US President Donald Trump has put a sweeping package of sanctions and tariffs under the Graham Act on hold and given Russia a comprehensive waiver only two days before it was due to take effect, AP reported on October 17.
Trump signed an executive order on October 16 telling Congress that the pause was in the US national interest. He had signed the so-called “sanctions from hell” – or more formally, the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act - into law only on September 18, and its sanctions and tariffs had to be imposed by October 18 unless he waived them.
The package was sponsored by the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a long-time ally of Ukraine, who proposed imposing 500% tariffs on third countries that continue to do business with Russia – specifically they targeted India and China that continue to fund the Kremlin budget by buying large amounts of oil. The package was designed to give the Trump administration powerful tools to break the back of the Russian economy and force Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table to end the Ukraine conflict.
Trump has done the opposite. The White House did not explain how the waiver served the national interest; it said a report setting out its reasons had been sent to Congress.
The waiver guts the toughest US sanctions bill of the war only a month after Trump signed it, and it comes days after his diesel deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin lifted sanctions on Russian fuel to bring down US pump prices. Washington is easing the pressure on Moscow just as Russia steps up its winter campaign to freeze Ukraine into submission when Kyiv needs help the most. As IntelliNews reported, the heating season has just kicked off in Ukraine just as Russian drones and missiles plunged its biggest cities into darkness.
The law, championed by Graham, who died in mandated blocking sanctions on top Russian entities including Sberbank, VTB, Gazprombank and the Russian central bank, with secondary sanctions on foreign banks that deal with them, allowed shadow fleet tankers to be blocked directly, and authorised tariffs of up to 500% on Russian goods and up to 100% on the five biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas, according to a summary by law firm Covington. Section 115 lets the president waive any of it with a report certifying the waiver is “in the national interest,” with no time limit.
The executive order formally sets the 500% duty on Russian goods and the 100% duty on the top five importers, then largely waives both, the Kyiv Independent reported. The tariffs now sit on the books, switched off, for Trump to use whenever he chooses.
"These waivers have nothing to do with our national security, and everything to do with sucking up to Vladimir Putin," said Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, who co-wrote the law with Graham. Democratic Representative Don Beyer said Trump had waived "all of the sanctions on Russia" in the act, "just as I and others warned he would". A bipartisan group of senators had asked Trump on October 13 to scrap the diesel deal and enforce the law instead.
The waiver comes at a time when Trump appears to have broken with Ukraine completely after his conversation with Putin. He has also cancelled the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) programme where Europe can buy US weapons on Ukraine’s behalf, threatened to stop sharing satellite intelligence and throttled Ukraine’s access to the Starlink communications system that in effect makes Ukraine’s drones inoperable.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned on October 16 that the diesel deal would open the door to more relief. "In my view, we cannot accept these agreements. Because gas deals will follow. And I am absolutely certain of this. After gas, they will lift sanctions on other things as well," he said, according to the Kyiv Independent.
And indeed, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Putin's investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev discussed the possibility of bringing in a US investor to restart Russia’s gas deliveries to Europe in October. Dmitriev has said in recent days that a large package of business deals is still being discussed with the Trump administration as part of a round of meetings in the last week.
More relief in the pipeline
Washington is also weighing easing sanctions on shadow fleet tankers to bring down freight rates, and Trump earlier backed a plan to trade sanctions relief for prisoners.
Dmitriev said on October 16 that Moscow and Washington were discussing joint projects including nuclear-powered data centres. "Naturally, progress is quite difficult; there is resistance - widespread resistance, in fact, from various quarters. Yet, as the diesel example demonstrates, I believe we will soon announce several other significant initiatives. The ice has, in fact, begun to break," Dmitriev said, Reuters reported.
The two presidents are getting on well. Their call on October 9, when the diesel deal was agreed, lasted an hour and a half and "nobody wanted to hang up first", Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said, TASS reported.
Almost no new sanctions
The about face on the hellish sanctions and the obvious bonhomie of last week’s telephone call only underscore Trump’s continued affiliation with Putin and his preference for doing business with Russia over rescuing Ukraine in its hour of need.
Trump has imposed almost new sanctions on Russia since returning to the White House and indeed, exempted it entirely from his Liberation Day tariffs on most of the rest of the world.
The one significant move was the blacklisting of oil majors Rosneft and Lukoil in October 2025, but analysts said at the time that Russia's buyers, mainly India and China, would soon find workarounds, and Russian oil continued to flow through other sellers and the shadow fleet.
In 2025, Trump's first year back in office, the US added 74 Russian persons to its main sanctions list, the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list, and no Russian entities to the Commerce Department's Entity List, according to the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Under President Joe Biden the US added 1,706 Russian persons to the SDN list in 2024 alone.
|
Year |
Administration |
Russian persons added to SDN list |
Russian persons added to Entity List |
|
2022 |
Biden |
not published by CNAS |
374 |
|
2023 |
Biden |
1,227 (persons located in Russia) |
207 |
|
2024 |
Biden |
1,706 |
147 |
|
2025 |
Trump |
74 |
0 |
US Russia sanctions designations by year. Source: CNAS, Sanctions by the Numbers, 2023, 2024 and 2025 year in review. The 2023 SDN figure counts sanctioned persons located in Russia; CNAS puts all Russia-related SDN designations that year at 1,522.
Kyiv's relations with the White House are at their lowest since the Oval Office row of February 2025. Trump's envoys threatened to cut off intelligence sharing, including warnings of missile launches, unless Ukraine stopped hitting Russian refineries, and the US pressed Kyiv on intelligence as the energy truce collapsed. Zelenskiy said Ukraine received no advance warning of the Russian missiles that killed six people in Kyiv on October 13-14. An order to limit Ukraine's military access to Starlink also came from inside the White House, Reuters reported.
Add the sanctions waiver and those moves look less like neutrality than an effort to force an end to the war on Moscow's terms before the November 3 midterm elections. Zelenskiy has called the diesel deal a “betrayal” and said Kyiv is "losing" Washington as an ally. Trump countered by calling for Zelenskiy’s removal as president and followed up by calling him a “dictator” in a tweet.
The row has also soured US-EU relations, which is being forced into progressively more extreme positions to support its ally Ukraine. At the EU summit in Brussels on October 16 even Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, long a Trump admirer, said: "Trump effectively betrayed us by concluding the business deal with Putin.”