Zelenskyy accuses Trump of rewarding Putin as Pope pleads for peace from a hospital bed

With Ukraine under fire and America’s resolve in retreat, a fracturing Western alliance and a papal ceasefire call from a Gemelli ward define the most turbulent week of the war

By Diaspora Times Team

It was, by any measure, an extraordinary week in the long and grinding saga of the Russia-Ukraine war. A recovering Pope telephoned the Kremlin from a hospital room three days after cancer surgery. A sitting American president waived sanctions his own government had enacted barely a month earlier. And a Ukrainian leader, watching his cities absorb fresh missile and drone strikes, accused Washington of handing Vladimir Putin both a financial lifeline and a political prize — without extracting a single concession in return.

The three developments, unfolding within 48 hours of each other in mid-October 2026, together paint a picture of a conflict at a genuinely dangerous inflection point. The traditional architecture of Western economic pressure on Moscow is visibly fracturing. The voices calling for peace grow simultaneously more urgent and more powerless. And the gap between what Western leaders say about Ukraine and what they are actually prepared to do for it has never been wider or more consequential.

At the centre of the diplomatic storm stands Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose public break with Washington has grown sharper, more personal and more desperate with each passing week. On Saturday, Zelenskyy publicly criticised President Donald Trump’s decision to waive sweeping new sanctions against Russia, warning that easing economic pressure would only embolden Putin. “A decision was unfortunately made in America to completely disregard the Lindsey Graham Act, which was supposed to impose truly effective pressure on Russia to bring this war to an end,” Zelenskyy wrote, in a statement that pulled no diplomatic punches and made no attempt to soften the accusation.

The Act in question — formally the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, named in honour of the late South Carolina senator who championed Ukraine’s cause before his death in July — had been signed into law by Trump himself just weeks earlier, on 18 September. Enacted with bipartisan congressional support, the legislation established sweeping new sanctions authorities targeting Russia’s energy and defence sectors, imposed tariffs of up to 500 per cent on Russian imports, and placed key restrictions on a statutory footing specifically designed to make them harder for any future president to unilaterally reverse. The signal from Congress had been unambiguous: this was not a discretionary measure. Most provisions required the president to conduct an initial review and, within 30 days of enactment — on or before 18 October 2026 — impose sanctions on persons determined to satisfy the applicable statutory criteria.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Instead, on the eve of that deadline, Trump signed an executive order suspending those very provisions. He argued the move was “in the national interests of the United States,” a phrase that told allies in Kyiv and European capitals everything they needed to know about Washington’s current priorities. The decision was tied to a deal Trump had separately struck with Putin — an agreement under which Moscow would release large volumes of diesel onto global markets in exchange for sanctions relief, with Trump announcing on his Truth Social platform that Russia would “immediately” supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, followed by 500,000 tons in November and a million tons “immediately thereafter.” Trump framed it in the language of domestic economics, saying lower diesel prices for “our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers” was his “Greatest Priority” — a framing that conspicuously omitted any mention of what Russia was or was not giving up in exchange.

For Zelenskyy, the sequencing and the silence told their own story. “Any easing of sanctions against Russia without a clear and lasting de-escalation agreement with Russia is an obvious weakness,” he wrote publicly. In a separate phone interview with Axios, the Ukrainian president sounded exasperated and dismayed, describing the diesel deal as “not fair and not honest” and expressing a sense of personal betrayal by the announcement. He had not been consulted. The deal had been announced while Ukraine’s own negotiating team was sitting across a table from Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Miami, discussing a framework to end the war. “If you allow them to export diesel, and you think before that you have to go to Russia to negotiate, it looks that you are buying this meeting,” Zelenskyy said, adding carefully that he did not know whether that was Trump’s actual intention.

He was equally blunt about what he believed would come next. “Because gas deals will follow,” Zelenskyy warned, noting that Putin’s envoys were already publicly presenting the diesel agreement as a model for broader US-Russia economic co-operation. “Unfortunately, the lifting of sanctions will continue,” he said. “You cannot achieve this by limiting Ukraine’s responses to Russia for killing our people. And certainly not by lifting sanctions.”

Russia’s reaction to the executive order confirmed Kyiv’s fears with uncomfortable speed. Several Russian officials celebrated the waiver publicly, with the Kremlin hailing Trump’s move as “historic.” Putin’s envoys moved quickly to frame the diesel agreement not as a one-off concession but as a template for the restoration of broad US-Russia economic ties. The Ukrainian president, as is his custom, pointed to events on the ground as the most honest commentary available. “Today, Russia expressed its thanks for the lifting of sanctions on diesel exports by dropping five glide bombs on residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia,” he wrote on X. It was an image that needed no elaboration.

The personal deterioration between Zelenskyy and Trump has mirrored the widening policy gap with an almost metronomic consistency. Trump called on Ukraine to “get a new leader” after Zelenskyy slammed Washington’s easing of Russian diesel sanctions, a demand without precedent in the history of US-Ukrainian relations. The American president also criticised Zelenskyy for not holding elections since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 — a charge Kyiv rejects as legally and logistically impossible under active wartime martial law. Trump, who rarely criticises Putin in such terms, showed no similar impatience with the Russian leader’s democratic record.

Russian President Vladimir Putin

In a Financial Times interview that provided perhaps the most candid window into Zelenskyy’s thinking, the Ukrainian president attempted to explain the psychology driving the American president’s posture toward Moscow. Zelenskyy said Trump has an “instinctive affinity for autocrats and the ultra-wealthy,” explaining that Putin’s decades in power command a kind of respect from a president who equates political longevity with strength. “Because, to him, people who can be leaders for 20, 30, or 40 years mean that they can be very strong,” Zelenskyy said. It was a pointed observation, but also a warning: if this is Washington’s operating logic, then pressure on Putin may never be the point.

The reaction in Congress was one of the rare moments in Trump’s second term when bipartisan discomfort broke visibly into the open. Representative Don Beyer said the executive order “betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression.” Even some Republican voices dissented. Representative Don Bacon, a Trump ally, said it was time to apply more sanctions, not fewer. A bipartisan group of House members had written to Trump just weeks earlier, urging him not to ease sanctions and to implement the Graham Act in full. “Sanctions relief will embolden Russia and prolong the war,” they wrote, calling on the administration to act swiftly ahead of the 18 October deadline. Trump ignored them.

Europe’s response was swift, united and, in tone, the most openly critical of Washington seen since the early days of Trump’s second term. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, speaking at the entrance to an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels, said: “We definitely have a different approach regarding this war. We must pressure the aggressor to stop the war, not the victim to surrender. Drowning Ukraine is not the right approach.” “Suspending sanctions on Russian diesel provides Moscow with more revenues to wage war. This is not the time to ease pressure on Russia, and Europe won’t,” Kallas wrote on X, adding that EU foreign ministers were set to formally add some 1,600 new individuals and entities to the EU’s sanctions blacklist — the biggest such package since the start of the war.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen expressed regret that Trump’s agreement had worsened the alliance with Washington. “We are worse off than we were a few days ago,” she said. Britain moved in the opposite direction to Washington, with Downing Street pledging to strengthen, not loosen, its own Russia sanctions regime. Germany reaffirmed that Russian diesel would not enter German territory and that its support for Ukraine “remains unwavering.” The message from the European mainstream could hardly have been clearer — or the divergence with Washington more stark.

Into this volatile and fractured diplomatic landscape came an intervention from a source that nobody — least of all the Kremlin — had anticipated: a hospital room on the tenth floor of Rome’s Gemelli Polyclinic.

Pope Leo XIV spoke by telephone with Putin on 16 October, calling for a ceasefire in Ukraine and for humanitarian aid to Ukrainian civilians starving amid a Russian blockade. The Holy Father, currently recovering from lung cancer surgery performed on 13 October, expressed deep concern about the grave humanitarian situation in the city of Oleshky, in Ukraine’s partially occupied Kherson region, and called for a ceasefire to allow the delivery of food and medical assistance and the voluntary and safe evacuation of the civilian population.

A senior Vatican source confirmed to America Magazine that it was the Holy See that initiated the call — a detail of considerable significance. It means that a pontiff three days out of surgery, and reportedly celebrating his first Mass from a hospital ward on the same day, judged the situation in Oleshky to be sufficiently urgent to justify picking up the phone to the Kremlin without waiting for a diplomatic opening or a formal request. Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin confirmed that it was “the Holy Father who took the initiative” to call Putin directly, “to plead the case of this besieged city, where around 2,000 civilians need safe routes out and humanitarian corridors.”

The situation in Oleshky is, by any humanitarian measure, dire. Mines and drone activity have effectively sealed evacuation routes. Food deliveries have been blocked. An estimated 2,000 civilians remain trapped, at risk of starvation, in a city that Russia partially occupies and that Ukraine cannot safely access. Since his election in May 2025, Pope Leo had called repeatedly for an immediate halt to the fighting in Ukraine and for diplomacy leading to a lasting peace. The Oleshky call marks an escalation of that personal diplomatic engagement — a willingness to go directly to Moscow, from a hospital bed, in a manner that carries its own unmistakable moral weight.

The Russian response was warm in tone and empty in content. Putin thanked the Pope for his willingness to help resolve the conflict and for his humanitarian efforts, and wished him a speedy recovery from surgery. The exchange was described by the Kremlin as taking place in a constructive atmosphere of mutual respect. What the Kremlin did not do was commit to anything. No ceasefire agreement. No humanitarian corridor. No evacuation timeline. No concession of any kind. Russian officials added, with characteristic deflection, that Putin blamed Ukraine for the situation in Oleshky — a claim Ukraine and international humanitarian organisations have consistently rejected.

The contrast between Moscow’s courteous language and its continued bombardment of Ukrainian cities was not lost on observers. It rarely is. But the papal call does something that goes beyond the immediate diplomatic ledger. At a moment when the Western sanctions architecture is being dismantled from within, when European unity faces its most serious structural test since 2022, and when the United States is cutting bilateral deals with Moscow that Kyiv describes as acts of strategic betrayal, the consistent moral clarity of the papacy provides a reference point that exists outside the language of national interest, energy prices and electoral arithmetic.

That matters more than it might appear. The war in Ukraine is increasingly being narrated in different registers by different actors — as a geopolitical chess match in Washington, as an existential civilisational conflict in Kyiv, as a trade and energy calculation in Moscow, and as a humanitarian catastrophe in Rome. The Pope’s call to Putin from Gemelli Hospital insists, in the most direct terms available to the Catholic Church, that the human dimension cannot be traded away for diesel.

For Zelenskyy, holding all of these competing narratives together while simultaneously commanding a war effort is a task of extraordinary and relentless difficulty. Ukraine’s armed forces continue to engage Russian troops across a front line stretching hundreds of kilometres, with particularly intense fighting in the Pokrovsk sector of Donetsk and sustained Russian pressure in the Zaporizhzhia region. Russian air and missile strikes on civilian infrastructure have continued throughout the week, with Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv and other cities targeted. Zelenskyy said on Sunday that over the past week “most regions of Ukraine” had come under Russian attack, and repeated his assertion that “Russia is dragging out the war,” elongating ceasefire negotiations “just to buy time and then try to grab more land.”

This is the context in which Trump’s sanctions waiver lands in Kyiv — not as an abstract diplomatic manoeuvre, but as a concrete shift in the material conditions of a war that is being fought, and died in, every day. The Graham Act’s provisions were designed precisely to tighten the financial vice around Russia’s ability to fund that war. Suspending them, whatever the domestic American rationale, loosens that vice at the moment when Ukraine and its European allies were counting on it to bite.

The week has also exposed, with unusual clarity, the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Trump’s Ukraine policy. A president who signed a sweeping Russia sanctions law in September and waived it in October. Who called himself a peacemaker while demanding Ukraine change its elected leader. Who said he wanted to end the war while signing deals that, by Kyiv’s reckoning, finance the means by which Russia continues to wage it. The White House spokeswoman, asked whether additional deals with Moscow were being considered, defended the diesel agreement but declined to address whether further economic co-operation with Russia was under discussion. The silence was noted in every European capital.

What is clear, as this turbulent week draws to a close, is that the war’s diplomatic landscape has shifted in ways that are unlikely to be easily reversed. Europe is now explicitly running a different policy to Washington. The US Congress is at odds with the US president over his own legislation. Ukraine’s relationship with its most powerful military backer is openly fractious in a way that would have been unthinkable a year ago. And from a hospital room in Rome, a Pope who has barely recovered from surgery is making direct calls to the Kremlin because the conventional diplomatic channels have, once again, failed the civilians who are dying in them.

The question haunting chancelleries from Brussels to Nairobi is not a complicated one. It simply demands an honest answer: if this is what Western resolve looks like in October 2026, nearly five years into a war of aggression on European soil, what will it look like in six months? And who, in Moscow, is not asking themselves exactly the same thing?

In Kyiv, the bombs keep falling. In Rome, a Pope recovers and reaches for the phone. In Washington, an executive order dismantles a law that was signed just weeks ago. And in Moscow, officials celebrate what they are calling historic progress — while offering nothing, to anyone, in return.

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