President Donald Trump set a two-week deadline Wednesday for his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to make progress on ceasefire negotiations over Ukraine, adding thinly veiled threats about the consequences for Moscow if he isn't satisfied.
The two leaders have long shared a public rapport, but tensions have mounted recently, with Trump increasingly frustrated by the Kremlin’s demanding what essentially amounts to a surrender by Kyiv in the two countries’ three-year-long war.
Trump recent complained that Putin is stringing him along, paired with his answer, “I’ll let you know in about two weeks,” when he was asked in the Oval Office whether he thought Putin was serious about a peace deal.
“We’re going to find out whether or not he’s tapping us along or not, and if he is, we’ll respond a little bit differently,” Trump added.
“The challenge is that a plausible timeline for getting to a real ceasefire is just longer than two weeks or two months,” said Samuel Charap, the distinguished chair in Russian policy at the Rand Corp., a California-based public policy think tank.
Charap added that in the absence of a regular negotiating format, there was also little clarity over whether the deadline could produce any serious results.
“The president sees this as something that could, can and should be finished and dealt with immediately, and that is just not the nature of the way this war is going to end,” he said.
The White House now faces the question of whether the openly cordial relationship between Trump and Putin has failed to achieve the ceasefire it promised, instead emboldening the Kremlin.
Senior U.S. officials are ramping up pressure on Trump to consider tougher measures against Russia.
They include imposing new sanctions on Moscow, which Trump said Sunday he would “absolutely” consider before he contradicted himself Wednesday, saying, “I don’t want to screw it up by doing that.”
But Trump may not have a choice if the Senate's Russia hawks get their way and pass a bipartisan bill that includes a 500% tariff on buyers of Russian exports, including oil.
Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said last week that their putative bill had 81 co-sponsors before Graham underscored his point in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Wednesday.
In it, Graham warned the Senate would take action “if Putin continued to play games,” adding, “I’m hoping for the best, but when it comes to the thug in Moscow, we should all prepare for more of the same.”
Moscow has done little to dispel that reputation of slow-walking the president in recent days. Putin has yet to deliver a memorandum for a peace agreement that he promised shortly after the two leaders spoke on the phone over a week ago.
The Kremlin says that a document is in its final stages and that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday proposed fresh direct talks with Ukraine on June 2 at which, he said, Moscow would hand over its proposal.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov accused Russia of delaying the process Wednesday on X, calling on the Kremlin to deliver its memorandum beforehand and pointing out that Kyiv had already done so.
Other advocates of tougher measures against Russia say the United States and its allies ought to target Russia's “shadow fleet” of around 500 shipping vessels used to export Russian oil around the world, which has largely evaded oil price cap sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union.
White House officials previously feared such a move could trigger higher energy prices, with potentially damaging political and economic consequences, but the E.U. and Britain did just that last week as they announced a new raft of sanctions on Russia.
The Biden administration also sanctioned 183 Russian vessels in its final weeks in January.
Such vessels have largely slipped under the West's gaze by avoiding any contracts for Western services, as well as certain types of insurance.
“Russia’s shadow fleet strategy circumvents sanctions by avoiding reliance on Western service providers in the export supply chain, rather than concealing the origins and destinations of their cargoes,” Craig Kennedy, an expert on Russian oil at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, said in a recent analysis.
Sanctions have already affected Russia's oil export revenues: The market price for Urals oil has slipped to $65 a barrel from a peak of $100 a barrel in 2022, shaving an estimated $142 billion off the Russian economy, according to the Kyiv School of Economics.
But that figure hasn’t been as large as previously hoped, Kennedy said.
“Western sanctions have significantly reduced Russia’s oil export revenues,” Kennedy wrote, adding, “Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that sanctions have fallen far short of their potential for limiting Russia’s export earnings, while avoiding counterproductive market disruptions.”
Even so, Trump has significant leverage over Russia if he chooses to use it, experts say, including blacklisting the rest of the shadow fleet, imposing secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil and gas and even imposing a full U.S. financial embargo on Russia.
That would raise doubts about how long Moscow can continue to wage a costly war in Ukraine, said Daniel Fried, a retired American diplomat who worked in Eastern Europe and helped craft sanctions on Russia during the Obama administration.
Fried cited studies suggesting “Russia will have trouble continuing the war at this pace once its [currency] reserves run out, which they’re likely to do.”
“It’ll never be 100% effective. The good news is it doesn’t have to be,” he said.
