U.S. President Donald Trump with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, U.S., August 15, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Conservative writer and commentator Mark Wallace is calling President Donald Trump's agreement with Vladimir Putin both a moral and strategic failure for the United States.
In Sept. 2025, Trump told Fox News, “If you want to win, don’t buy oil from Russia.” Now he's doing exactly that.
In a column for iPaper, Wallace explained that Trump's deal to buy a minuscule amount of diesel from Russia reverses years of Western economic pressure designed to deprive the Kremlin of revenue for its war in Ukraine and its broader campaign of sabotage and aggression.
"The latest display of 'the art of the deal' represents a new low, even for the White House’s most erratic and self-indulgent occupant in its more than two centuries," he wrote on Tuesday, referencing Trump's famous book.
Wallace concedes that sanctions have been imperfect, but Russian oil still reaches the global market through workarounds. Now, instead of holding the sanction violators responsible, Trump is caving into his own claim that to win he can't buy oil.
Wallace pointed to President Volodymyr Zelensky, who described Trump's diesel purchase as “an investment” in Russia’s war. He added that Putin would likely repay with “further terror" on his people. Ukraine has been responding in kind to Russia's attacks by hitting Russian oil refineries. It has made a huge difference and may have prompted Putin's proposal to sell Trump diesel.
"Such an agreement is pure foolishness from a president visibly flailing in the face of soaring diesel prices, driven by his own misadventure in the Gulf," wrote Wallace. "The amounts involved would provide only enough fuel for a few days of domestic consumption, so Trump has sold Western solidarity, the vestiges of American decency and Ukrainian lives for nothing more than a fig leaf for his self-inflicted political troubles."
He thinks that Trump likely fell for Putin's lies again. The Russian president falsely claimed he agreed to the ceasefire, and Trump announced the diesel, which experts believe will do little to ease high pump prices. Mere hours after the ceasefire was announced and into the following day, Russia was still bombing Ukraine's power grid. It wasn't long after that "drones slammed into Ukrainian gas and other energy facilities, just as they have done for years on end," wrote Wallace.
He made it clear that no one in the world has a reason to believe what Putin says or trust him.
"The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet, with the CIA and humanity’s largest spy satellite network at his personal disposal, has the least excuse of all to be gulled by such a tyrant," Wallace complained. "Yet he falls for Putin’s lies again and again, whenever they suit his agenda or his self-image."
He wondered if Trump thought it would get him a ticket to the Nobel Peace Prize, which he lost to someone who helped fight genocide legally.
Wallace closed by blasting, "Add it to the list of Donald Trump’s many, many deals. It was a dreadful idea to start with; his interlocutor was a liar and a killer who could not be trusted at the best of times, and the grandest achievement it purported to deliver evaporated faster than a Russian refinery on a clear day. If this is the art of the deal, thanks but no thanks."
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