Murdoch Paper Torches Trump Over Desperate Putin Deal

Carlo Allegri/Reuters Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has torn into Donald Trump for his sanctions-busting deal to buy diesel from Russia.

The 80-year-old president announced last week a deal to buy millions of barrels of diesel from Vladimir Putin’s Russia in a bid to bring down prices before midterm elections on Nov.

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But in an editorial published Sunday titled “Trump’s Diesel Insult to Lindsey Graham,” the Journal’s Editorial Board said the amounts involved would be too small to affect global prices and any money raised would simply fund Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.

“Thirty-six million barrels of Russian diesel won’t move prices much.

The world consumed 28 million barrels of diesel and other distillates daily in 2025, according to OPIS, which is part of Dow Jones Energy,” the Journal wrote in its op-ed.

“What the deal will do is directly finance Mr.

Putin’s bloody war in Ukraine.” The U.S. has been plunged into an energy crisis following its war in Iran, which closed the Strait of Hormuz and caused prices at the pump to soar for everyday Americans.

That’s bad news for Trump and the GOP ahead of the midterms, with the Democrats widely expected to capture the House of Representatives and increasingly likely to control the Senate.

Trump’s route out of the woods is to blame the drone blitz Ukraine has carried out on Russian oil and gas infrastructure over the summer and declare a so-called “energy ceasefire” in which both sides would stop targeting each other’s energy sector.

Both Kyiv and Moscow have been carrying out far-reaching strikes on one another’s vital infrastructure, with the former particularly successful in hitting the latter’s huge oil and gas refineries.

Russia is generally regarded as the world’s third-largest exporter of refined fuel products.

It has been so successful that Ukraine’s Defense Ministry claimed in early October that it had disabled 51 percent of Russia’s refining capacity, while the International Energy Agency reports that some refineries have been hit 15 times.

The octogenarian president went on Truth Social on Sunday to proclaim “an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine.