Russia dropped five glide bombs on apartment blocks in Zaporizhzhia before dawn on Saturday and killed at least 15 people, three of them children. Coverage of the strike quotes Volodymyr Zelensky saying Moscow was thanking Washington for sanctions relief. It does not open the document he means, so we did. Treasury’s General License No. 135 is two paragraphs long, and its digital signature is stamped 2:43:59 p.m. Eastern on Friday. The bombs fell at about 9:48 p.m. Eastern, seven hours and four minutes later.
Regina Kharchenko is the acting mayor who has to run a city inside that gap. Zaporizhzhia holds more than 700,000 people and sits less than 10 miles from the front line. On Friday morning Russian aircraft put six guided bombs into it, killing one man and injuring 23. Then, at about 4:48 a.m. on Saturday, five more hit the Shevchenkivskyi and Voznesenivskyi districts, damaging 26 residential buildings and collapsing a five-story block. “The ground floor was hit, and the floors above just collapsed,” Kharchenko told Ukrainian television from the scene, where more than 80 rescuers kept stopping to listen for anyone alive under the concrete. Among the dead, she said, were “our littlest ones.”
Washington, Friday, 2:43 p.m. Eastern
OFAC Director Bradley T. Smith signs a license authorizing “the sale, delivery, offloading, or importation, including importation into the United States, of diesel fuel of Russian Federation origin” through April 7, 2027.
Zaporizhzhia, Saturday, 4:48 a.m. local
Five glide bombs. Twenty-six residential buildings damaged and a five-story block collapsed. At least 15 dead, three of them children, 16 injured, and people still missing under the rubble.
What General License 135 Asks of Russia
Nothing. Paragraph (a) authorizes the sale and import of Russian diesel for nearly six months, and paragraph (b) keeps the accounts of three Russian state institutions at American banks off limits. The word Ukraine appears twice, both times in the title of the sanctions regulations being set aside. There is no clause about a ceasefire, a city or a civilian. Donald Trump announced the trade as Vladimir Putin agreeing to release 300,000 tons of diesel “immediately,” another 500,000 in November and a million after that. The diesel Putin is releasing is diesel he locked up himself: the Kremlin banned its own diesel exports in July, after Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy sites, and extended the ban through October.
The paper trail starts before Friday. On September 13, at his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland, Trump told reporters, “Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia.” Twenty-six days later he went from asking Kyiv to spare Russian diesel to licensing its sale, with American diesel averaging $6.28 a gallon, up from $3.68 a year ago, and the midterms 25 days off. The Kremlin’s readout lists “the prospects for resolving the Ukrainian crisis” among the subjects of the call. The license shows what that part of the conversation produced for Ukraine, which is not one line.
We think Zelensky has the sequence right. “Today, Russia expressed its thanks for the lifting of sanctions on diesel exports by dropping five glide bombs on residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia,” he wrote on Saturday. No document shows Putin ordered this strike as a reply to the license, and the case against the deal does not need one. Trump opened an export market to Moscow and attached no price for hitting cities, in the same week a Russian bomb killed 33 people on two buses in Kramatorsk and a missile killed 22 in an apartment block in Pryluky. Add Saturday and that is at least 70 dead in three strikes since Wednesday. Trump calls lower prices for Americans his “Greatest Priority.” He bought them from the man doing this and asked for nothing in return, and we think that is indefensible.
The license runs until April 7, and OFAC can withdraw a general license on any day before then. Rescuers in Zaporizhzhia were still digging on Saturday afternoon, and Zelensky says Ukraine’s long-range weapons will answer, which we read as more strikes on the Russian energy sites Trump told him to leave alone. General License 135 should be revoked, or rewritten with a condition in paragraph (b), before the first tanker loads. Until then the signature stamp is the plainest statement of American policy on record: seven hours and four minutes, and no price.