The Russian diesel license: Authorized is not delivered

On October 9, 2026, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a two-paragraph document that changes what is legal and nothing else. It is Russia-related General License No. 135, and its title states its scope exactly: Authorizing Transactions Related to the Sale, Delivery, Offloading, and Importation of Diesel Fuel of Russian Federation Origin.

The same day, the President announced on social media that Russia had agreed to supply diesel to the United States and world markets, and insisted the announcement would help bring costs down quickly. Those are two different kinds of statement, and it is worth keeping them apart. The license is a permission. The announcement is an intention. A permission is not a barrel, and the distance between the two is where a reader’s expectations should live this month.

This article is about the document, the arithmetic behind the promise, and what it does not change.

What General License 135 actually says

The operative paragraph is one sentence long, and it is worth reading in full because the scope is narrower and more specific than the headlines:

… all transactions prohibited by the Russian Harmful Foreign Activities Sanctions Regulations, 31 CFR part 587, or the Ukraine-/Russia-Related Sanctions Regulations, 31 CFR part 589, that are related to the sale, delivery, offloading, or importation, including importation into the United States, of diesel fuel of Russian Federation origin are authorized through 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time, April 7, 2027.

Four things follow from that sentence.

It is about diesel of Russian origin, and nothing else. The two regulations named in it are the main Russia sanctions programs, and the license carves one product out of them. It does not suspend those programs, and it authorizes nothing beyond this one product: a transaction in Russian crude oil, in Russian finance, or with any entity on OFAC’s sanctions lists is not made authorized by this document.

It reaches imports into the United States — the phrase is in the text, and it is the part that matters for an American reader. Those transactions were prohibited, which is why a license was needed for them; through the license’s term they are permitted.

It has an end date, and a precise one. Not “April 2027” — 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on April 7, 2027. A permission with an end date is a permission that has to be renewed. If it is not renewed, the ordinary prohibition applies again the following minute, and any contract that assumed otherwise has a problem in it.

One carve-out survives. Paragraph (b) says the license “does not authorize any debit to an account on the books of a U.S. financial institution of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the National Wealth Fund of the Russian Federation, or the Ministry of Finance.” In plain terms, someone else may sell the fuel to you; the Russian state’s own accounts in U.S. banks remain closed. That is the difference between opening a trade and opening a banking relationship, and the license deliberately does only the first.

What was announced alongside it

The same day, the President said Russia had agreed to a schedule of deliveries. The wording, from his post:

• more than 300,000 Tons immediately to the American and global market;
• another 500,000 Tons during November;
• 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter;
• and then, “based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries,” 3,000,000 Tons “within a short period of time.”

One unit note, because it matters when the numbers get large. The post says “Tons.” The first tranche is reported elsewhere as 300,000 metric tonnes, which is the unit fuel tonnages are normally quoted in. A U.S. short ton is about 9 percent smaller than a metric tonne, so treat these as approximate figures rather than exact quantities.

He attached the purpose directly: “Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority.” Russia’s deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak, said Russia would begin lifting its own diesel export restrictions ahead of schedule, and that domestic supply would be fully covered first.

Note what the license does not contain: any volume, any price, any obligation on Russia to deliver, or any obligation on any refiner, shipper or terminal to sell. Announced quantities and licensed transactions are two different kinds of statement. The license makes the second legal; only the market can make the first real.

The arithmetic the promise has to beat

A metric tonne of distillate is roughly 7.5 barrels, the factor implied by the reported equivalence of 300,000 tonnes to about 2.25 million barrels. Multiplying out the announced tranches:

Announced	Tonnes	≈ Barrels	≈ Days of U.S. distillate demand (3.8 million barrels a day)
Immediately	>300,000	≈ 2.25 million	0.6
November	500,000	≈ 3.75 million	1.0
“Immediately thereafter”	1,000,000	≈ 7.5 million	2.0
“Within a short period,” refinery condition permitting	3,000,000	≈ 22.5 million	5.9

The day-count column uses the Energy Information Administration’s four-week average for U.S. distillate product supplied — 3.8 million barrels a day — in the week ending October 2, 2026. Read that column slowly, because it is the whole argument. The first tranche is a bit more than half a day of American distillate use. The next two tranches together add up to about three days. Even the largest figure in the post — the one explicitly conditioned on the state of Russia’s refineries — is about six days.

That is the frame in which a supply announcement has to be read. It says nothing about whether the price falls. It says what size the lever is.

Set the first tranche against the market it is meant to move and the same 2.25 million barrels reads differently depending on what you compare it to. The United States produced 5.3 million barrels a day of distillate in the week ending October 2 — less than half a day of refinery output. It imported only 118,000 barrels a day of distillate — about nineteen days of the entire import flow. And against the volume the world has actually lost, the first tranche covers roughly a day and a half: the International Energy Agency puts combined net diesel and gasoil exports from the Gulf and Russia in August at 1.6 million barrels a day below February’s level, back when those two sources were almost 45 percent of global seaborne trade in the product.

That is the backdrop the announcement was made against. The IEA’s September report records U.S. diesel prices passing $200 a barrel in early September, 94 percent above pre-war levels, with Gulf diesel and gasoil net exports down to 390,000 barrels a day — just over a quarter of what they were before the war. An import license removes a legal obstacle. It does not restore a refinery, reopen a strait, or put tankers back on the water.

Two federal instruments, two dates, two completely different mechanisms

This is the second federal action on diesel in the same week, and the two are easy to mix up. They do different jobs.

	Executive Order 14435 (October 5)	General License 135 (October 9)
What it changes	When businesses pay the 24.4-cent federal excise tax on highway use of dyed diesel	Whether transactions in Russian-origin diesel are prohibited at all
Legal basis	26 U.S.C. § 7508A, § 4041, § 6715	31 CFR parts 587 and 589
Runs to	December 31, 2026	12:01 a.m. EDT, April 7, 2027
What the reader owes after it ends	The deferred tax, unless guidance says otherwise	Nothing personal — the permission simply stops
Status	In force; the IRS announcement the order itself required within five days had still not appeared when that deadline passed on October 10	In force

The distinction is the one worth carrying away. One instrument moves money in time; the other moves a legal barrier. Neither of them creates a barrel of fuel, and neither sets a price. The full treatment of the tax order — including the arithmetic on what a deferred 24.4 cents is worth and why the trade groups told their members not to sell dyed diesel for highway use — is in Red-Dyed Diesel on the Highway.

For scale: 24.4 cents is about 4 percent of the $6.199-a-gallon national average for the week of October 5. The same EIA series fell 33 cents, or about 5 percent, over the two weeks from the week of September 21 to the week of October 5 — a larger move than the tax being deferred, and one that happened without any federal action at all. And the level is still far above last year: the same week a year earlier, that series read $2.488 a gallon, so the price is $3.71 a gallon higher than it was twelve months ago.

Where the disagreement is

The administration’s stated position is that the supplies will bring prices down quickly, and that its priority is the cost facing farmers, ranchers and truckers. What is contested is the arithmetic, and the argument is on the record from two directions.

• The volumes may not be deliverable. Analysts quoted by The National say the announced figures “exceed Russia’s total diesel export capacity by up to 200 percent,” and the same report cites International Energy Agency estimates that Ukrainian strikes have cut Russian diesel production capacity by nearly a third. It also describes those strikes as having destroyed more than half of the country’s refining capacity. Whether the barrels exist to ship, and whether they reach a port, is a question the license cannot answer.
• The timing of the concession is disputed. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, called it a “weak decision on the part of strong partners” and said allowing Russia to sell petroleum products “is an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged”; he said Russia would repay the diesel with “further terror.” At least one Republican member of Congress, Don Bacon, said the United States should be “squeezing Russia, not rewarding Putin by giving him more money.” On the other side, a strategist quoted by AFP, Angelo Kourkafas of Edward Jones, described the deal as alleviating “some of the worst-case scenarios” on energy supply and inflation, and Russia’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev called the cooperation a benefit to global markets.

Both readings are in circulation and neither is settled by the document. What the document settles is only this: the transactions are no longer prohibited, until April 7, 2027.

What to do with this

Very little, and that is the honest answer for most readers. There is no application, no payment, no refund and no form. The concrete steps that follow from it are narrow.

• If you buy diesel for a business, the license changes who may sell to you, not what you pay. It removes a legal prohibition on origin and says nothing about price, allocation or delivery. A supplier that was sourcing elsewhere last month has no obligation to switch, and nothing in the document obliges any refiner, shipper or terminal to sell.
• Watch the instrument, not the announcement. The permission expires on April 7, 2027. If a supplier offers terms past that date, the terms should say who bears the risk if the license is not extended.
• Watch the federal series, not the headlines. The EIA publishes the U.S. on-highway diesel price every week, and a five percent move over two weeks has already happened this autumn. It is the same series the news reports are describing, and you can read the number yourself rather than the adjective attached to it.
• Watch for the announcement that still has not come. Under the October 5 tax order, the IRS was directed to announce penalty relief for dyed diesel sold for highway use. That deadline has passed without publication. Until it appears, nothing about the tax side of this story has changed, whatever the price at the pump does.

If someone offers to help you profit from it

A federal fuel story reliably attracts two things: bad advice and outright fraud. The rules here are short.

1. There is no rebate in this. The license pays nobody. A service offering to “claim your diesel relief,” to register you for a payment, or to file something on your behalf is describing money the government has not created.
2. The IRS does not call, text or email to demand immediate payment, and does not ask for gift cards, wire transfers or cryptocurrency. The IRS also does not ask for government-portal passwords. Our network’s scam checklist, Is That Really America.gov?, walks through how to verify a contact before acting on it.
3. Check who is asking. Fuel-tax and fuel-supply questions belong with the agency or a professional, not with the person selling the fuel.
4. Report it. Schemes go to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov and to the IRS.

One note on jurisdiction

The sanctions programs and the federal excise tax are federal and apply the same way in all fifty states — on this subject, none of it turns on where you live. Two qualifications. State diesel taxes, state fuel rules and state enforcement are separate, and a federal permission does not bind a state; the tax order’s own state-level arithmetic is in the linked article. And the exemptions in this country’s fuel tax code vary between vehicles and uses, so the federal treatment of a specific fill-up is a question for a tax professional rather than a page on the internet.

A wider list of the official pages worth bookmarking for federal programs lives at omc.center/resources.

This article is general information about a change in federal sanctions and federal fuel-tax timing, not legal, tax or investment advice, and it is not a substitute for advice about your own situation. Federal sanctions and the federal fuel excise tax apply nationwide; state diesel taxes and state fuel rules vary by state. It is AI-written and independently AI-reviewed before publication; the review standard and this article’s findings are recorded in the network’s editorial review log.