Trump sharpens sanctions threat on Russia, while admitting it may not work
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Administration officials gave no reasons to believe the latest engagement with Russia would be any more useful. And Trump himself, usually a true believer in the power of economic sanctions to alter the decisions of foreign leaders, admitted for the second time this week that Putin appears to be immune.
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'I don't know that sanctions bother him,' he said Thursday.
Nonetheless, Trump has now executed a 180-degree turn on Russia, at least in tone, in roughly 180 days.
He came to office questioning whether Russia was truly the invader of Ukraine, and hinting that the Ukrainians were responsible for their own troubles. His famous blowup with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February led him to briefly cut off aid to the Ukrainian military. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that Ukraine would never join NATO -- a reversal of stated American policy -- and Vice President JD Vance spoke out against arming the Ukrainians. Russia was exempted from most tariffs.
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That has been followed by a series of apparent reversals, with no public acknowledgment from Trump that he is changing strategy. He no longer relies on what he has framed as a deep past relationship with Putin in an effort to win him over. In fact, he has been quite open about his frustration that conversations about ceasefires are usually followed by Russian escalation, often in the pace of drone and missile attacks.
'I think what bothers the president the most is he has these great phone calls where everyone sort of claims yeah, we'd like to see this end, if we could find a way forward,' Rubio said in his Fox interview, 'and then he turns on the news and another city has been bombed, including those far from the front lines.'
'So at some point,' Rubio told his interviewer, Brian Kilmeade of Fox News Radio, 'he's got to make a decision here about what -- how much to continue to engage in an effort to do ceasefires if one of the two sides is not interested.'
On Monday, Trump said he would give Russia about 10 to 12 days to end the war before imposing 'sanctions and maybe tariffs, secondary tariffs,' a reference to sanctions on countries that trade with Russia.
But there is reason to question how far Trump will push for full secondary sanctions, which would involve threatening the three countries buying much of Russia's oil and gas: China, India and Turkey. All are key to other American interests, and Trump is likely to need future favors and cooperation from them. And it is hard to imagine that China's president, Xi Jinping, would abandon Putin, his most critical partner in challenging American power.
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Rubio took up the hard choices in his conversation with Kilmeade, arguing that 'the president has a lot of options.' He noted that if the United States could get at Russia's oil sales, it 'is a huge part of their revenue.'
For their part, Russian officials who have long been presumed to speak with Putin's blessing have dismissed Trump's threats, portraying him in Russian media as erratic and unpredictable.
'Fifty days, it used to be 24 hours, it used to be 100 days,' Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, said a few weeks ago, as Trump kept moving the deadlines. 'We've been through all this.'
Democrats say Trump has other options: He could provide direct military aid to Ukraine, as Congress did during the Biden administration. Instead, he has an elaborate plan to sell arms and related technologies to Europe, which will then donate them to Ukraine.
Trump once suggested he could end the war in 24 hours simply by negotiating with Putin, man to man. But now, as Trump's frustration over the conflict grows, his threats have raised questions about how much leverage the United States has with Russia -- and whether Trump is willing to use it.
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