President Donald Trump has sold out Ukraine, the critics were right all along: Trump, the Russian asset, finally showed his hand. We have been here before—almost exactly here. In February 2025, Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the cameras, and the administration spent weeks advancing terms the Kremlin might as well have drafted.
Ukraine's obituaries were written then too. Seventeen months later, the two presidents stood together in Ankara joking about Ukrainian drones over Moscow, after a year in which Kyiv was granted what no previous administration had given it: the freedom to choose its own targets inside Russia. That is reason enough to hold the verdict a while longer.
On October 9, Trump announced Russia would ship diesel to global markets—300,000 tons immediately, over three million more to follow—with Treasury waiving sanctions through April 2027. Two days later he declared an “energy ceasefire”. Kyiv agreed to suspend refinery strikes, and Zelensky said within days that Russia had already broken it.
Last week he accused Trump of pressuring Ukraine to capitulate and offered to trade the refinery campaign for Patriot interceptors. Trump told him to take a deal or watch it “get worse.” That refinery campaign was the most consequential thing this administration did to Russia—I said so in August—and it is now a chip on the table. But Trump's Russia policy has never run on a theory of Russia.
It runs on whether the present course is working for him. In early 2025, appeasement looked like a fast win, so he tried it. Within months, it was clear Moscow would take nothing short of surrender, so he dropped it and handed Kyiv the targeting map.
Now, diesel is $6.28 a gallon, up nearly 80 percent since January, and the midterms are two weeks out. Russian barrels look like relief, or at least the mirage of relief. Which is why it will not hold.
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