It’s called the Graham-Blumenthal Sanctions Bill and if passed will penalise Russia, India, China and Brazil, over their purchase of Russian oil with 500% tariffs!
President Trump seems to believe that sanctions of this kind will cripple Russia economically at a time when he is looking for a way to end the war in Ukraine.
“This bill would give President Trump tremendous leverage against countries like China, India and Brazil to incentivise them to stop buying the cheap Russian oil that provides the financing for Putin’s bloodbath against Ukraine,” said Senator Lindsay Graham, a Trump acolyte from South Carolina.
According to an Al Jazeera report quoting analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, China bought nearly half of Russia’s crude oil exports in November, while India took about 38 percent of exports.
But former Treasury official Catherine Wolfram, who worked on sanctions under the Biden Administration, “I worry that Russia and India will call the US government’s bluff and continue to import Russian oil, if perhaps at a slight discount, as the cost to the US of carrying through on the threat, especially in the middle of trade negotiations with China, is nontrivial.”
Trump’s move comes at a time when Moscow and Kyiv are engaged in Washington-brokered negotiations to bring an end to the nearly four-year war.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration for the first time gave its backing to European proposals for binding security guarantees for Ukraine, including post-war truce monitoring and a European-led multinational force.
Russia, which has repeatedly said it will not accept any deployment of NATO member countries’ soldiers in Ukraine, has yet to indicate that it would support such security measures, Al Jazeera reported.
But Graham believes the bill couldn’t have been better timed. “This will be well-timed, as Ukraine is making concessions for peace and Putin is all talk, continuing to kill the innocent,” he said.
