THE ‘energy ceasefire’ Donald Trump announced on Sunday occasioned surprise in Kyiv and silence in Moscow. Volodymyr Zelensky declared that Ukraine would abide by it if Russia followed suit. A day later, the beleaguered president said six Ukrainian energy facilities had been attacked since Trump’s declaration, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reportedly said that Ukraine did not deserve any respite.
Diesel prices in the US have almost doubled during Trump’s second term. The primary culprit, according to most analysts, is the US-Israeli war on Iran. Hardly anyone takes seriously American claims of completely controlling the Strait of Hormuz. It is worth noting that when, almost a half-century ago, Cold War hawks in Washington were petrified by the prospect of the Red Army rolling into Iran after it invaded Afghanistan, the first step in the retaliatory game plan entailed the American capture of the same strait to thwart the designs of the ‘evil empire’.
The thirst for fuel has since only increased, and Trump’s diesel deal with Moscow, pausing the recently imposed sanctions against Russian commercial interests, is obviously intended to salvage the declining prospects of the ruling Republicans in next month’s midterm elections. Trump fears Congressional censure and a third impeachment in the (unlikely) event of the Democrats obtaining majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, just as Benjamin Netanyahu fears legal consequences should his genocidal coalition fail to perpetuate its ascendancy following the forthcoming Israeli polls.
Given its key role as a supply chain fuel, diesel affects the price of almost everything in the capitalist economy. And, no matter what he claims, Trump’s politics is reeling from the popular reaction to the rising cost of living, which includes the MAGA loyalists who had swallowed the lie that their economic woes would at least be alleviated, if not vanquished, by the second coming of their faltering messiah.
The diesel relief Trump desires ahead of the midterms is unlikely.
Trump has often criticised Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, and lately repeated his call for Zelensky’s replacement by a more pliable president, while never so much as hinting that Russia might be better served by someone other than Vladimir Putin. The claims from 2024 that he would halt the conflict in a day once he became president are ancient history, although he continues to insist that the war would never have started had he been president in 2022. Notwithstanding Trump’s customary delusions about his deal-making skills, that is not an entirely absurd notion, given the extent to which the Biden administration missed every opportunity to forestall a conflict it knew was imminent.
That’s now history, and Trump’s continued attempts to blame all his domestic woes on ‘sleepy Joe Biden’ are rarely taken seriously even by the MAGA faithful. But however gratifying a Democratic ascendancy next month or two years hence might be in the domestic context (at least public executions would probably be ruled out), it is unlikely to serve as a panacea on the fraught Ukraine front. A complete US realignment with the warmongering impulses of Nato’s least sensible European components could prove catastrophic.
Much of Europe has been rearming at a ferocious pace, partly to please Trump but mostly to prepare for what is seen by some as an inevitable direct conflict with Russia. The most belligerent among them — from the UK and France to Poland and Finland — have seemingly tried to hasten it. By and large, neither the alarmingly ascendant far right, nor much of the reasonable left is a party to the renewed Russophobia. The biggest risk of expanding the deadliest conflict Europe has experienced since 1945 comes from the so-called centrists in charge of Britain, France, Germany, the European Union, Nato, and so on. The occasional pushback against Trump’s more flagrant outrages is accompanied by neoconservative impulses of their own.
Putin’s capacity for catastrophic errors is legendary, and it isn’t inconceivable that Russia could do its bit to provoke the wider war that Nato diehards dream of. One can only hope that better sense will prevail on both sides. The diesel relief Trump desperately desires ahead of the midterms is unlikely. It’s an open question whether a different Ukrainian president would be more amenable to the kind of capitulation that Putin demands, but there’s even less chance that Israel’s genocidal impulses will be diminished after this month’s elections.
But then, with a few exceptions, elections hardly matter anywhere in the world nowadays. Democracy without disinformation might be a thing of the past, but we’re doomed unless it can be resurrected. From Palestine to Ukraine, fake ceasefires won’t halt the momentum towards an irrevocable apocalypse.
Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2026
