U.S. President Donald Trump has given Russian President Vladimir Putin a lot of rope over the past eight and a half years, but his patience now appears to be rapidly diminishing as he grows frustrated with Putin’s refusal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Trump cut short a 50-day deadline that he had given Russia to arrive at a deal to end the war or face additional sanctions—including secondary tariffs on countries such as India and possibly China that continue to purchase Russian oil—saying during a visit to Scotland last month that he would only give Russia 10 more days, or until Aug. 8.
On Wednesday, two days before the deadline, Trump pulled the trigger on secondary tariffs aimed at India, issuing an executive order that would raise the U.S. tariff rate on India to 50 percent—25 percent for Trump’s trade ire and 25 percent for India’s reliance on Russian oil, with the latter increase beginning in 21 days.
In the first year of his second term in office, Trump has gone from shouting down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office to promising him more Patriot missiles. Last week, Trump responded to a veiled threat from former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev by claiming to reposition two “nuclear” submarines closer to Russia (though it remains unclear whether Trump meant nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered submarines, as the United States has both).
That hasn’t precluded continued attempts at diplomacy—Trump sent presidential envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow on Wednesday, where he sat down with Putin in a meeting that reportedly lasted about three hours. Neither side has indicated what was discussed, but Trump had earlier said Russia and Ukraine have “got to get to a deal where people stop getting killed.” Trump also reportedly told European leaders after Witkoff’s visit on Wednesday that Trump plans to meet in person with Putin as early as next week and then shortly after with Putin and Zelensky together, though it is unclear if the Ukrainian and Russian leaders have agreed to those meetings.
Trump has shown a tendency to abruptly reverse course or blow past self-imposed deadlines on several issues, but the Aug. 1 unveiling—as promised—of a swath of new tariffs on U.S. trading partners could indicate a shift in strategy, said Torrey Taussig, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously served in the Biden administration as a National Security Council director for Europe and the Defense Department’s coordinator for the 2024 NATO summit.
“We are at a point in this administration where they have carried out costs that they promised to enact,” Taussig said. “And this is a president that’s shown he’s increasingly frustrated with President Putin.”
Less clear is how seriously Putin is taking Trump’s threats (initial reports indicate that the Russian president is inclined to ignore them) or what impact they will have on Russia’s war machine.
“It may be causing [Putin] to refine his approach, but I think that he still thinks that he has influence over [Witkoff] and certainly over President Trump,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia and Eurasia in the Obama administration. “Putin will do everything he can to play for time—he just wants another day to get another inch, and that approach has worked for him for a while, but it’s not an approach that will work indefinitely without some kind of strategic shift.”
The latest U.S. pressure focuses on Russia’s energy sector, still the cash cow that funds the country’s economy and its war in Ukraine. The Trump administration is reportedly mulling fresh sanctions on Russia’s so-called shadow fleet tankers, which circumvent the Western sanctions regime. The United Kingdom and the European Union, unlike the United States, have continued to blacklist Russian tankers this year, an effective way to curtail the country’s earnings from oil exports.
A bigger and more controversial step came Wednesday, when Trump—who had previously threatened to use secondary tariffs to punish big buyers of Russian oil, especially India—then went and did it. Trump slapped India with additional tariffs of 25 percent on its exports if it continues to purchase Russian crude, as it has been doing with Western connivance since 2022. Trump administration officials have also floated the idea of secondary tariffs on other big buyers of Russian oil, such as China, but Trump’s threats have focused on India in the midst of wider trade disputes that led to the imposition of 25 percent U.S. tariffs early this month.
Trump’s idea behind the secondary tariffs is to further choke off Russian oil revenues and force Putin to the negotiating table. Even if they worked, and India swore off the main source of the medium-grade crude that runs its refineries, that would only hit about $3 billion of Russia’s monthly earnings. (Intensifying a trade war with China and aiming to stop Beijing’s even bigger imports of Russian oil could lead to a $7 billion loss per month for Russia.)
Trump could have inflicted that much pain (and avoided higher taxes on U.S. consumers) simply by supporting the G-7 proposal for a lower price cap on legal Russian oil exports this summer, but he refused. India’s refinery mix also makes it an unattractive destination for U.S. crude exports, even if low prices weren’t discouraging production in the U.S. oil patch.
There is one other problem. Taking off, or threatening to take off, a chunk of Russian oil from the global market would likely send oil prices (and gasoline prices) higher. If oil prices go up from today’s value of mid-$60s per barrel to an average of $80 a barrel, which they could if big volumes are diverted, then Russia would still be in the black.
“Ultimately, we are trying to starve the Russian war machine of cash,” said Harvard University scholar Craig Kennedy, an expert on the Russian energy sector. The question—and the problem—is how one does it. Choking off volumes of Russian oil on the global market is not the answer, because that raises oil prices for everyone. Choking off Russian oil earnings would be the ticket, but that won’t come from secondary tariffs on Indian exports of pharmaceuticals to New Jersey.
“If we want sanctions to be taken seriously, they need to be seriously thought through. It can’t be shooting from the hip,” Kennedy said. “Is this a coherent and durable plan? How does it actually reduce Russian revenues?”
The energy battle could get even muddier as Ukraine continues its assault on Russian oil refineries, which will likely push Moscow to export more crude oil in coming months, just as its main buyers are coming under pressure to curtail purchases.
It’s not clear under what legal authority Trump might levy secondary tariffs. His executive order invokes a Carter administration-era bill about U.S. national emergencies that has nothing at all to say about Indian energy import needs. Senate legislation that would allow for steep secondary tariffs remains stalled, at Trump’s request, in Congress. He announced a similar move against buyers of Venezuelan oil this spring, but the administration has made no move or mention of that since.
At any rate, India and China have responded to Trump’s threat of secondary tariffs with defiance, with the foreign ministries of both countries issuing statements indicating that they will continue buying Russian oil if it suits their economic and national security interests.
Both countries, like many others, have been in negotiations with the Trump administration over trade deals. But China may have more leverage. Negotiations with China over a deal are still ongoing, and Beijing’s dominance of rare-earth minerals—which it has shown a willingness to use—remains its greatest point of leverage.
“President Trump has far more leverage vis-à-vis India than he and the United States have vis-à-vis China,” said Farkas, now the executive director of the McCain Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. “Having said that,” she added, “there are things we can do with China.”
Trump has thus far been hesitant to impose additional sanctions on Russia to bring Putin to the negotiating table—a new report by Senate Democratic staffers found that the Trump administration has not added any new sanctions since taking over from President Joe Biden in January—but there are a few more levers that he can pull.
Those include expanding sanctions on Russian civilian firms that support the country’s defense industrial base as well as additional Russian exports beyond energy, such as metals, fertilizers, and other agricultural products, Nicholas Fenton and Maria Snegovaya recently wrote in Foreign Policy.
There’s also the long-standing push to seize the roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian currency reserves tied up in the Western banking system, using it to further rearm and later rebuild Ukraine. Or there are ways to make Russia pay. Kennedy, the Harvard energy expert, suggested a simple shipping surcharge for legal Russian oil exports that could be banked and later used for arms or reconstruction.
“These options have always been on the table, but President Trump has yet to be willing to enact them,” said Taussig, the Atlantic Council fellow. “We are at a point now where should Witkoff come back empty-handed, there’s a very real chance that President Trump could move to enact some of these economic costs.”
The Ukrainians themselves have some concrete ideas. “Russia’s military-industrial complex needs to be better targeted,” Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Monday, specifically calling out Russia’s state nuclear agency, Rosatom, and its space agency, Roscosmos. “Both agencies must be sanctioned in full and banned from cooperating with Western scientific and academic institutions,” Yermak said, additionally calling for a “full economic blockade” of Russia.
How much of that Trump is legally able—or personally willing—to do remains to be seen.
“Everything that President Trump has done so far has been more along the lines of signaling,” Farkas said. “We have yet to see him take action that moves Russia undeniably toward an understanding that they can’t win this war.”
FP’s John Haltiwanger contributed reporting to this article.
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