by Larry C. Johnson
"On 14 September 2026, with American diesel having crossed six dollars a gallon for the first time in history, President Trump settled the question of blame in a single sentence posted to social media: “The World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/Ukraine War, not Iran.” A day earlier, at his golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland, he had told Zelensky to “stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia,” because the strikes were “hurting the world.”
It is a tidy story, and it has one great virtue for the man telling it: it points at a war with someone else’s name on it. It is also, in its central claim, backwards. Not wholly false - the part about Ukrainian strikes is real - but backwards in the one respect that matters, the ranking of causes. The market data that Trump is implicitly citing say the opposite of what he says they say.
The tell is in the crack spread If you want to know what is driving the price of diesel, you do not look at the price of diesel. You look at the crack spread - the margin between crude oil and the refined product made from it. That number tells you whether the problem is a shortage of oil or a shortage of the refining capacity to turn oil into fuel. And in 2026 the diesel crack did something it had never done in recorded history: it broke one hundred dollars a barrel, hitting a record of roughly $102 on 17 August and pushing past $107 in early September. In a normal, balanced market that spread runs twenty to forty dollars.
That single fact reorders the whole argument. As RBN Energy put it plainly, the world is “not terribly short of crude in the traditional sense” - it is struggling to refine enough crude into middle distillates. The refiners themselves are running flat out, above 97 percent utilization, and still cannot keep up; they are draining tanks to cover the gap. And the tanks are nearly empty. US distillate inventories in August sat at their lowest end-of-month level since 1951 - not a typo, 1951 - and near thirty-year seasonal lows. Global refinery runs had fallen by roughly 5.1 million barrels a day year-on-year in the second quarter. This is a refining crisis sitting on top of a decade of closed refineries and underinvestment. It is structural, it is global, and most of it has nothing to do with either Vladimir Putin or Volodymyr Zelensky.
Why “mostly Russia, not Iran” inverts the evidence: Three pieces of evidence, taken together, dismantle the ranking.
First, the timeline. The Ukrainian refinery campaign is not new; it has been grinding on for well over a year. If it were the primary driver of the price, diesel would have climbed with the strike tempo. It did not. The diesel crack spread exploded to its historic highs specifically in the weeks after the United States and Israel went to war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz - through which something like a fifth of the world’s oil and products move - was throttled. Crude tells the same story in Trump’s own timeframe: Brent ran from around $67 in January to $117 in April after the first strikes on Iran, eased to the low $80s during the ceasefire, and climbed back toward $108 as the fighting resumed this autumn. The price is indexed to the Iran war, phase by phase. It is not indexed to Kyiv’s drones.
Second, the nature of the shock. The Hormuz disruption is a dual shock in a way the Russian strikes are not: it constrains both the crude reaching refiners downstream and the enormous volume of refined product that Gulf refineries themselves export to the world. Add the drone strike that briefly shut Saudi Arabia’s East–West pipeline - the very line built to bypass Hormuz - and you have the Middle East, not Russia, sitting on the pressure point. Analysts across the refining trade have reached the same verdict: record product margins reflect acute supply tightness and lost refining output, with crude prices actually moderating from their wartime peaks even as diesel held firm. Geopolitical disruption is the catalyst, and the disruption doing the heavy lifting is in the Gulf.
Third, the American price specifically. The United States does not buy Russian diesel and has not for years, so $6 at a Miami truck stop is not the sound of Russian barrels failing to arrive here - they were never coming here. What reaches the US pump is global fungibility plus a set of domestic costs Trump did not mention, including roughly $15 a barrel of renewable-fuel compliance baked straight into the price. Even the size of the Russian hit is contested: Kyiv claims it has knocked out 42.7 percent of Russian refining capacity; Reuters put the figure closer to 17 percent in the spring. When the man blaming a shortage is quoting the most generous possible number for it, that is worth noticing.
Why the wrong answer is a convenient one: I try not to read minds, so let me stick to incentives, which are visible enough. Trump is heading into November midterms in which fuel prices have become a straightforward liability for his party. The energy crisis traces, more than to anything else, to a war with Iran that he prosecuted and escalated. “Mostly Russia, not Iran” performs a specific piece of work: it moves the blame from his war to someone else’s, and it hands him a lever to pressure Zelensky into halting the strikes - which, within a day, he claimed to have achieved, announcing a mutual energy-target ceasefire that Kyiv described more cautiously as a proposal. It is also worth recording, without overstating it, that his own energy holdings have appreciated as the Iran war moved the oil market. The framing is convenient on every axis at once. That does not make it false. The evidence makes it false. But it does explain why so implausible a ranking got asserted so confidently.
The honest limits: Two caveats, because the strongest version of Trump’s case deserves an answer rather than a caricature.
The refining diagnosis actually cuts slightly his way. Because this is a distillate-capacity crisis rather than a crude crisis, refinery outages carry unusual weight right now, and Russian outages are among them. In a market this tight, with tanks this empty, even a secondary contributor moves the price more than it would in a normal year - so the strikes are doing more damage at the margin than their raw share of world capacity suggests. Halting them, and lifting Russia’s export ban, would genuinely help. That is a real point, and it is the reason the claim is misleading rather than simply fabricated.
But “would help at the margin” is a very different statement from “mostly caused by,” and the distance between those two is exactly the distance between analysis and spin. A fair account puts the structural distillate shortage first, the Iran war and Hormuz as the acute trigger that tipped a fragile market into crisis, and the Russian refinery outages third - real, aggravating, but not the engine. Trump took the third item and called it the first, and deleted the second item entirely, even though the second item is the one flying his flag. He is not wrong that refineries are the story. He is wrong about which refineries, and which war. And the war he left out is the one that answers to him."
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