Trump Pauses the Graham Act as Russia Hits Ukraine’s Grid

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that Russia struck more than 15 energy sites, hours after President Donald Trump waived new U.S. sanctions on Moscow. Repair crews were already restoring power in western and central cities when the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, signed on September 18, sat two days from its October 18 start and stayed switched off.

The overnight barrage is the first large winter hit on the grid after a week in which Washington treated cheaper diesel as the constraint and Kyiv’s heat as the remainder. Putin’s investment envoy called that pause historic. Zelenskyy asked Americans to speak up for a law that, in his words, still can work.

More Than 15 Energy Sites in One Night

Zelenskyy wrote that Friday into Saturday brought one of Russia’s largest attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector, with more than 15 critical generation and transmission sites hit in different regions. Restoration work, he said, has every available crew from Ukrainian energy companies on it. The hardest municipal outages were in a short list of western and central towns.

CITIES WITH THE WORST OUTAGES

• Lutsk: Regional center in the northwest, among the hardest municipal networks after the strike.
• Rivne: Neighboring regional center on the same western belt of the grid.
• Zhytomyr: Central city on the line between Kyiv and the west.
• Vinnytsia: Governor Natalia Zabolotna said the oblast took one of its largest attacks of the full-scale war, with six people injured.
• Shepetivka, Slavuta, and Netishyn: Smaller Khmelnytskyi-area towns where local networks took the same wave.

Energy sites in the Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Dnipro regions were hit as well. Between 7 p.m. Friday and 7 a.m. Saturday, Zelenskyy said, Russia used more than 320 jet-powered and gasoline-powered Shaheds, plus loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, against the energy sector, cities, and communities. That combined weapons count is his. Ukraine’s Air Force, in a separate tally, put the drone wave at 332 attack drones, including jet-powered types, and said 289 were downed. Four cruise missiles were also launched. Drones and ballistic missiles, Iskander-M or the North Korean KN-23, still struck 22 locations, with debris in three more.

Russian attacks over the past day killed seven people and injured around 90, regional officials said. Two died in Kharkiv Oblast, a man aged 58 and a woman aged 71, with 41 people hurt or treated for stress, including three children. A 74-year-old woman was killed near Nikopol and another man in Dnipro. Two people were killed in Kramatorsk. One person was killed in Kherson Oblast, where 31 towns and villages were shelled and at least 19 people were injured, including children.

Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said some homes lost power. Zelenskyy said Russia has scaled up its anti-energy operation and is trying to stretch reserves and repair capacity as thin as possible. That is the winter method from earlier years of the war: knock out heat and water, then keep hitting while crews are still on the last repair.

The Graham Act Was Due to Bite on Sunday

Trump signed the Graham Act on September 18, 28 days before he waived it. The late Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican and a long backer of Ukraine, died on July 11. The House had passed the bill on September 16. The law gave the president 30 days to raise duties or to certify a waiver in the national interest. That clock ran to October 18.

The White House order of October 16 does both things in one document. Section 2 raises the duty on goods from Russia by 500 percent and raises the duty by 100 percent on goods from the five largest importers of Russian crude oil and natural gas if those countries make new purchases on or after October 18. It also sets a 100 percent duty on goods from the top five countries that help evade Russian oil sanctions. Then section 4, citing section 115 of the Act, waived the new duties on Russian goods, plus a long list of sanctions and restrictions in sections 102 through 111 and 117, including measures aimed at officials, banks, and the shadow tanker fleet. Trump wrote that he had sent Congress a certification that the waiver is in the national interests of the United States.

WHAT THE ORDER SET AND THEN WAIVED

The waivers last until the president or the secretary of state, consulting the Treasury and the trade representative as needed, decides that further action is appropriate. There is no end date on the page. Older sanctions stay. The new ones, the ones Congress named for Graham, do not come into force on Sunday. The United States Trade Representative is told to watch who still buys Russian oil and who helps move it, and to tell the president if the facts change.

That design is why the order reads as a loaded tariff that never fires. The 500 percent and 100 percent lines exist. The next section turns them off. The squeeze in the statute was always the secondary hit on large buyers, China, India, and Turkey among them, the countries that still pay Moscow for crude. A U.S. duty on Russian goods was never the main lever. Waiving the buyer tariffs is the move that keeps those payments flowing.

A Diesel Deal, Then an Energy Ceasefire That Did Not Hold

The waiver did not arrive on a quiet calendar. Trump had already moved to let Russian diesel onto the market, a step he tied to high fuel prices at home. He said Russia could supply 300,000 tons at once, another 500,000 tons in November, then 1 million tons after that. Zelenskyy had called an earlier version of that bargain a gift to Vladimir Putin. On October 16, Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced legislation to block Trump’s diesel deal, arguing it would hand Moscow money while Ukrainian civilians are still being hit.

THE WEEK THE PRESSURE CAME OFF

1. October 11, 2026: Trump announces an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, effective immediately, and tells both sides not to break it. Kyiv says it will support a halt if Moscow does. Moscow does not confirm the deal.
2. October 12, 2026: Zelenskyy says Russia has already hit six Ukrainian energy sites since the announcement, with 33 people wounded.
3. October 14, 2026: Russia fires 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 attack drones at energy and other sites in Kyiv, the Kyiv region, and Kharkiv. Zelenskyy says at least 600,000 people are without power and that 26 power-system sites and four oil and gas sites are damaged. He calls the strike ostentatious disrespect for the American president’s ceasefire.
4. October 15, 2026: Zelenskyy says the block on Ukrainian strikes against Russian refineries is out. Trump calls the resumed hits a disgrace and says he finds Zelenskyy harder to deal with than Putin.
5. October 16, 2026: Trump signs the order waiving the Graham Act. After 7 p.m., Russia opens the strike on more than 15 Ukrainian energy sites.
6. October 17, 2026: Zelenskyy asks for voices in support of the Act. Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special representative for investment, calls the U.S. pause historic.

The national-interest certification is the legal hook. The order does not spell out, in the public text, why cheaper fuel outweighs the statute Congress just passed. Max Meizlish, a former official at the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the live question is what justification went to Congress for waiving almost every major new penalty in a bipartisan law. If the package was worth signing in September, the war on October 16 had not gotten smaller.

Putin’s Envoy Called It a Historic Moment

Dmitriev wrote on Telegram that the Trump administration’s suspension of the Graham Act is “an important and truly historic moment.” He said the law could have halted economic cooperation between Russia and the United States and hurt American and global markets. “Instead of sanctions and confrontation, we have dialogue, mutually beneficial cooperation, and shared responsibility for global stability,” he wrote. The Kremlin itself had not issued a matching line. The envoy did not wait.

Zelenskyy put the strike and the waiver in the same message. He thanked European partners for new support packages and said everyone in America needed to see what was happening. Then he turned to the Act.

At a time when the Russians have carried out such a massive attack on our energy sector, 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. This Act could have helped enormously, and still can! But it needs to actually work, and every voice in support of it matters.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, on X

Yesterday, the Russians carried out one of their largest attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector – more than 15 critical power generation and transmission facilities were targeted across different regions of Ukraine. Restoration work is ongoing, with all necessary services and all… pic.twitter.com/nEhkkjxwXa

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 17, 2026

He added that a U.S. sanctions blackout, easing pressure on the aggressor, and financial rewards for Putin only encourage further attacks. “We must not give up ground. We must keep trying to end the war. To end it, not give Putin every reason to continue it indefinitely.” He did not attack Trump by name. The contrast with Dmitriev’s “historic moment” did the work.

Daniel Balson, director of advocacy at Razom for Ukraine, a U.S. nonprofit, put the same thought in plainer American terms. “Lacking the tools to end this war would be a tragedy. Having them and refusing to use them is a cruel policy choice.” Mykola Murskyj, Razom’s advocacy director, noted that the waivers do not even carry an expiration date. Alexander Kirk, a sanctions campaigner at the research group Urgewald, said Republicans and Democrats had passed the law in Graham’s name to squeeze Russia’s war revenues, and that the White House had hollowed it out before those sanctions could bite.

Who Loses Heat If the Tariffs Never Land?

The people who feel a grid strike are not in the tariff tables. A day before the overnight attack, the International Organization for Migration warned that Ukrainians who had already gone home face a risk of being displaced again this winter because of damaged housing, repeated hits on energy sites, and heating they cannot pay for. Nearly 3.6 million people remain displaced inside Ukraine. About 3.8 million have returned, often to damaged homes.

WINTER IN THE HOUSEHOLDS

• Last heating season: Only 32 percent of households said they could heat their homes adequately, the IOM found, and only one in four could do so in frontline areas.
• Cutbacks: Nearly six in ten households reduced heating to save money.
• City systems: Six in ten residents of large cities depend on district heating, and one fifth of urban households have no backup power.
• Older people: An estimated 2.1 million older people live alone in apartment buildings, a group the IOM says is exposed if heat and electricity fail for long stretches.
• Aid gap: Less than 7 percent of the IOM’s 2026 Ukraine Crisis Response Plan has been funded, said Arthur Erken, the agency’s regional director for Europe and Central Asia.

Erken said the window to act is narrowing. Dejan Keserovic, the IOM’s deputy chief of mission in Ukraine, told reporters the months ahead could be the most difficult for many families since the full-scale war began. Water systems fail when the power fails. Roofing and wall repairs that were already short in frontline districts get harder once the cold settles in. A blackout in October is a rehearsal. A blackout in January is a move.

That is the second effect of leaving the Graham Act on paper. Secondary tariffs on oil buyers would not have restored a transformer in Lutsk overnight. They were the tool Congress wrote to raise the cost of the next missile stockpile. With those tariffs waived, the cost of the next wave is still paid in Ukrainian kilowatt-hours and in family decisions to leave a cold apartment.

Lawmakers From Both Parties Want the Stick Restored

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and a co-author of the bill, wrote that Trump “confirms again that he stands on the side of a bloodthirsty thug and the enablers of Russia’s war machine.” He added that the waivers “have nothing to do with our national security, and everything to do with sucking up to Vladimir Putin.” Representative Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, wrote, “The President is prolonging the war, not ending it.” Those lines came from a Republican and a Democrat on the same night, aimed at a law both parties had just sent to the desk.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers had already urged Trump, in a letter earlier in the week, to use the authorities in the Act. The statute itself still exists. The president can lift the waivers when he decides further action is appropriate. The trade representative is on watch. None of that puts a 500 percent duty on a Russian crate, or a 100 percent duty on a cargo from a top oil buyer, on October 18.

Zelenskyy spent Friday at an EU summit in Brussels and spent Saturday asking for voices, not for a new law. The law is already on the books. What it does not have, until the White House moves, is force. Repair crews in Lutsk, Rivne, and Vinnytsia will work the next nights of the heating season under that fact. Dmitriev has already named it historic. The waivers run until someone in Washington says they do not.