“Trump rips Zelensky amid Russia diesel deal feud: 'I suggest they get a new leader'”, 10 October 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
The file opens September 14th, when the president posted that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to leave each other's energy grids alone. Russia's defense ministry answered October 4th: keep hitting refineries and Russian forces would hit Ukrainian military and industrial sites in return. Five days after that, the president lifted sanctions on Russian diesel and bought it.
Friday the 9th, he posted the invoice in three lines: 300,000 tons of Russian diesel "immediately," 500,000 more in November, a million tons after that. No unit of relief was attached to a price at any American pump; the post supplied tonnage, not a timetable for the number drivers actually watch.…
…(cont) Saturday the 10th, the accounting turned personal. The president told reporters outside the White House that Ukraine's leader "could have settled this war many times" and "chose not to," and added, "I suggest they get a new leader." Monday the 12th, in Warsaw, Zelenskyy answered a room of European security officials: he said he learned of the "energy ceasefire" the way everyone else did, from a social media post, and had not signed off on it. He said that if Russian strikes on Ukraine's power grid continue through the winter, Ukraine will respond.
Today the arithmetic came due, filed by the one newspaper with no reason to flatter the other side. The Washington Examiner — not a Democratic outlet, not a foreign one, a paper that counts Republican seats as its own stock — ran the diesel deal through its own ledger and filed it as "worse than useless": too tiny, too late to change anyone's mind about gas prices before voters decide the House and maybe the Senate, and, by the same filing, a dose of relief handed to the economy the sanctions were written to punish. The number did the explaining by itself.
Run the sequence in the order it happened: a ceasefire announced and ignored inside the week, a purchase from the party sanctioned for the war, a leader told to find a different leader for refusing to end a war still being fought on his own grid, and a relief shipment that, by his own side's math, relieves the seller first. The gap between the podium and the pump has a name on this desk: late, small, and credited to the wrong column.
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“This is the oldest trick in the ledger: sanction the guy, then quietly pay the guy, then call the payment a gas-price fix for people who can't afford the drive to work. The only account that clears here is Moscow's — the pump stays where it was, and Zelensky's still catching drones while Washington argues tonnage. That's not energy policy, that's a campaign ad paid for in diesel.”
“Look, buying diesel from whoever's selling cheap is just smart energy diversification, presidents cut deals with adversaries all the time when it serves American drivers — and if the numbers are small now they scale up fast, 300,000 tons today is a million tons tomorrow, that's just how supply chains — did I say "adversaries"? That's not — the point is, diesel's diesel.”
"I'll meet with Putin. I'll meet with Zelensky... And within 24 hours, that war will be settled" - Trump, CNN town hall, 10 May 2023. CNN counted 53 separate occasions he promised it CNN fact check, 25 April 2025 (all 53 instances)
President Trump said Friday on Truth Social that Russia will "immediately supply" more than 300,000 tons of diesel to global markets, an additional 500,000 tons in November, and 1 million tons "immediately thereafter." Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, joins CBS News to discuss the effect that might have on prices.
President Trump on Saturday pushed back on criticism from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian diesel amid the Russia-Ukraine war. The president told reporters outside the White House that Zelensky “could have settled this war many times,” but “chose not to.”
Rising gas and diesel prices are a major reason Republicans risk losing the House and possibly the Senate in November, but President Donald Trump’s energy deal with Russia will not fix that. It is too tiny and comes too late to change anyone’s mind about the economy. Worse, it provides much-needed economic relief to a […]
Ukrainian leader says he was surprised by Trump’s ‘energy ceasefire’ announcement, posted as Russian drones hit Kyiv Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed to respond to Russia’s continuing attacks on the Ukrainian power grid as European leaders rally around Kyiv amid a feud with Donald Trump over Ukraine’s strikes on oil refineries. Speaking to…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
