Trump's Russian Diesel Is a Legal Hot Potato With a Five-Year Fuse
Exxon, Chevron Executives Cancel Gulf Visit Over Security Concerns What I Cover My focus spans the global energy landscape and the technologies reshaping it, specifically focusing on oil and gas, renewables, and tech-driven market… A Malta-flagged tanker called the Agioi Fanendes left the Russian port of Primorsk on Oct.
22 carrying nearly 40,000 metric tons of ultra-low-sulfur diesel, andship-tracking datahas it arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey on Nov.
Nobody has publicly said who bought the fuel, and Sen.
Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., hasasked the ship’s ownerto identify the buyer and everyone else involved by Oct.
The cargo is the first visible piece of the deal President Donald Trump announced Oct.
9, after a call with Vladimir Putin that was supposed to be about a suspected plague case in Russia.
He announced it while envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were meeting Ukrainian officials in Miami about a proposal to end the war, saying Russia would start with 300,000 tons of diesel right away and scale up from there, and as he left the White House for a campaign rally, he told reporters, “I want to thank President Putin.” Treasury issued a license authorizing the trade the same day.
Washington spent years tightening the screws on Russian energy, and Congress wrote the import ban into law in 2022, so a president thanking Putin for diesel on his way to a rally went over about as well as you’d guess.
Four days later, 12 senators,six of them Republicans, wrote to Trump asking him to rescind it.
Much of the debate has centered on the politics and the fallout for Ukraine, which matters, but there’s a more practical question that gets less attention: what happens when the fuel actually shows up, and can anyone take it without worrying about a knock on the door later? The document doing the work isOFAC General License 135, which authorizes transactions tied to the sale, delivery, offloading, and importation of Russian-origin diesel, including into the United States, through April 7, 2027.
It’s a Treasury license rather than an executive order, and that distinction carries the whole legal fight, because a license can only relax rules the executive branch wrote itself.
Most of the Russia sanctions Treasury enforces rest on emergency powers that presidents have used since 2014, andScott Anderson, a senior editor at Lawfare and a former State Department lawyer, says Trump can almost certainly waive those at will, but the import ban is another matter.
| Product | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Brent Crude | $102.14/bbl | +0.34% |
| WTI Crude | $96.90/bbl | +0.21% |
| EN590 Diesel | $846/MT | +0.18% |
| Jet Fuel A-1 | $1090/MT | +0.55% |
| Mazut M100 | $450/MT | -0.15% |
| Bitumen 60/70 | $470/MT | +0.08% |
| Sulphur Gran 99.5% | $470/MT | -0.44% |
| Urea 46% Gran | $650/MT | +1.12% |
| NPK 16-16-16 | $460/MT | -0.28% |
| Nat Gas TTF | $15.42/MMBtu | +0.92% |
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