As winter approaches, Russia has lifted its ban on exports of diesel and is preparing to sell hundreds of thousands of tonnes to the United States and other countries. The move is part of a deal negotiated between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which resulted in the US Department of the Treasury issuing a sanctions waiver on Russian fuel. The deal was struck amid a growing global crisis over energy supplies and prices.
More importantly for Trump, he announced it just a few weeks before the US midterm elections, in which his Republican Party risks losing its majority in both houses of Congress. The deal’s principal significance is political. Trump is in dire need of being seen by American voters as caring for them.
The fact that Trump turned to Putin and the latter was in a position to oblige him reflects Russia’s crucial role in the global energy market. But it also revealed the White House’s willingness to dump a client at a time of weakness – Ukraine, in this case – to serve domestic interests. Whether the deal constitutes a turning point in the US approach to the war in Ukraine is not clear yet.
The fate of last year’s Anchorage understanding suggests it should be approached with caution. Trump’s sudden mention post-deal of an “energy ceasefire”, which is unacceptable to Russia, looks like the US president balancing a move towards Moscow with another one reassuring Kiev – and the Europeans. In any event, the US’s ambivalent position is not helping Ukraine and its European allies as they struggle with an energy crisis and continuing losses.
The conflict, since its very start, has been about much more than what happens on the battlefield. When the US-led West in the spring of 2022, declared the “strategic defeat of Russia” as its top goal, it hoped that Western sanctions would “turn the rouble into rubble”, as then-US President Joe Biden famously said, and leave the Russian economy in tatters, all translating into Russia’s military collapse. This, as we know, did not work.
Now, Ukraine and its European allies face another difficult winter that will test their resilience to continue fighting a war of attrition. Their strategy – to escalate through a heavy air campaign against targets deep in Russian territories – has not worked either. The expectation was that ordinary Russian citizens, once directly affected by the war, would rise up and compel the Kremlin to agree to a ceasefire that would give Ukraine much-needed respite.
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