For years, critics of President Trump accused him of welcoming help from Russia to tilt elections in his favor. Now, with midterm elections in the United States two weeks away, Mr. Trump is explicitly seeking economic support from Russia.
A week ago, the Trump administration announced that it was lifting sanctions on Russian diesel exports. Late on Friday night, the White House released an executive order exempting Russia from a sanctions law that Congress passed last month. The moves were a last-ditch effort to lower the soaring gas prices in America that polls show are turning voters against Mr. Trump and Republican candidates.
Ukraine has frustrated Mr. Trump in recent months with its attacks on Russian oil refineries, which he blames for high global energy prices. Although the attacks have disrupted global energy supplies, oil prices have been climbing since the United States attacked Iran at the end of February, leading to violence across the Middle East and clogging the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices on Saturday averaged $4.31 a gallon in the United States, according to the AAA motor club, up nearly 45 percent since the start of the war.
The crumbling of years of work by the United States to put economic pressure on Russia to end its war in Ukraine raises questions about the Trump administration’s strategy to broker a peace deal. The waiver also casts doubt on why Congress passed sanctions legislation that was intended to punish Russia but made imposing the sanctions optional.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump’s decision to waive the sanctions was hailed by Russia and assailed by Ukraine.
“The suspension of some of the provisions of the Graham Act marks an important and truly historic moment,” said Kirill Dmitriev, who is Mr. Putin’s special envoy for investment and economic cooperation. “These provisions could have effectively brought all economic cooperation between Russia and the United States to a complete halt, inflicting serious damage primarily on the U.S. economy and global markets.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who has maintained that Ukraine has a right to defend itself against Russia, condemned the sanctions relief for Russia and predicted that there would be more of that to come.
“I want to thank both Democrats and Republicans who supported his bill,” said Mr. Zelensky, who posted a photograph on social media of him with Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who died in July after working for more than a year to build support for the legislation. . “That was a major victory: this truly bipartisan support. And now, the decision to undo all of this, to block all of it, seems wrong to me. And it definitely helps only the Russians.”
Skeptics of the law said that they were not surprised that Mr. Trump was ignoring the will of Congress. The sanctions in the law, which was named after Mr. Graham, were intended to target Russian officials, oligarchs and financial institutions. But the law also said that Mr. Trump could decline to impose the sanctions if he sent a letter to Congress explaining that they were not in the “national interest.”
The law also gave Mr. Trump new powers, which he has yet to deploy, to impose high tariffs on buyers of Russian energy products.
Some top Republican lawmakers who have recently run afoul of Mr. Trump criticized the president’s executive order on Saturday as letting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia off the hook.
“Congress Must Investigate Trump’s Aid and Comfort to Putin,” Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, wrote in a post on social media.
Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, called the decision “beyond irresponsible.”
“It’s unconscionable that this administration is capitulating to a Russian dictator who illegally invaded Ukraine and butchers innocent civilians every single day,” Mr. Tillis said in a social media post. “If the President wants to actually bring down energy prices, he can do it by solving the Iran problem, not by doing a solid for Vladimir Putin.”
But it appears that Congress has little recourse. Even when Congress mandates sanctions, the executive branch has broad discretion on whether to deploy them based on what it believes is best for national security.
“Presidents have always sort of bridled at congressionally mandated measures,” said Adam M. Smith, a former senior adviser to the director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in the Obama administration.
Mr. Smith said that he was surprised that Mr. Trump had opted against imposing any of the sanctions and noted that it gave the appearance that the president was turning away from Ukraine and toward Moscow.
“This plus the diesel deal will make some people concerned about where the president’s head is in this space,” Mr. Smith said.
Alex Zerden, the founder of the risk advisory firm Capitol Peak Strategies and a former official in the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said that Mr. Trump appeared to be adhering to the sanctions law as it was written. He was perplexed by the political calculus of seeking economic assistance from Russia after Congress demonstrated bipartisan support for crippling Russia’s economy.
“The optics around this are confounding given the bipartisan and presidential support for the Lindsey Graham legislation,” Mr. Zerden said. “But the president maintains wide discretion with this Congress.”
During the Biden administration, the United States imposed more than a thousand sanctions on Russian targets and corralled allies to put a cap on the price of Russian oil. The Trump administration has been lenient in enforcing many of those sanctions and so far has only imposed new sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, Russia’s two largest oil companies.
The decision to offer Russia relief from sanctions because of fears about energy prices also represent an about-face for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
At his confirmation hearing last year, Mr. Bessent said the Biden administration’s sanctions on Russia were not “fulsome” enough and described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as one of the greatest tragedies of his adult life. He warned any Russian officials who were watching the Senate hearing that he would gladly ratchet up sanctions pressure to force Russia to the bargaining table.
“I believe that the previous administration was worried about raising U.S. energy prices during an election season,” Mr. Bessent said.
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