India and other nations engaged in continued trade with Russia are being targeted with untenably steep tariffs under a bill that got the go-ahead from President Donald Trump this week.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who sponsored the bill, said Wednesday that he now has the president’s blessing in pushing the Sanctioning Russia Act forward for a vote, which he believes could happen as early as next week.
“After a very productive meeting today with President Trump on a variety of issues, he greenlit the bipartisan Russia sanctions bill that I have been working on for months with Senator Blumenthal and many others,” the lawmaker wrote on X.
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The Sanctioning Russia Act would allow the president to impose penalties on both entities and individuals involved in the Russian war effort. It stipulates that the president must increase the duty rate on all goods and services imported from Russia into the U.S. to at least 500 percent, and he must also increase the duty rate on countries that knowingly engage in the exchange of Russian-origin uranium and petroleum products by the same measure.
“This will be well-timed, as Ukraine is making concessions for peace and Putin is all talk, continuing to kill the innocent,” he added. “This bill will allow President Trump to punish those countries who buy cheap Russian oil fueling Putin’s war machine.”
According to Graham, the legislation would give the president “tremendous leverage” over countries like China, India and Brazil that would stop them from buying the Russian oil and natural gas resources “that provides the financing for Putin’s bloodbath against Ukraine.” The senator said he was hopeful that the bill would garner bipartisan support and that it could go to a vote in the coming days.
Trump has been more than keen to facilitate an end to the protracted showdown between Russia and Ukraine. The relationship between the Commander in Chief and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been tension-filled, and Trump has repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership prowess.
However, Trump’s patience with Putin has worn thin following stalled attempts to negotiate an end to the war, and Russia’s unyielding demands—including huge territorial concessions, demilitarization and a permanent commitment to refrain from joining NATO—have proven impossible terms for Ukraine to bear in pursuit of a peace agreement.
After negotiations between officials in Paris this week and a late-December meeting between Trump and Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader announced Thursday that Washington and Kiev have essentially finalized a security guarantee that America and Western allies will come to Ukraine’s aide should Russia invade again.
Trump has, in recent months, has taken to threatening Russia’s primary trading partners with tariffs, believing that sanctioning them economically will cause them to pull back on Russian oil buys that support the war effort. Trump’s chummy relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (who he called a “good guy” over the weekend) hasn’t been enough to smooth things over.
While China is the biggest buyer of Russian oil, the president has been much more acutely focused on India, which already faces a 25 percent punitive duty because of its economic ties to Russia. The country’s total tariff burden hovers at 50 percent—among the highest of any U.S. trading partner, including China (which faces a 47 percent duty rate). According to Indian media, the country purchases more than 30 percent of its oil from Russia, and about 10 percent from the U.S.
