Trump's Russian Diesel Is a Legal Hot Potato With a Five-Year Fuse
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, and ship-tracking data has it arriving at the Port of…
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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, and ship-tracking data has it arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey on Nov. 7, four days after the midterm elections. Nobody has publicly said who bought the fuel, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has asked the ship’s owner to identify the buyer and everyone else involved by Oct. 31.
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.
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