Pence urges Trump to restore the Russia sanctions as his cabinet defends the diesel deal

Former vice president Mike Pence called on President Donald Trump to restore the Russia sanctions and scrap the Russian diesel deal, The Hill reported on Sunday¹. The same report said the president and other administration officials had not yet yielded to critical members of their own party¹.

The administration spent the day defending the arrangement. Energy Secretary Chris Wright described the diesel deal as an incentive for Moscow to reduce its war, Politico reported². Wright said the decision to waive new sanctions would motivate Russia to end its war with Ukraine, according to Business Insider⁴, and suggested the relief could pressure President Vladimir Putin to tone down the fighting as a step toward peace, the New York Post reported⁵. Speaking to CNN, Wright put it as an incentive to end the war⁶.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took the same line, saying no one has been tougher on Russian sanctions than Trump, and defending the decision to set aside sweeping Russian tariffs⁷. These are the administration’s own characterisations of its policy rather than evidence that the policy is working.

Where the accounts diverge

Axios reported that the president’s top aides offered sharply different explanations of the diesel deal over the weekend, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio arguing that Russia would sell the fuel anyway³. That is a different claim from Wright’s: one presents the waiver as leverage, the other as an acknowledgement that the sanctions would not have bitten.

Axios said the move drew a barrage of bipartisan criticism calling it a gift to Russia, and noted that oil, gas and petroleum products help finance Russia’s war on Ukraine³. Late on Friday, Trump waived new sanctions against Russia and tariffs on top buyers of Russian energy that would have taken effect under the bipartisan Graham Act he signed last month, the outlet reported, days after the administration waived certain sanctions to enable higher exports of Russian diesel³. Critics including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have pushed back on the waiver⁸.

What to watch

The fault line to follow is inside the Republican Party rather than across it. Axios framed the episode as opening rifts within the party just ahead of the midterm elections³, and Pence’s intervention gives those rifts a name attached to the administration’s own lineage¹.

For energy markets the question is whether the waiver survives contact with that pressure. The Hill’s account places the president and his officials as not yet moved by critics in their party¹, so the near-term signal is whether any further senior Republicans follow Pence, and whether the explanations from Wright and Rubio converge or stay apart^2,3.