Trump talks tough on Russia, but will he follow through?

Al Jazeera

2 days ago

On July 14, United States President Donald Trump teased a sea change in his approach to Russia's war against Ukraine. Trump declared he would send significant additional air defence units to Ukraine, whose cities are now subject to an average onslaught of more than 100 Russian drones and missiles daily. Leaks from the White House even claimed Trump had inquired with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a preceding phone call about what offensive weaponry Kyiv needed to hit Moscow directly.
Trump also made his most explicit sanction threat to date, proposing a 100 percent 'secondary tariff' on countries that buy Russian oil, if the Kremlin does not agree to a ceasefire in 50 days, by September 3. But Trump's tough talk has fallen far short of moving the dial. Russian officials have laughed off his claims about hitting Moscow. Air defence deliveries may lower the damage from Putin's aerial onslaught, but delivering them in anything like the numbers Trump floated will take many months.
Trump's sanctions threat has not moved markets, though such a restriction would amount to an attempted blockade of the world's third-largest oil producer.
That Trump has shifted his approach to Russia should, however, come as no surprise. Despite Trump's apparent personal affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin, regarding Ukraine and Russia, his view of key US strategic interests is fundamentally opposed to Putin's.
Trump wants to export more US natural gas; Putin wants to do the same with Russia's gas, having lost his European pipeline market. Trump cares about Greenland because he recognises the importance of Arctic shipping routes in the future, and for Russia, its rival Arctic shipping route is a key factor in maintaining Chinese support. Putin wants to seize as much of Ukraine's mineral resources for Russia as he can; Trump wants to do the same for Washington.
Having failed in his inaugural pledge to settle the conflict within a day, something he now admits was an exaggeration, Trump's longstanding hostility towards Zelenskyy – a legacy of Trump's first impeachment scandal, which resulted from an attempt to extort blackmail on the Biden campaign from Zelenskyy – was eased after Kyiv agreed to a long-term strategic alignment with Washington on those minerals.
Trump has, if belatedly, recognised that Putin has not been negotiating in good faith. No progress was made in the May and June peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow, with both sides just showing up to please Trump and try to win him over to their respective positions.
Trump's realisation may have come from the fact that Putin increased his demands amid those negotiations. He not only continued to insist on the occupation of all of the southern and eastern Ukrainian regions he claims to have annexed, though never fully occupied, but added that Russia would need a 'buffer zone' in northern Ukraine as well.
The change in Trump's approach has thus far had a muted impact for two reasons. Firstly, because his threat of the Russian oil tariff is not credible on its own. Trump has been extremely wary of high oil prices, or even the potential for them to rise. In the aftermath of his June strikes on Iran, he publicly decried the subsequent spike in oil markets.
But it is also doubtful that the secondary tariff threat alone will work. Trump first used a similar threat to target Venezuelan oil exports at the end of March, and while Venezuelan exports declined, they have since recovered as Beijing has expanded purchases. Especially as it is in the middle of its own tariff war with Trump, which has already seen him threaten tariffs even above 100 percent, there is little chance Beijing, Russia's largest oil buyer, will care about a similar threat on Russian production.
Additionally, Trump's decision to play for time with his threat is likely to delay passage of a Senate bill imposing additional sanctions on Russia, though 83 of 100 members of the chamber have co-sponsored it. The Republican Party's leadership in the Senate and the House are wary of being seen to goad Trump on the issue, lest it risk blowback from Trump, who demands near-universal authority and deference on policymaking from his party.
Nevertheless, while Trump has gotten Europe to agree to be more public in accepting its costs of supporting Kyiv – which cumulatively were larger than the US's even before Trump began his second term, despite his assertions to the contrary – it will continue to be US equipment and technology that drive Kyiv's ability to resist or turn the tide. And delivering new arms to Ukraine and training its forces to use them will take time.
Trump will also have to change his approach. Increasing economic pressure on Russia that can force Putin to treat negotiations seriously is not something that the US can achieve alone. It is made only harder to achieve when Washington spars with its allies and partners.
With regards to additional restrictions on Russian oil, Trump may not have much chance of convincing Russia to go along, but such restrictions could jolt India to change its approach. New Delhi has gone from being a negligible purchaser of Russian oil before the full-scale invasion to its second-largest market, with 40 percent of India's imports now coming from Russia.
India's Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri last week noted the country would not change its approach. He emphasised New Delhi has complied with previous restrictions, including the oil price cap, which the Biden administration engineered together with G7 allies in 2022 to actually keep Russian oil flowing, just limiting its revenues therefrom. They too were wary of market disruption, as Trump is today, with Biden's Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen even explicitly supporting the structure as a way to secure oil 'bargains' for India and other developing markets.
But the minister did note that if there was an international agreement on shifting Russian oil purchases, then New Delhi could change its approach.
If Trump wants his threats against Moscow to be credible, he will have to embrace a multilateral approach.
Some steps are easy to do. As Trump's administration has thus far resisted additional sanctions, Brussels and Westminster have taken the lead in targeting Russia's 'shadow fleet' aimed at evading sanctions and the price cap, and engineering new sanctions proposals, including proposing tweaks to the oil price cap to lower it further when prices are soft. Two European Union sanctions packages have been agreed in the last six months, the second on July 18, and Trump should swiftly match their measures.
If Europe can also be convinced to support a secondary tariff or other sanctions on Russian oil purchasers, that measure too would be far more likely to be effective.
Additionally, Trump can target Russia's additional liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports by finally blacklisting Novatek, its key LNG exporter. Europe has not been willing to go that far yet, instead seeking only a phaseout of its purchases by the end of next year. But because the market for LNG tankers is much smaller than the oil market, earlier US sanctions on Russian LNG projects have proven much harder to evade.
Russia's economy is finally struggling under the costs of Putin's war and all the sanctions he has brought upon his country in response to his aggression. Russian banks are reportedly holding preliminary discussions on the terms of state bailouts.
But amid this pain, Russia claims to have seized a town in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time – a claim Kyiv denies and which remains unverified. Trump can have a far more significant impact on the course of the war by reversing his resistance to Ukrainian attacks on the Kremlin's energy assets.
Trump may have declared a new approach to Russia, but whether it goes beyond mere rhetoric will depend on his willingness to work with partners and allies and acknowledge the costs of such pressure.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.