Trump Signs Russia Sanctions: Tariff Powers Expanded
Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act into law, two days after the House passed it in a bipartisan vote, according to The Guardian.
Donald Trump has signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act into law, two days after the House passed it in a bipartisan vote, according to The Guardian. The legislation imposes new sanctions on Russia and simultaneously expands the executive branch's authority to levy tariffs — a combination that hands the White House considerably broader economic leverage over both adversaries and allies alike.
The timing is deliberate. Russia is holding its first parliamentary elections since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, a process the Kremlin has tightly stage-managed to ensure the State Duma's composition changes in form but not in function, per the New York Times. Signing sanctions legislation while Moscow is performing democratic theatre is not coincidence — it is message.
What the bill gives Trump is twofold: a harder legal framework for squeezing Russian energy revenues and financial institutions, and a wider mandate to use tariffs as coercive instruments without returning to Congress for approval. That second provision is the one Brussels and other capitals will be reading carefully. Sanctions on Moscow are welcome in most European chancelleries. Tariff powers concentrated in one executive hand are not.
Latvia's president Edgars Rinkēvičs has separately warned that Europe's aerial and drone defences are moving too slowly to keep pace with the war's technological evolution — a signal that even as Washington tightens its legal grip on Moscow, the military gap on the ground remains unresolved.
*By Isla Camilleri, Global Affairs & Lifestyle Editor*
