🩸 Trump Wanted Cheap Blood Diesel Before the Midterms. It Is Already Too Late.
Donald Trump got on the phone with Vladimir Putin and came back with a shopping list. Three hundred thousand tonnes of Russian diesel now, five hundred thousand in November, another million after that, and three million more “within a short period,” if the refineries Ukraine has been burning can be talked back onto their feet. The Treasury wrote General License 135 so Russian-origin diesel can move through April 7, 2027. Putin, later, confirmed a mood. Russia was willing to supply oil and petroleum products to the American market and the global one. He did not confirm the tonnes. The Kremlin still has not. The man who does not have the oil announced the oil.
That is the whole courtship. A sucker pays first and calls the invoice a friendship.
The call, and the people who were in the other room
The call was Friday, October 9. Ukrainian negotiators were in Miami, sitting with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, talking about an energy ceasefire, when Washington told them the sanctions on Russian diesel were coming off. Volodymyr Zelensky called the delegation a smokescreen. He called the deal a gift to Putin and “an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged.” He said Russia would repay the diesel with “further terror.”
Russia did the polite thing and paid in the currency it actually keeps. Overnight strikes hit Zaporizhzhia and Kyiv. A glide-bomb attack on Zaporizhzhia killed at least fifteen people. Zelensky called the bombs a thank-you note. You can argue with his wording. You cannot argue with the order of events. The license, then the bodies. The tanker is still a press release. The morgue is not.
Kaja Kallas, speaking for the EU, said the quiet part in a complete sentence. Suspending sanctions “provides Moscow with more revenues to wage war.” Europe, she added, will not ease. A British spokesperson said the same thing in the longer, duller dialect of a government that still remembers who invaded whom. Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s envoy, welcomed the arrangement on social media. Cooperation on diesel, he said, will benefit the world. It will benefit the war. The world was not the customer.
He blamed the country that got invaded
The price of diesel in the United States is ugly. AAA put the average at $6.28 a gallon, down from a record $6.53 at the end of September. Brent crude is still above $103 a barrel. Before the Iran war that started in February, it was about $73. Paul Johnson, on the BBC, said the part Trump would like struck from the minutes: this pump price was not made in Ukraine. It was made in the Middle East, and Trump made that problem himself.
So the president found a different culprit, because November is close and a culprit who cannot vote in Ohio is convenient.
He blamed Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries. He said Zelensky wants to make problems for the world and for American farmers, with diesel. He said Zelensky could have settled the war many times and chooses not to. He said it is time for Ukraine to get a new president, a new leader “who can make a deal,” because the elected one has failed to end a war he did not start. The International Energy Agency’s estimate is that Russian diesel production has fallen by nearly thirty percent under those strikes. Zelensky’s terms for stopping were not obscure. “Ukraine will not set Russian oil refineries on fire if Russia does not destroy our energy infrastructure.” Russia kept destroying it. Trump’s complaint survived the refusal anyway. The invaded country is late. The invading one is a vendor.
That is the blame shift, with the serial numbers still on it. Russia’s attack is treated as a scheduling failure in Kyiv. The missiles are a background noise. The offense is that Ukrainians answered them in a way that showed up at an American pump, in a month when pumps have pollsters. A dictator bombs a grid for years. The democracy hits the refineries that feed the planes. The president of the United States scolds the democracy, shops from the dictator, and tells the democracy to change leaders if it wants to be spoken to nicely.
He is a sucker for that kind of man. Not a secret sucker. A public one, with a license number.
Putin does not have to like him. Putin has to let him announce a number. The number can be vapor. The announcement is the product. It photographs like strength and itemizes like a tip. Democratic allies get the toddler voice: weak, ungrateful, replaceable. The man who poisons critics and files glide bombs through apartment blocks gets “willing,” gets the waiver, gets the birthday-adjacent courtesy of being negotiated with while the people he is killing sit in Miami and find out from their own allies. Allied governments are a constituency to be managed. Authoritarians are the ones who get the call.
The territorial daydreams were never a separate genre. They are the same taste. A strongman is a person Trump recognizes as real. An elected neighbor is a person he recognizes as staff. Staff gets blamed when the boss is uncomfortable.
What the money actually buys
Look at the quantity, because the podium would rather you didn’t.
Tim Armitage at Quilter Cheviot did the sum the speech skipped. The first tranche is about 2.25 million barrels. The United States burns on the order of 3.8 million barrels of diesel in a day. One announcement, under one day of thirst, and two more releases that still have to survive refineries the IEA says are already down by nearly a third. Goldman Sachs, looking at what Russia proposed to put on the market this fall, put the wholesale effect at one to two dollars a barrel. That is a few cents a gallon. Center for American Progress, citing S&P Global, noted that roughly half of Russia’s refining capacity is offline and that these cargoes do little beyond what Russia was already shipping. Moscow partly lifted its own diesel export ban after the handshake. A ban you lift because someone asked is not a river of fuel. It is a press release with a valve.
The administration knows the calendar better than the barrel. The Iran war soured the pump and the pump soured the midterms. Earlier in the week Trump was “thinking about” suspending the federal gasoline tax, and he said red-dye diesel could go on the highways without the federal tax. He leaned on the G7 until it promised about 100 million barrels out of stockpiles. He had signed a sanctions-and-tariffs package aimed at countries still buying Russian oil and gas, the Lindsey Graham package, and then waived the new bite of it in the name of negotiations. The negotiations are with the beneficiary of the waiver. The sequence is the joke. Write the penalty. Sign the penalty. Phone the man the penalty was for. Pocket the penalty. Announce tonnes his own government will not confirm. Call it relief.
A few cents, if they arrive, will not unroll a war and will not unroll February. They will not un-bomb Zaporizhzhia. They will not make a farmer whole. They are a campaign prop that happens to be flammable. The war gets the revenue Kallas named. Trump gets a sentence about prices. Putin gets to watch the president of the United States explain that the blood on the diesel is a Ukrainian manners problem.
Cheap blood diesel. That is the product. Not cheap as in affordable. Cheap as in the buyer thinks the dead are a discount code.
Too late
Here is the part he cannot message his way out of, and it is the only part I am interested in mocking.
He wanted it before the midterms. The cheap part. The story where the strong man calls the stronger man and the number on the sign out front goes down in time for people to feel it in their hands. The sign is at six dollars and change. The first cargo is smaller than a day’s burn. The analyst called the move slightly desperate, which is analyst for too late. Goldman is offering him cents. AAA is offering him a twenty-five-cent retreat from a record he still owns. November is not a refinery. It does not crack crude, and it does not crack a conscience, and it does not move a tanker backward through October.
Too late for the price. A nickel in the cup holder is not a theory of victory. Too late for the allies, who have already said they will not pretend this is pressure. Too late for the negotiators in Miami, who got to learn the new policy the way you learn a lock has been changed, by being outside. Too late for the fifteen in Zaporizhzhia, who did not get a comment window. Too late for the fiction that the war is a thing Zelensky is doing to American truckers, rather than a thing Russia is doing to Ukraine while Washington invoices the corpse for diesel.
The sucker’s tragedy is that he thinks the clock is his. He thinks a dictator on a Friday call can be cashed before a Tuesday vote, and that the people under the bombs will hold still while the receipt prints. They will not. They did not. The license runs until April. The gratitude arrived as a glide bomb on Saturday. Anyone still describing this as a bargain is reading the podium and not the morgue, and the podium was already late when it cleared its throat.
He can still take the fuel. He can still blame the invaded for the invasion’s arithmetic. He can still tell them to elect someone more convenient. What he cannot have is the thing he called for: a clean, cheap, bloodless number, delivered in time to matter, from a man who does not sell those.
It is too late. It was too late when he asked. The rest is shopping.
