In between inspecting his golf courses in Scotland and meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, President Trump delivered another stern message to Russian President Vladimir Putin this week: the 50-day time frame the United States has given you to stop the war in Ukraine is now reduced to 10 to 12 days. “No reason in waiting,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “We just don’t see any progress being made.”
Those remarks come after weeks in which the Trump administration, and the president specifically, issued pointed barbs at the Russians for impeding the peace process between the two countries, which the White House has tried to facilitate. In addition to sanctions, the administration threatened to slap secondary tariffs on Russia’s trading partners, particularly those who buy Russian oil and gas, if no peace agreement is reached. There was widespread skepticism that Trump would actually go through with this, but Trump’s announcement Wednesday that India will be hit with an additional penalty for purchasing Russian oil suggests this concern was misplaced.
Yet even as Trump seems to be getting increasingly tough on Putin for stonewalling peace talks, two questions are front of mind. First, will secondary tariffs affect Moscow’s ability to continue the war? And second, by sanctioning India, does Trump risk undermining a critical strategic relationship that every U.S. president since the turn of the century has sought to cultivate?
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