A Diesel Tragedy in Three Acts
BRUSSELS — While the European Union continued its noble blockade of Russian hydrocarbons — a policy that has, for years, successfully raised the price of everything that moves — President Donald Trump announced Friday that he had concluded a “highly successful” phone call with Vladimir Putin. Under the arrangement, Russia is to release more than 300,000 tons of diesel immediately, another 500,000 tons in November, one million tons thereafter, and, refinery conditions permitting, a further three million tons “within a short period of time.” The U.S. Treasury promptly issued a temporary license allowing the fuel onto the global market until April 2027.
Diesel prices in the United States, which had roughly doubled amid the wars in Iran and Ukraine and stood near $6.28 a gallon, were promised to come “DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST.” Kirill Dmitriev called the cooperation beneficial to the world. Volodymyr Zelensky called it a gift to Moscow. European officials have not yet issued a joint statement, possibly because they are still searching for a sufficiently anguished font.
The contrast is, from a certain Brussels vantage, catastrophic. For four years the continent has treated Russian diesel as a moral contaminant. Germany, having once piped the stuff in with the enthusiasm of a man who later discovers the invoice, now lectures others on strategic autonomy while its truckers idle. Sweden, long the conscience of the Baltic, has preferred the clean burn of principle to the dirty burn of a working logistics chain. The Commission has perfected the art of the press release that begins “Europe stands united” and ends with a footnote about temporary exemptions for whichever member state is currently freezing.
Trump’s version of unity is less lyrical. He appears to have noticed that diesel is what moves food, ambulances, and the midterm electorate, and that Russia — despite Ukrainian strikes that Kyiv says have idled more than half its refining capacity, and despite Moscow’s own export ban extended through October — still possesses barrels the market wants. The three-million-ton tranche is explicitly conditional on those refineries; the immediate volumes are not. Markets will decide whether the numbers survive contact with reality. Principles, in Brussels, are not subject to the same test.
Will the President of the Commission, Berlin, and Stockholm weep? Sources close to the weeping say the tears are already scheduled. One senior diplomat, speaking on background because the background is a very expensive conference room, described the deal as “a betrayal of the rules-based order by the country that wrote most of the rules and then decided the price of diesel was also a rule.” Another noted that Europe remains free to refuse the molecules. The molecules, being molecules, do not appear to have filed a complaint.
In the meantime the temporary American license runs until spring 2027. European hauliers may discover that a barrel which has paid a Russian producer looks, at the pump, remarkably like a barrel that has not. The Commission is expected to respond with a strongly worded communiqué and a new working group on strategic weeping. Turnout is expected to be high.
