Trump shifts position on Ukraine as fuel prices pose existential threat

It would be easy to dismiss the erratic, contradictory and increasingly rapid changes in the proclamations from Donald Trump about Ukraine, and US diesel purchases from Russia, if it wasn't for the US making threats to Europe about cutting intelligence and military procurements to Ukraine.

The underlying shift amid all the noise appears to be one of Trump moving back from his position of recent months to align more with Russia than Ukraine in their long running war.

But it is hard to see this as a clear strategic change by the US and not one driven principally by the almost existential threat posed to the Republican Party in the looming US mid-term elections by soaring fuel prices.

"This is hard to accept, I know. But Trump just makes things up," John Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser, told The Telegraph in the UK.

"This is not about Ukraine and Russia. This is about the American election. The whole point of the diesel deal, which is stunning and outrageous itself, but the whole point of that is to get diesel flowing internationally, specifically into the US market to get prices down."

Analyst Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the US "resembles a giant flailing in quicksand. Its policy is sinking under the weight of its own contradictions".

International strategy driven by domestic politics is only made murkier by revelations in recent weeks of the deal in the offing involving a conglomerate linked to the Trump family seeking to buy the oil assets of a major Russian oligarch.

It's been just a month since Trump told Ukraine it "has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia", arguing it was the Russia-Ukraine war, rather than the Middle East, that had pushed US diesel prices above $US6 a gallon for the first time. 

Then, in an unfortunate bit of timing for Trump, the US House of Representatives passed new sanction laws on Russia and Iran which required tariffs of up to 100 per cent on the biggest buyers of Russian crude and gas.

A week later, Trump was pressuring Europe to release its diesel reserves, threatening a ban on US diesel exports. With the G7 agreeing to release up to 100 million barrels from strategic reserves over four months, the US president asserted that a US export ban was "never really on the table". 

This month, there has been an executive order to let tax-free, red-dyed off-road diesel be used on public roads. Even Trump told a rally he wasn't sure what that meant.

Then on Friday, after a phone call with Vladamir Putin, Trump announced Russia would supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel immediately, 500,000 tons in November, then 1 million tons, then another 3 million tons, but said nothing about how this would happen given the sanctions regime, or the war. 

The US Treasury immediately issued a licence suspending US sanctions on Russian diesel until April next year.

Most analysts say the amounts of diesel involved are not substantial enough to change prices, and the International Energy Agency estimates Russian diesel output has fallen by about 30 per cent anyway.

The White House also hasn't said who would be paying for the diesel.

Ukraine took an understandably dim view of the deal, saying it was a gift to Putin that would only prolong the war by helping finance Russia's military campaign.

Just to broaden out the ramifications of keeping the Russian war machine alive, it came amid reports by Bloomberg that Russia had provided Iran with missiles, allowing Tehran to replenish its arsenals amid uncertainty over the possibility of renewed US strikes on Iran.

So Russia is reportedly arming the state with which Trump is at war: a war that kicked off the fuel crisis in the first place.

There were more presidential outbursts over the weekend after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticised the deal.

Trump said it was "time for Ukraine to get a new president". 

"I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does", he said, adding Zelenskyy "wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel".

Several European leaders emerged to express their support for Zelenskyy, saying they would seek to increase economic pressure on Russia after the deal was announced.

Leaders from the EU, the UK, France, Germany and Poland all reiterated their support.

UK Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said "we are trying to increase economic pressure on Russia, not to give President Putin any sense of a weakening of Western resolve, which remains absolute".

Back in the US, the diesel deal angered members of his own party, who joined with Democrats in claiming that it was against the law.

Seven senators, including four Republicans, on Sunday called on the US president to "immediately reverse course" on his deal to purchase millions of tons of diesel fuel from Moscow, calling it a "financial lifeline" to a murderous regime.

Then overnight, Trump announced on Truth Social that, "effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine". He gave no details.

The ceasefire seemed to be news to both Russia and Ukraine. 

Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure continued after the announcement.

But what is of more concern than the war of words is the fact the US has been threatening to not only stop intelligence sharing with Ukraine but to stop the deal which allows Ukraine to buy weapons from the US through NATO.

The Financial Times reported that the US told European countries over the weekend it might stop selling the weapons if Ukraine continued to strike Russian refineries.

"They are calling Kyiv … they are calling everyone [in Europe]," the FT reported an official who received a call from a US defence official as saying.

The announcement of the diesel deal came as Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were meeting with Ukrainian negotiators, who heard about the deal as they sat down.

The FT also reported that these threats were made to the negotiators.

"It was a firm request from POTUS", one of the Ukrainians involved in the talks told the FT, referring to Trump.

On the one hand, world leaders seem inured to, and often just irritated by, Trump's increasing rages at the windmill as he confronts a potential political meltdown on November 3. 

But the threats on intelligence sharing and weapons purchases provide a new test of how the rest of the west, let alone Ukraine, responds.

Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.