Tetiana from Kharkiv is paying one third more for gasoline than a year ago. She knows this intuitively — but on March 30 it was confirmed by the London ICE Futures exchange: Brent crude surpassed $115.84 a barrel, rising nearly 3% in a single trading day.
Notably, the jump occurred exactly at the moment when Donald Trump said the war with Iran could "end soon." The market ignored that rhetoric — and that speaks more loudly than any analyst commentary.
The mechanism of impact on Ukraine is straightforward. According to the National Bank of Ukraine, if fuel prices hold at current levels, their direct contribution to annual inflation will amount to 0.45 percentage point. But there are also secondary effects: the cost of fuel is built into the production cost of every product — from bread to building materials. The NBU estimates these effects to be twice as large as the direct ones.
A separate blow hits the trade balance. Ukraine imports oil, gas and fertilizers. The more expensive these resources are on the world market, the more currency flows out of the country — and the less remains for other needs, including reconstruction.
So the real conflict here is not between Trump and Tehran — but between official optimism and market mathematics. The former speaks of de-escalation; the latter prices in the opposite scenario.
The question that will determine the coming months: will this mathematics change if diplomatic progress in talks with Iran becomes not rhetoric but a verified fact with specific dates and control mechanisms?
