Last week, Donald Trump announced an agreement with Vladimir Putin to import millions of tons of Russian diesel into the United States over the coming months. Shortly afterwards, the Treasury Department lifted the very sanctions on Russian diesel exports that had been imposed in 2022 to starve the Kremlin’s war chest.

A gift to Russia

With this single decision, Washington reopened a revenue stream that Western allies had spent four years trying to close, accelerating an alignment toward Moscow that now looks increasingly difficult to reverse. Set against the White House’s simultaneous pressure on Kyiv to cease strikes on Russian refineries, a coherent picture emerges — one in which Trump is deliberately clearing the ground for a Russian victory.

The official justification centres on fuel prices, which have spiralled since the war Trump launched against Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz. Russian diesel, however, will do remarkably little to address a crisis of that magnitude. A few million tons spread across several months will barely register at American pumps. With the midterm election in mind, voters may notice a marginal dip at best, while Putin walks away with billions.

Strategically, the arrangement is even harder to defend. Russia continues to supply Iran with satellite information and intelligence that help the IRGC keep fighting American forces. Consequently, every dollar flowing to Russian energy companies indirectly finances the targeting of American soldiers. Ukraine loses, US troops face greater risk, and regular Americans gain almost nothing. Only one party walks away better off, and it sits in the Kremlin.

Blaming the victim

Last night, in an interview with Newsmax, Trump made his loyalties plainer still. “Zelenskyy is not a good guy for us to deal with,” he said, adding that Ukraine’s leadership had “destroyed that country.” He then accused Zelensky of driving up oil prices by striking Russian refineries, and recounted a young Ukrainian woman’s supposed claim that her president had cost the nation its men.

The inversion is breathtaking in its audacity. Every casualty Trump so gravely enumerated traces its origin back to a single decision made in Moscow, to Putin’s order that sent Russian forces across a sovereign border in the dead of winter. Zelensky, for his part, is doing precisely what any leader would do when his country is being consumed from the outside, striking the refineries that keep Russia’s war machine fed and moving. That is called self-defence.

And the oil prices that Trump mourns so theatrically soared not from any Ukrainian provocation, but from his own war on Iran, from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that his administration set in motion. Yet through the entire interview, across every grievance and every dramatic pause, Putin’s name went unspoken as a source of blame. Not once.

Musk’s hand on the switch

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been tightening a different screw. For years, Ukraine’s armed forces have depended on SpaceX’s Starlink and, more recently, on its military-grade sibling, Starshield. This week, Ukrainian forces reported that battlefield operations had been hampered by lost access, specifically citing new restrictions on Starshield.

Serhiy Beskrestnov, who advises President Zelensky on weapons technology, wrote that the military received no warning and that several missions failed as a result. Zelensky himself told the Financial Times that Starlink service had been “pushed” to a slow speed, adding pointedly: “It was not a technical problem. It was the will.”

Zelensky stopped short of naming who made that decision. Still, Musk’s record leaves little room for charitable readings. He has repeatedly mocked the Ukrainian president and called for him to step down, so restrictions arriving in lockstep with White House pressure point strongly toward coordination. In Kyiv, at least, they are widely understood as part of the administration’s campaign to limit what Ukrainian forces can do on the battlefield.

A predictable alignment

None of this should come as a surprise. Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have spent years displaying open disdain for democratic allies while lavishing praise on autocrats around the world. Their instincts consistently favour strongmen, and Ukraine, a democracy fighting for its survival, is now paying the price for that sympathy.

Europe, therefore, should draw the obvious conclusion. The Russian diesel deal is merely the latest entry in a long ledger of American unreliability. Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran, launched without meaningful consultation with European capitals, sent oil prices soaring, reignited inflation across the continent, and choked the supply lines on which European industry depends.

Before that, Washington had already slapped sweeping tariffs on its closest allies, treating decades of partnership as a bargaining chip in a trade dispute. Now, on top of everything, it is rewarding the very regime that threatens Europe’s eastern flank.

A president who wages sustained assault on his own country’s democratic institutions can hardly be expected to defend democracy anywhere else. Trump has made that much clear. And then there is Elon Musk himself. A single billionaire, answerable to no electorate, has demonstrated the capacity to throttle a nation’s battlefield communications at will and bend his platform’s algorithms toward propaganda with equal ease. Taken together, European dependence on American goodwill reveals itself for what it has become, a profound and overlooked strategic vulnerability.