Zelenskyy Strikes Deep Inside Russia as Trump Moves to Limit Ukraine

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy launched his biggest sabotage mission yet against Russia, striking the Amur Gas Chemical Complex roughly 6,000 kilometers inside Russian territory, as the Trump administration’s CIA director was reportedly in Moscow for less than two hours trying to recruit Vladimir Putin into an economic pressure campaign against Iran. The juxtaposition captures the current state of the war: Ukraine improvising with escalating deep strikes while the U.S. under Donald Trump appears to be begging for cooperation from the very adversary arming Ukraine’s enemy.

Zelenskyy’s Deep Strike Against a Critical Russian-Chinese Joint Venture

The explosion at the Amur Gas Chemical Complex was massive. The facility, a joint venture between Russia’s Sibur and China’s Sinopec (60% Russian, 40% Chinese), cost between $10 billion and $11 billion and took seven years to build to its current state. It was designed to produce about 2.7 million tons of polyethylene and polypropylene annually, set to become Russia’s largest base polymer plant and one of the world’s largest petrochemical complexes of its kind. One worker died, 19 people were hospitalized, and at least 104 others received medical treatment after the blast, which occurred around an auxiliary section of the pyrolysis unit during commissioning work ahead of its planned launch. The exact cause is under investig