New York [US], October 11: US President Donald Trump on Saturday called for Ukraine to replace its leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy and railed against Ukraine's attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, a day after announcing a diesel supply deal with Russia that had drawn a sharp rebuke from Zelenskiy.
In some of his harshest criticism yet of the White House, Zelenskiy linked the US lifting of sanctions Russian diesel with a Russian attack on Saturday that killed 20 people, including 3 children, in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.
A steep rise in global diesel prices, which followed the outbreak of the Iran war in February, has become a political liability for Trump's Republican Party ahead of next month's midterm elections, when opposition Democrats could gain control of one or both houses of Congress.
Earlier in the day, Zelenskiy said Trump's announcement on Friday of the diesel deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin had emboldened Moscow. Kyiv has instead urged Washington to pressure Moscow for serious negotiations to end the 4-1/2-year-old war.
The Russian government said on Saturday it had partially lifted a ban on diesel exports.
The southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia has been a regular target of Russian bombardment with strikes intensifying in the past few months.
On Saturday, a 6-year-old girl was among those killed in Zaporizhzhia when one strike reduced part of an apartment block to rubble. Her grandfather, Anatoliy Chumniy, stood sobbing over her body, laid on the ground in a white bag, after rescuers pulled it from the wreckage.
It was the third mass-casualty attack on Ukraine this week.
Nearly 80 civilians were killed in Russian strikes on Wednesday and Thursday, including at least 30 killed by a bomb in the eastern garrison city of Kramatorsk and 22 others by a missile in the town of Pryluky, about 130 km (80 miles) east of Kyiv.
The diesel deal was also criticized by US lawmakers, including one of Trump's fellow Republicans, Representative Don Bacon, who said it was time to apply more sanctions that Congress had recently passed, not lift them.
Analysts said the agreement was unlikely to lead to sustained lower fuel prices, with the volumes still much lower than what Russia usually exports when its refineries are not under attack.
Source: Fijian Broadcasting Corporation
