Hey there everyone,
I do apologise for my absence this week. I’ll be back with podcasts this coming week, not least Live Q&A for paid subscribers. Watch out for invite.
Trump’s delayed birthday call with Russian terror mastermind Putin resulted in the announcement of a diesel deal that’s shocking when you see it, but not at all surprising when you give it a couple of minutes thought. This is not the huge deal portrayed by Trump. Most of all, it looked like a delayed birthday present for Putin.
Let’s rewind the clock a couple of months to Congress passing the Lindsay Graham sanctions bill. I said back then that I assessed it as extremely unlikely that Trump would ever implement the provisions in the bill. Why? Because Trump’s close ties to Russia and Putin that have evolved since the 1990s simply run too deep. If it hadn’t been for Russian money, Trump would have gone broke and I doubt his business empire would have ever come off the ground, if it hadn’t been for Russian oligarchs and mobsters directed by Putin and his intelligence services.
Therefore, in reality Trump is a Russian asset as I concluded in the book “Subverted” which was released in February this year. Many intelligence professionals, researchers, academics and journalists have concluded the same, not least my good friend . This is not conspiracy theory. The “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” was no hoax. The relationship is documented and if you understand how the Russian agencies operate, Trump’s status as a witting asset is quite obvious. That’s why I like many others have repeatedly said, there was not a snowball’s chance in hell that Trump would “get tough with Putin” or make “a pivot to Ukraine” and whatever enonsense has been peddled over the last year and a half.
On Friday, Trump showed his true colours under the guise of ending the soaring diesel prices for US voters. Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries have a very limited impact on the price of diesel and especially global oil prices. The blame on Ukraine is simply false. The soaring prices are overwhelmingly the result of Trump’s own making due to his disastrous Iran war.
Another important aspect is the fact that the amount of diesel covered by the deal are far too low to have a significant impact. The first shipment amounts to less than US consumption for 24 hrs (as far as I can tell 15 or 16 hrs). Increasing US diesel imports from Canada by only 4% would give the US the same supply. Obviously, the Canadians have been branded “super villains” by the Trump regime, so a deal with a terrorist like Putin is preferable. The logic makes a ton of sense in the world of super villains.
There are other aspects that make this deal rather odd. Due to Ukrainian strikes Russia has passed a diesel export ban. 90% of the Russian regions report shortages and 75% of the regions have passed laws rationing sales of diesel. Due to the shortages, Russia has even imported diesel from South Korea.
Then why do the deal at all? Firstly, the Russian have wrapped a treasonous web of “kompromat” around Trump since the 1990s and especially during the 2000s. From Putin’s perspective this deal is likely seen as a way to strengthen the treasonous web. Why? That’s how the Russian agencies think and operate. We’ve seen Putin’s operatives, namely finance czar, Kirill Dimitriev, do this again and again. And by the way, Dimitriev was in Trump Tower, New York, on election night back in 2016, so this is no news at all. These relationships and thereby also “kompromat” have evolved even more since then. Former Goldman Sachs banker Dimitriev is always lurking in the shadows with billion dollar deals in hand. Always. You can check out the photos yourselves from all the meetings. I guarantee you, Dimitriev was there with deals.
Secondly, Putin sees this as a way to get Trump to put more pressure on Ukraine and end US intelligence support for Ukraine. Now, we know that this is precisely what Trump’s lackeys threatened the Ukrainians to do during the Miami “negotiations” on Friday. No surprise at all.
Regarding the Miami “negotiations” at Steve Witkoff’s estate were another “string along exercise”. That’s what it’s been all along. It started with the US-Russia meeting in Jeddah in February 2025. Again, if you check the photos, Dimitriev was there too, even though this meeting was portrayed as a meeting to start peace talks. Essentially, the alleged peace talks have been an exercise of smoke and mirrors with nothing to show. It was hardly a coincidence that Trump chose to announce the diesel deal while Kyrylo Budanov and the Ukrainian delegation were at Miami.
To underline the point, petroleum tanker “Minerva Zen” departed Saint Petersburg, Russia, already on 22 September. According to Vesselfinder the Minerva is destined for Wilmington, North Carolina. Whether this means that the diesel deal had already been made two weeks prior, we can’t conclude with certainty. On the other hand, it’s a distinct possibility that shouldn’t be overlooked. What’s the chance that a tanker carrying Russian diesel or other petroleum products would drift around the Atlantic for a couple of weeks waiting for a port call? And why would it drift close to US ports given the fact that Russian diesel has been banned in the US since 2022, if the shippers didn’t know the paperwork was forthcoming? It certainly doesn’t look random. Coincidence takes a lot of planning.
Now let’s turn to what else has been going on of late, which makes “the true colours” even more obvious. Behind the curtains of “the string along exercise” which took Witkoff and Kushner to Moscow (again) and a visit to Kyiv for once, it has been documented that there were intensive talks with not least Dimitriev (of course) about several energy deals. Again, peace talks were but a smokescreen.
One of these is the longstanding ambition of both the Trump inner circle and obviously the Russians to reestablish the Nord Stream pipelines transporting cheap Russian natural gas to Germany. For this to work, Trump and Putin’s men need a German counterpart. And who would that be? The radical right wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) that’s surging in the polls. AfD also champions the reestablishment of Nord Stream thereby promising Germans access to cheap energy and obviously also an end to aid for Ukraine.
So besides filling the coffers of Trump, Putin and their lackeys, the Nord Stream initiative would have the added benefit of increasing the election prospects of a fellow fascist party in Germany. Dimitriev (again) is scheduled to meet the AfD leadership early next year.
Another prospective deal involves buying Russian Lukoil’s foreign assets where Witkoff and Kushner have involved investors from the UAE and Qatar. A USD 20 billion deal would undercut the sanctions imposed by the US in 2025 on Lukoil. Obviously, the Lukoil sanctions were due to US domestic pressure and not a Trump preference.
Finally, there’s also the potash deal with Putin’s vassal in Belarus. Belarus has been under US sanctions since Lukashenko’s violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2021. By why keep up sanctions on Belarus when you can help a fellow dictator?
So there you go. This was to be expected. Trump wants his buddy and terror mastermind Putin out of the cold. Putin has wrapped a treasonous web around Trump that will only be tightened. It will only be if - and that’s a big IF - Congress finally shows balls and stops the treasonous path. I hope the latter, but as a European I urge decision-makers to take matters into our own hands. Then we can hope America comes to its senses. As long as the GOP is a cult run by a mobster, we cannot run the risk.
Sources: most of these issues has been reported by a variety of media, not least the Financial Times and Reuters. Obviously, the assessments are my own.
Finally, you can pre-order the book “Subverted” by sending me DM. The publisher should be ready very soon:-)
