Ukraine Barrage Sets Up Putin's Trilateral Summit Push

A record night for Ukraine's drone campaign

Russia's Defence Ministry said it destroyed or neutralised 1,015 Ukrainian drones overnight Saturday into Sunday, across 15 regions, occupied Crimea and the Black Sea, in what CNN described as the largest single-night count Moscow has ever published. The trilateral summit proposal from the Kremlin surfaced on the same day as the barrage, and the two developments now sit side by side. Fires broke out at the Petersburg Oil Terminal, the Ruchi oil depot and industrial warehouses in the Kolpino district south of St. Petersburg, according to St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov, who called the attack massive.

The damage spread beyond energy infrastructure. Online retailer Ozon confirmed its St. Petersburg logistics centre caught fire and was evacuated, while social network VK said a data centre in the Leningrad region was attacked, though its services kept running. Beglov said the strikes killed one person and wounded five others in the city, and damaged twelve apartment buildings and a pair of private homes. In the wider Leningrad region, Governor Alexander Drozdenko said 145 drones were downed and debris cut power to twenty thousand people. St. Petersburg's main airport restricted operations for safety reasons.

Kyiv has spent the year working down a target list of the export infrastructure that funds Russia's war effort, and the Petersburg Oil Terminal, a facility able to handle twelve and a half million tons of fuel a year, fits that pattern. Striking St. Petersburg carries weight because the city lies far from the front line and was thought to sit well inside Russia's air defence umbrella; it is also Vladimir Putin's home city. Even by Moscow's own numbers, the raid ranks among the largest Ukrainian aerial operations of the four and a half year war.

A summit without Ukraine at the table

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Putin proposed a three-way summit with US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to negotiate an end to the war on terms favouring Moscow. People familiar with the discussions told the newspaper that Putin raised the idea during an Oct. 9 phone call with Trump, and that the Kremlin has suggested holding the talks on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen on Nov. 18 and 19. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that discussions were underway, telling the Journal that there was no clear understanding yet regarding the meeting or its potential agenda.

A senior US official told the Journal that Trump had not agreed to the proposal but could be receptive. The outreach follows a warming stretch between Washington and Moscow: on that same call, the two leaders reached a deal for the United States to purchase Russian diesel and help distribute it on global markets, according to the Journal's reporting, and Trump later signed an executive order waiving key sanctions on Moscow. Chinese officials indicated through diplomatic channels that Beijing would not oppose the meeting if Trump agreed.

Zelensky pushed back hard on Sunday. Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, he warned that the United States siding with Russia would be a "historic mistake" and called the sanctions waiver "more support for Russian aggression". In a post on X, he wrote that Ukraine was doing everything on its part to make talks with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner happen.

The Washington-Kyiv rift widens

The drone wave landed in the middle of the roughest public stretch of the US-Ukraine relationship of the war. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday that Zelensky "doesn't want to end this war, and probably never did", while saying he was in the process of negotiating peace and did not want to "drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table". The rebuke followed Zelensky's declaration to the Financial Times that he was done with the energy ceasefire Trump had announced on Oct. 11, after Russia kept striking Ukraine's power grid.

Trump's sanctions posture has been the other source of friction. He waived most of the sanctions and tariffs in the Graham Act, the bipartisan Russia sanctions law he signed last month, days before they were due to take effect. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview on Sunday that no sanctions had been lifted, only the diesel embargo, and called it reckless for Zelensky to claim that a message from the American government had led SpaceX to limit Ukraine's Starlink feed. The Financial Times noted that Trump's diesel purchases from Russia were announced days after Zelensky claimed US officials had told Kyiv that Washington would curtail its support for Ukraine's long-range drone programme.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Uzbekistan for talks with Central Asian leaders, denied that Washington had paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine, as Kyiv authorities have claimed. He said Zelensky should be focused on ending the war. So the situation stands: Ukraine keeps striking the infrastructure that pays for Russia's war, Trump keeps pressing Kyiv to stop, and Putin is offering a summit table with no seat for Ukraine. The APEC gathering is scheduled for Nov. 18 and 19 in Shenzhen; no agreement to hold the three-way meeting has been announced.