Oil Prices Today: Russian Diesel Deal Stalls at Sea
The oil prices today facing American drivers tell a story that President Donald Trump's deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin was supposed to change — and so far has not. When Trump announced on October 9 that Russia would begin supplying diesel to the United States, the pitch was simple: more fuel on the market would push down prices that had climbed toward record highs in the weeks before the midterm elections. More than a month later, not a single barrel of Russian diesel has been imported into the United States, the first tankers carrying the fuel have turned away from American ports mid-voyage, and the national average price of a gallon of diesel has barely moved. The deal exists on paper, in the form of a Treasury Department license. In practice, it is stalled on the high seas, caught between a presidential announcement, a law passed by Congress, and a fuel industry that does not want to be the test case for which one wins.
The deal Trump announced on October 9
Trump announced the arrangement on October 9, after what he described as a highly successful discussion with Putin. The call had been expected to focus on a suspected plague case in Russia; instead, Trump used it to unveil an energy deal, saying Moscow had agreed to immediately supply diesel to the United States and to global markets. In a post on Truth Social, he said Russia would start with 300,000 tons of diesel right away and scale up from there. Later reporting put the shape of the plan in more detail: 500,000 metric tons to be put on the market in November, followed by another one million tons after that, with a total of more than 4.8 million metric tons destined for American and global markets over the life of the arrangement.
The timing was political as well as economic. Diesel prices had been climbing through the autumn, driven in part by tighter global supplies after the conflict in the Middle East, and the cost of fuel was feeding into the price of almost everything Americans buy, because trucks, trains, farm equipment and heating systems all run on it. In the run-up to the midterm elections, high diesel prices were a visible pocketbook issue, and Trump presented Russian diesel as a direct answer. The White House later said that, consistent with the deal agreed between Trump and Putin, Russian diesel was on the water and heading to the market, which would ease prices for Americans.
The same day Trump unveiled the deal, the Treasury Department moved to clear the way. Its Office of Foreign Assets Control issued General License 135, which authorizes transactions tied to the sale, delivery, offloading and importation of Russian-origin diesel, including imports into the United States, through April 7, 2027. Without it, any American company handling the fuel would have faced the sanctions regime the United States has built around Russian energy since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With it, the administration argued, the trade could proceed lawfully for six months.
The tankers that turned away
The first test of that argument came on the water, and it did not go the administration's way. At least three tankers loaded with Russian diesel at the Baltic port of Primorsk in late October set out declaring destinations on the American East Coast — and then changed their minds. Two of them, the Talisman and the Leruo, diverted entirely. The Leruo updated its transponder on Monday, November 2, to show it was en route to Brazil, while the Talisman set a course for the Mediterranean, where it was later tracked off the coast of Algeria. A third tanker, the Malta-flagged Agioi Fanendes, carrying roughly 40,000 metric tons of ultra-low-sulfur diesel — about 300,000 barrels — loaded at Primorsk on October 22, slowed near the American East Coast and began loitering in a zigzag pattern, its destination uncertain. Ship-tracking service Kpler later listed its likely destination as South America, and the vessel's manager, Eastern Mediterranean Maritime, told reporters that its discharging port had not been confirmed.
The diversions were not accidents of weather or scheduling. Industry executives and lobbyists told reporters that American oil companies were reluctant to handle the cargoes because of the potential legal and reputational consequences, and the pattern bore that out: ships that had declared American destinations changed them after it became clear that no buyer, terminal, bank or insurer wanted to be the first to take title to Russian fuel. Nobody has publicly said who bought the first cargo, and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut asked the ship's owner to identify the buyer and everyone else involved by October 31. As of the latest reporting, the buyer still has not surfaced. The lesson of the first month is that a Treasury license can authorize a transaction, but it cannot compel anyone to take part in it — and so far, no one in the American fuel chain has been willing to be first.
Why buyers are afraid to touch the cargo
The fear rests on a direct conflict between two instruments of American law, and on the fact that no court has yet resolved which one prevails. In March 2022, President Joe Biden banned Russian oil and fuel imports by executive order. Congress followed later that spring with the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act, which put the ban into statute for everything classified under Chapter 27 of the tariff schedule — a category that includes diesel. A president can lift a ban imposed by executive order. Lifting a ban written into statute is a different matter: the law sets out conditions that must be met, including a certification to Congress following a period of consultation, and legal analysts have argued that those conditions have not been satisfied.
General License 135, by contrast, is a Treasury license, not an executive order and not a statute. Its power reaches only as far as the executive branch's own rules. It can relax sanctions prohibitions that the executive branch wrote itself. What it cannot do, according to the legal analysis that has shaped the debate, is override a statute passed by Congress. The analysis published by the legal journal Lawfare concluded that the statutory restrictions appear to remain in place, and as of November 5, no court had ruled on the dispute. That leaves every company in the chain — the buyer who takes title, the terminal that lets the ship dock, the bank that moves the money, the insurer that covers the voyage — looking at the same exposure with no judicial answer in sight. Importing goods contrary to law carries criminal penalties under federal customs law, along with civil penalties that can reach the full value of the cargo, and one legal scholar noted that Trump could use his pardon power to shield importers from the criminal side of that exposure, but not from the civil side.
Congress has made the warning explicit. Four days after Trump announced the deal, twelve senators — six of them Republicans — wrote to Trump asking him to rescind it. A bipartisan group of lawmakers then wrote to the chief executives of major American banks and the heads of several port authorities, warning that importing Russian diesel could violate federal law and expose companies to civil and criminal liability, and that the imports would raise national-security concerns by providing Moscow with revenue to help finance its war against Ukraine. The group included Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Ron Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse, Chris Coons and Elizabeth Warren, outgoing Republican Senator Thom Tillis, and Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. They urged companies not to facilitate the trade until the relevant legal requirements had been met, and demanded that they preserve records of proposed or completed transactions dating back to September 1 and confirm by October 28 that they had done so. State officials joined the warning: on November 2, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill wrote to port officials and terminal operators warning that any transaction involving the diesel would violate federal law and could result in sanctions.
Oil prices today: the number that has barely moved
For all the drama on the water, the number that matters most to American households has barely changed — and that is the heart of the story for oil prices today. On the day the deal was announced, the average diesel price in the United States was 6.28 dollars a gallon. On November 3, the day of the midterm elections, it was 6.29 dollars. By November 9 it had eased to 6.17 dollars, according to AAA — a small decline, but one that left prices close to the record of 6.53 dollars set in September. Another measure put the national average at 6.16 dollars a gallon as of the Tuesday of the week the tankers diverted. In other words, a month after a deal that was supposed to flood the market with cheap Russian fuel, American drivers are paying almost exactly what they paid before it was announced.
There are two reasons the price has not moved, and both were visible from the start. The first is that the fuel has not actually arrived: no Russian diesel has been imported into the United States since April 2022, according to American government data, and the deal has not changed that. A cargo that diverts to Brazil or loiters in the Atlantic does not lower the price at an American pump. The second is scale. The 500,000 metric tons agreed for the first month of the deal represents only about 0.4 percent of global consumption — a rounding error in a world market, and far too small to move prices on its own even if every ton reached its intended buyer. The tariffs impact on prices that American consumers feel most directly comes through diesel itself: because the fuel powers the trucks that deliver goods, the farm equipment that harvests crops and the heating systems that warm homes in winter, a high diesel price ripples through the whole economy. That is why the deal was pitched as relief, and why its failure to deliver is politically costly. Fuel imports from Russia remain banned by the United Kingdom, the European Union and Switzerland, which limits where the cargoes can easily go and underlines how isolated the American carve-out is among Western allies.
The politics of a deal with Moscow
The deal has also become a political liability. The image of an American president thanking Vladimir Putin for diesel, days before an election in which his party lost control of both chambers of Congress, drew criticism from senior Democrats and Republicans alike. Critics argue that the carve-out for diesel is illegal, that it hands Moscow revenue for its war in Ukraine at a moment when the United States is pressing allies to tighten sanctions, and that it was negotiated without the consultation with Congress that the 2022 statute requires. The bipartisan character of the Senate letter — six Republicans among the twelve signatories — is a measure of how broadly that view is held.
What happens next for the diesel deal
The immediate future of the arrangement turns on three questions, none of which has a quick answer. The first is legal: whether any court will rule on the conflict between General License 135 and the 2022 statute, and if so, which way. Until a judge speaks, the uncertainty that has kept buyers away will persist. The second is commercial: whether any buyer, terminal, bank or insurer will decide the cargo is worth the risk. The first cargo's buyer has still not been identified, and the industry's behaviour so far suggests that no major American company wants to be the test case. The third is political: whether the new Congress, which takes office in January with Democrats in control of both chambers, will use its oversight powers to investigate the deal, demand documents and hold hearings — a prospect the lawmakers' record-preservation letters already anticipate.
The license itself runs through April 7, 2027, which gives the administration months to try to make the arrangement work. But time may not help if the underlying problem is legal rather than logistical: a license that cannot override a statute will not become more powerful with age, and a cargo that no one will unload will not become more attractive because it has been at sea longer.
For American drivers, the practical conclusion is simpler. The oil prices today at the pump reflect a global market in which Russian diesel is still effectively absent from the United States, and nothing in the past month suggests that is about to change quickly. The deal that was supposed to bring relief has so far brought only a legal fight, a set of diverted tankers, and a reminder that in energy markets, as in much else, an announcement is not the same as a delivery. If a cargo does eventually reach an American port, it will raise the same questions all over again, about who bought it, who financed it, who insured it, and whether the law allowed any of them to do so. Until then, the diesel deal remains what it has been since the day it was announced: fuel on the water, heading somewhere, with no one willing to say where it will land.
Source: CNN