For the past three years, the US has been telling the world that buying Russian oil helps fund Putin's war in Ukraine. It imposed sanctions, pushed price caps and pressured other countries to stop buying Russian energy. The message was simple: don't give Russia money that can be used to keep the war going.
And now, apparently, that's no longer the message.
Trump has announced a deal to buy Russian diesel. More than 300,000 metric tonnes to begin with, followed by another 500,000 in November and a further million tonnes after that. The US Treasury has also issued a temporary waiver allowing Russian diesel imports until April 7.
I read that and honestly wondered if I'd missed something.
Because how do you spend three years telling the world that buying Russian fuel is helping finance a war, only to turn around and buy it yourself?
And the timing makes it even harder to understand.
Just last month, Trump signed a sweeping sanctions law targeting Russia's energy revenues, the very revenues that help finance its war against Ukraine. Now there's a deal that appears to go in the opposite direction.
A month. That's all it took for the message to become so confusing.
Zelenskyy's response was understandably angry. He warned that giving Putin these kinds of concessions wouldn't bring peace and would only encourage further Russian aggression.
It's easy to read statements like that and move on to the next headline. But there's a real person behind those words, leading a country that is still being attacked. For Ukraine, this isn't some argument over fuel prices or diplomatic optics. It's about a war that continues to cost lives.
And yes, I understand that energy prices are a serious problem.
Diesel doesn't just power trucks. It keeps supply chains moving, helps farmers get their work done and affects the cost of transporting just about everything we buy. When prices rise sharply, ordinary people feel it. Businesses struggle, household budgets get tighter and governments come under pressure to do something.
I'm not going to pretend that problem doesn't matter.
But surely there's a difference between trying to ease an energy crisis and making a deal that undermines the very policy you've spent years defending.
That's what I can't quite get past.
This isn't simply a case of the US quietly adjusting its energy policy. It's happening publicly, while the same administration has spent years arguing that Russian energy money helps sustain the war in Ukraine.
And the deal may not even deliver much relief.
Oil market analyst Rory Johnston reportedly dismissed the expected impact as a "nothing burger". The numbers help explain why. The initial 300,000 tonnes amount to roughly 2.25 million barrels of diesel, while the US exports around 1.5 million barrels a day.
Even without getting lost in the technical details, the difference in scale is hard to ignore.
Jim Mitchell of Wood Mackenzie reportedly described the arrangement as another source of supply for a very tight diesel market, rather than a real solution.
So what exactly is being achieved here?
The US takes a political hit, gives Russia an opportunity to portray the deal as a diplomatic victory and risks damaging the credibility of its own sanctions policy. Meanwhile, the relief for American consumers may be far smaller than the headlines suggest.
That seems like a lot to give up for something that might not change very much.
Australia's energy minister, Chris Bowen, also made his country's position clear. Australia doesn't need or want Russian fuel, he said, adding that it doesn't want Putin to benefit from the war in the Middle East.
He didn't directly attack Washington, but the message wasn't difficult to understand. Australia's position is that Russia shouldn't be rewarded for its invasion of Ukraine.
Sometimes, what a government doesn't say is almost as revealing as what it does.
And I keep wondering what the actual thinking is behind all this.
Is it about bringing diesel prices down before the midterm elections? Is it an attempt to put America's domestic economic concerns ahead of its commitments to Ukraine? Or is it simply another example of how quickly foreign policy can change when the political costs at home become too high?
Maybe it's a bit of everything. I honestly don't know.
What I do know is that consistency matters, especially when you're asking other countries to make sacrifices in the name of a principle.
You can't spend years telling the world that buying Russian fuel helps fund a war, pressure your allies to stop doing it and then turn around and make your own deal when prices become politically uncomfortable without expecting people to question what that principle was worth in the first place.
There's nothing wrong with governments changing course when circumstances change. Sometimes they have to. But if the reasoning has changed, explain it. If there's an emergency, make the case for it. If the decision involves a difficult trade-off, be honest about what is being traded away.
What doesn't help is pretending that none of this contradicts anything that came before.
Because the people who will bear the consequences of this war aren't sitting around negotiating diesel shipments. They're the people in Ukraine who have spent years being told that the United States stands with them.
Imagine being in their position and watching this unfold. One day, you're told that cutting off Russian energy revenue is essential to stopping the war. The next, you're watching the same country make a deal to buy Russian fuel.
What are you supposed to make of that?
I don't have a better solution to the diesel crisis. I don't know what the perfect policy would look like, and I'm not going to pretend that running a country through an energy shock is simple.
But I do think governments should be held to the standards they set for everyone else.
And there's one detail I keep coming back to.
In the same week that the United States took action against an international court over its pursuit of accountability for alleged war crimes, it was also moving towards a deal to buy fuel from Russia, the country it has spent years accusing of aggression against Ukraine.
Those are two separate decisions, with different legal and political circumstances. But together, they raise an uncomfortable question about how consistently the US applies the principles it claims to defend.
Maybe this deal will bring some relief at the pump. Maybe it won't.
Either way, I think it's worth asking what happens to a country's credibility when its principles seem firm until following them becomes expensive.
Because that's the part that stays with me.
Not just the diesel. Not just the money. Not even the politics.
It's the thought that, somewhere along the way, a promise made to people fighting for their survival can become negotiable when the price at home gets too high.
And I don't think we should simply shrug and move on from that.
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