When times are tough, people often turn to their friends for support. Last week, Donald Trump — approval underwater, gasping for air as gas prices soar, battered by a disastrous war he started, and eyes fixed on a midterm election that could wipe out his party for years — looked east, to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The result was an oil deal that experts say is desperate political theater, an appeal to voters that harms long-term U.S. interests.
And worse, it won’t even make things cheaper at the pump.
On October 9, Trump announced that the United States would temporarily lift some sanctions on Russian oil, suggesting that the United States could purchase the product in order to lower domestic fuel prices. In return, Russia promised to immediately supply 2.25 million barrels of diesel to global markets, including the United States.
This project was immediately controversial. This represents a capitulation to Russia, whose oil exports have been severely hampered by Ukraine’s repeated strikes on its refining facilities. At the simplest possible level, Trump’s intent was clear: Fuel prices are high, especially diesel, so announcing that more products would enter the market could be a good thing. But as is the case with many of Trump’s projects, the deal was anything but polished.
First, experts say, the amount of diesel committed by Russia is only a fraction of what the United States alone consumes in a single day. The U.S. energy sector uses nearly 3 million barrels per day, and global demand is around 29 million barrels per day.
“It’s a tiny amount, 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 necessary: the United States is a net exporter of diesel fuel – it produces more than it consumes. The deal with Russia is therefore just a general increase in overall supply on world markets, which would theoretically cause prices in the United States to fall. But given the quantities offered, it is unlikely that this will make any difference.
“He focused on one particular thing, which was ‘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.”
So the reasoning on Trump’s side is profit-driven propaganda. The president, famous for his deal-making ability, desperately needs victories to boast about as he is in the hot seat for statewide Republican candidates.
“At this point, (the Trump administration) is throwing everything it can against the wall,” Johnston says. “They want Republican candidates to be able to say he did everything possible to bring prices down. None of that really matters, 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 Putin is the real winner. In recent years, Priddy said, Russia has worked to upgrade some of its diesel refining capacity to meet European Union standards, but its export production has been severely limited by U.S. sanctions and now Ukrainian strikes on its facilities.
In August, the Senate passed a major bill intended to further sanction the Russian state as well as any state that purchases energy from it, indicating that Congress and the executive branch are diametrically opposed in this particular area of foreign policy. Lawmakers also argued that Trump’s deal directly violated laws passed four years ago at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which barred the United States from purchasing Russian energy products.
On Friday night, Trump moved to bulldoze those arguments, signing an executive order that effectively waived the August bill he signed into law last month named for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. The decree designated Russia as exempt from the sanctions that were to be put in place, but did not specify why this was in the country’s best interests.
But if upheld, Trump’s deal would indicate that Russian diesel is potentially returning to the European market, which would indirectly put more pressure on Ukraine and weaken that country’s influence in any settlement negotiations it may have with its invaders.
“The benefits to Russia are much greater than the cosmetic benefits the United States enjoys,” Priddy says.
Part of the reason Trump was able to push this deal forward is because he’s not getting particularly good advice. Until 2025, the State Department had a thriving team of analysts in the Office of Energy Resources whose job it was to advise the Secretary of State and the President on the impact of various diplomatic, military, and economic actions. This team was gutted by DOGE layoffs, and nothing took its place. The Department of Energy has similar teams of analysts, but Priddy says their work largely falls on deaf ears.
“They haven’t heard from the White House,” Priddy says. “In a normal administration, people would go there to brief the (National Security Council) staff, and no one would talk to them. It’s really weird.”
The specter looming over all this, of course, is Trump’s war in Iran, which has had an exponentially greater impact on the world’s oil supply than Russia’s war in Ukraine. Iranian strikes on Saudi refineries have already impacted that region’s ability to produce diesel, and Priddy warns that if Trump increases pressure on Iran again, the cornered country’s response could be “catastrophic.” The United States has exhausted many of its critical missile defense stockpiles, such as Patriot interceptors, which are among the only weapons with a chance of protecting Persian Gulf refineries from Iranian strikes.
“There’s no way to bring them to heel,” Priddy says. “There will ultimately have to be an agreement.”
So the diesel deal with Russia is just a facade for a much larger quagmire – a quagmire for which Trump has no one to blame but himself.
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