Jim Risch is tied to a fresh warning from Petr Pavel, who said Donald Trump’s diesel deal with Russia gave Moscow “time to breathe” and made a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire harder to reach. Pavel said the ceasefire had been “quite close” before Trump lifted sanctions on Russian diesel earlier this month.
Petr Pavel on the ceasefire shift
The Czech President said Russia and Ukraine were close enough to an agreement that the diplomatic opening mattered. Then the diesel deal changed the pressure on Russia. “It will be much harder now,” Pavel said, adding that the move gave Moscow “a new hope” and more room to push its own terms.
He said coordinated U.S.-European sanctions on Russian oil, oligarchs, and other industries had been putting Russia “under strain.” In that setting, the deal did more than change trade flows: it altered the leverage around the talks, because a side under pressure had less room to wait for a better bargain.
White House and Zelenskyy
The White House said on Wednesday that Trump had “successfully negotiated” the deal to supply the global market with “massive amounts of diesel and bring prices down.” That explanation sits directly against Pavel’s view, which is that the arrangement gave Russia room to reset the diplomacy while easing pressure on its economy.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy took the sharper line. He said the deal “plays into Russia’s hands” and allows Russia to “kill more, wage war for longer, have even less respect for America, and inflict even greater losses and damage on the world.” He also accused Trump of using peace talks in Florida as a “smokescreen” while the administration pursued the deal with Russia.
Russia and Europe
Pavel said he would be “probably the last to blame Ukraine for being guilty of the conflict,” and added, “It was not Ukraine who attacked Russia.” He said Trump appears to view the issue through economic prosperity for the United States rather than a wider struggle between democracy and autocracies, and said he could not yet call the move betrayal, but would call it “a mistake.”
His deeper objection is strategic. Pavel said the deal gives Russia “a new hope” that it can disregard Europe and Ukraine, focus on making a deal with the United States, potentially with China, and arrange matters around its own priorities. He said that was “clearly against our interest in Europe,” and argued Russia is not yet a country respecting other countries’ sovereignty and borders.
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators has urged Trump to rescind the deal, but the clash has already exposed the split between lower diesel prices and the wider diplomatic cost. That is the unresolved trade-off now hanging over the ceasefire talks: whether easing market pressure on Russia helps the U.S. enough to outweigh the boost Pavel says Moscow just received.
