two of Moscow’s four airports remained closed to all flights for roughly seven hours.

For regular citizens, these disruptions have been compounded by the new wave of Ukrainian strikes against Russian data centers. Most of the attacks have targeted the facilities of Yandex, a local counterpart to Google that acts as the backbone of Russia’s digital economy. Millions of Russians use its services every day, and many of them posted angry rants on social media in response to the latest outages. Yandex could need up to six months to repair the damage to its data centers, the Russian business newspaper Kommersant reported.

As a bonus for Ukraine and many of its allies, the attacks appear to have caused a sharp decline in the activity of Russian bots across the internet, Zelensky noted in a video address to the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday. “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social-media platforms,” he said. “There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations, because there were fewer bots.”

In response to such attacks, the Russian military has expanded its strikes against civilians. Locomotives have become a favorite target. In August, 37 of them came under attack, more than one a day, the head of Ukraine’s state railway company, Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, told me. Last month, the number rose to 47, including freight and passenger trains. When we met in Kyiv a few weeks ago, Pertsovskyi pulled out his phone and scrolled through a series of photos, each one showing trains torn apart by explosions. One of the gutted sleeper carriages had spilled its blackened cots and luggage onto the tracks. “This is how my mornings start now, with these reports and images, every day,” he said.

A few days later, Russian drones prompted the evacuation of a train full of foreign dignitaries traveling from Kyiv to Poland, including David Petraeus, the former director of the CIA. One of the passengers, an American philanthropist, told me that she walked through marshy fields in the middle of the night to get away from the train during an evacuation. The attack served as a reminder that no matter how creative Ukraine gets in targeting Moscow’s economic pressure points, Russia can always escalate, stomping on whatever norms remain un-trampled in this war. Trump’s deal to buy Russian fuel will make that easier by inviting the Kremlin to top up its war chest with billions of dollars in export revenue. The deal also lifts some of the sanctions that the U.S. had imposed to punish and isolate Russia, leaving Putin with even less reason to accept a cease-fire.

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For some members of Zelensky’s team, that act of American betrayal felt less like a setback for their strategy to win the war than it did the end of their best hope for victory. Even one of the officials behind the plan to shut down Moscow’s airports told me that if the U.S. sides with Russia, Ukraine will have little choice but to abandon the ladder of escalation and sue for peace. “There’s a realization now that Russia will not collapse because of its difficult economic situation,” he said. In offering a lifeline to Russia’s energy industry, Trump made the U.S. an obstacle to the Ukrainian strategy of wearing down the Russian economy and exhausting its population. “That means we need to change our strategy,” the official said. “Russia will not collapse, at least not now.” Ukraine still has plenty of ways to make life miserable in Russia, but it will likely take more than that to force Putin to accept a truce.

It rained most of Sunday in Washington, as the remnants of Hurricane Isaias washed over the East Coast. Unable to golf, and stuck inside the White House, President Trump spent part of his morning on social media touting the size of his rallies and defending Christopher Columbus. He also declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt strikes against each other’s energy infrastructures. Except that he hadn’t first confirmed that with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and Russia spent the hours that followed bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones, hitting a Kharkiv power plant.

Trump’s inability to bring the Iran war to a close has left him incensed but also oddly paralyzed, two people close to him told us. One of them, an adviser, said that Trump “is used to snapping his fingers and having the whole world—Republicans, world leaders, the media—come to attention, and he is losing his mind that Iran won’t listen.” Iran has resumed menacing oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the average price of diesel in the United States has crossed the $6-a-gallon mark, raising the cost of goods that travel the nation’s highways on trucks.

Republicans are panicked that those high energy prices could help Democrats take control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, which are now only three weeks away. Trump has been searching for a scapegoat, and appears to have settled on Ukraine. Although blaming a European country that’s fighting for its existence for the rise in global oil prices might seem implausible, Trump seems to prefer that to accepting responsibility for his decision to attack Iran. His broadsides against Ukraine, moreover, are consistent with his decade-long deference to Vladimir Putin. With rare exceptions, Trump has aligned with Moscow over Kyiv throughout the four-and-a-half-year war. He wants Ukraine to end the fighting—and has pressured the country to agree to terms that Zelensky finds unacceptable.

A U.S. president siding with the Kremlin is quite an October surprise. But in just the past few days, Trump appears to have fully turned against Ukraine. He announced on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Putin to import Russian diesel fuel, undercutting the new sanctions bill against Moscow’s energy industry that Trump signed into law last month. Even if the roughly 2.25 million barrels headed to the U.S. only marginally ease fuel costs, the deal allows Trump to tout efforts to help Americans while also providing Russia with additional revenue. (Another few million barrels are set to ship next month.)

Despite the opposition of European allies and some Republicans on Capitol Hill, Trump has followed up by placing even more pressure on Ukraine. He called for Zelensky to be replaced. His aides have threatened to withhold arms sales unless Kyiv stops targeting Russian diesel plants. Some in Trump’s orbit have suggested that the U.S. go further, and stop sharing intelligence with Kyiv. That was the context in which Trump announced his fictional energy cease-fire. A senior Ukrainian military officer told us that Trump’s statements are “simply beyond comprehension.”

“Things are already incredibly difficult for us here,” the officer said, speaking, like others who talked with us, on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “But apparently, there’s always another level below rock bottom. Things can always get worse.”

Ukraine has expanded its strikes deep into Russian territory in recent months, targeting the larger nation’s oil refineries. Those attacks sparked an energy crisis in Russia and were cheered across Europe—but not in the White House. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in response, which added more pressure to global diesel markets already under strain from the war in Iran. Zelensky told Trump and his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that he was willing to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if the Russians halted attacks on Ukrainian power plants, a White House official told us. But Trump doesn’t see the strikes as equivalent—and demanded that Ukraine first stop attacking Russian refineries, the official said. Zelensky refused.

“Zelensky is overplaying his hand and pissing the president off,” the White House official said. “The president is asking for one thing: stop hitting the refineries. Give him that.”

[Read: Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies]

Trump’s next move against Ukraine came, as it so often does, after a phone call with Putin. Zelensky’s aides have expressed frustration that Putin has swayed Trump at crucial junctures in the conflict (once, even, while Zelensky was flying to Washington to meet with Trump in an effort to secure access to new U.S. weapons). This time, Trump spoke with Putin on Friday to wish him a belated birthday, even though some in the White House counseled against the call, the adviser told us, believing it would yield little. During the 90-minute conversation, Trump told Putin that he would lift the sanctions on Russian diesel exports. (Some in Kyiv believe that the deal was agreed to earlier, because a ship carrying Russian oil and gas is already approaching the U.S.)

That undermined sanctions applied in 2022 and undercut the tougher Russian-sanctions bill that Trump signed last month; the law was named in honor of one of its champions, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. A bipartisan group of lawmakers was infuriated by the move, and some Republicans denounced Trump for siding with Putin. Four GOP senators—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of ⁠Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and John Curtis of Utah—joined some of their Democratic colleagues to release a statement yesterday saying that lifting the sanctions “runs directly counter to that law” and that the U.S. should not provide “Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians.”

Zelensky, who was blindsided by the diesel deal, deemed it “not fair and not honest.” He had spent more than a year trying to repair his relationship with Trump, which hit its nadir in February 2025 during a shouting match in the Oval Office. Since then, Zelensky has taken to flattering the U.S. president, and he has tried to capitalize on Trump’s occasional annoyance that Putin will not end the war. Trump and Putin’s Alaska summit last year yielded little more than a photo of the two that hangs in the Palm Room at the White House. Even if Trump wouldn’t fully support Ukraine, officials in Kyiv had hoped he would not actively hurt their cause. That hope may be fading.

Recent talks between Kushner, Witkoff, and Putin have included the promise of massive business deals that Russia could strike with U.S. interests once the war concludes, according to reports. Ukrainian officials have long believed that Trump’s foreign policy focuses on opening up business deals—and the potential enrichment of the president’s family and friends—over the defense of democracy, human rights, or territorial sovereignty. Some officials in Kyiv believe that Russia’s economy, which has been remade to fuel Putin’s war machine, will not implode, despite the pressure of increased drone strikes and sanctions. A Ukrainian official close to the negotiating process told us that means “we need to change our strategy, stop fooling ourselves,” and find a way out of the war with Europe’s help. That, the official said, would likely require a new emphasis on negotiations.

During his call with Trump, Putin declined to commit to resuming peace talks, the Kremlin later told reporters. Yet Trump continues to view Zelensky as the primary impediment to peace—and the business deals it might bring—and he called for Ukraine to hold elections to select a new president. (Zelensky has said he will hold an election if Putin agrees to a 60-day cease-fire.) Trump also views Zelensky as an obstacle to his coveted, yet elusive, Nobel Peace Prize, for which he was passed over again last week. A senior European official told us that the U.S. has threatened to stop selling weapons to Ukraine via Europe if the strikes continue, and some close to Trump have suggested that the U.S. stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, as it briefly did after the 2025 Oval Office argument.

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Ukraine was already bracing for a difficult winter. Moscow has escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s cities. It has grown its missile stockpiles and debuted a jet-powered drone that Ukrainian defenses have had difficulty stopping. Europe has tried to fill the gaps left by Trump’s indifference—and the U.S. being bogged down in Iran—but Zelensky’s aides believe that Putin will use the winter to pummel their cities before making another lunge at Kyiv in the spring. If, suddenly, Ukraine were left without U.S. intelligence or American-made weapons, Kyiv might be in its most vulnerable position since the first days of the war.

Trump’s admiration for Putin has been one of the most enduring geopolitical subplots of the past decade. He refused to publicly acknowledge Russia’s efforts to help elect him in 2016, infamously siding with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies during the leaders’ summit in Helsinki during his first term. More recently, he has refrained from holding Putin to account for helping Iran, even after American intelligence agencies revealed that Moscow gave Tehran targeting information to strike U.S. military assets in the region. Some of Trump’s closest outside advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president; Trump’s respect for the Russian leader appears undiminished despite the humiliating struggles Putin has faced during the Ukraine invasion.

Instead, Trump has taken steps to help Putin shed his status as an international pariah. Though Putin has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Trump welcomed him to Anchorage last summer. Trump’s move to undo the diesel sanctions could provide a boost to Russia’s faltering economy. And he has overruled the objections of some in his own party by inviting Putin to this winter’s G20 summit, which the United States is hosting at a Trump-owned golf course in Doral, just outside Miami.

If Putin accepts the invitation to that December meeting, it would be the first time he has attended a multilateral summit in a Western country since his invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky has said he’ll be there, and is hoping to meet with Putin to negotiate the end of the war. Trump has mentioned to advisers, one of them told us, that he’d like both sides to arrive to Doral ready to make a deal, so he can then preside over a peacemaking summit. Maybe then, Trump has suggested, he can finally win that Nobel.