larry johnson says the orange man is attempting a bait and switch here blaming the ukies for the diesel shortage of his making; 

 

The charge is simple, and Donald Trump has built a very public demand on Kyiv around it: Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries are starving the world of diesel. Here is what that charge misses. Russia’s sour crude does not vanish when its refineries burn. It gets loaded onto tankers and sold, as crude, to India and China, whose refiners run it into diesel instead — Indian purchases of Russian crude have roughly doubled, Chinese ESPO imports keep climbing. The molecules keep moving; the refining simply relocates. What Ukraine destroys is Russia’s refining margin, not the world’s diesel supply.

Trump laid the accusation out on September 13, on his own golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland, two days after US diesel cleared six dollars a gallon for the first time in history. He had found the culprit. It was not Iran. It was not the Strait of Hormuz. It was Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky “has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia,” Trump told reporters; he could “go after targets, but not diesel fuel.” And then, removing any ambiguity about where he was pinning the blame: the shortage “isn’t done by the Middle East.”

That last clause is the tell, and it is false. To see why, you have to understand two things Trump either does not grasp or is counting on you not to: what kind of crude Russia actually produces, and where the world’s diesel is really made. Start with the crude, because the numbers settle the argument...........more...........