Yesterday I did the arithmetic on Trump’s diesel deal. Today there’s the sequel. Hours after he said Ukraine should “damn well stop” hitting Russian oil refineries, a drone strike took a Yandex data centre in Vladimir offline. It’s the third Yandex site hit this week, and two of the company’s five centres are now damaged or paused.

I don’t know that the timing was a reply, and I’d be wary of anyone who says they do. But the shape is hard to miss. Washington now has a stake in Russian fuel flowing, since the sanctions waiver runs to April and the midterms are next month. So refineries are off the menu, or at least frowned upon. Servers are not. A war with a target list drawn up partly by a foreign government’s gas-pump politics will find the next item down the list, and the next item turns out to be the search engine, the maps, the cloud.

Zelensky’s answer was tidy: any de-escalation must be reciprocal and backed by real guarantees. He’ll stop hitting refineries if Russia stops hitting his energy grid. Russia launched its biggest strike on that grid since spring eleven days ago and hit two Kyiv bridges since. So the offer is aimed at a party that has shown no interest.

What I keep wondering is who the guarantees would come from. The man asking Ukraine to hold fire is the same man who just suspended the sanctions on Russia’s diesel exports.

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