US average diesel cost $6.28 (€5.60) a gallon on Thursday, according to the AAA motorist group, per RTÉ, up 70% since the US and Israel launched their war with Iran on 28 February. Diesel is a direct input into freight and food prices, midterm elections are next month, and President Donald Trump’s Republican Party risks losing Congress over the cost of living. That arithmetic now runs through Ukraine policy. On Saturday, Trump said Ukraine should replace President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal,” Trump said at the White House, as Al Jazeera reported, adding that “for some reason [Zelenskyy] never does.” Al Jazeera frames the outburst as a response to Kyiv’s strikes on Russian oil refineries, which have tightened fuel supply and fed the price rise; Trump has called on Ukraine to stop hitting the refineries.
“That’s a war that should have never started. And I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” Trump said, per RTÉ. He claimed Zelenskyy has “lost 30% of your country and you’ve had over a million people go between the two of them, over two million people killed” — figures presented without a source; no independent estimate puts combined dead near two million. He also argued that had he been president in 2022, “that war would have never started... It started due to incompetence.”
The diesel deal, tonne by tonne
The comments came one day after Trump announced a deal to buy diesel from Russia. RTÉ’s account of the schedule: more than 300,000 tonnes immediately, then 500,000 tonnes in November, then one million tonnes “immediately thereafter” — 1.8 million tonnes in all by the announced tranches, though the initial headline figure given was “more than one million tonnes”. No price was disclosed. On Truth Social, Trump said the announcement would mean “Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be coming down, in record numbers, and fast.” The Kremlin, for its part, said Russia “reaffirmed its readiness to supply oil and oil products to the American and world markets.”
Two earlier Trump supply moves — pressuring allies to release emergency reserves and expanding access to tax-exempt red-dyed diesel, normally reserved for farm equipment — did not bring the price down, which is the baseline against which the 1.8-million-tonne purchase should be measured. What the deal certainly does is pay Russia an undisclosed sum at a moment when sanctions are meant to squeeze its war budget.
Kyiv, London and Berlin say no
Zelenskyy condemned the purchase, saying easing sanctions on Moscow “without a clear and lasting de-escalation agreement with Russia” was “an obvious weakness”. “It plays into Russia’s hands - allowing it to kill more, wage war for longer, have even less respect for America, and inflict even greater losses and damage on the world,” he said. “Gifts to Putin will not bring peace or any benefit to the civilised world. Russia will ‘repay’ the diesel with further terror and perfidy.”
Britain and Germany both pledged to hold the sanctions line. A UK government spokesperson said Britain would “maintain pressure on Russia through the toughest sanctions regime ever imposed by the UK” and that “Russia could end this war today”, noting that Moscow has “repeatedly rejected full and partial ceasefires while continuing attacks on Ukrainian civilians and energy”. German government spokesman Stefan Kornelius said Berlin “sticks to its measures sanctioning Russia and is working jointly with its European partners on new sanctions”, and that German support for Ukraine “remains unfailing”.
The split is now explicit: Washington is buying Russian petroleum while its two largest European partners promise to tighten the regime the purchase undercuts. Whether the diesel actually moves US pump prices before election day is a function of shipping times and refinery capacity that the announcement does not address; the first tranche, 300,000 tonnes, is roughly two days of US distillate consumption. The number to watch is the AAA daily average between now and 3 November.