Trump Pushes Putin to End War in Ukraine, Threatening Russia with Tariffs
and Sanctions
[ABS
News Service/23.01.2025]
President Trump on Wednesday
(22.01.2025) threatened to impose tariffs and sanctions on Russia if President Vladimir
V. Putin does not reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Trump has yet to unveil a detailed
strategy to end the war, which he promised on the campaign trail to do in 24 hours.
In a post on social media, Mr. Trump said
he was “not looking to hurt Russia” but warned that if Mr. Putin did not make a
deal “soon” that he had no choice than to put “high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and
Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States.”
There is little trade between the United
States and Russia to tariff. The entire trade between the two nations in the first
11 months of 2024 was just $3.4 billion, compared to, for example, $700 billion
in the same time period between the United States and Canada, according to U.S.
census data. Russia’s minuscule trade with the U.S. has already fallen from $36
billion in 2021, the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The United States has also already issued
sweeping tariffs on Russian metals, and the Biden administration imposed extensive
sanctions to cripple the Russian economy. The efforts have failed to push Mr. Putin
to halt his invasion of Ukraine.
Hours after he was inaugurated on Monday,
Mr. Trump issued some of his most critical comments he had ever made about Mr. Putin
when he said the Russian president was “destroying Russia” by waging war in Ukraine.
The comments were notable given Mr. Trump’s history of speaking warmly about Mr.
Putin, and in 2018 he accepted the Russian leader’s word over his own intelligence
agencies at a summit in Helsinki.
The next day, Mr. Trump said sanctions
against Russia were “likely.” He dodged a question, however, about whether he thought
the war in Ukraine should be “frozen.”
“The war should have never started,” Mr.
Trump said at the White House on Tuesday.
In his Truth Social post on Wednesday,
Mr. Trump still made time to compliment Mr. Putin.
“I love the Russian people, and always
had a very good relationship with President Putin,” Mr. Trump said.