Breaking news: Trump reaches deal with Putin for release of Russian diesel stock to global markets

This morning’s Financial Times feature article tells us the following:

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Donald Trump has struck a deal with Vladimir Putin for Russia to release diesel to the world, sparking a backlash from Ukraine as Washington aims to quell fuel prices ahead of November’s midterm elections. The US president on Friday said Moscow had agreed to “immediately” release 300,000 tonnes of the fuel “to the American and Global Marketplace” followed by another 500,000 tonnes in November and a further 1mn tonnes “immediately thereafter”.

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The article goes on to analyze the impact that this deal will have on prices for diesel at gas stations in the USA and elsewhere, as well as to consider how the Russians will find the spare fuel to fulfill these commitments.

Let us consider here other, rather different dimensions of this extraordinary deal: what it says about the two-way relationship of Putin and Trump, what it says about the likelihood of a U.S. deal on restoring the Nord Stream pipelines which is being rumored in the German press, and what it says about how and when the Russia-Ukraine war will end.

As we have heard in recent weeks, Donald Trump has sought to explain the soaring prices of diesel by the damage done to Russian refineries from Ukrainian drone attacks This issue all by itself requires some unwrapping.

First, our biggest loudmouths in the Alt Media, Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson, long denied that there was any significant damage to Russian refineries. Even as major media showed enormous lines at gas stations across Russia, our Alt Media experts said this was just a nuisance which the Russian authorities were busy fixing up. Anyone who said otherwise was now denounced as an agent of Western Russia-haters. Other analysts piled into that story and it became a chorus.

The dominant Alt Media narrative was repeated for some time, until Mainstream media produced figures showing that 40% of Russian refinery capacity had been knocked out and was taking long to repair. This news in turn was first said by our youtube heroes to be false, CIA and MI6 inspired. However, finally it was tacitly but never explicitly accepted as true. Then their attention shifted to discounting the importance of the loss of Russian refinery capacity on global market prices. Somehow they counted on universal amnesia and ignorance of records from global diesel markets showing that Russia had traditionally accounted for 10% of global diesel trading. When you remove 10% of supply to the market the effect on prices is vastly greater. Nonetheless, our Alt Media experts pooh poohed that reality when they directed all attention to Donald Trump and his repeatedly blaming high diesel prices on the Ukrainian destruction of Russian capacity rather than on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz resulting from his war of aggression on Iran.

With that background situation explained, let us move on to consider what the deal announced today suggests with respect to Russian-US relations. It is a thunderbolt! Vladimir Putin is now openly assisting the electoral prospects of Trump in the mid-term elections. This suggests a deal of far reaching proportions. Some kind of quid pro quo has been agreed. It is likely that the quid pro quo is in several directions. Almost certainly it suggests that there is a real U.S. plan for financing repairs to the Nord Stream pipeline and for the U.S. to be selling the Russian gas to Europe over the ferocious opposition of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. This in turn envisages a fierce battle with the European Parliament and European Commission who have put in place a total ban on Russian hydrocarbon imports as from 1 January 2027.

It is inconceivable that these plans for commercial cooperation are being laid down without some US-Russian understanding on how and when the Ukraine war will end. I will not speculate here and now on the content of such an understanding. However, I will be paying very close attention to all developments in the forthcoming meeting of Trump’s emissaries with the Kremlin, to any changes in the Russian negotiating position on truce in the maritime war on civilian shipping and on attacks directed at critical infrastructure on both sides in the conflict.

But if one element in this deal is worth speculating on now it is the timing: by holding out for this deal till the last weeks before the midterms, Putin surely has been able to extract the greatest benefits for Russia. He has also waited till the Russian harvest is largely collected already. Remember that agricultural equipment is a major and time sensitive consumer of diesel fuel and that domain in the Russian economy has already been served.

Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

News X World podcast on Russian bridge bombing at arrival of Merz in Kiev

as from minute 1.20

I express my gratitude to the production team at News X World for putting up this morning’s rather passionate condemnation of Merz, “thick as a stick”as I say here. I don’t know how the Modi government feels about Merz, but if any tuned in to this show it gave them food for thought.

To the Community, I ask that you consider how Alternative Media, like Mainstream, devote so much attention to the alleged senility of Donald Trump, to his mental peculiarities underlying his ugly personality. Well, it is high time to pay attention to Friedrich Merz, who, I submit, is insane, yes, criminally insane in the sense that he is a wannabe war criminal. And I can say no better about the captains of German industry who accompanied him to Kiev. My best advice to fellow investors: SELL German assets because Merz and Company are making them worthless.

Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026