The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control posted General License 134B to its website at some point on Friday, April 17. The document authorizes the delivery and sale of Russian-origin crude oil and petroleum products loaded onto vessels on or before April 17, and runs until 12:01 a.m. Eastern on May 16. [1] On Wednesday, April 16, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had told reporters in Washington that the waiver would not be renewed: "We will not be renewing the general licence on Russian oil, and we will not be renewing the general licence on Iranian oil." [2] Forty-eight hours later, the general license on Russian oil was renewed. The general license on Iranian oil — General License U, covering roughly 140 million barrels of crude already at sea — expired at 12:01 a.m. Sunday, as promised.

The paper's April 18 lead on the bank-war-equity gap argued that the administration was hedging for war while the equity market priced peace. Friday's OFAC action fits that duality from a different angle. Sanctions-as-strict for Iran, sanctions-as-flexible for Russia, both on the same day, both in the same hour. The policy content and the policy performance are not the same document.

What the license authorizes

General License 134B is the third version of a document that began as General License 133 on March 5, became General License 134 on March 12, and General License 134A on March 19. [3] The progression has been consistent: each iteration has broadened the scope of authorized transactions involving Russian-origin crude and petroleum products loaded before the iteration's issuance date. GL 133 covered deliveries at Indian ports to Indian purchasers. GL 134 expanded the same authorization globally. GL 134A pushed the loading-date cutoff to March 12 and extended the window to April 11. GL 134B pushes the loading-date cutoff to April 17 and extends the window to May 16. [4]

The expansion is incremental by design. Each version is announced as "narrowly tailored" and "short-term." Each version, by extending the cutoff date, implicitly recognizes that the prior cutoff was not the operational ceiling. Kirill Dmitriev, Russia's envoy at the U.S.-Russia economic negotiations, told Telegram that the March 12 version would free approximately 100 million barrels of Russian crude. [5] The subsequent versions have not named updated figures. The market has inferred.

What the license excludes

Paragraph (b)(1) of the general license explicitly prohibits any transaction involving "a person located in or organized under the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran." [6] The text is unchanged from prior iterations. What has changed is that the Iran-side of the same bargain — General License U, which authorized the delivery and sale of Iranian-origin crude and petroleum products loaded on or before March 20 — was allowed to expire at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Sunday.

The consequence is that a cargo of Russian crude loaded on April 16 and bound for an Indian refinery can be delivered through May 16. A cargo of Iranian crude loaded on March 19 and bound for the same Indian refinery cannot be delivered after Sunday morning without exposing every party in the chain — vessel owner, insurer, bank, refinery — to secondary sanctions. India is a declared beneficiary of the first and a declared victim of the second. It was India's Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri who lobbied Bessent for extension of both licenses on Tuesday and Wednesday. The Philippines, a second declared beneficiary, made a similar request. Treasury has answered one.

The 48-hour reversal

Bessent's Wednesday statement at the Economic Club of Washington was direct. He said the Russian oil waiver expiring Friday night would not be renewed. He said the Iranian oil waiver expiring Sunday morning would not be renewed. He characterized the decision in terms the administration has been using since March: energy prices would be allowed to equilibrate, the waivers were never intended to become permanent, sanctions regimes were still intact. On Thursday Bessent met with the President at the White House. On Friday OFAC posted GL 134B. [7]

Reuters' Thursday account sourced two administration figures who said the extension was "likely" and cited concerns about rising gasoline prices heading into November midterms. [8] The Friday reversal supports those sources. Brent crude was trading above $100 on Friday afternoon; U.S. gasoline prices had risen fourteen cents at the national average in the prior ten days. Republicans with oil-refining districts — Graham of South Carolina, Tillis of North Carolina, Moran of Kansas — had not publicly asked for the extension, but neither had they publicly opposed it. Senator Jerry Moran had, in a February statement, called the waivers a policy that "advantages the countries that wish to do us harm."

The policy half-life is not the document's. It is Bessent's. Wednesday's commitment was on the record. Friday's action contradicted it without explanation. A Treasury press release accompanying GL 134B used the prior iterations' language — "narrowly tailored," "short-term" — and did not refer to Wednesday's statement. [9] The administration's willingness to be publicly misread about its own sanctions posture is now a pattern, not an event.

What this does to the Islamabad cliff

The ceasefire with Iran expires on Wednesday, April 22. The second round of Islamabad talks was cancelled on Saturday morning. Iran's waiver, in the same hour, was allowed to expire. Russia's waiver, in the same 48 hours, was extended by thirty days. An American sanctions regime that presents itself as a legal instrument is operating on an energy-market timeline, on an electoral calendar, and — as of Friday — on a political posture that declines to publicly acknowledge its own reversal.

For Zelensky, the arithmetic is punitive. The European Commission had, earlier in April, described the Russia waiver extension as a step that risks "throwing Russia a financial lifeline." [10] The White House's response has been not to answer the European critique but to extend the license. The Ukrainian president's Friday statement, rendered through his own English-language feed, used the $10-billion figure Zelensky has been using since March. The figure is not meaningful in isolation, but the figure has been repeated, and the response from Washington has been GL 134B. The sanctions regime, as it currently operates, has not yet shown what a bid would look like that would cause Treasury to say no to Moscow while Treasury is saying no to Tehran.

For Tehran, the arithmetic is the 96-hour window to Wednesday. The Indian refiners that had been receiving Iranian crude under GL U now have to find replacement supply, while the Russian alternatives are authorized through May 16. The market's answer is already visible in India's April oil import mix. Moscow's answer has been a Telegram post from the envoy responsible for the negotiation. Tehran's answer has been the second round of Islamabad cancelled and IRGC fire on cleared Indian tankers. The waivers are no longer technical documents. They are how the war's credit window is structured.

Bessent said no on Wednesday. OFAC wrote yes on Friday. The document that says yes runs until May 16. The document that said no about Iran runs out Sunday. Between the two, the mechanism of American sanctions policy has become a 48-hour instrument. That is a shorter half-life than the ceasefire the sanctions are supposed to enforce.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco