President Donald Trump’s controversial decision to suspend sanctions on Russian diesel exports won’t do much, if anything, to lower fuel prices, especially before next month’s midterm elections. Yet it won’t provide Moscow with a financial windfall, either.
The administration’s surprise suspension of bans on Russian diesel exports, announced on Friday, faces legal and political challenges, as many lawmakers have noted. In 2022, in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Congress passed legislation that prohibits the United States from importing fossil fuels from Russia, as Trump’s waiver would allow. And less than a month ago, Trump signed tough new legislation meant to further hamper Russian energy sales.
The Trump administration's abrupt about-face has sparked a large and growing bipartisan backlash in Congress.
“This deal is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our allies; it should be rescinded,” a dozen senators from both parties wrote to Trump in a letter Tuesday.
Trump’s sanctions relief was paired with a written demand for an “energy ceasefire” from both Moscow and Kyiv, a move that would strip Ukraine of the most powerful weapon in its four-plus-year war with Russia: long-range drone and missile strikes that have wrought great damage on Russia’s oil industry, especially its refineries. Nearly all Russian refineries, except those in distant Siberia, have been hit at least once by Ukrainian attacks, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in September, and it estimates that Russia’s diesel production has declined by about 30% over the past year.
More recently, Ukrainian attacks have targeted more complex parts of Russian refineries, the IEA said, requiring much longer repair times and causing lasting damage to Russia’s refining complex, which has shrunk from a prewar capacity of about 5.5 million barrels a day to about 4 million barrels a day. The IEA also said that Russia’s capacity is at a 20-year low.
Even Trump’s former envoy for the Ukraine war, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, said Ukraine should be encouraged to continue its long-range strikes, as one of the few effective ways Kyiv can weaken Russia’s war machine by limiting its energy revenues. In August, Russia’s exports of oil products by sea reached the lowest level since the start of the full-scale war, said the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which tracks Russian energy earnings.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has, in the wake of Trump’s diesel deal and demand for a pause on energy attacks, complied, making no new strikes on Russian oil facilities since 10 October. Russia has neither accepted the demand for a cease-fire nor lessened the pace of its drone and missile offensive on Ukrainian cities, including on vital power plants.
But Zelensky’s forbearance has yet to pay off, with apparent restrictions starting Wednesday on the Ukrainian military’s ability to use Elon Musk’s SpaceX military-grade version of the Starlink internet service for its high-speed weapons. That sudden interruption of service won’t necessarily affect Ukraine’s ability to conduct long-range strikes into Russia, which rely on other platforms, but it will erode Kyiv’s ability to defend against high-speed Russian drones and missiles.
Despite all the damage done to Russia’s oil industry, it should easily be able to supply the volumes of diesel exports envisioned in Trump’s diesel deal—300,000 tons in the rest of October, 500,000 tons in November, and then as much as a million tons each month until April.
