President Trump announced a new diesel deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin on October 9 to the surprise of many U.S. allies. Experts argue the agreement could undercut Western economic pressure on Russia and solidarity efforts with Ukraine while doing little to lower fuel prices. “The announcement of the deal is really for political effect at home, to try to influence voters in this election,” expert Vijay Vaitheeswaran said. “The idea that there might be lower prices coming because of an innovative deal that President Trump did, with his relationship with Putin, sounds pretty good [to voters].” Beyond lowering fuel prices, the Trump administration reportedly hopes the deal will signal Washington’s openness to working with Moscow and bring the country back to the negotiating table to end the war. Few experts believe the diesel deal will have much of an effect on global oil markets in the near future. Instead, several said it would only bolster Russia economically and further strain transatlantic unity. “The diesel deal shows that Washington’s Russia policy is now driven by high prices at the pump before the November 3 midterm elections, rather than by any shared transatlantic strategy,” expert @m2matthijs said. “The irony is that the U.S., and especially President Trump, has lectured the Europeans for years about the dangers of buying Russian energy; now it is easing sanctions to buy Russian diesel itself, without consulting anyone in Europe.” Whether or not it is implemented, the surprise diesel deal has strained relations between the United States and its allies. “For many EU leaders, [the diesel deal] is further proof that the Europeans can no longer afford to outsource their security policy and can no longer rely on the United States to contain Russia,” Matthijs said.

In this episode of The Spillover, cohost Rebecca Patterson and Veda Partners cofounder @HenriettaVeda discuss the upcoming 2026 U.S. midterm elections. Treyz notes that although “the House is a guaranteed pickup” for Democrats, Senate races will prove more challenging. “If you are in the United States Senate, you have an 88 percent chance of winning your election if you are already the incumbent,” says Treyz.

When President Donald Trump announced a deal to buy diesel from Russia at the end of last week, “it was easy to shrug off the move as a feeble effort to limit energy prices in advance of the midterms,” writes expert Stephen Sestanovich. "A week later, the story looks disturbingly different; the possible consequences, much more serious, and likely to last well beyond" the elections. A day after announcing new diesel imports from Russia, Trump began calling for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s removal from office. He followed this up by claiming that Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to suspend attacks on each other’s main energy targets. "This, it quickly became clear, was pure invention. Reports suggested what had actually happened was that U.S. negotiators were pressing the Ukrainian government to do something far more radical than a mutual ceasefire—to cease its attacks unilaterally, whether Russia complied or not," Sestanovich writes. “It is hard to overstate how much this new public hostility by U.S. officials—above all, the president—has disoriented Ukraine’s leadership,” he writes. “In searching for a new way to handle Trump, Ukraine’s leadership has seemed suddenly at sea." "Rather than see the prospect of postwar riches as the key that will bring Putin to the table, he now acts as though pressure—on Zelenskyy, not Putin—will be the crucial instrument of a breakthrough, ” Sestanovich argues.

“Of [a car’s] gasoline, less than 1% of that energy ends up moving the driver,” says Amory Lovins, cofounder and chairman emeritus of the @RockyMtnInst. If companies make cars out of carbon fiber–reinforced plastic, he states that “you take out almost 700 pounds of weight, but the car costs the same because you need fewer batteries to haul less weight around.” According to Lovins, the most efficient car about to enter production in the United States “is a two seater that gets the equivalent of 343 miles a gallon. In fact, so efficient—three times better than a Tesla—that just the solar cells on top of the car will run it 11,000 miles a year without having to plug in.”