Russia agrees to stop striking energy targets, strikes train station near Poland border instead.

…(cont) On September 6th, the U.S. Energy Secretary went on CNN and said the war in Ukraine was the "single biggest factor" driving the historic rise in diesel prices — and he was specific about which side of the war he meant: not Russian production, not the war in general, but "the Ukrainian destruction of Russian refineries." That's Chris Wright's phrase, from State of the Union, a Sunday morning show, and I'm only repeating it because it's on the record and I don't have better information than the record.

On September 14th, in the morning, President Trump posted that Ukraine had agreed not to hit Russian energy targets, and that Russia had agreed to do likewise. Two sentences, one exclamation point, on Truth Social. Diesel was at $6.23 a gallon that morning, a record, and papers noted the post came as fuel prices were rising. I read two sentences like that as a deal. I don't know another way to read two governments agreeing not to hit each other's energy targets, on the same day, in the same post.

Here's where I want to slow down, because I go through a toll plaza on the Turnpike most Fridays, and there's a sign over lane four that quotes one price, and then the statement that comes to my house a week later quotes another number. I don't assume the sign was lying to me the moment it went up. I assume it was true right then. The bill that comes later is a different moment, from a different desk, and I try to hold both of those without deciding which one the sign was actually for.

On September 14th — I'm sorry to keep circling back to this same date, but it's the one with two things filed under it — the New York Times reported that a Russian strike hit a train station near the Ukraine-Poland border. Officials described it, the paper said, as a warning to Kyiv's allies — the countries on the other side of that border, the ones the rail line runs to. A train station is not an oil refinery. I want to be fair about that distinction. But the story went up the same day, a few lines under a post that said the hitting had already been agreed not to happen.

I don't have a mechanic's opinion on whether a train station counts as an energy target. I have a toll plaza and a calendar, and on the calendar, the agreement and the strike share a date the same way the sign over lane four and the bill in my mailbox share an address.

Excuse me — before you go — the piece about the train station, the one near the Polish border. The date on that story. Is it the fourteenth, same as the post about the agreement, or a different day?