World on fire: Leaders converge on the U.N. as wars squeeze the world's oil

It’s a world on fire.

Ukraine on Sunday launched more than 1,000 drones at Russia, hundreds of them toward Moscow. The city’s mayor said the barrage damaged the Moscow Oil Refinery and a residential building. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called it an “unprecedented attack.” Two people were killed and 20 wounded across the Moscow region, the governor said.

In the Middle East, the war in Iran is still strangling the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the passage for a fifth of the world’s oil in normal times.

And now the Iran-backed Houthis are seizing strategic maritime territory to block Saudi Arabia’s alternative Red Sea route for exporting petroleum. Last week, the rebels took two more strategic islands in the southern Red Sea, days after capturing the port city of Mokha. A Saudi pipeline that feeds that route, hit in an attack Sept. 10, could be mostly out of service for three to five weeks, regional officials told The Associated Press.

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Against this backdrop of chaos, some of the key players convene in New York. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And President Donald Trump. Trump speaks Tuesday. Zelenskyy and Pezeshkian follow Wednesday. Netanyahu takes the podium Thursday.

All could signal from that podium where a world of conflict may be headed… and with it, the direction of energy and the economy. Diesel prices in the U.S. hit a record earlier this month, topping $6 a gallon on average. The costs are clobbering American consumers.

Trump on Monday blamed Russia’s war with Ukraine for a large number of its diesel refineries being “blown up” or “out of commission.” Last week, he blamed Ukraine itself, telling reporters Zelenskyy has to “stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia.”

Zelenskyy says he expects to meet Trump this week. The big question: Will Trump pressure Zelenskyy to accept a deal with Russia that most Ukrainians think would amount to surrender? And could Trump get Zelenskyy to stop attacking Russian oil refineries, absent Moscow halting its devastating punches against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and economy? Zelenskyy has said Ukraine would pause its strikes if the Kremlin spares that infrastructure.

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Meanwhile, Tehran on Monday asserted that the U.S. plans to resume military action against Iran — warning that any country supporting America is fair game for reprisal attacks.

The outgoing U.N. secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, told The Associated Press last week that the international order is unraveling.

“many countries say if superpowers can violate the law, why can’t we? And so what we are seeing around the world is more and more situations in which countries simply do not care. They do whatever they want, knowing that there will be total impunity. Knowing that the security council will not be able to condemn them, to apply sanctions to them.”