Trump Says He Will Import Russian Diesel Fuel Amid High Prices

 

Trump Says He Will Import Russian Diesel Fuel Amid High Prices

 

President Trump said Russia had agreed to ship potentially millions of tons of diesel fuel in the coming months. But the amounts would be small relative to global demand.

 

Chris Cameron Ivan Penn Valerie Hopkins

By Chris CameronIvan Penn and Valerie Hopkins

Chris Cameron reported from Washington, Ivan Penn from Los Angeles and Valerie Hopkins from Berlin.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/us/politics/trump-russia-diesel-putin.html

Oct. 9, 2026

 

President Trump said on Friday that he had reached an agreement with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to immediately import Russian diesel fuel to the U.S. market, undercutting U.S. sanctions.

 

The Kremlin issued a statement saying Mr. Putin had expressed a willingness to supply more oil and other fuels to the world in a phone call with Mr. Trump.

 

Minutes after Mr. Trump’s announcement, the Treasury Department said it was lifting sanctions on Russian diesel exports “to allow the supply of Russian diesel to the global market.” The announcement gave Russian energy producers a general license to sell diesel fuel until April.

 

The United States placed sanctions on Russian energy exports after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022, to limit Mr. Putin’s ability to finance that war.

 

Russia, a crucial supplier of diesel to the rest of the world, last week had extended its ban on diesel exports until the end of October, amid punishing Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries and other fuel infrastructure. Those attacks, and the export ban, have helped keep fuel prices high before the U.S. midterm elections. Mr. Trump has recently criticized Ukraine for the strikes, saying they were driving up prices.

 

But Mr. Trump said in a social media post on Friday that Mr. Putin had approved shipping potentially millions of tons of diesel fuel in the coming months.

 

“It was agreed,” Mr. Trump said, “that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel.”

 

Speaking to reporters at the White House later, the president thanked Mr. Putin and said, about the diesel from Russia, that “we’re very happy to get it.”

 

Russia’s deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak, confirmed those numbers in a statement to the state news agency TASS. Russia is ready to export “300,000 tons as early as October, with further increases in diesel exports to 500,000 tons in November and one million tons in December,” he said. “In the future, the volume could grow to three million tons per month.”

 

The return of Russian diesel to international markets would be a win for Mr. Putin, who has sought for years to break the ice on U.S. sanctions against Moscow’s energy sector.

 

Despite suffering from the most acute gasoline crisis in decades, with many gas stations around Moscow and across the country not able to keep up with demand, Russia has an excess supply of diesel. Mr. Novak insisted that Russia would be able to keep up with its domestic fuel needs.

 

But Edward Fishman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said he doubted that Russia could supply as much diesel fuel as Mr. Trump said it had promised.

 

“The reason Russia imposed an export ban was that Ukrainian strikes had degraded its refining output, necessitating fuel rationing for domestic use,” Mr. Fishman said. “This strikes me as classic Putin — empty promises aimed at sowing further divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance.”

 

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine criticized the diesel deal on Friday, while noting that Ukrainian negotiators were in Florida to meet U.S. officials to discuss ending the war with Russia.

 

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“This only fuels Putin’s war effort and gives him the ability to wage war even more aggressively,” Mr. Zelensky said.

 

When asked about that criticism, Mr. Trump shrugged it off.

 

Even if Mr. Putin were to export as much diesel as Mr. Trump claimed, the amounts would be small relative to global demand for the fuel, which is used in trucks, ships, buses, farm machinery and electricity generators. The world burns roughly 30 million barrels of diesel and related fuels every day.

 

The agreement would most likely amount to about 72,000 barrels of diesel in October, 124,000 in November and between 240,000 and 720,000 in the following months, if Russia could indeed deliver, said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm. In the last three months of 2025, Russia exported about 800,000 barrels a day.

 

“This is a relatively small increase,” Mr. Book said. “It could have some price effect, but it’s nothing like restoring the missing barrels.”

 

It is the latest effort by the Trump administration to ease sanctions on Russia in a bid to lower energy prices. At the beginning of the war with Iran, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent lifted sanctions on Russian oil that was at sea, saying it would add hundreds of millions of barrels of crude to global markets and curb prices.

 

The sanctions relief comes a month after Congress passed legislation written to squeeze the financial lifelines sustaining Russia’s war against Ukraine. The law allows the president to impose tariffs of as much as 100 percent on countries, including China and India, that are among the top five purchasers of Russian oil or gas. However, the law gave the president discretion not to impose the sanctions under certain circumstances.

 

The diesel agreement is the latest sign that the Trump administration is open to business deals with Russia before the end of the war, a shift from Mr. Trump’s prior stance that Mr. Putin would need to stop the fighting first.

 

The administration appears to believe that such deals could help pave the way for peace. But analysts note that Mr. Putin could simply use the perceived benefits to the United States from those deals — such as lower energy prices — to distract the White House from its efforts to end the war.

 

“Any leverage used for things other than trying to enable an end to the war dilutes the U.S.’s overall leverage,” Samuel Charap, a Russia specialist at the RAND Corporation think tank, said of Friday’s diesel announcement.

 

In another example of dealmaking, the U.S. officials leading the Ukraine peace talks, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, last month discussed with Mr. Putin a bid to buy the international assets of Lukoil, the Russian energy giant that is under sanctions. The administration has argued that the deal, which would give the U.S. government a stake in those assets, would benefit U.S. taxpayers and help lower energy prices.

 

Diesel cost $6.28 a gallon on average at U.S. gas stations on Friday, up from $3.68 a year ago, according to the AAA motor club. The national average reached a high of $6.53 on Sept. 22.

 

The jump in diesel prices has become a big political liability for Mr. Trump and Republican candidates in next month’s congressional elections, especially in rural states like Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, where many farmers are deeply dependent on diesel.

 

Last month, Mr. Trump proposed banning U.S. diesel exports to help lower costs for farmers, truckers and businesses. But the oil and gas industry said a ban would not bring relief to business and consumers and instead lead to global shortages, causing an increase in prices.

 

Then on Monday, at one of his campaign rallies in Grand Island, Neb., Mr. Trump made another attempt to reduce diesel prices by signing an executive order to allow greater use of so-called red-dyed diesel, which is not assessed the federal fuel tax because it is meant to be used in off-road vehicles like tractors.

 

But oil industry experts said that, like the export ban, the temporary use of red-dyed diesel was likely to have a minimal or no impact on lowering diesel prices in the United States or abroad.

 

“These are all Band-Aid-over-bullet-hole measures that I think are designed to get a little bit of price relief through December,” said Alex Jacquez, senior vice president of policy, advocacy and research at Groundwork Collaborative, who previously worked on economic issues in the Biden administration.

 

The United States supplies more diesel than any other country, providing about 20 percent of the eight million barrels of diesel traded by sea daily.

 

Demand for diesel globally led to record-high exports of U.S. diesel, as much as 1.6 million barrels a day in recent months. Before the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran began on Feb. 28, the United States exported an average of 1.1 million barrels a day.

 

Alan Rappeport and Anton Troianovski contributed reporting from Washington, and Ivan Nechepurenko from Tbilisi, Georgia.

 

Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.

 

Ivan Penn is a reporter based in Los Angeles and covers the energy industry. His work has included reporting on clean energy, failures in the electric grid and the economics of utility services.

 

Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.