Update: This story has been updated to include a Treasury Department license easing sanctions on Russian diesel, issued hours after Trump’s announcement.
President Donald Trump announced Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to send nearly 5 million tons of diesel fuel to world markets, but his post made no mention of the sanctions that Putin himself said are keeping that fuel off those markets.
Hours later, the Treasury Department quietly moved to ease them. The department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a general license authorizing transactions involving the sale, delivery and importation of Russian-origin diesel, “including importation into the United States,” through April 7, 2027. The license is dated Friday and was signed at 2:43 p.m. EDT, about two hours after Trump’s post.
In a Truth Social post after a call with Putin, Trump said Russia would “immediately” supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, another 500,000 tons in November and 1 million tons “immediately thereafter,” followed by 3 million tons “within a short period of time,” depending on the condition of Russia’s refineries. That adds up to 4.8 million tons.
“Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!” Trump wrote.
Eight days earlier, Putin told an audience in Russia that his country had diesel to spare but couldn’t sell it abroad.
“We have enough diesel fuel. But it will not come to international markets because the bans, the sanctions are in effect against our oil and petroleum products,” Putin said, according to TASS.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the same link last month, telling reporters after Trump claimed an energy truce between Russia and Ukraine that “the second necessary step is, of course, to lift the sanctions,” according to CNN.
Those restrictions include a U.S. ban on imports of Russian petroleum products dating to a 2022 executive order, as well as Treasury sanctions imposed last year on Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. The new license covers transactions barred under the U.S. sanctions programs targeting Russia, as long as they relate to diesel, and runs well past the Nov. 3 midterm elections. Its only stated exception bars debits to U.S. accounts held by Russia’s Central Bank, National Wealth Fund and Ministry of Finance. Trump’s post did not mention the license, and it was not immediately clear whether the Kremlin had confirmed the terms Trump described.
Russia has also banned its own diesel exports since July after Ukrainian drone strikes damaged its refineries. Last month, Trump publicly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to stop hitting them, and he has repeatedly blamed Ukraine’s strikes for record U.S. diesel prices, which have topped $6 a gallon.
The announcement is the latest in a string of fuel moves weeks before the midterms. On Monday, Trump signed an order opening tax-deferred red-dye diesel to truckers. Last week, he claimed Europe had agreed to release a “massive amount” of diesel, a deal University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said amounted to “almost nothing new.”
