Russian gas plant hit in long-range strike – DW – 10/19/2025

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged his US counterpart Donald Trump to exert more pressure on Russia’s Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy said Putin was stronger than Hamas, in a reference to the peace plan for Gaza brokered by the Trump administration.

Zelenskyy made the remarks during an interview with US channel NBC broadcast on Sunday.

Responding in English to a question on “Meet the Press” about whether the US leader should take a tougher stance with Putin, Zelenskyy replied, “Yes, and even more because Putin is something similar, but more strong than Hamas.” 

“It’s [a] bigger war, and he is the second army in the world,” Zelenskyy added.

Zelenskyy visited Washington D.C. last week in a failed bid to secure US-made Tomahawk missiles, which the Ukrainian leader has been calling for for weeks.

Trump, who is set to meet with Putin in Budapest in the coming weeks, did not commit to providing Kyiv with the weapons, highlighting that doing so would be an “escalation.”

The US leader also said that his country needed the weapons and did not want stockpiles to dwindle, something he highlighted again on Sunday during an appearance on US broadcaster Fox.

The Orenburg gas processing plant, the largest facility of its type in the world, has been compelled to halt its intake of gas from Kazakhstan following a Ukrainian drone attack, according to Kazakhstan’s Energy Ministry.

The ministry ministry said Gazprom had notified it of the emergency but had yet to provide details on the extent of the damage or a timeline for resuming full operations.

Earlier, Orenburg regional governor Yevgeny Solntsev had said the plant had been partially damaged in the strike.

Ukraine confirmed it targeted the Gazprom operated processing plant.

Ukrainian drones struck a gas processing plant in Russia’s Orenburg region, regional governor Yevgeny Solntsev said Sunday on Telegram.

The attack sparked a fire and left the plant partially damaged, Solntsev said.

This is the first time the plant, which is part of the Orenburg gas chemical complex, including Gazprom’s production and processing facilities in the region, has been reported to have been hit.

The complex has an annual capacity of 45 billion cubic meters of gas, the world’s largest facility of its kind.

Ukraine has not made an immediate comment, but it has increased its attacks on Russian refineries and energy facilities since August.

These attacks aim to disrupt petrol supplies and limit Moscow’s funding.

Ukrainian forces say they shot down 40 of 62 drones launched by Russia overnight into Sunday.

Nineteen drones struck seven locations, damaging apartment blocks in the eastern town of Shakhtarske, which lies east of Dnipro in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Ten people were injured.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry has said it intercepted 45 Ukrainian drones, mostly over the Samara and Saratov regions in southern Russia.

In the Urals, a drone hit a gas plant in Orenburg, sparking a fire, Orenburg Governor Yevgeny Solntsev said. 

No injuries were reported.

Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded full control of Ukraine’s Donetsk region in a call with President Donald Trump, two senior officials familiar with the conversation, told The Washington Post. 

Russia or Russian-backed separatists have claimed parts of the region since 2014, but have never been able to take full control of it. 

The newspaper reported that Putin offered to surrender parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange. 

That’s a more restrained territorial claim than Putin made in August, during the Trump–Putin summit in Anchorage.

Trump did not mention the demands in public remarks during a meeting with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday. 

Trump plans to meet with Putin in Hungary to continue discussions.

Russia claimed to have annexed the southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in their entirety in September 2022, but only controls them in part, and Kyiv retains control of the eponymous regional capitals.

DW resumes its reporting on the war in Ukraine as the two sides exchange overnight drone attacks.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post, quoting two anonymous sources, has reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a call with President Donald Trump, demanded that Kyiv surrender complete control of the eastern Donetsk region as a condition for ending the war.

Despite concentrating its military efforts on the region in Ukraine, Russia has failed to conquer it.

You’ll find these and other stories as we continue our coverage this Sunday. 

Repair work has begun on the power lines to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant after a four-week outage, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi said.

“Restoration of off-site power is crucial for nuclear safety and security,” he said in a post by the UN nuclear watchdog.

The plant was occupied by Russian forces shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Although its reactors have been shut down, they still require cooling, which depends primarily on external power. Diesel generators were used as a backup.

The last high-voltage power line supplying Europe’s largest nuclear power plant failed on September 23. Fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces had prevented repairs.

Both the IAEA and Russia have confirmed that conditions now allow the work to proceed.

Russian forces continued their attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure overnight to Saturday.

More than 10 strikes hit Chuhuiv in the eastern Kharkiv region, causing power outages in almost all districts, Mayor Halyna Minayeva posted on Facebook.

The regional energy supplier in the northern city of Chernihiv said around 17,000 customers were without power after attacks on an energy infrastructure facility in the Koriukivka district. 

Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched a total of 164 explosive-laden drones at Ukraine in overnight attacks. Some 136 were repelled, while 27 hit targets in 12 locations.  

Meanwhile, Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces have taken the village of Pleshchiivka in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

The claim has not been independently verified.

A large explosion in an explosives factory in the Russian city of Sterlitamak in the Urals has killed three women, a senior local offical has said, while refuting speculation that the blast was caused by a drone attack.

Five other people were being treated in hospital after the incident on Friday evening at the Avangard factory, according to Radi Khabirov, head of the Russian autonomous republic of Bashkortostan.

One building was destroyed but the plant continued to manufacture “extremely necessary and sought-after products for our country,” Khabirov said in a post on Telegram.

Russian media outlets reported that the factory produced weapons and ammunition for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

In September, Ukrainian drones hit the Bashkortostan oil refinery run by state-controlled company Gazprom, as Kyiv tries to reduce Russian energy revenues used to fund the military.

A Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian-occupied part of Kherson region in southern Ukraine, has klled two people, the Russian-installed governor of the area, Vladimir Saldo, said on his Telegram channel on Saturday.

Both victims lived in a temporary accommodation centre for evacuees, Saldo said.

Russia claimed to have annexed the Kherson region in its entirety in September 2022 but only controls parts of it.

Ukrainian forces retook the regional capital, also called Kherson, in November 2022.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said there had been a “productive” call with Kyiv’s European allies following Zelenskyy’s meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Starmer called for a “just and lasting peace” in Ukraine.

“Productive call this evening with @ZelenskyyUa, other European leaders and @SecGenNATO,” he said.

“I reiterated our unwavering commitment to Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, the UK will continue to send humanitarian aid and military support,” he added.

The call included leaders from Germany, Finland, Italy, Norway and Poland, along with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and European Council President Antonio Costa.

Zelenkyy wrote on X that he had shared details of his talks with Trump during the call.

“The main priority now is to protect as many lives as possible, guarantee security for Ukraine, and strengthen all of us in Europe,” he wrote.

“I am grateful for the conversation, for all the support, and for the readiness to stand with Ukraine,” he added.

 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Kyiv has still not abandoned the hope that the US will approve the delivery of long-range Tomahawk missiles, despite a meeting with US President Donald Trump where the issue was apparently sidelined.

“Our teams work on it” Zelensky told US broadcaster NBC in an interview.

“It’s good that President Trump didn’t say ‘no,'” he said, while acknowledging Trump also didn’t say “yes.”

Zelenskyy told reporters after the meeting that although he and Trump discussed long-range weapons they “decided that we don’t speak about it because … the United States doesn’t want escalation.”

Kyiv has long requested the missiles from the US, as they would allow Ukraine to strike targets well within Russia.

In the interview, Zelenskyy noted that the weapons are therefore a sensitive issue for Moscow and that Russian President Vladimir Putin fears their delivery to Kyiv.

Trump’s reticence on delivering Kyiv Tomahawks, which follows a period when he seemed more open to the idea, comes after his call with Putin on Thursday.

According to Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, Putin told Trump during the call that if Kyiv received the Tomahawks, it wouldn’t “change the situation on the battlefield, but would cause substantial damage to the relationship between” the US and Russia. 

Thank you for joining DW’s reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now far into its third year.

News on the war is currently dominated by the question of whether US President Donald Trump will accede to Kyiv’s request for long-range Tomahawk missiles, with the chances of their being delivered to Ukraine seeming to dwindle after Friday’s meeting between Trump and the Ukrainian president.

Meanwhile, both sides continue to target each other’s energy infrastructure: Kyiv in a bid to stop energy revenue from going to finance Russia’s war, Moscow to disrupt supplies ahead of the winter and the heating season.

You can read the top headlines and analysis from the conflict in Ukraine in this blog.