“It finances an economy geared toward total war”—Ukraine’s third president on the Russian diesel Washington just cleared

In an open letter to US President Donald Trump, Ukraine's former president Viktor Yushchenko expressed his outrage over the US granting approval for Russian diesel trade, following a call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yushchenko's letter, posted on Facebook on October 14, highlighted that Russia had banned its diesel exports in July due to fuel shortages, exacerbated by Ukrainian strikes on refineries.

He argued that Trump's waiver and the subsequent supply deal with Moscow would reintroduce Russian fuel into the global market, potentially funding Russia's ongoing attacks on Ukrainian civilians.

Yushchenko emphasized that Russian ballistic missiles, Iranian Shahed drones, and aerial bombs are striking homes daily and nightly in cities such as Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Dnipro, and Kharkiv. He criticized the notion of "concessions" or deals with Putin, stating that they are met with more aggression from the Kremlin. He urged Ukraine not to "restrain its strikes against the infrastructure that finances and sustains Russia's war," arguing that the money paid for Russian fuel is not an abstraction but directly finances an economy geared toward total war.

Ukraine's nuclear history was a point of comparison made by Yushchenko. He noted that Ukraine inherited one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world and agreed to dismantle it, trusting the words and signatures of great powers in the Budapest Memorandum. He likened Russian energy trade to America's trade with Imperial Japan before WWII, warning that history had taught America a costly lesson on how dangerous it is to believe trade can tame an aggressor.

Yushchenko named two Ukrainians who exemplified this lesson, Sergeant Michael Strank, and Oleksandr Silvashko, to underscore the consequences of negotiating with tyrants. He concluded by emphasizing, "One does not negotiate with tyrants—one stops them."