A dozen United States senators — six Republicans and six Democrats — sent President Trump a letter on Tuesday asking him to tear up the diesel arrangement he announced with Vladimir Putin on October 9 and to revoke the Treasury Department license that makes it work.
The letter, released by the office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and copied to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is blunt in a way that Senate correspondence usually is not. “This deal is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies; it should be rescinded,” the senators wrote.
What makes it news is not the Democratic signatures. It is the Republican ones. For most of this term, GOP senators have backed the president's foreign policy with near-unanimity; Reuters, in coverage of the letter, described the resistance as a shift from that pattern. Three weeks before a November 3 election that decides control of Congress, half of this letter's signers are from the president's own party.
What the license actually does
The mechanism at the center of the fight is Treasury General License No. 135, issued in connection with the October 9 announcement. It lifts sanctions on Russia's diesel exports. In the senators' words, it grants Moscow “the ability to sell Russian diesel freely in global markets.”
How much diesel, and for how long, is genuinely unclear from the public reporting. CNBC put the figure at 4.8 million metric tons — described as nearly 36 million barrels — running through mid-April. Other outlets have published sharply different numbers, ranging from roughly 2.5 million tons down to 300,000, and at least one account describes a waiver running into April 2027. Those figures cannot be reconciled from the material available, and no one should treat any single number as settled until Treasury publishes the terms.
The senators' complaint does not turn on tonnage. Their argument is that the revenues will advance Moscow's security cooperation with China, Iran and North Korea. They also argue the deal endangers American servicemembers taking part in Operation Epic Fury, and they note that the war has cost hundreds of thousands of lives over four and a half years.
The law Trump signed last month
The sharpest point in the letter is a legislative one. The senators invoke the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which passed both chambers by bipartisan votes last month and which the president, in the letter's words, “swiftly signed.” Their position is that Congress spoke on this question weeks ago and that General License No. 135 cuts against it.
The letter says the arrangement “damages American security interests and is a betrayal of the people of Ukraine.” It closes with a line that reads more like a floor speech than a memo: “Putin is a tyrant. Withdraw from this agreement, rescind General License No. 135.”
Whether the arrangement actually violates the law is a claim made by critics, not a finding by any court. Some members have pointed to a 2022 statute requiring congressional notification. No judge or agency has ruled on it.
Who signed, and one loose end
Blumenthal's office listed twelve signers: Blumenthal, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Richard Durbin of Illinois, Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Chris Coons of Delaware on the Democratic side; and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, Alan Armstrong of Oklahoma, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Cornyn of Texas on the Republican side. CNBC reported the same six Republican names and noted that other GOP members of Congress had raised questions about the deal before the letter went out.
One wrinkle: the signature block in the posted PDF shows eleven names, with no signature line for Cornyn, even though the press release counts him among the twelve. That discrepancy has not been explained.
What happens next
The administration faces a near-term decision on whether to impose additional sanctions on Moscow, and the White House and Treasury have not publicly answered the senators. Watch for a Treasury statement clarifying the license terms and the actual export volume, for any move toward hearings or a resolution of disapproval, and for whether the six Republican names on this letter grow or stay at six.
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