UK urges an energy ceasefire for Ukraine

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband used the Warsaw Security Forum on 13 October 2026 to call for an end to attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure and to say that Britain should back President Zelenskyy's support for an energy ceasefire, according to the UK government notice published that day.

The BBC reported that President Zelenskyy first called Trump's claim news to him, then wrote that Ukraine was ready not to strike Russian energy sites if Russia showed the same readiness. It also reported that Zelenskyy said Russian strikes hit Ukrainian energy facilities after Trump's statement, and that Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Britain strongly supports Trump's call for a sustained energy ceasefire to start now. The same report said Trump had been urging Ukraine to stop strikes on Russian oil infrastructure so Russia could carry out a deal to release diesel to the United States and the global market.

The British notice gives its own figures for the previous week: 200 attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure, 1,450 bombs, and 1,600 drones. It describes the campaign as Russia again using winter against Ukrainian communities while Ukraine takes steps toward peace. In remarks carried by the notice, Miliband said that the week before in Kyiv he had met children who have known winters of strikes, blackouts, and cold, and that Russian strikes should not decide whether people can keep their lights and heating on. He said adversaries are testing European defenses through cyberattacks and sabotage, and that the answer he wants from partners is unity behind Ukraine and an energy ceasefire.

The same notice says that in December 2025 a Russian attack on Poland's energy grid came close to leaving half a million people without power, and that a train sabotage the month before narrowly avoided mass casualties. CERT Polska describes attacks on 29 December against more than 30 wind and solar farms, a manufacturing company, and a large combined heat and power plant that supplies heat to almost half a million customers. The farms lost communication with the grid operator and lost remote control. Electricity production continued. CERT writes that the attack on the heat plant did not achieve the attacker's aim of cutting heat to end users, and that the incidents reached both information systems and industrial equipment. It says the infrastructure overlaps a cluster known publicly as Static Tundra, Berserk Bear, Ghost Blizzard, and Dragonfly, and that this is the first destructive activity publicly attributed to that cluster.

On 15 January 2026 the Polish prime minister's office said Poland had stopped the attack, with no blackout and no destabilization of the national energy system. Donald Tusk said the transmission networks were not threatened, and that everything indicates the attacks were prepared by groups directly linked to Russian services. The half million in the British notice is the heat-customer figure CERT gives for the plant. The notice's claim that the attack came close to leaving that many people without power is not the outcome either Polish record reports.

The notice does not name the people accused in the November train sabotage. Notes from Poland reported that the National Prosecutor's Office charged a Ukrainian citizen, Volodymyr B., with acting for Russian intelligence and with assisting the perpetrators of railway sabotage on 15 and 16 November 2025. The same report said prosecutors named two other Ukrainian citizens, Oleksandr K. and Yevhenii I., as the direct perpetrators and said they had fled to Belarus, and that the prime minister had described those two as working on behalf of Russia.

In Warsaw, the notice says, Miliband met Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski. It presents the Northolt Treaty, signed earlier in 2026, as deeper cooperation on defense, security, and economic resilience, including against cyberattacks and sabotage. It describes the British spending that accompanies this as the largest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War, more than 300 billion pounds over the next four years.

None of these records says an energy ceasefire is in force. The British notice states Miliband's call and London's count of the week's strikes. CERT Polska and the Polish government state that the December attack did not cut the heat supply and did not cause a blackout, while the prime minister attributes it to groups linked to Russian services. The sabotage charges, as reported, name Ukrainian citizens and Russian intelligence in the same case.