US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war.
Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term.
“If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries,” Trump wrote.
Photo: Reuters
Trump said he was “not looking to hurt Russia” and had “always had a very good relationship with President Putin,” a leader for whom he has expressed admiration in the past.
Russia already faces crushing US sanctions over the war since invading Ukraine in 2022 and trade has slowed to a trickle. Trump’s predecessor, former US president Joe Biden, imposed sweeping sanctions against Moscow’s energy sector earlier this month, but Trump and his administration reportedly believe there are ways of toughening measures to press Putin.
The US imported US$2.9 billion of goods from Russia from January to November last year — down sharply from US$4.3 billion over the same period in 2023, US Department of Commerce data showed.
Top US imports from Russia include fertilizers and precious metals.
It was Trump’s toughest line on Putin since he returned to the White House this week, and comes despite fears that it was Kyiv rather than Moscow that he would persuade to make a peace deal.
Trump at a White House news conference on Tuesday said only that it “sounds likely” that he would apply additional sanctions if Putin did not come to the table, but the US president declined to say whether he would continue Biden’s policy of sending billions of dollars in weaponry to help Ukraine.
“We’re looking at that,” he said. “We’re talking to [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskiy, we’re going to be talking to President Putin very soon.”
Trump has also said he expects to meet Putin — with whom he had a summit in his first term in Helsinki — soon.
Prior to beginning his new term on Monday, Trump had vowed to end the Ukraine war “within 24 hours” and before even taking office, raising expectations that he would leverage aid to force Kyiv to make territorial concessions to Moscow, but his promised breakthrough has proved elusive.
In unusually critical remarks about Putin on Monday, Trump said the Russian president was “destroying Russia by not making a deal.”
Trump added that Zelenskiy had told him he wanted a peace agreement to end the war.
Putin congratulated Trump on his inauguration on Monday. The Russian leader added that he was “open to dialogue” on the Ukraine conflict with Trump’s incoming US administration, adding that he hoped any settlement would ensure “lasting peace.”
US special counsel for the US Department of Justice Robert Mueller and the FBI both investigated alleged collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign — which Trump in his post on Wednesday dubbed once again the “Russia hoax.”
Mueller won convictions of six members of the Trump campaign, but said he found no evidence of criminal cooperation with Russia by the Trump campaign.
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