On September 19 Trump signed a Russia sanctions bill named for a late senator who spent his career pushing aid to Ukraine. Two days earlier the tariffs on buyers of Russian oil had passed, and the headlines were about what that meant for Beijing and Delhi. Today Trump announced that Putin will release 300,000 tonnes of diesel immediately, 500,000 in November, a million after that, and that the Treasury is suspending sanctions on Russian diesel exports until April 7.

Do the arithmetic, because I think it’s the funny part. By my rough conversion, 300,000 tonnes is around two million barrels, which is a small fraction of one day of global diesel demand. Even the whole promised stream is maybe half a day. The sanctions regime built over years, and signed three weeks ago, has a price tag measured in hours of consumption. What it bought is a talking point before the midterms, and a very specific expiry date for the waiver, which lands well after the election.

You can see the path here. Early this month Trump threatened a ban on US diesel exports to pressure Europe, the G7 released emergency stocks to head that off, and now the missing barrels are coming from the country the sanctions were aimed at.

Then the timing. Hours after the announcement, five glide bombs hit Zaporizhzhia and killed at least 15 people, three of them children. I don’t think the two are causally linked, and nobody has claimed they are. But Zelensky called the deal “an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged,” and that’s the sentence I keep re-reading, because the glide bombs did the arguing for him.

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