‘Trump’s Crazy Russia Deal Leaves Kyiv Angry and Moscow Gleeful’

The weekend that has just passed was pretty fast-paced. The crazy announcements being issued from Washington were met with anger in Kyiv, and glee in Moscow.

US President Donald Trump has one main focus, and fear, right now. The midterm elections are looming fast and so he’s focused on anything that he might be able to do to arrest the slide of his Republican Party. Without getting into too much detail, students of US politics know that flipping control of Congress is going to be accompanied by accountability. Something Trump is desperate to avoid, and he doesn’t care who he’s throwing under the bus.

The Non-Starting Diesel Deal

Let’s start with the news that came in on Saturday morning, when Trump announced that after a “highly successful discussion” with the lifelong dictator of Russia, he had secured lots of diesel that the US can start to import immediately, thus heralding in a new dawn of low low low prices for US consumers, farmers, ranchers, and truckers.

There are a few problems that Trump had not considered in his calculation, his only goal being to save his own ass (and the asses of/in his Cabinet and family too) from impeachment.

The first problem is that it’s literally illegal.

According to the 2022 Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act, passed 100-0 in the Senate and 413-9 in the House, the United States may not import such products from Russia unless and until the President certifies to Congress that Russia has ceased all hostilities against Ukraine, that Russia poses no threat to NATO members, and that Russia respects Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Maybe Trump’s attention from these details was distracted due to the fact that he was, once again, not the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and he was busy composing his very sane 600-word rebuttal of the Committee’s decision when he claimed that he should have actually (while coming to the aid of warmonger Vladimir Putin) won eight Nobel Prizes.

The next problem with the Trump/Putin diesel deal, aside from the complete lack of morality behind the decision, is that it’s very likely impossible for Russia to meet the agreed delivery volumes and timelines. This is due to the fact that much of their refining capacity is incapacitated due to Ukraine’s long range drone strikes.

Even though Moscow gets special treatment to shield residents there from any effects of the war against Ukraine, fuel shortages are even common there. If Putin can’t satisfy domestic needs, he can’t fulfill international orders.

And then we have the problems with the volumes of deliveries from Russia to the US being, for various reasons, almost irrelevant when compared to US domestic consumption, production, and exports.

If Trump had anyone competent in his administration, he would know that the initial delivery of 2.25 million barrels is the equivalent of about 14 hours of demand. If Trump had anyone competent in his administration, he would know that the US is exporting 13.6 million barrels of petroleum products per day. If Trump hadn’t decided that Canada was “one of the worst countries in the entire world” to deal with, he might have tapped into their long history of supplying petroleum products to the US, particularly the northern US states they are literally touching, with no pan-continental shipping therefore needed.

And, lastly, not to put too fine a point on it, if the US pays Russia for the import of anything of any description, they’re funding the war machine that kills Ukrainian civilians every day.

One of the things we always see in the way the Trump cult operates is how everyone falls into line with what Trump is attempting to pull, regardless of how crazy it is or his record of one abject failure after another.

So cue Fox News spouting utter nonsense in defence of the deal, and Elon Musk claiming that “Zelenskyy has gone too far” [in the defence of his people] and calling for Zelenskyy to be replaced with a new President.

In the aforementioned three-minute exchange on Fox News it was refreshing to see pushback from Brian Kilmeade on a firehose of falsehoods from across the sofa where even Boris Johnson was being blamed, 49 months after he left Downing Street, for the ongoing war. This trope is common, it makes sense only in one context, to direct blame way from where it truly lies – Russia. As Kilmeade said, “it would be the biggest mistake of his administration, to work with Russia. That is the modern Hitler of our generation.”

Related reading: ‘A Clear Answer’: Russia Intervened in the Brexit Vote

The Ceasefire That Wasn’t

The anger and disbelief over the events of Saturday were then overshadowed by the bombshell Sunday announcement that Trump made via his Truth Social platform regarding an agreement over an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. It was a surprise to the Ukrainian Government, which quickly made clear that it was not aware of any such deal, but, if true, would welcome it.

In fact, Ukraine has been pushing for an energy ceasefire for quite some time, only to find that Russia would prefer to watch their own economy burn rather than lighten up on attempting to kill millions of Ukrainians by denying them heat and power during yet another winter of war.

To be clear, Ukraine would be setting aside a significant element of their overall war aims in agreeing to this ceasefire. It does so as a necessary protection of Ukrainian citizens, rather than from a position of weakness.

Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure became possible thanks to investments in long-range drone capabilities that had been envisaged as a way to end the war by stopping the revenues that finance it. Those investments and the innovations they led to began to make an impact on the battlefield in 2024, when the first such strikes disabled about 15-20% of all Russian refining capacity.

The damage done in those attacks was significant but not critical because Russia had the means to repair the affected sites, but as Mikhail Khodorkovsky (once the largest oil man in Russia before he spent a decade in prison for thinking his wealth could translate into political activity) has pointed out, there are only so many times you can patch up destruction on this scale.

By the second half of 2025, Ukraine had honed their tactics and improved the accuracy of their drones. Rather than a facility being the general target of an attack, specific parts of the facility, such as the distillation units, were being blown up by Ukraine’s Top Gun drone pilots. Distillation units are particularly hard to repair and even harder to replace.

Throughout 2026 Ukraine’s ability to project strength into Russia itself has expanded in terms of the number and frequency of the attacks and in terms of their geographical reach also. Rather than a few drones being launched on a weekly basis at targets hundreds of miles inside Russia, those drones are now launched every single night. The attacks consist of hundreds of unmanned arial vehicles every day. And incredibly they now reach beyond the Ural Mountains and into Siberia. That is a range of up to 3,000 Km.

The Omsk refinery, the largest oil refining facility in Russia, was hit just this last week. It sits 2,500 KM from the Ukrainian border, and it sits seemingly as a duck as Ukraine’s drones have evaded the air defences protecting the facility twice now and can do so again.

According to analysts, more than half of Russia’s refining capacity has now been taken offline. Ukraine does not have to stop hitting this lifeblood of the Russian economy, and Ukraine is not obliged to do Donald Trump any favours whatsoever regarding the midterms, but it is willing to do so. It has offered to do so.

The other side of the coin is that Russia must not spend the winter attacking civilian power infrastructure in Ukraine, which is anyway a war crime and, at scale, constitutes as crimes against humanity.

Ukraine has offered the truce. Putin would be best served by taking it. Trump has announced the truce. Yet, so far, in the second humiliation of Trump in the space of a weekend, there is silence from Moscow. There has been no acceptance from Russia of the deal Trump announced, Putin has not commented at all.