Foreign Interests
The president's big favor for Vladimir Putin isn't going to bring down prices for Americans
When times get hard, people often look to their friends for support. Last week Donald Trump — approval underwater, stretched thin as gas prices skyrocket, battered by a disastrous war that he started, and staring down the barrel of midterm elections that could wipe out his party for years — looked east, to Vladimir Putin of Russia. The result was an oil deal that experts say is a desperate move of political theater, a plea to voters that hurts U.S. interests in the long run.
And worse — it won’t even make things cheaper at the pump.
On October 9, Trump announced that the U.S. would temporarily lift some sanctions on Russian oil, suggesting that the U.S. could buy the product in order to lower domestic prices on fuel. In return, Russia promised to immediately supply 2.25 million barrels of diesel to global markets, including the U.S.
This plan was immediately controversial. It represented a capitulation to Russia, whose oil exports have been severely hindered by repeated Ukrainian strikes on their refining facilities. On the simplest possible level, Trump’s intent was clear: fuel prices are high, particularly diesel, so announcing that more would be entering the market could be a good thing. But as with so many of Trump’s plans, the deal was anything but well-refined.
First, experts say, the amount of diesel Russia has committed is a fraction of what the U.S. alone uses in a single day. The U.S. energy sector uses almost 3 million barrels a day, and global demand is somewhere around 29 million barrels a day.
“It’s a miniscule volume — a drop in the bucket,” says Greg Priddy, a senior fellow at the Center for National Interest who has studied oil markets for decades. And in some ways, it’s not even needed: the U.S. is a net exporter of diesel fuel – it produces more than it uses. The Russia deal, then, is just a general increase of the overall supply to global markets, which would theoretically make prices fall in the U.S. But at the amounts on offer, it’s unlikely to make any kind of difference.
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“He glommed on to a particular piece of this, which is ‘I have a good relationship with Putin,’” says Rory Johnston, an oil market researcher who writes the Commodity Context newsletter. “If Putin told him that was a lot of diesel then that was a lie.”
The reasoning on Trump’s end, then, is propaganda over profit. The president, famed for his deal-making, desperately needs wins he can brag about while on the stump for flailing Republican statewide candidates.
“At this stage, [The Trump administration is] throwing everything they can at the wall,” Johnston says. “They want Republican candidates to be able to say he’s done everything possible under the sun to get prices down. All of this is stuff that doesn’t really matter, but you can say it matters.”
Trump announcing a meaningless deal for political gain would be one thing, but the other side of the deal means that Putin is the real winner. In recent years, Priddy said, Russia has worked to modernize some of their diesel refining capabilities to meet European Union standards, but their export output has been severely limited by U.S. sanctions, and now, Ukrainian strikes on their facilities.
In August, the Senate passed a major bill intended to further sanction the Russian state as well as any state buying energy from them, indicating that Congress and the executive branch are diametrically opposed in this particular realm of foreign policy. Lawmakers have also argued that Trump’s deal directly violates laws passed four years ago at the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which prohibited the U.S. from buying any Russian energy products.
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On Friday evening, Trump decided to bulldoze through these arguments, signing an executive order that effectively waived the August bill he signed into law last month, which was named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham. The executive order named Russia as exempt from the sanctions that were set to go in place, but did not specifically say why this was in the country’s best interest.
But if it stands, Trump’s deal signals that Russian diesel is potentially back on the European market, indirectly putting more pressure on Ukraine, weakening that country’s leverage in any settlement talks it has with its invaders.
“The benefit to Russia is much greater than the cosmetic benefits that the U.S. is getting,” Priddy says.
Part of the reason Trump may have pushed this deal forward is that he’s not getting particularly good advice. Until 2025, the State Department had a flourishing team of analysts in the Bureau of Energy Resources, whose job it was to advise the Secretary of State and president on the impact of various diplomatic, military, and economic actions. That team was gutted by the DOGE layoffs, and nothing has taken its place. The Department of Energy has similar teams of analysts, but Priddy says their work is largely falling on deaf ears.
“They don’t hear from the White House at all,” Priddy says. “In a normal administration you’d have people going over there to brief the [National Security Council] staff, and no one’s talking to them. It’s really weird.”
The specter looming above all of this, of course, is Trump’s war in Iran, which has impacted the global oil supply exponentially more than Russia’s war in Ukraine. Iran’s strikes on Saudi refineries have already impacted that region’s ability to produce diesel, and Priddy warns that if Trump ratchets up pressure on Iran again, the cornered nation’s response could be “catastrophic.” The U.S. has depleted a huge amount of its critical missile defense stocks, like Patriot interceptors, which are some of the only weapons that stand a chance of protecting Persian Gulf refineries from Iranian strikes.
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“There’s no way to bring them to heel,” Priddy says. “There’s eventually going to have to be a deal.”
The diesel deal with Russia, then, is window-dressing on a far larger quagmire — one that Trump has no one to blame for but himself.