Trump Admits Financial Penalties on Russia ‘May or May Not’ Work

Just 24 hours after President Trump threatened Russia with financial penalties over the war in Ukraine, he seemed unsure on Tuesday about whether the strategy would even work.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Mr. Trump said that in 10 days, the United States may have to impose “tariffs and stuff.”

“I don’t know if it’s going to affect Russia, because he wants to, obviously, probably keep the war going,” Mr. Trump said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin. “But we’re going to put on tariffs and the various things you put on. It may or may not affect them. But it could.”

Mr. Trump once suggested he could end the war in Ukraine by appealing to Mr. Putin, man to man. He tried to rewrite the history of Russia’s invasion by casting Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, not as victims but as villains. But now, as Mr. Trump’s frustration over the conflict grows, his threats have raised questions about how much leverage the United States has with Moscow — and whether Mr. Trump is willing to use it.

“Trump seems to be realizing what a lot of us observed from early on — that Zelensky is not the problem,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. “Ukraine is not the problem. Putin is the problem.”

Mr. Trump “obviously had great confidence in his own deal-making abilities,” Mr. Duss added, “but reality seems to be hitting.”

Mr. Trump said on Monday that he would give Russia about 10 to 12 days to end the war before imposing “sanctions and maybe tariffs, secondary tariffs,” a reference to tariffs on countries that trade with Russia.

That was a shorter timeline from the 50 days he specified on July 14.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to punish Russia over its escalating attacks in Ukraine, but so far has not followed through. And his latest threat of financial penalties — as the president acknowledged — could fall flat.

Sanctions that punish Russia’s energy sector and its customers, as a proposed Senate bill would do, would hurt Moscow much more than tariffs on the few goods that Russia sends to the United States. But Republican leaders have pulled back on their plans to vote on that bill after Mr. Trump threatened to act unilaterally.

There is little indication that Mr. Trump’s ultimatum will change Mr. Putin’s mind on the war. The Russian leader has embarked on what he sees as a history-defining mission to bring Ukraine back under the Kremlin’s thumb.

With his forces in the middle of a summer offensive, Mr. Putin believes he has the upper hand on the battlefield, where Kyiv’s reserves of personnel are dwindling and Moscow is making gains.

Russian technocrats have also spent more than three years building an economy that can weather Western sanctions, with one top Moscow university even offering a new master’s degree in sanctions evasion.

But Russia does remain dependent on oil and gas, which are responsible for about a third of the country’s government revenue.

Mr. Trump’s threat to slap secondary tariffs on countries buying Russian oil would involve China, India and Turkey, and would represent a potential escalation in his global trade war.

The problem, as commentators in Russia have pointed out, is that such a move could cause global oil prices to skyrocket. Western policymakers have pursued an “oil price cap” strategy against Russia, trying to limit Moscow’s oil revenues without shocking the global market. But it has largely faltered, and has failed to curb Mr. Putin.

Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that he was not concerned about how any forthcoming economic penalties would affect the oil market.

Foreign policy experts say that Mr. Trump has other economic and military options to compel Russia to stop the war. Even though Russia has sanction-proofed itself, experts say, its economy is vulnerable. Mr. Trump, they say, could still go after parts of its banking system, cap its oil prices and leverage his influence on foreign policy and trade deals with European allies.

In a statement, the White House would not say whether Mr. Trump was exploring other options, but maintained that he “wants to stop the killing, which is why he is selling American-made weapons to NATO members and threatening Putin with biting tariffs and sanctions.”

Evelyn Farkas, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, said that Mr. Trump “has a lot of cards up his sleeve,” including the Senate bill that would slap sanctions of at least 500 percent on imports from Russia or from any country that buys Russian uranium or oil products.

But Ms. Farkas said that Mr. Trump needs to convey that Russia cannot win the war militarily.

He could ramp up military assistance, encourage Ukraine to take bigger risks in using its military assistance and work with allies to use frozen Russian assets to help ensure a pipeline of weaponry, she noted.

“He thought that he and his negotiators could talk Russia into some kind of compromise, but Putin is not interested in compromise,” Ms. Farkas said. “And so he’s going to keep on fighting until he realizes that he can’t achieve his objectives using military force. At the end of the day, he has to be convinced that he’s losing, and his people around him need to be convinced of that.”

The Kremlin offered little in the way of reaction to Mr. Trump’s latest threat. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said Tuesday that the Kremlin had “taken note” of the comments.

But Mr. Putin’s allies have condemned, and even mocked, Mr. Trump’s shifting deadlines.

“Fifty days, it used to be 24 hours, it used to be 100 days,” Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said earlier this month after Mr. Trump issued his 50-day deadline. “We’ve been through all this.”

In a social media post on Monday, former Russian president Dmitri A. Medvedev, a close ally of Mr. Putin’s, said Mr. Trump was playing “the ultimatum game with Russia.” Using the nickname Mr. Trump has deployed for his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Medvedev urged the American president not to “go down the Sleepy Joe road!”

“Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war,” Mr. Medvedev wrote of Mr. Trump. “Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.”

Daniel Fried, a fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington and a former top U.S. diplomat who has negotiated with the Russians, said that Mr. Trump has the chance to repair what he called a “terrible and costly” mistake, when he initially signaled that the United States did not support Ukraine. He said it gave Russia the runway “to play this out as long as they can, looking for total victory.”

“The inconsistency and abrupt shift of position makes it harder to keep the pressure on Russia, because it increases the chance that Putin will fold his arms and wait,” Mr. Fried said. “Trump’s moves over recent weeks suggest that he may understand this, and is moving in a tougher direction.”

Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, said Mr. Trump could use his success in coercive diplomacy by bombing Iran, and his openness to collective defense with NATO allies to be more strategic about the long-term stake that he and the United States have in the war.

“Bottom line, Putin will stop when he is stopped,” Mr. Kupchan said. “And Trump does not want to go down in history as the American president who lost Ukraine.”

Paul Sonne contributed reporting from Berlin.