FLASH
Shkruar nga David Blair
If the US president is serious, he should be willing to pressure China's leader to act on Russian oil...
If Donald Trump is serious about imposing punitive sanctions on Russia, there is one immediate diplomatic move he could make. He could send an envoy not to Moscow but to Beijing to warn China's leaders that they are just 50 days away from 100% US tariffs unless they stop buying Russian oil.
Xi Jinping could then turn to his junior partner, Vladimir Putin, and suggest that Russia avoid this outcome by agreeing to a ceasefire in Ukraine.
But there is no public sign that anything like that will happen, and the risk remains that after 50 days, Mr. Trump will not follow through on his words. The war against Ukraine will continue as before, with Putin escaping the harshest sanctions America can impose.
After all, we've been here before.
Mr. Trump has often criticized Putin's stubbornness and threatened more sanctions. On May 29, he said that "within two weeks we will find out whether Putin is spying on us or not."
Two weeks passed without any action. The 50-day countdown could end in the same way.
It remains a remarkable fact that Mr. Trump has not imposed any new sanctions on Russia since he regained the White House six months ago. All such regimes are vulnerable to circumvention, as the targeted country finds ways to circumvent the restrictions.
The only way to respond is to continually update and expand sanctions, closing loopholes as they open. That's why Britain and the EU announce new measures against Russia every few months.
But Mr. Trump has done nothing since taking office in January 2025, allowing US sanctions to dry up immediately.
And now, despite the price increase, there will be nothing for the next 50 days. It is no wonder that the Moscow stock exchange reacted to the president's announcement by rising sharply.
However, markets could be wrong, and things could be different this time. If, as seems possible, Mr. Trump now supplies Ukraine with advanced weapons, including long-range missiles capable of hitting targets in Russia, and if he allows Kiev to use them for that purpose, then Putin will know that American policy has truly changed.
He should have realized by now that Mr. Trump is truly exasperated by the stubborn stubbornness of Russian diplomacy. Speaking in the Oval Office, the president stressed how he thought a peace deal in Ukraine was on the horizon “about four times,” but “here we are still talking” and “it just goes on and on.”
This would not bother Putin if Mr. Trump were inclined to blame Volodymyr Zelensky for the blockade. But it seems to have caught a lot of attention that Ukraine accepted America’s proposed ceasefire on March 11, while all Putin has done is fire more and more killer drones and ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities.
In the battle to influence Mr. Trump’s perceptions, from which all American policy flows, Putin for the first time appears to be losing. Mr. Trump is no longer inclined to exonerate his Russian counterpart.
Putin’s own view of Mr. Trump’s threatened sanctions will soon become clear. If Russia returns to the negotiating table with a modified set of demands, perhaps acknowledging that it will never gain an inch of Ukrainian territory, then Mr. Trump will have succeeded in forcing Putin to change his position.
But it remains equally possible that Putin will sit back and wait for the next deadline to pass as smoothly as the last one. / Adapted from The Telegraph Pamphlet/
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