It would be easy to dismiss the erratic, contradictory and increasingly rapid changes in the proclamations from Donald Trump about Ukraine, and US diesel purchases from Russia, if it wasn't for the US making threats to Europe about cutting intelligence and military procurements to Ukraine.
The underlying shift amid all the noise appears to be one of Trump moving back from his position of recent months to align more with Russia than Ukraine in their long running war.
But it is hard to see this as a clear strategic change by the US and not one driven principally by the almost existential threat posed to the Republican Party in the looming US mid-term elections by soaring fuel prices.
"This is hard to accept, I know.
But Trump just makes things up," John Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser, told The Telegraph in the UK."This is not about Ukraine and Russia.
This is about the American election.
The whole point of the diesel deal, which is stunning and outrageous itself, but the whole point of that is to get diesel flowing internationally, specifically into the US market to get prices down." Analyst Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the US "resembles a giant flailing in quicksand.
Its policy is sinking under the weight of its own contradictions".
International strategy driven by domestic politics is only made murkier by revelations in recent weeks of the deal in the offing involving a conglomerate linked to the Trump family seeking to buy the oil assets of a major Russian oligarch.
It's been just a month since Trump told Ukraine it "has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia", arguing it was the Russia-Ukraine war, rather than the Middle East, that had pushed US diesel prices above $US6 a gallon for the first time.
Then, in an unfortunate bit of timing for Trump, the US House of Representatives passed new sanction laws on Russia and Iran which required tariffs of up to 100 per cent on the biggest buyers of Russian crude and gas.
A week later, Trump was pressuring Europe to release its diesel reserves, threatening a ban on US diesel exports.
With the G7 agreeing to release up to 100 million barrels from strategic reserves over four months, the US president asserted that a US export ban was "never really on the table".
This month, there has been an executive order to let tax-free, red-dyed off-road diesel be used on public roads.
Even Trump told a rally he wasn't sure what that meant.
Then on Friday, after a phone call with Vladamir Putin, Trump announced Russia would supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel immediately, 500,000 tons in November, then 1 million tons, then another 3 million tons, but said nothing about how this would happen given the sanctions regime, or the war.
The US Treasury immediately issued a licence suspending US sanctions on Russian diesel until April next year.
