Belarus Says Its Potash Is Already Sold. A Gulf War Took Diesel to a Record.

The two posts

Both are authentic. We pulled them from Truth Social’s own interface rather than from the screenshots circulating, and the text matches word for word.^[1][2]

One note on the screenshots themselves. The potash image is stamped 09:47 PM. The post was made at 14:47 UTC, which is the morning in every American time zone. The hour matches Central time; the marker does not. The content is authentic, the timestamp on the image is not.

Verdicts

The refineries, which is the true part

The International Energy Agency counted the campaign in September. Through the first eight months of 2026, a Russian refinery was hit on average once every three days. By late August, only five of Russia’s thirty-two major refineries remained untouched, all of them in eastern Siberia or the far east, thousands of kilometres from Ukraine.^[3]

Kirishi, the second largest, stopped processing entirely on 2 September. Volgograd and the Lukoil refinery at Kstovo were running at about a quarter of nameplate by mid-September. The governor of Orenburg said repairs at one plant could take six months.^[4] Ukraine has been aiming at the secondary units, the hydrocrackers and hydrotreaters, which take six to eight months to rebuild and which are the units that make diesel.

Russia responded with measures it had never taken before. A jet fuel export ban in June, the first in its history, and a diesel export ban on 8 July, also the first, from a country that had been exporting roughly half of what it refined.^[3] By the end of June, fuel shortages were reported across 92 percent of Russian regions and two-thirds had introduced rationing. Russia began importing gasoline by sea from Morocco, Korea, India and Türkiye.

So the sentence about refineries being blown up and out of commission is accurate, and understated if anything.

What “lost control” would require

The phrase does more work than the evidence supports. Russian refinery throughput is running at 3.6 to 4.0 million barrels a day against a seasonal norm of 5.3 to 5.6, the lowest since 2004 and roughly 30 percent below normal.^[3] That is a severe contraction. It is not the loss of an industry.

Russia still refines. It still exports diesel, at around 150 thousand barrels a day against more than 800 thousand in 2025. It still exports crude oil without restriction, and lower refinery runs have actually freed up more crude for export. And a large share of the export collapse is Russia’s own export ban, which is a decision to keep fuel at home, not an inability to produce it. Those two things get merged by the phrase and they should not be.

Where 25,000 came from

This is the claim that fails, and it fails in a way worth following, because the number is not invented. It is a real figure that changed category twice on its way into the post.

• 15 SeptemberThe Ukrainian General Staff reports 301,030 Russian personnel lost since the start of 2026. Its own headline says killed and wounded.^[5]
• 16 SeptemberZelensky tells CBS News, in remarks published by Ukraine’s state agency: “We believe that they will lose 300,000 people this year. We are talking about those killed.”^[6] The combined tally has become a death count.
• 20 SeptemberTrump and Zelensky speak by telephone.
• 21 SeptemberThe post says 25,000 are being killed each month. Three hundred thousand divided by twelve is exactly 25,000.

Three things drift across those steps. A Russian-only figure becomes “people,” which reads as both sides. A projection for the whole of 2026 becomes a rate happening now. And killed-and-wounded becomes killed.

The arithmetic then fails against every cumulative estimate. The war has run 1,671 days, or 54 months. At 25,000 deaths a month that implies 1,350,000 dead. The best available estimates put total deaths on both sides, military and civilian, at 542,000 to 676,000.^[7][8][9]

Measured against 2026 alone, which is the deadliest phase of the war so far, combined deaths still run about 10,000 to 16,000 a month. No source anywhere publishes 25,000 deaths a month. What 25,000 does match, within seven percent, is the war-long average rate of Russian casualties, killed and wounded counted together.

A defensible version of the sentence exists. Roughly 25,000 to 35,000 Russian soldiers are killed or wounded each month. Roughly 10,000 to 15,000 people are killed. Either is terrible and either is true.

The week that actually moved diesel

American retail diesel reached $6.285 a gallon in the week of 14 September. The Energy Information Administration says that is the highest on record in nominal terms since it began publishing the series in 1994. Adjusted for inflation, the agency says it is the highest since 2022, which means it is not an all-time high.^[10]

The post implies Russia is why. The record has a different starting point.

Ninety-six cents in a single week, in March. The IEA explained that week in a press release of 11 March:

“The conflict in the Middle East that began on 28 February 2026 has impeded oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, with export volumes of crude and refined products currently at less than 10% of pre-conflict levels.”^[12]

The agency released 400 million barrels from emergency reserves, only the sixth collective action in its history since 1974. That step happened before the Ukrainian refinery campaign escalated to its 2026 intensity.

On the relative size of the two shocks, the Middle East was the larger supplier and is the larger loss. Before the conflicts, the Gulf accounted for about 20 percent of global seaborne diesel exports and Russia for about 12 percent. The IEA puts the causation in that order: sharply lower exports from the Middle East, it writes, have made diesel markets more vulnerable to the loss of Russian supplies.^[3]

Russian refinery damage is a real and compounding contributor to the later part of the move, from $4.67 in late June to $6.29 in September. It is not why diesel jumped a dollar in March. We looked for a published figure attributing some share of the American pump price to Russian outages specifically and found none. The IEA reports the two shocks combined by choice, and we are not going to substitute an estimate for a measurement that nobody has made.

The potash sanctions were lifted in March

The premise underneath the second post is true, and the story of how it became true is larger than the post.

Belaruskali was designated by the Treasury in August 2021. The Belarusian Potash Company, which sells its output, followed that December. In December 2025 the Treasury issued a general licence permitting transactions with both. On 26 March 2026 it removed them from the sanctions list entirely and rescinded the directive behind them.^[14][15]

We checked the current list rather than relying on the announcement. Searching the full file of 19,393 entries returns no hits for Belaruskali, the Belarusian Potash Company or their aliases. The same search returns 185 entries under the Belarus program, which confirms the search was capable of finding something. A third Belarusian potash company, Slavkaliy, remains designated. Trade in Belarusian potash is legal for American buyers today.

What the post omits is the currency. The relief arrived in three instalments, each alongside a prisoner release: 52 detainees in September 2025, more than 120 in December alongside the potash licence, and 250 in March alongside the full delisting.^[16] A presidential envoy met Lukashenko again on 15 September and left with 25 more.

The supplier says it has nothing to sell

On the same day as the post, the Belarusian presidency published its own account of a meeting on customs and trade. Lukashenko is quoted directly:

“Even if we wanted to supply [potash] to other, Western markets, we simply do not have those volumes - everything is contracted.”^[17]

The same readout records that 85 percent of Belarusian exports and imports now move east, to China, other Asian markets and Russia.

Beyond that, nothing corroborates a deal. There is no volume, no price, no schedule and no named counterparty. The White House did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Post. Mosaic, Nutrien and the Belarusian Potash Company all declined to comment. Canada’s trade minister had no comment. No action has appeared in the Treasury’s public feed since. We rate the deal unproven rather than false, because an announcement could follow, but as of today it exists only as a post.

The scale is the harder problem.

Belarus would have to send essentially its entire national output to the United States to replace Canada, at a moment when 85 percent of its trade flows east and this year’s production is already sold. Before sanctions it supplied the American market with about 635,000 tonnes a year, roughly five percent of imports, and nothing at all since February 2022. The first cargo reported as expected at New Orleans next month is 30,000 tonnes, about a quarter of one percent of annual Canadian volume.

The price comparison has a different problem. There is no bilateral rate to beat. Washington does not buy potash from Ottawa; fertilizer retailers and distributors buy from suppliers at negotiated commercial prices. Canadian potash that meets the trade agreement’s rules already enters duty-free and was exempted from the reciprocal tariffs. And American buyers already pay roughly $35 a tonne above offshore prices, a gap that reflects freight and netback rather than a Canadian markup. There is no large margin sitting in the middle waiting to be captured.

One route detail matters. Belarus is landlocked and its rail transit through Lithuania to the Baltic has been closed since February 2022. The live route runs through Russian ports, which means American purchases would move Belarusian potash through Russian infrastructure.

The wrong nutrient

Even granting every optimistic assumption, the relief is aimed at the one input that is not the problem. Josh Linville, who trades fertilizer for StoneX, put it plainly: there has been no struggle to find potash, there is more than enough to go around, and it is phosphate and nitrogen that need help.

The measured prices agree with him. Against 2024, potash is up about 31 percent and currently softening on high inventories. Phosphate is up about 41 percent and still climbing. Nitrogen is rising on the same Strait of Hormuz disruption that moved diesel, because natural gas is what nitrogen fertilizer is made from.

What actually happened to farm costs

Both posts are addressed to farmers, so the honest backdrop belongs here. The Agriculture Department’s September forecast shows farm income holding up and its composition changing underneath.^[19]

The headline is down 2.6 percent. Strip out the federal payments and farm income is down 17.6 percent from 2025 and sits below where it was in 2024. Thirty cents of every dollar of forecast 2026 net farm income is a government payment, against eight cents two years ago. Fertilizer expense is up 17 percent against 2024 and fuel expense up about 31 percent.

The largest single piece of that support is the Farmer Bridge Assistance program, $12 billion authorised in December and about $9.6 billion paid out across roughly 500,000 applications by late April.^[20] It was funded through the Commodity Credit Corporation, which does not require a congressional appropriation.

The precedent in both posts

Each post is a small claim. The arrangements behind them are not small, and they outlast the week.

Sanctions became a currency

The potash designations were lifted in three tranches, each matched to a release of prisoners. Whatever one thinks of the trade, it establishes that a sanctions listing is a negotiable asset rather than a finding about conduct. The conduct that produced the 2021 designations has not been reported as having changed. What changed is that Belarus had something the United States wanted to give back, and people it was willing to release. A designation that can be traded is a designation that a future government will be asked to trade again.

Farm income moved to money Congress does not vote

Direct government payments to farmers rose from $10.1 billion in 2024 to a forecast $47.4 billion in 2026. The largest new component ran through the Commodity Credit Corporation, whose borrowing authority does not require an appropriation. Meanwhile the 2018 farm bill is operating on its third extension and expires on 30 September, eight days from now. The practical result is that the largest support program for American agriculture in years was designed, sized and disbursed without a vote, while the statute that is supposed to set farm policy sits unfinished. That is a durable shift in who decides, and it does not reverse when prices recover.

A claim can be sourced to a real document and still be wrong

The 25,000 figure did not come from nowhere. It traces to a real tally published by a real institution. It became false through two ordinary-looking moves, relabelling a category and dividing by twelve. This is the third version of that pattern we have documented this month. One added a detail to a true story, one deleted a qualifier, and this one changes what a number is counting. The underlying events in all three are real, which is exactly why the drift is hard to see and worth naming.