Trump Wants a New Man in Kyiv. His Fuel Fix Comes From Moscow

Donald Trump says Ukraine should get a new president and that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is partly to blame for high diesel prices in the United States.

The blame is aimed at the wrong man. The reporting ties the global energy shock to the US-led war in Iran, and the one concrete fuel measure Trump has announced is a deal with Vladimir Putin that Kyiv says will help Russia pay for its war. A president is entitled to want cheaper diesel. He is not entitled to send the bill to the one government whose negotiators, a senior Ukrainian official says, were not told about the remedy.

What Trump said, and what he left out

On October 10, Trump said Ukraine should have a new president who could make a deal. He accused Zelenskyy of causing problems for American farmers and ranchers by contributing to high diesel prices, according to the Associated Press report carried by The Hindu. ^[1] He also said Zelenskyy had not done enough to end the war with Russia, and that the war should never have started, which he put down to incompetence. ^[1]

What the report does not contain is any account of how Zelenskyy raised the price of diesel in the United States. Trump offered none that the report records. What it does contain is the context Trump skipped. According to the report, the US-led war in Iran has elevated world energy prices, while Trump has sought to pin record US diesel prices on Ukraine instead. ^[1]

The reporting does not say how much of the American diesel price comes from Iran and how much from other causes, and I will not pretend to a percentage. But the direction of the blame is not hard to see. A war the United States leads is, by the reporting's account, lifting energy prices worldwide, and the American president has located the cause in Kyiv.

The best case for the president

Grant Trump what he is owed. Diesel is not an abstraction to a farmer or a rancher, it is the cost of planting, hauling and harvesting, and it arrives on the same invoice whether or not anyone in Washington has an excuse. A president who hears that and goes looking for supply is doing his job.

He is also right that the war in Ukraine has gone on too long, and that the pressure to end it is legitimate. Zelenskyy's own officials were in Miami that week, talking to Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner about a proposal to end it. ^[1] Kyiv is at the table.

But look at what the two complaints have in common. Both treat the invaded country as the obstacle. The war began with a Russian invasion, and Zelenskyy cannot be asked to end it by himself, any more than he can be asked to lower a price set in a global market that a different war has disturbed.

The numbers have a mind of their own

There is another awkward fact, and it cuts against both the president's story and some of his critics. Prices are high, but the latest official series shows them falling.

The US Energy Information Administration lists the national average for diesel at $6.529 a gallon on September 21, $6.382 on September 28 and $6.199 on October 5, in a release dated October 6. ^[3] That is a drop of 33 cents in two weeks, about 5%. It is still an enormous price. But it is not a price in a runaway climb, and a president reaching for a villain on October 10 had a weekly chart, published four days earlier, showing the easing had already begun.

Two readings do not make a trend, and the page says nothing about why prices moved. What they do show is that the national average was not climbing in the latest data, whatever Zelenskyy is supposed to have done to it.

Voters, for their part, have not pointed at Kyiv. An AP-NORC poll taken September 24 to 28 and published October 1 found that 71% of US adults disapproved of Trump's handling of Iran, and 69% said the war had not been worth fighting. ^[2] On prices, 65% said higher-than-usual costs were the result of Trump's policies. ^[2] The poll surveyed 2,140 adults, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points. ^[2]

I read the political arithmetic this way. If two in three Americans already trace their bills to the president, the tempting move is to find someone else to trace them to.

The deal is the real story

If this were only rhetoric, it would be one more president blaming a foreigner for a domestic ache. It is more than that, because Trump has paired the blame with a policy.

After a phone call with Putin on October 9, Trump announced that Russia would supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel immediately, 500,000 tons in November, one million tons after that and a further three million tons within a short period. ^[1] If those figures stack, that is 4.8 million tons, which is my sum and not Trump's.

Trump announced quantities and a schedule. Nothing in the reporting establishes that any of it has shipped, who would buy it, how much would reach American consumers or whether it would move pump prices. The most pointed doubt came from Poland's foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who questioned whether Russia could deliver a surplus at all, citing fuel shortages and reported damage to Russian refining capacity. ^[1]

The timing is the other thing. The announcement came while Ukrainian officials sat in Miami discussing a plan to end the war. A senior Ukrainian official told the Associated Press the delegation had not known about the deal beforehand and that it was not tied to the Florida talks. ^[1] Zelenskyy has said his team was being used as a "smokescreen." ^[1] The Daily Inference reported that account here, and his warning that Russian fuel sales could fund the war here.

Zelenskyy's argument is plain. Russia reads any easing of pressure as permission to keep attacking, and extra export revenue pays for weapons components, drone upgrades, missile production and mercenaries. ^[1] The same report describes Russian strikes in Ukraine during the Miami talks, including attacks that Ukrainian officials said killed civilians in Zaporizhzhia. ^[1]

Europe is not persuaded

It is not only Kyiv that sees it this way. Sweden's prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said Stockholm regretted the deal because energy revenues are central to Russia's war effort. ^[1] Germany said it remained committed to sanctions and to supporting Ukraine. ^[1]

This is the part that matters beyond one bad week of rhetoric. Sanctions on Russian energy are the main instrument Western governments have used to squeeze Moscow's budget. A deal that has Russia selling diesel in volume, announced by the American president without warning to Kyiv's negotiators, a senior Ukrainian official said, tells every European capital that the instrument may be negotiable.

Whether Europe's sanctions line holds is the question now hanging over the deal.

A leader in trouble at home finds a stranger abroad to carry it. The trick works only while people forget the order of events. Here the order is short enough to recite.

A war in Iran, led by the United States, has elevated world energy prices, according to the reporting. Diesel became a political burden. The American president blamed the Ukrainian president, then announced that Russia would supply the fuel.

Say it that way and the logic comes apart on its own. Zelenskyy did not start the Iran war. Nothing in the reporting shows he set the diesel price, and a senior Ukrainian official says his delegation did not know about the deal. The party with the clearest gain from a bigger Russian fuel market is Russia, whose strikes on Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian officials say, killed civilians the same week.

What to watch

The first test is simple and physical: whether a single tanker of that diesel moves, and to whom. Trump has promised more than 300,000 tons immediately, so there is no need to wait for November to find out.

The second is Europe's sanctions position, and whether Washington's partners stay firm or begin to wobble. The third is whether Trump ever explains how Ukraine raised the price of diesel for American farmers, something the report does not record him doing.

If I had to wager on what will lower a farmer's fuel bill, it would be an end to the Iran war that the reporting links to the energy shock, not a new face in Kyiv. Changing the president of a country at war to fix an American price is a long way to travel to avoid looking at what is nearer home.