President Donald Trump said Monday the United States would pause “any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure” for five days as Tehran and Washington engage in diplomatic negotiations. In a social media post, Trump wrote that the U.S. and Iran have had “very good and productive conversations” in the past two days and that the pause on strikes against energy infrastructure came as a direct result of the “in depth, detailed, and constructive conversations.” Trump added that the talks “will continue throughout the week.” The move indicates that a diplomatic off-ramp to the conflict between the U.S. and Iran could be in reach. It also followed increasing unease from the U.S.’s allies in the Middle East and Europe over the conflict continuing to spiral. Ferdinand Knapp contributed to this report. This is a breaking news story that will be updated.

U.S. sanctions on some Iranian oil will be temporarily lifted to allow the sale of shipments already in transit, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Friday. The partial pause on sanctions is intended to help ease what the Trump administration sees as a short-term shock to the global market as a result of the attack on Iran launched by the U.S. and Israel three weeks ago. Bessent said in a social media post that the U.S. is granting a short-term authorization to allow the sale of about 140 million barrels of Iranian oil in transit. “In essence, we will be using the Iranian barrels against Tehran to keep the price down as we continue Operation Epic Fury,” he said. Oil prices have spiked to more than $100 per barrel since the U.S. launched airstrikes on Iran last month, triggering a rise in gas prices. Israeli strikes on Iran’s vast offshore gas field and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical trade passage that facilitates a significant share of the world’s oil and natural gas trade, have helped drive the increases. The sales have been authorized for 30 days, according to a copy of the general license issued by the Treasury Department on Friday. The announcement marks a partial reversal of the longstanding aggressive economic pressure campaign by the U.S. intended to weaken Iran’s economy, though Bessent said the country would have “difficulty accessing any revenue generated” from the sales. “The United States will continue to maintain maximum pressure on Iran and its ability to access the international financial system,” he added. Trump appeared to acknowledge he was aware that entering a war with Iran could cause oil prices to spike, even as he touted the success of the U.S. military operation and the strength of the economy. “I expected it worse actually,” he told reporters at the White House on Friday. “I thought that oil prices would go much higher.” Bessent said he’s confident the suspension of sanctions on Iran will benefit the U.S. economy in the long run. “Any short-term disruption now will ultimately translate into longer-term economic gains for Americans — because there is no prosperity without security,” he said. Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in response that the easing of sanctions gives the Iranian government “a financial lifeline” as Americans “continue to feel the impact” of the war. “To say the president has no plan is an understatement,” Shaheen said.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described European allies’ attitude over the Druzhba oil pipeline as “blackmail.” In remarks made public on Sunday, the Ukrainian leader criticized European pressure to allow oil to flow through the pipeline, which connects producer country Russia to Europe by way of Ukraine. The pipeline has been offline since January after a Russian attack, and has been at the center of a bitter row between Ukraine and Hungary. Budapest has accused Kyiv of deliberately blocking progress on repairing the infrastructure in order to engineer an energy crisis in the Hungary. In response, Hungarian Prime Viktor Orbán has been blocking the release of a €90 billion tranche of EU funding for Ukraine needed to keep the war-torn country financially afloat. On Thursday, the European Commission proposed sending a fact-finding mission to inspect the damage to the Druzhba pipeline in an attempt to resolve the dispute. “If we have decided to restore Russian oil supplies, then I want them to know that I am against it. … But if I am given conditions that Ukraine will not receive weapons, then, excuse me, I am powerless on this issue; I told our friends in Europe that this is called blackmail,” Zelenskyy said in reported remarks. The price of oil has surged passed $100 a barrel in recent days due to disruptions linked to the war in Iran, which began with American-Israeli strikes on Tehran on Feb. 28. Washington has eased sanctions on certain Russian oil consignments in response to the price pressure. On Saturday, Ukraine’s state oil and gas company, Naftogaz, announced that it had held a briefing with European and G7 ambassadors where it updated them on the state of the Druzhba pipeline. The company said the pipeline had been heavily damaged following a Russian attack in January. “Restoring such infrastructure is a complex technological process that requires time, specialized equipment, and the continuous work of teams even under constant threat,” Naftogaz said. The word druzhba means friendship in Russian.

Tehran warned it would strike U.S.-linked oil and energy infrastructures in the Middle East if its own oil facilities are attacked, reiterating its threat in response to U.S. bombardment of military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island. “In the event of an attack on the oil, economic and energy infrastructure of the Islamic Republic of Iran … all oil, economic and energy infrastructure belonging to oil companies throughout the region that own American stocks or cooperate with the United States will be immediately destroyed,” a spokesperson for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said, according to a report by Iran’s Fars news agency. “They will be destroyed and turned into a pile of ashes,” the spokesperson added. U.S. President Donald Trump late Friday said the U.S. had launched air strikes on Kharg Island, targeting only military assets in what he called one of the “most powerful bombing raids in the History of the Middle East.” The island, a 5-mile strip of land, is home to Iran’s most important oil facility, where roughly 90 percent of the country’s crude is processed. Trump said the U.S. attack spared vital oil infrastructure on the island. But “should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision,” he said on social media.

President Donald Trump may be pledging a quick end to his war on Iran — but the political fallout will persist long after the fighting stops. Trump administration officials are downplaying the spike in oil and gasoline prices resulting from the disruption of crude shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway. “The recent increase in oil and gas prices is temporary, and this operation will result in lower gas prices in the long term,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday, referring to the attacks on Iran. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Monday that price perturbations would last “weeks, not months” as tanker traffic continues snarling in the strait. But analysts say the disruption is already baked into oil and gas prices, threatening to prolong higher gasoline prices further into the midterm elections. Here are five reasons high oil prices might persist: IT’S PHYSICAL The war on Iran has already disrupted the Gulf region’s energy markets so significantly that a quick recovery is no longer possible, said Anas Alhajji, a global energy markets expert. A mounting backlog of tankers on both sides of the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively shut down for more than a week, will take at least two weeks to clear. Then there will need to be a return to oil and gas production in a growing number of Middle Eastern countries that have now been shut down, including Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Some of the damage from Iranian attacks, such as those on Qatar’s natural gas facilities, cannot be easily repaired, he said. “Ending the war does not mean ending the crisis,” Alhajji said. “We have countries that literally shut down production because their storage is full. To bring back that oil to a pre-crisis level takes time. For [liquefied natural gas] in particular, it takes a very long time.” IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO Trump may have started the war — but he doesn’t have the power to unilaterally end it. The Iranians have not publicly stated that they will quickly agree to stop their attacks. In the last week, they have increasingly targeted the region’s energy infrastructure, which could cause a major jump in oil prices and a longer period of uncertainty if they persist. In response to Trump’s comments, Revolutionary Guard spokesperson Ali Mohammad Naini on Tuesday told Iranian state media that “Iran will determine when the war ends.” Iranian officials are keenly aware of the political pressure Trump faces at home as long as gas prices at the pump remain elevated. Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, said the spike in global oil prices showed that the regime would not capitulate if the U.S. and Israel continued to target oil infrastructure. “9 days into Operation Epic Mistake, oil prices have doubled while all commodities are skyrocketing,” he wrote on X. “We know the U.S. is plotting against our oil and nuclear sites in hopes of containing huge inflationary shock. Iran is fully prepared. And we, too, have many surprises in store.” IT COULD GET WORSE On Tuesday, evidence emerged that Iran was beginning to place mines in the Strait of Hormuz, a significant escalation that greatly could complicate efforts to resume the 20 percent of daily global energy shipments that traverse the region, CBS News reported. The potential mining of the strait, along with all of the damage to infrastructure and stalled production, means it could be a long time before the energy markets return to normal, said Rory Johnston, an oil analyst who writes the newsletter “Commodity Context.” “This crisis will continue to get worse until normal traffic through the Strait resumes, and, at this stage, even if the conflict ended today and tankers ramped back up to 100% Hormuz flow, it would still take months to return to anything resembling normality,” he wrote on X. The longer the strait is effectively closed, the greater the chance the world tips toward a “deep recession,” said Greg Priddy, an expert on energy market disruption who worked at the U.S. Energy Information Administration in the George W. Bush administration. He said it would take more than a month to get back to normal if the war were to stop today, but that there will not be “normal tanker traffic as long as Iran has weapons to throw at tankers.” Priddy, who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Center for the National Interest, said keeping the current volume off the market for another seven weeks would cause a major global economic contraction so severe that it would create “probably the worst recession that anyone has seen since the 1930s.” IT’S NOT JUST MINES The attacks on energy infrastructure from Iran and potentially other groups are widening by the day and have the potential to create lasting damage. On Wednesday, Iran attacked and destroyed a major oil storage facility in Oman. Three ships were hit near the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, including a Thai-flagged container vessel that the Iranian government took credit for attacking because it was “illegally insisting on passing through the Strait of Hormuz.” On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that oil tankers should start transiting the narrow opening despite the risks. “I think they should use the strait,” Trump said. “Look, we took out just about all of their mine ships in one night.” Democratic senators who attended a classified briefing on the war Tuesday said the administration has no plan to reopen the strait. “Right now, they don’t know how to get it safely back open,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy wrote on X. “Which is unforgiveable, because this part of the disaster was 100% foreseeable.” IT’S NOT JUST IRAN While the administration is threatening the Iranian government with severe consequences if they attack ships moving through the strait, they are not the only hostile actors in the region that can effectively block the shipping route. There are multiple splinter groups in the region that are not affiliated with the Iranian government but who are incensed that their leader has been killed and want revenge, noted Alhajji, the energy market expert. The late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not just the leader of Iran, but also for Shia muslims in general, and had supporters across the region, including in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Afghanistan and more, he noted. That has created a wider network of groups that are willing to attack oil interests in the region, he said, and there is evidence that they may already be preparing attacks. Cheap drones could be used to damage multimillion-dollar oil tankers. “They are angry because their leader got killed,” Alhajji said. “The technology in the last 15 years has advanced to the extent that to cause multimillion-dollar damage with $500 is very possible.”

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has triggered the largest supply disruption in global oil market history, according to a Thursday report from the International Energy Agency, as tensions escalate along a critical waterway for international trade. The Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway responsible for carrying roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, has seen oil and product flows plunge from around 20 million barrels a day to “a trickle,” the agency wrote. The price of oil has also “gyrated wildly” since the start of the war, the report read. Rising energy costs have been a central focus of the Trump administration since the beginning of the U.S.-Israeli operation in February. The White House has said it could offer naval escorts and political risk insurance for tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The president has also loosened sanctions on India’s acquisition of Russian oil. Still, global oil supply will likely drop by 8 million barrels per day in March, according to the IEA, with “direct damage to energy infrastructure” also contributing to supply shocks. “With nearly 20 [million barrels per day] of crude and product exports currently disrupted and limited alternative options to bypass the world’s most critical oil transit chokepoint, producers and consumers globally are feeling the strain,” the agency wrote in its report. IEA member countries on Wednesday committed to releasing 400 million barrels of oil in an effort to stabilize supply and bring down energy prices. And U.S. Central Command is now striking Iranian vessels believed to be placing naval mines throughout the Strait of Hormuz. But President Donald Trump on Thursday seemingly dismissed the market disruptions as having a dramatic impact on the U.S. economy. “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote on Truth Social Thursday morning. “BUT, of far greater interest and importance to me, as President, is stopping an evil Empire, Iran, from having Nuclear Weapons, and destroying the Middle East and, indeed, the World. I won’t ever let that happen!”

Poland is looking into whether an attempted cyberattack on a nuclear research facility was carried out by Iran, the government said on Thursday. The country’s digital minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said in an emailed statement that Poland had “identified an attempted cyberattack on the servers of the National Centre for Nuclear Research,” which authorities had thwarted. He told local media that the attack was carried out “in the past few days,” Reuters reported.  The nuclear center said in a statement that “all safety systems operated according to procedures.” A reactor is “operating safely and smoothly at full power,” Jakub Kupecki, the center’s director said in the statement. The facility carries out research into nuclear energy; Poland does not have nuclear weapons of its own.  Polish cybersecurity services and the energy ministry are working with the facility, Gawkowski said.  The minister told local media that there are early signals suggesting the attack came from Iran, Reuters reported. “The first identifications of the entry vectors … are related to Iran,” he said, adding that more investigation is required.  Gawkowski added that hackers could also have used indicators linking the attack to Iran in efforts to hide their real origins. Poland has faced a huge number of Russian cyberattacks since the war in Ukraine began in 2022. Western cyber and intelligence agencies have warned critical entities to be on high alert for Iranian cyberattacks following the start of the conflict in late February. The Iranian embassy in Warsaw did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The war with Iran is sucking up expensive U.S. air defense munitions that Ukraine desperately needs, putting future deliveries at risk and threatening Kyiv’s ability to counter Russian ballistic missile attacks. The U.S. and Gulf allies have burned through hundreds of Patriot missiles shooting down Iranian ballistic missiles and attack drones, eating up stockpiles that might have gone to Ukraine. The dynamic has put the Trump administration’s expanding war against the Iranian regime in direct conflict with Kyiv’s reliance on contracts for U.S.-made air defenses, according to interviews with 10 top European officials and two U.S. lawmakers. Those allies fear that Russia will seize the initiative by attempting to lay waste to more of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and try to move the front lines while the U.S. and Europe are distracted with a separate war — and stockpile concerns — of their own. “If [Vladimir] Putin was feeling any pressure to negotiate before, and it’s not clear he was, it’s gone for now,” said a EU official. “The U.S. is distracted and burning through some of the weapons Europe wants to purchase for Ukraine. … It’s a very gloomy scenario.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday warned of impending shortages. The overall deficit of missiles for Patriot systems “is not because of this war in the Middle East,” Zelenskyy told WELT, part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which includes POLITICO. But “this war will have [an] influence on decreasing the number of missiles, decreasing the opportunity to get more missiles” for Ukraine. The scale of attacks against American and allied forces in the Gulf is beyond anything seen in decades. The United Arab Emirates’ defense ministry said Tuesday that Iran had launched 1,475 drones, 262 ballistic missiles and eight cruise missiles at the country since the war began, many of which were met with U.S.-made Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missiles. More than 1,600 of those drones and missiles were brought down — underscoring the intensity of the air defense fire. A Bloomberg Intelligence report estimated that the U.S. and its partners in the region have fired as many as 1,000 PAC-3 Patriot interceptors at Iranian missiles and drones since the start of the war, a number that dwarfs the replacement rate for the expensive — and hard to produce — weapon. The missiles take months to manufacture, and the war in Ukraine has led to allies across the globe rushing to put in new orders. Lockheed Martin agreed in January to triple its production of Patriot missiles — in part due to demands from the Trump administration — going from about 600 annually in 2025 to 2,000 to meet exploding worldwide demand. But it will take several years for the company’s factories to expand capacity sufficiently to meet any new requirements. “There’s a lot of confusion on that question, of what the priorities are going to be for Ukraine versus the Middle East, and specifically, how long and how high the demands are for these munitions,” said U.S. Sen Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and Ukraine ally. “Europeans are frustrated that we’re not more forthcoming in terms of our production capacity, and that the difficulty of ramping up production is used as an excuse for failing to provide more.” In the years before conflicts erupted in Europe and the Middle East, the U.S. only produced about 270 Patriot missiles a year, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Industry has a long way to go before it can meet expected demand. “It goes without saying that Ukraine will be affected as the U.S. will prioritize national needs” in the coming months, an official from a NATO country said. The official, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive national defense issues. One German official said that “sluggish” deliveries of weapons to Ukraine in November and December have significantly contributed to the destruction of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. And that could just be the start. “The worry is that [Donald] Trump will break agreements, withhold supplies, and that Putin will ruthlessly exploit this,” the official said. Allies also are increasingly concerned about skyrocketing prices for sought-after American weapons. “Some prices of weapon systems are clearly doubled,” said a second official from a NATO country. “That’s the ballpark and degree of price issues we are having.” Beyond the near-term scramble for air defenses, Europeans are worried that the broader Ukrainian arms pipeline could be in jeopardy as U.S. forces — and their allies — expand their arsenals amid escalating conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. and NATO set up the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, or PURL, last year as a way to keep weapons flowing into Ukraine, including helping Kyiv procure much-needed Patriot air defense interceptors. The Trump administration stopped American military aid for Ukraine last year, and PURL has served as a way to keep the spigot open. It allows European countries to buy American equipment and then donate it to Kyiv. Finnish defense secretary Antti Häkkänen said his government has “emphasized there has to be some kind of a European industry pillar, and Ukrainian pillar,” that would allow some manufacturing to move from the U.S. to the continent so Ukraine can quickly get what it needs. Stefanie Bolzen at WELT, Joe Gould and Eli Stokols contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS — European countries are gearing up to approve the release of 400 million barrels of oil to offset soaring energy costs and supply fears as war rages in Iran. France, Italy, Germany and the U.K. have all signaled support for the measure, which would be the largest coordinated release of reserves in the International Energy Agency’s history. It would be more than twice the 182 million barrels of oil IEA countries released following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “The IEA has requested that oil reserves amounting to 400 million barrels be released. We will comply with this request and make our contribution, because Germany supports the IEA’s most important principle of mutual solidarity,” Germany’s energy minister Katherina Reiche said on Wednesday. Asian members — hit hardest thanks to their heavy exposure to the Persian Gulf — and the U.S. are also strongly supportive of tapping the reserves, according to two European officials familiar with the matter. French President Emmanuel has convened a virtual meeting of G7 leaders at 3 p.m., which is expected to address the release decision. The IEA — a key venue for wealthy countries to coordinate oil and gas supplies set up after the 1973 oil embargo — first proposed the measure late Tuesday during an extraordinary all-members meeting that followed a gathering of the G7, according to another person familiar with the matter. Oil soared to over $100 a barrel over the past week as Iran struck energy infrastructure across the Persian Gulf in response to U.S.-Israeli airstrikes across Iran. It retreated to around $90 a barrel on early reports that the IEA had proposed tapping reserves. The U.S. is among the biggest supporters of releasing the barrels, with rising oil prices a major concern for U.S. President Donald Trump ahead of mid-term elections this year. While the big European G7 countries have indicated support for the measure, it’s not clear the extent to which they will contribute. The group issued a statement early Wednesday saying it supported it “in principle.” Other IEA countries have publicly supported measure, including Austria.

BRUSSELS — The head of the International Energy Agency on Tuesday summoned an extraordinary meeting to decide whether to tap millions of barrels of emergency oil supplies amid soaring energy costs. The meeting, to be held at an undisclosed time on Tuesday, will “assess the current security of supply and market conditions to inform a subsequent decision on whether to make emergency stocks of IEA countries available to the market,” the agency’s chief, Fatih Birol, said in an emailed statement. The IEA’s 31 members — mostly advanced Western economies — have grown increasingly panicked as Iran and a U.S.-Israeli coalition trade airstrikes, imperilling critical supply chains and energy infrastructure across the Gulf. Merchant shipping has also abandoned the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for 20 percent of the world’s energy trade, prompting fears of price spikes. The IEA’s members have yet to coordinate on measures to address the crisis, citing uncertainty over how long the war will last. Benchmark oil prices skyrocketed to over $100 a barrel in the first week of the war, before settling at $88 on Tuesday after U.S. President Donald Trump implied that the conflict was nearing a conclusion. Member countries currently hold over 1.2 billion barrels of emergency oil supplies as well as a further 600 million held under government obligation, Birol said.