Theirs to Replace: What the Church Asks When Washington Tells Ukraine to Change Its President

On Saturday, President Trump told reporters that Ukraine should get a new president. He said it a day after striking a deal with Vladimir Putin to bring Russian diesel onto the world market, and on the same day Russian glide bombs killed at least 20 people in Zaporizhzhia. The deal, the sanctions and the diesel prices will be argued over all week. Underneath them sits a question the Church answered long ago: when a nation’s leader should go, who decides?

The News Story

President Donald Trump said on Saturday, October 10, that Ukraine should replace President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, one day after he announced a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to move millions of tons of Russian diesel onto the world market. The remarks came the same day Russian glide bombs struck residential buildings in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, killing at least 20 people, including three children, and wounding at least 18, according to regional officials.¹

Trump announced the diesel agreement on Truth Social on Friday, October 9, after a phone call with Putin. He said Russia would immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, followed by 500,000 tons in November, 1 million tons “immediately thereafter,” and about 3 million more tons “within a short period of time.” The White House did not say who would pay for the fuel, when it would arrive, or whether November shipments would land before the November 3 midterm elections. The Kremlin said Russia “confirmed its readiness to supply oil and oil products” and that the two leaders agreed to stay in contact.²

To clear the way, the Treasury Department issued a temporary general license exempting Russian diesel loaded onto tankers as of October 9 from U.S. sanctions until April 2027. The Associated Press reported it is the first such diesel license to run longer than the standard 30-day window since the war began. The license comes a month after Trump signed a bipartisan Russia sanctions law that targets Russian officials, banks and a “shadow fleet” of tankers, bans new U.S. investment in Russia, and directs tariffs of up to 100% on the five largest importers of Russian oil and gas. The AP reported that the deal makes it unlikely the White House will impose those sanctions this month.³

Trump framed the agreement as relief at the pump. Diesel hit a record national average of $6.52 a gallon on September 22, according to AAA, a spike the AP ties to the U.S. war with Iran. Russia banned its own diesel exports in July after Ukrainian drone strikes on its refineries, and the International Energy Agency estimates Russian diesel output has fallen about 30%.⁴

Speaking to reporters on Saturday before leaving for a campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, Trump blamed those strikes for U.S. prices. “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” he said, adding that Zelenskyy “better damn well stop” hitting refineries. He said Ukraine “wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel,” and that Zelenskyy “could have made many deals and for some reason, he never does.” Trump also said Ukraine had lost 30% of its territory. Independent estimates cited by ABC News (Australia) put Russian control at about 20%.⁵

Zelenskyy called the deal “a weak decision by strong partners” on Friday and said Kyiv’s negotiators were being used as a “smokescreen.” U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were meeting Ukrainian officials in Miami on a peace proposal when the deal was announced, and a senior Ukrainian official said Kyiv had not been told in advance. On Saturday, Zelenskyy wrote on X that Russia had shown its gratitude by dropping five glide bombs on residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Zelenskyy “has the support of the Ukrainian people, and they have the right to decide.”⁶

Criticism came from both parties. Former Vice President Mike Pence said the deal “makes no sense” and urged Trump to “rescind the deal immediately.” Rep. Don Beyer, the senior House Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee, called it “infuriating.” Sweden’s prime minister said he regretted the move, Germany called its support for Ukraine “unwavering,” and the European Union is expected to present a new sanctions package on Monday.⁷

The bombardment continued through the weekend. Missiles struck Kyiv on Saturday, wounding four people, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko. The AP reported that Russian strikes have killed more than 60 people in Ukraine over the past four days.⁸

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

Whose Choice It Is

On Saturday, speaking to reporters outside the White House before a flight to Tennessee, President Donald Trump said, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”⁹ The same day, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, answered in one sentence. Zelenskyy, he wrote, “has the support of the Ukrainian people, and they have the right to decide.”¹⁰

I want to set aside, for a few minutes, the argument over whether Volodymyr Zelenskyy has governed Ukraine well. The President thinks the war should have ended long ago and blames Kyiv for it. Kyiv blames Moscow, which invaded. Catholics can weigh that record and land in different places in good conscience. Sybiha’s sentence raises an older question, and I think a more important one: when a nation’s leader ought to be replaced, who gets to make that call? The Church has answered it plainly for well over a century, and her answer sits much closer to Sybiha’s sentence than to the President’s.

The People Hold the Prerogative

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church puts it in two sentences. “The subject of political authority is the people considered in its entirety as those who have sovereignty.” The people hand the exercise of that sovereignty to representatives they freely elect, “but it preserves the prerogative to assert this sovereignty in evaluating the work of those charged with governing and also in replacing them when they do not fulfil their functions satisfactorily.”¹¹

Read that second sentence slowly, because it cuts both ways. The Church grants a real right to remove a leader who governs badly. Zelenskyy has no claim to office for life, and Ukrainians owe him no blind loyalty. The Compendium also places the right to judge him and to replace him with the people, and the people in question are the ones he governs. If Ukrainians someday decide their president has failed them, the remedy is theirs and theirs alone. Of course, defending the rights of the Ukrainian people to determine who their leader is does not imply that Zelenskyy has done a good job. Rather, it is to drive home the point of who has the authority to determine that.

The Catechism says the same principle more briefly, quoting the Second Vatican Council: “the choice of the political regime and the appointment of rulers are left to the free decision of the citizens.”¹² Of the citizens. That word carries the whole argument. A foreign head of state, however powerful and however generous, is not a citizen of Ukraine.

What Leo XIII Saw in 1881

Pope Leo XIII wrote Diuturnum in the summer of 1881, a few months after revolutionaries murdered Russia’s emperor in St. Petersburg. He was no friend of the idea that all power comes from the people. He rejected it in so many words: Catholics hold “that the right to rule is from God, as from a natural and necessary principle.” Then he added a distinction that matters a great deal this week. Those placed over a State “may in certain cases be chosen by the will and decision of the multitude, without opposition to or impugning of the Catholic doctrine. And by this choice, in truth, the ruler is designated, but the rights of ruling are not thereby conferred.” The people, he wrote, “are not hindered from choosing for themselves that form of government which suits best either their own disposition, or the institutions and customs of their ancestors.”¹³

So Leo gives the sequence. Authority comes from God. The person who exercises it is designated by the community he will govern. A foreign capital appears nowhere in that sequence. Washington does not confer the authority to rule Ukraine, and Washington does not designate the man who will hold it.

Scripture carries the same principle. When Moses taught Israel how it might one day set a king over itself, he added a condition: “One from among your brethren you shall set as king over you; you may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother” (Deuteronomy 17:15). That law guarded Israel’s covenant with God, and I don’t want to stretch it into a theory of modern elections. But the instinct inside it is a natural one. A people’s ruler should come from that people and answer to that people.

Nations Have Rights, Too

The Church applies this to nations as well as to persons. “What is true for the individual is also true for peoples,” the Compendium says, and international law “rests upon the principle of equal respect for States, for each people’s right to self-determination and for their free cooperation in view of the higher common good of humanity.”¹⁴ Further on it describes the community of nations as “founded on the sovereignty of each member State, without bonds of subordination that deny or limit its independence.”¹⁵

Ukraine depends on American weapons and American money, and it will for a long time. That dependence is real. Gratitude is owed for it, and Washington is entitled to ask hard things in return. But aid creates a bond of friendship between States, and the Compendium prevents that bond from becoming a leash. Help given to a sovereign nation buys no say over who sits in its president’s chair. To suggest otherwise goes directly against Catholic Social Teaching.

St. Thomas Aquinas gives the reason that underlies all of this. Justice, he says, is rightly defined as “rendering to each one his right,” and he quotes St. Isidore: “a man is said to be just because he respects the rights [jus] of others.” Its proper act “is nothing else than to render to each one his own.”¹⁶ The choice of Ukraine’s president is Ukraine’s own. The strong owe that respect most of all, because they are the ones able to withhold it.

Where Washington Has a Real Voice

Fairness requires saying what the President does have a right to do. He is responsible for the common good of Americans, and diesel at a record $6.52 a gallon in September hurt the farmers, ranchers, and truckers he named in his announcement.¹⁷ Asking an ally to stop striking refineries is a legitimate request. Attaching conditions to aid is a legitimate tool. Leo XIII wrote that “the administration of the State must be carried on to the profit of those who have been committed to their care, not to the profit of those to whom it has been committed.”¹⁸ An American president’s charge is Americans, and he may press their interests hard. Zelenskyy’s charge is Ukrainians. Each man answers to his own people, and both answer to God.

That is why the manner of this week matters. The diesel deal was announced while American envoys were sitting with Ukrainian negotiators in Miami, and a senior Ukrainian official said Kyiv was not told in advance.¹⁹ Pope Leo XIV, in Magnifica Humanitas, narrows the moral room for force to “the right to self-defense in the strictest sense” and calls the old just war theory “outdated.” In the same paragraph, he names the tools that remain: “Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”²⁰ If force is to be used so sparingly, then diplomacy carries more weight than it used to, but it has to be the honest kind of diplomacy. Partners at a negotiating table owe each other the truth about what they’re doing. Telling a democracy, in public, to change its president in the middle of a war is pressure of a different order. It reaches past the government to the people themselves.

The Compendium adds one line that keeps everyone humble: “The mere consent of the people is not, however, sufficient for considering ‘just’ the ways in which political authority is exercised.”²¹ Popularity doesn’t make Zelenskyy right. Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia said this week there is no consensus in his country that wartime elections are even possible.²² That’s a hard question, and Ukrainians will have to answer it under their own constitution. The Church leaves that timing to them, and she reminds everyone else whose vote it is to carry out.

What I’d Watch

Watch whether the call for a new president is repeated, or quietly dropped. Watch the European Union’s sanctions package on Monday, and whether any Russian diesel actually reaches American pumps before November 3. Watch the talks Witkoff and Kushner began in Miami, and whether Kyiv is still at the table next week.

Then pray. Pray for the 20 people killed in Zaporizhzhia on Saturday, three of them children, and for the families digging through the rubble. Pray for President Trump and President Zelenskyy, that each serves his own people faithfully while also understanding that their right to govern comes from God. And pray for the Ukrainian people, that the war ends soon enough for them to choose their leaders in peace.

---

This story turns on the sovereignty of peoples: a nation’s rulers are chosen, judged and replaced by its own citizens, and no outside power, however generous, may make that choice for them.

One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.

Get it by email

---

Notes

1. ↑ “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president, blames Zelenskyy’s strikes on Russian refineries for high diesel prices,” CBS News, with the Associated Press, updated October 10, 2026, cbsnews.com; Jasmine Baehr, “Trump calls for Ukraine to replace Zelenskyy after clash over Russia diesel deal: ‘Get a new president,’” Fox News, October 10, 2026, foxnews.com; “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president after striking diesel supply deal with Russia,” ABC News (Australia), October 11, 2026, abc.net.au.
2. ↑ Michelle L. Price and Collin Binkley, “Trump strikes deal with Putin for Russian diesel in sharp reversal of U.S. policy ahead of midterms,” Associated Press via PBS News, October 9, 2026, pbs.org; CBS News, “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president”; “Trump signed sweeping Russia sanctions last month. Now he’s striking a diesel deal with Putin,” Associated Press via Fortune, October 9, 2026, fortune.com.
3. ↑ Price and Binkley, “Trump strikes deal with Putin”; Associated Press, “Trump signed sweeping Russia sanctions”; CBS News, “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president.”
4. ↑ Price and Binkley, “Trump strikes deal with Putin”; Associated Press, “Trump signed sweeping Russia sanctions”; Baehr, “Trump calls for Ukraine to replace Zelenskyy.”
5. ↑ Baehr, “Trump calls for Ukraine to replace Zelenskyy”; “Trump slams Zelensky for attacking Russian refineries, says Ukraine should get ‘new president,’” Kyiv Independent, October 10, 2026, kyivindependent.com; CBS News, “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president”; ABC News (Australia), “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president.”
6. ↑ Price and Binkley, “Trump strikes deal with Putin”; ABC News (Australia), “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president”; CBS News, “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president.”
7. ↑ CBS News, “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president”; Price and Binkley, “Trump strikes deal with Putin”; ABC News (Australia), “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president.”
8. ↑ CBS News, “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president”; ABC News (Australia), “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president.”
9. ↑ CBS News, “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president”; Baehr, “Trump calls for Ukraine to replace Zelenskyy.”
10. ↑ CBS News, “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president.”
11. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 395, vatican.va.
12. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1901, vatican.va.
13. ↑ Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Diuturnum: On the Origin of Civil Power (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, June 29, 1881), nos. 2, 5-7, vatican.va.
14. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 157.
15. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 434.
16. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 58, a. 1 and a. 11, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
17. ↑ Price and Binkley, “Trump strikes deal with Putin”; Baehr, “Trump calls for Ukraine to replace Zelenskyy.”
18. ↑ Pope Leo XIII, Diuturnum, no. 16.
19. ↑ Price and Binkley, “Trump strikes deal with Putin”; ABC News (Australia), “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president.”
20. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 192, vatican.va.
21. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 395.
22. ↑ ABC News (Australia), “Trump says Ukraine needs a new president.”

Books Cited

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, complete set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)