Trump’s Russian Diesel Is a Legal Hot Potato With a Five-Year Fuse | OilPrice.com
Michael Kern
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By Michael Kern – Oct 29, 2026, 4:00 PM CDT
- A tanker carrying nearly 40,000 metric tons of Russian diesel is due in New York on Nov. 7, four days after the midterms, and no buyer has been named.
- Treasury’s General License 135 authorizes the imports, but the 2022 Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act bans them by statute, and customs penalties can be pursued for five years.
- Opposition is bipartisan, with 12 senators, six of them Republicans, asking Trump to rescind the deal, so the legal risk doesn’t hinge on who wins on Nov. 3.
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.
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?
What a Treasury License Can’t Do
The document doing the work is OFAC 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, and Scott 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. Joe Biden banned Russian oil and fuel imports by executive order in March 2022, and Congress followed later that spring with the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act, which put the ban in statute for everything under Chapter 27 of the tariff schedule, diesel included. A president can lift it only if conditions are met, among them a peace deal accepted by Ukraine’s government and advance notice to Congress, and none of that has happened.
Treasury’s only public explanation so far is a post on X saying the license is consistent with earlier actions and complies with all applicable laws. Anderson says the administration has a colorable argument built on language in the 2022 act that ties it to the original executive order, but that it’s far from clear a court would accept it. The White House does have some precedent on its side, since Treasury issued a series of 30-day licenses this spring, aimed at easing prices that spiked with the Iran war, for Russian oil already loaded on ships, and they passed without much fuss, even though there’s a separate argument that Congress should have been given advance notice of licenses that significantly change Russia policy. This one runs six months and covers future shipments, which is a bigger ask.
Blumenthal put the objection more bluntly in his letter to the shipowner, writing that the president may have issued a license but “only Congress can make it legally valid.”
The license is also drawn around diesel alone, which Anderson reads as a possible nod to the Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, the sanctions law Trump signed in September. That law defines crude oil in a way that leaves diesel out, so the administration can argue it isn’t working against the letter of the statute, though whether it honors the spirit is a harder question.
Who Signs for the Cargo?
Trump himself seemed to hedge on the U.S. part of the equation earlier this month, telling reporters the arrangement wasn’t really with him and was “a deal for the world,” which sits awkwardly next to a tanker steaming for New York Harbor. If the fuel does arrive, though, someone has to take title to it, a terminal has to let it dock, a bank has to move the money, and an insurer has to cover the ship, and each of them is looking at the same exposure. The White House didn’t say at the announcement who would be paying for the fuel, and the buyer of the first cargo still hasn’t surfaced.
Importing goods contrary to law carries criminal penalties under federal customs law along with civil ones, and Anderson notes that Trump could use his pardon power to shield importers from the criminal side but not the civil side, which can reach the full value of the cargo and the forfeiture of the vessel that carried it. Customs penalties can be pursued for up to five years after a shipment arrives.
That five-year window is the real answer to whether a company could get stuck after the election, because it doesn’t depend on who controls Congress, and a president who takes office in January 2029 would still have years left on the clock for a cargo that lands in November.
Lawmakers have already
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