President Donald Trump issued sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, Russian state-owned oil companies, Thursday. Chinese state oil companies immediately stopped buying Russian crude oil. India, which has been Russia’s number one overseas buyer of crude oil, also suspended purchases. Republican Senators are taking up a number of bills next week aimed at further sanctioning Russia — after waiting for months while Trump exhausted all other options with Vladimir Putin.
Ten days after Trump took his second inaugural oath, I asked how much time Putin could buy before this moment, and how much leverage Trump would create. I treated this moment as inevitable — because Putin would never trade his ambition to destroy Ukraine for anything material that Trump could ever give him. I said that Moscow’s negotiating leverage would decrease over time as economic realities stack up. I decided not to unlock this post after the usual eight weeks. Instead, I waited until this morning, 267 days later.
It has been 277 days since the inauguration, when Trump figured he could end Putin’s war in 100 days. Two days after taking his second oath of office, Trump warned Vladimir Putin that if he did not agree to peace, “I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.” Secretary-appointee of the Treasury Scott Bessent told Congress that he would be happy to exert the economic leverage that was left unused against Russia under the Biden administration if Trump told him to, saying “I believe that the sanctions were not fulsome enough” before.
In May, after a series of false starts, Trump appeared to be ready for sanctions, saying that Putin “has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Clearly humiliated, Trump pretended that the KGB spook-turned-dictator had changed in some important way: “Something happened to this guy and I don’t like it.” In the 107 days since Trump gave 50 days to clean up his act, Putin has redoubled his efforts to seize the Donbas, invaded Sumy, punished civilians harder than ever in Kherson and Kyiv and Odesa. No one can ever seriously claim that Trump did not give Putin enough chances, or enough time.
Quite the opposite: Trump’s harshest critics have made the most of his inaction. Most recently, Trump floated the possibility of providing Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine. While there were practical questions about launch vehicles and training before this could even happen, the very public discussion was clearly aimed at bringing Putin back to a negotiation process.
In the brief moment when a Budapest meeting seemed to be happening, Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Trump would not be providing the cruise missiles “at this time”, which means they may still be provided in the future. While there are no Tomahawks on the way to Ukraine, Trump clearly gave permission this week for Ukraine to start using Storm Shadow missiles on targets deep inside Russia.
Predictably, Russian media reacted to the Tomahawk discussion with threats and cope. Cruise missiles are both the greatest threat to world peace and also not a threat to Russia at all. They are doing the same with Trump’s new sanctions, but the president is talking about timetables in a whole new way. When a reporter asked him to respond to Putin saying that “Russia is immune from U.S. sanctions,” he responded: “Glad he feels that way. Let’s see in six months.” Reader, it will be a long winter in Russia.
A Budapest meeting will not happen, so this will happen instead. “I just felt it was time,” Trump told reporters. “We waited a long time.” Indeed, there was a final flurry of stories about attempts to strong-arm Ukraine into giving up the Donbas, but this was bound to fail. Premium subscribers have known this moment was coming, even if it has been like waiting for Christmas. The war does not get better from here, for Russia. It only gets worse, and so does the eventual peace. Putin has received the best offer he will ever get from Donald Trump. All the offers get worse from here.