Trump’s Dumb Diesel Deal with Russia

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 12, 2026

 

Late last Friday, David Frum pointedly proposed a compelling alternative to the Trump administration’s deal with Vladimir Putin’s regime:

 

 

Apparently, it was such a good idea that everyone took Frum up on it.

 

On Sunday, Ottawa announced that, after coordinating with the U.S., it will maximize oil and diesel fuel exports to the United States to ease domestic supply constraints. That’s quite a reversal from Trump’s long-stated belief that the U.S. doesn’t need Canadian energy imports. It also underscores what a blunder it was for the president to sidle up to Putin, hat in hand, soliciting his own share of Russia’s illicit petroleum products.

 

What set Frum off in the first place was Trump’s announcement that he had persuaded Putin to release hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel in the near term — and millions going forward — “to address concerns over rising energy costs due to the global fuel shortage.”

 

The president seemed quite pleased with what he believed was a deft political maneuver the American people would welcome. But because the deal came at a time when Moscow continues to rain deadly bombs and missiles down on the Ukrainian people, and as it engineers “grey zone” terrorist attacks inside NATO countries — including inside the U.S. — the reaction to Trump’s deal with Putin wasn’t what he had expected.

 

Seven senators, including four Republicans, attacked the arrangement and its contempt for the law. Congress, they reminded the president, “explicitly banned Russian energy imports in 2022 to prevent American dollars from financing Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine.” Senator John Kennedy observed that Putin “will never be our friend” and called on Trump to “end the war in Iran” to bring energy costs down. The president’s approach “will only fund the Kremlin’s war machine,” Representative Michael McCaul noted, “emboldening more violence and destruction.” Representative Brian Fitzpatrick pledged to block “any and all purchases of Russian oil” via emergency legislation.

 

Trump’s pursuit of a lifeline from Russia will ease the financial pressure on Moscow. But it’s not clear where the White House’s conspicuous warmth toward Putin ends and its skepticism toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky begins.

 

Axios reported this weekend that the Putin deal comes as the White House’s patience with Zelensky has reached a nadir. The administration has, after all, asked Kyiv over and over to halt its long-range strikes targeting Russia’s refinery capacity. “Zelensky is misreading the room,” one U.S. official said. “By continuing to hit refineries, he is eroding the goodwill that he has built with Trump over the last six months.”

 

This is more than a presidential temper tantrum. Over the weekend, the Financial Times revealed that administration officials warned Kyiv and its European allies that Washington may stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine and providing arms procured for it through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL). Europe is, understandably, up in arms over the threat. But beyond the sacrifice of American moral authority, the tactical advantages Washington provides to America’s adversaries in the Kremlin, and the degree to which the agreement has alienated Trump’s allies, both foreign and domestic, the math doesn’t make sense.

 

“The price tag for these weapons is in the billions of dollars (upwards of $6.7 billion to date), orders of magnitude higher than what the Russian diesel deal is worth,” the prolific conflict analyst Michael Weiss observed. “Trump would be losing money — and costing the American defense industry revenue — for a sham deal with Russia that benefits none outside of Moscow and Miami.”

 

Moreover, energy industry analysts expect the agreement to have a modest impact on gasoline and diesel prices. “The best you could hope for is a tiny dip in prices locally in places like the New York-New Jersey area, Philadelphia maybe,” the Energy Policy Research Foundation’s Michael Lynch told the Washington Post. “It just means that the oil is just going to be shuffled around and it’s not really going to change the price globally or across the U.S.” In other words, there will be no relief for “our great farmers, ranchers, and truckers,” as Trump promised.

 

Zelensky himself concurred:

 

 

In sum, the agreement will do little to relieve the financial pain voters are experiencing. It has only exacerbated tensions between the White House and its allies abroad. It reinforces the impression that this administration is sympathetic to the despot in the Kremlin — a political liability — and it forces Republicans on the ballot this November to distance themselves from the unpopular head of their party.

 

Why did Trump do this again?