After 10 months of procrastination, Donald Trump finally slams his fist on the table. Faced with Vladimir Putin’s refusal to seriously sit down at the negotiating table and consider a ceasefire in Ukraine, Washington imposed additional sanctions on Moscow for the first time since January.
They target the Russian oil groups Rosneft and Lukoil, “the two largest oil companies that finance the Kremlin’s war machine”, in the words of the American Finance Minister, Scott Bessent, who denounces a Russian president “neither frank nor honest” who does not want to stop “this senseless war.” The two groups account for almost half of Russian oil exports.
Expressing his exasperation, Donald Trump called these sanctions “huge” and “hopes they don’t last too long.”
“We have the feeling that Trump has reluctantly sanctioned Russia,” says Ulrich Bounat, geopolitical analyst and associate researcher at the Euro Créativ think tank, contacted by BFMTV. The American president has raised the threat of sanctions in recent months, with important statements, without taking the step.
“Trump had hoped to bring Putin to the negotiating table. To do so, he will have promised a lot and made verbal concessions beforehand: a mix of positive psychology, performance and command optimism. But Putin is stubborn, he wants everything and more,” he explains. has BFMTV Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, Researcher at the French Institute of Geopolitics. The American president ended up finding himself against the wall.
“A significant and symbolic gesture”
Washington’s sanctions involve freezing all assets of Rosneft and Lukoil in the United States, as well as banning all American companies from doing business with the two Russian oil giants.
It is “the first time that Russian crude oil exports are a direct target” of the United States, Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, an analyst at Global Risk Management, told AFP. Previous G7 sanctions set a price limit for Moscow’s purchase of barrels, but did not reduce export volumes.
If it is “a significant and symbolic gesture,” according to researcher Ulrich Bounat, its implementation and sustainability remain to be seen. For him, these sanctions will take effect especially if they become “secondary”, that is, if they are not only directed at Russia but also at countries that trade with it in currencies other than the dollar. On the front line: China and India, the two main importers of Russian black gold.
Officially, Beijing has directly opposed US sanctions, but some of its major state oil companies have already suspended purchases. Attention is also focused on New Delhi: Donald Trump says that his “great friend” Narendra Modi will stop buying Russian oil. Which India has neither confirmed nor denied.
The Europeans also announced a new set of measures against Moscow, the 19th since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In particular, it provides for a complete cessation of imports of Russian liquefied natural gas by the end of 2026 and additional measures against the ghost fleet of oil tankers that Russia uses to circumvent Western sanctions.
Appearing impassive, the Kremlin, which continues its deadly attack on energy structures in Ukraine, declared itself “immune” to these economic pressures. Although he considered the US sanctions “serious”, Vladimir Putin himself assured that they “will not have a significant impact” on the economic health of his country.
Emmanuel Macron, for his part, spoke of a “true turning point” and a “massive blow” to the financing of the Russian war effort.
Strategic change: a beginning?
Until now, Donald Trump had refrained from resorting to his “peace through strength” mantra in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. At least towards Moscow. On the contrary, for many months the pressure was focused on Ukraine in favor of tolerance towards the Kremlin. Again this Friday, October 17, during a “tense” call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the American billionaire tried to pressure kyiv to give up the disputed province of Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, in exchange for peace.
But the sanctions imposed on Russian oil seem “the beginning of a strategic change,” says Ukraine specialist Ulrich Bounat. For him, “the second sword of ‘peace through strength'” would be the supply of additional weapons to Ukraine.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Washington has lifted restrictions on the use of long-range US missiles to attack Russia in depth. What Donald Trump denied: “They use, I think, European or other missiles, but they don’t use ours.”
During his last call, Volodymyr Zelensky failed to convince his counterpart to provide him with Tomahawk missiles with a range of more than 1,500 kilometers, which worries Moscow. “This question could arise again,” estimates Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, also an associate professor of History and Geography.
“If the Trump administration stays on this course and decides to provide kyiv with more weapons and the intelligence needed to strike deep into Russian territory, the war in Ukraine could reach a new milestone,” he says.
Vladimir Putin reiterated that the use of Tomahawk missiles in Russia would constitute an “escalation” of the conflict and would generate a “strong”, “not to say surprising” response.
Donald Trump in the face of his impotence
Another sign of Donald Trump’s discontent: the cancellation of the long-awaited summit with Vladimir Putin in Budapest, the Hungarian capital. “It seemed to me that we were not going in the direction we needed to go,” he told reporters at the White House. “So I canceled it, but we will do it in the future.”
“Every time I talk to Vladimir, our conversations are good, but then they lead to nothing. They simply lead to nothing,” lamented the American president, who had indicated the day before that he did not want to “waste time.”
For his part, the former KGB spy advocated the continuation of dialogue “always preferable to confrontation, disputes and even more so to war.”
Donald Trump wants to avoid a scenario similar to that in Anchorage, Alaska, last August. Their summit turned out to be a failure. “He did not want to be confronted with his inability to obtain results. When he meets with Vladimir Putin and nothing happens, it is an implicit admission of his impotence,” says Ulrich Bounat.
After having triumphed with the ceasefire in Gaza, the real estate magnate looks gloomy. If Donald Trump managed to twist Benjamin Netanyahu’s arm to secure a truce, this is not the case with Vladimir Putin. “The Americans have a colossal level of influence over Israel. If tomorrow they decide to stop supplying military weapons to Israel, Israel will stop its war,” explains Ulrich Bounat. While in this conflict, the United States has more “methods of pressure on the defensive country, Ukraine.”
“I also believe that Benjamin Netanyahu went too far in Trump’s eyes by attacking the Hamas delegation in Doha, thus entering into immediate conflict with his financial and diplomatic interests,” he adds. “So there was an international consensus, which is not the case here. The Chinese, the North Koreans and the Iranians do not have the same strategic objectives at all.”
It is difficult to know at this point whether the unprecedented sanctions that materialize Donald Trump’s exasperation can make Vladimir Putin relent. “In any case, it will be a hard blow for a part of the Russian economic elite that will realize that Putin’s attitude is destructive for the ties between Washington and Moscow,” underlines researcher Ulrich Bounat.
Blinded by his intransigence, the owner of the Kremlin did not take advantage of the opportunity of the territorial, economic and diplomatic concessions offered by Donald Trump, at the expense of kyiv. For geopolitics expert Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, Vladimir Putin probably “missed a historic opportunity.”
Source: BFM TV
