The war in Ukraine has now raged for more than 54 months, longer than the First World War and closing in on the duration of the Second. Thanks to rapid advances in drones, long-range missiles, and precision targeting on both sides, this conflict has become one of the most brutal and indiscriminate in modern history. The target list has long since spilled far beyond purely military sites.
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Ukraine, unable to reverse the steady Russian advances on the ground and facing the near-certainty of further territorial losses, has shifted to economic warfare. Kyiv has systematically struck Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure, critical export terminals, and related civilian assets. Our legacy media has widely covered these operations, but often downplayed the very fact that some of them have hit facilities with direct American ownership stakes.
Yes, Kyiv’s strikes have repeatedly hit civilian energy infrastructure in which American businesses hold direct stakes. The most glaring example is the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), the 1,510-kilometer pipeline that carries the bulk of Kazakhstan’s oil exports to the Black Sea terminal near Novorossiysk. U.S. majors Chevron and ExxonMobil are major shareholders in the upstream fields that feed it.
In recent weeks, legacy outlets and Ukrainian sources reported that Vice President J.D. Vance personally called President Zelenskyy and asked him to stop attacks on American property. Kyiv, they claimed, agreed. The spin was unmistakable: look how powerful Ukraine has become that even the American vice president must plead for restraint because Kyiv’s campaign against Russia has gone “too far.”
Those reports turned out to be premature at best and misleading at worst. Just days ago, Ukrainian drones struck another oil tanker linked to the very same American commercial interests operating through the CPC system. Ukraine simply ignored the request from its largest backer and largest source of remaining support. This is no small matter amid oil-market instability created by the ongoing American military campaign against Iran and the related disruption of the Strait of Hormuz. Kyiv appears determined to play its own game, complete with past election meddling and aggressive lobbying, regardless of the costs to the United States.
The deeper problem is that both sides have abandoned serious diplomacy. Ukraine, having no realistic path to battlefield recovery, escalates by hitting Russian oil facilities, Amazon-like logistics warehouses, and now agricultural infrastructure. Russia answers in kind, striking vessels near Odessa just as Ukraine targets shipping in the Azov Sea and eastern Black Sea. Step back from the immediate combat zone and the global consequences become obvious: a deepened oil crisis that drives up gasoline prices, and a food-shortage risk that would hit every household as both combatants attack the agricultural capacity of the other.
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Why does Europe enable this? How do European capitals continue to cheer and supply a campaign that risks severe disruption to global energy and food supplies? It is either reckless or willfully blind.
Ukrainian politicians and activists openly speak of not merely defeating Russia but forcing its collapse on the model of the Soviet Union in 1991. Many Americans might instinctively favor that outcome, given our long rivalry with Moscow. Reality points the other way. Washington, as well as Beijing, have every incentive to preserve Russia within its current borders. A fragmented Russia sliding into civil war over ethnicity, religion, resources, and revenue would produce a continent-wide humanitarian and security catastrophe. The United States will not permit Ukraine to realize its most maximalist aims against Russia for precisely that reason.
Ukrainian deep strikes on various targets deep inside Russian territory have already provoked severe retaliatory missile and drone barrages. With an ongoing shortage of Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, and little realistic prospect that Kyiv will receive large additional quantities before winter, the danger is obvious. If Putin decides to fight the same way Zelenskyy does, matching deep strikes against economic and civilian infrastructure, the war could rapidly turn into a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Trump administration must now force an end to this war. Continued escalation by both parties, and by a Europe that has outsourced its strategic judgment to Kyiv, will eventually reach residential districts, nuclear facilities, and other infrastructure whose disruption would affect daily life for millions far beyond the battlefield. America First means ending the bleeding before the secondary effects become unmanageable.
Mike Robertson is a contributor to American Thinker. Follow him on X at @Mike_for_MAGA and Reddit.
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