Seven oil tankers carrying an estimated 288,000 tonnes of Russian diesel are now sailing toward the United States, in what environmental campaigners say is the first real test of a contentious oil-supply deal struck earlier this month between presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that reversed years of sanctions on Russian energy exports.
The shipments are being tracked by Greenpeace, which says its monitoring effort — drawing on a range of sources including commercial shipping-tracking data — is the most complete count yet; earlier reports had identified only three tankers that had left Russian terminals on the Baltic Sea. It remains uncertain whether the vessels will actually be permitted to unload once they reach US waters, amid an unresolved political dispute over the legality of the shipments.
Shaun Burnie, an energy specialist with Greenpeace Ukraine, argued that now that the tankers' locations can be mapped, Congress or local US authorities should move to halt the shipments outright. "Instead of rewarding Russia for its vile war against Ukraine, there needs to be more punitive sanctions against Russia," he said. "These shipments can be stopped."
The diesel deal is one of the more unusual byproducts of the broader diplomatic thaw between Washington and Moscow this autumn, coming even as Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, including rail stations, have continued largely unabated. Critics of the arrangement argue it undercuts years of Western sanctions policy built around starving Moscow of energy revenue, while the Trump administration has framed the imports as a pragmatic response to diesel shortages pushing pump prices to record highs across the US and Europe.
Whatever happens to this particular flotilla, the episode underscores how quickly the sanctions landscape around Russian energy has shifted this year — and how closely future shipments are likely to be watched by both environmental monitors and Capitol Hill, where support for easing pressure on Moscow remains far from unanimous even within the president's own party.