KYIV, September 22 — Russia and Ukraine traded strikes on energy infrastructure on Tuesday, as U.S.-mediated talks between the two sides remain deadlocked over territorial concessions and security guarantees for Kyiv. Moscow launched attacks on the cities of Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih and Pavlohrad in the Dnipropetrovsk region, killing four people, injuring six, and damaging local defense industrial sites, according to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Wachenheim Center for Peace and Security Global Conflict Tracker, updated September 1, 2026.
Ukrainian special forces claimed to hit a Russian oil refinery in Samara with a drone attack, killing one person and injuring four others. The exchange is the latest in a war that has killed over one million people and left Russia occupying roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, the tracker states.
It classifies the conflict as an interstate war with significant impact on the United States and an unchanging status.
A weekend of escalation
Two days earlier, on September 20, Ukraine launched around 1,600 drones in its largest-yet attack on Russia during its parliamentary election, damaging an oil refinery and killing two people in Moscow and two others in Russian-held Kherson. At least twenty people were also injured, including three children, according to the Governor of Moscow, Andrei Vorobyov. A Russian drone attack on Kyiv killed four people, including three children, during overnight strikes.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later announced on social media that he would be meeting U.S. President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, stating that the conversation may “change a lot” and that peace is Ukraine’s “number one priority.” The announcement came after a phone call between the two leaders during which Trump reportedly repeated his request for Ukraine to cease targeting Russian energy infrastructure, expressing concerns over rising diesel prices.
On September 19, Trump signed the Lindsey Graham Act, which gives the president power to levy one-hundred percent tariffs on Russia’s top five oil and gas customers and sanctions Russian President Vladimir Putin and his associates.
European alarm and a mall in flames
On September 18, French President Emmanuel Macron said that threats from Russia were growing and that he had asked the government to prepare plans to secure critical infrastructure. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported that a Russian drone strike hit a shopping mall in Zaporizhzhia, injuring one person and setting the complex on fire. The previous day, September 17, Russian strikes targeted industrial sites in Kyiv, Odesa, and Zaporizhzhia; Ukrainian officials reported strikes at thirty-six locations in total, injuring at least nineteen people.
Zelenskyy stated that Ukraine conducted strikes against a Russian oil refinery in Yaroslavl and an airbase in Rostov. Ukraine has countered the invasion with long-range drone strikes that have knocked out up to 40 percent of Russia’s refining capacity, while Russia continues to bombard Ukrainian cities.
The conflict traces its origins to Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine, which followed protests in Kyiv after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych rejected a deal for greater economic integration with the European Union in late 2013. What is at stake in the coming days is whether the Zelenskyy-Trump meeting in New York can break the impasse that U.S.-mediated talks have yet to resolve.
Against this backdrop, the wider picture remains one of attrition: energy infrastructure on both sides of the front line is now a primary target, and neither capital has shown willingness to concede on the terms that would end the fighting.
