Ukraine marks Putin’s scripted election win with assault on Moscow refinery

The air attack hit an oil refinery in Moscow, contradicting President Donald Trump's claim that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to halt strikes on energy targets.

By Mary Ilyushina and Natalia Abbakumova

The Washington Post

September 21, 2026 at 8:23 a.m.

 

Fires burn at a Moscow-area oil refinery after what authorities said was a Ukrainian drone strike Sunday. (Reuters)

As the first parliamentary elections in Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine delivered a scripted victory on Sunday to Vladimir Putin, Ukraine pummeled the Moscow region with drones and missiles, hitting a key oil refinery and showing that winning the war remains out of reach for the Russian leader.

The Ukrainian air attack, one of its largest on Russia’s capital area, killed at least three people, local officials said, and damaged the refinery in Kapotnya, on Moscow’s southeastern edge, which supplies a large share of the city’s fuel, including for diesel and aviation. Videos on social media showed it on fire.

The strike contradicted President Donald Trump’s assertion last week that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to halt attacks on energy targets. Trump insisted that the war in Ukraine — not his own war against Iran — is driving up diesel prices in the United States. Experts more commonly cite the war in the Middle East.

The refinery in Kapotnya has been hit several times, and the Moscow region has experienced intermittent fuel shortages in the aftermath of each attack. On Monday, lines formed again at gas stations, which began rationing supplies.

A residential building hit by what authorities said was a Ukrainian drone strike in the Moscow region Sunday. (Reuters)

A day before claiming the supposed energy truce, Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to “stop knocking out diesel fuel” targets in Russia, saying the attacks were contributing to a global shortage. Late on Sunday, Zelensky said that he had spoken with Trump and that they had agreed to meet on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

“There are ideas for de-escalation steps and for addressing fundamental security issues — energy security, food security, and the protection of human life,” Zelensky posted on X. “We are working together with the American team and are ready to take really serious steps.”

Zelensky also thanked Trump for signing into law what the Ukrainian leader called the “sanctions from hell” legislation, a bill co-written by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) before his death that authorizes the president to impose sweeping sanctions on Moscow and additional tariffs on countries that continue to buy Russian energy.

The law gives Trump considerable latitude in its implementation, including over which countries could face tariffs and at what rates, as well as discretion to waive sanctions for certain countries.

The Kremlin said Monday that the signing “certainly does not contribute to the revival of bilateral relations” between Russia and the United States. “And, of course, it is unlikely to contribute to more successful progress toward a resolution of the Ukrainian conflict,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said more than 1,600 drones had been intercepted and shot down Sunday, 450 of them aimed at Moscow. Russian officials have been accused of inflating such figures.

“The unprecedented attack was obviously planned with the aim of disrupting the elections,” Sobyanin posted on Telegram. “The enemy did not succeed.” 

A screen displays preliminary results of Russia's parliamentary elections at the headquarters of the Central Election Commission in Moscow on Sunday. (Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters)

With 95 percent of ballots counted in Russia's national parliamentary vote, the Central Election mission said Monday morning that United Russia, the party that serves as an extension of Putin’s policies, was in first place with 57.8 percent and the Communist Party in second at 13.8 percent.

The election was decried as sham by Russian opposition leaders, election watchers and foreign officials.

“United Russia has ‘won’ an election it was never allowed to lose. There was no genuine political competition and little room for voices outside the Kremlin’s line,” Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa wrote on X. “This was not a mandate. It was political theatre designed to manufacture support for Putin’s war.”

The core mechanism of staged elections in Russia is local authorities pressuring public-sector workers to go to the polls in support of the government, with employers tracking turnout and demanding that employees send photos of their ballots as proof that they voted to achieve the desired result.

Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov casts a ballot in the parliamentary elections in Moscow on Sunday. (Pavel Bednyakov/AP)

This year, however, criticism of the election procedures also came from Gennady Zyuganov, the longtime leader of the Communist Party, who described the campaign and the vote count as a “return to the wild ’90s.”

In an interview with state media, Zyuganov lamented pressure on voters, and he alleged numerous irregularities. In one region, he said, his party’s poll observers “were removed, completely illegally.” Zyuganov said the party would compare its copies of polling station protocols with the official count.

In Russia, uncertainly has swirled over many aspects of life, even as the election outcome was a foregone conclusion.

The results announced Monday guarantee that Putin will remain firmly in control, amid inevitable speculation over who will succeed him when he is gone.

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What readers are saying:

The comments reflect a strong criticism of Donald Trump's handling of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, with many accusing him of siding with Russia and blaming Ukraine for rising diesel prices. There is significant support for Ukraine's military actions against Russian targets, with some commenters highlighting the effectiveness of recent Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries. Additionally, there is skepticism about the legitimacy of Russian elections and criticism of Trump's reluctance to impose sanctions on Russia. Overall, the sentiment is largely pro-Ukraine and critical of both Trump and Putin.

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This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

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On the authors of this article:

By Mary Ilyushina, a reporter on the Foreign Desk of The Washington Post, covers Russia and the region. She began her career in independent Russian media before joining CNN’s Moscow bureau as a field producer in 2017. She has been with The Post since 2021. She speaks Russian, English, Ukrainian and Arabic. [Follow on X@maryilyushina]

By Natalia Abbakumova: Natalia Abbakumova is a researcher for The Washington Post's Moscow Bureau.