US officials stepped up pressure on Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries and threatened to cut off vital intelligence sharing as US President Donald Trump announced a deal with Moscow to release diesel on to the world market.
Axar.az reports, citing The Financial Times, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s negotiating team met Trump’s representatives for nearly eight hours on Friday in Miami, where they were meant to discuss ways to convince Russia to end its war.
But the meeting was derailed when the Ukrainian team was blindsided by Trump’s announcement that he had cut a deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to release diesel, according to three people with direct knowledge of the talks.
During the meeting, Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner raised the possibility that intelligence sharing could be cut off if Kyiv did not heed Washington’s warning to halt the strikes, according to people familiar with the matter.
It should be noted that US President Donald Trump previously said he had reached an agreement with his Russian counterpart on diesel fuel supplies. The US Treasury Department subsequently announced that sanctions on Russian diesel exports had been lifted until April 7 next year.
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