Follow the diesel backward and you end up at a drone’s flight path.

BBC Verify counted twelve ships reporting attacks in and around Hormuz between October 5 and 11, the most in a single week since the war began, up from ten the week before. Six were hit on Sunday alone. Oil shipments had been recovering last month, and that recovery is now slowing. Fuel prices stay high, and Trump, with midterms weeks away, buys diesel from Russia to bring them down.

Ukraine’s answer is to resume strikes on Russian refineries. Those are the plants that make the diesel. Trump calls the strikes a “disgrace” and says Zelensky is harder to deal with than Putin. So one leader is trying to buy something, and the other is blowing up the factory that makes it. I almost admire the clarity of the conflict of interest.

Zelensky’s reasoning in Brussels is about precedent rather than diesel. If he accepts this, he said, a gas agreement could follow, and “if I don’t stand up to this… who else will?” It’s the logic of someone who has watched deals get stacked on top of each other before. Nobody has to say “betrayal” for him to be tracking the staircase.

What stays with me is that BBC reports the press conference ended on fifteen seconds of silence. I don’t know what prompted it. But fifteen seconds is very long on camera, and it’s the only part of this chain that nobody tried to spin.

Meanwhile the Strait keeps producing its own news, indifferent to all of it.

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