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Donald Trump has said he is “pissed off” with Vladimir Putin for his approach towards a ceasefire in Ukraine and threatened to levy tariffs on Moscow’s oil exports if the Russian leader did not agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine in a month.
The US president indicated he would levy a 25% or 50% tariff that would affect countries buying Russian oil, in telephone interviews with NBC News where he also threatened to bomb Iran and did not rule out using force in Greenland.
“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault – which it might not be – but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump began.
Seeking to explain, he added: “That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be a 25% tariff on all – on all oil, a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil.”
The abrupt change of direction came, Trump said, after Putin had tried to attack the legitimacy of Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday. Appearing on Russian television, Putin had suggested Ukraine could be placed under a temporary UN-led government to organise fresh elections before negotiating a peace deal.
Though Trump has previously called the Ukrainian president a “dictator”, on Sunday he said: “I was very angry, pissed off” when Putin “started getting into Zelenskyy’s credibility, because that’s not going in the right location, you understand?”
The US leader argued that “new leadership means you’re not gonna have a deal for a long time, right” and said he wanted to exert pressure on the Kremlin, which has thrown up a string of questions about a peace settlement and only agreed to limited maritime and energy ceasefires so far.
Trump repeated that “if a deal isn’t made, and if I think it was Russia’s fault, I’m going to put secondary sanctions on Russia”, but then indicated that he would quickly back down if there was progress on a ceasefire.
“The anger dissipates quickly,” Trump said, if Putin “does the right thing” and said he expected to talk to his Russian counterpart this week.
The president also used the same short interview to tell Iran that if “they don’t make a deal” to curb their nuclear weapons programme, “there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” Officials from both countries were engaged in negotiations, he added.
However, he also referenced fresh economic sanctions as an alternative. “There’s a chance that if they don’t make a deal, that I will do secondary tariffs on them,” Trump said, repeating the phrase shortly after. “I am considering putting on secondary tariffs on Iran,” he continued “until such time as a deal is signed”.
Secondary tariffs are a novel idea. Last week the US implemented a 25% tariff on countries that buy crude oil and liquid fuels from Venezuela, the largest of which is China, after Trump accused the Latin American country of sending criminals and gang members into the US under the cover of migrants.
Russian oil exports are already subject to a range of sanctions from the US, UK, EU and other G7 countries, leaving China and India as the two largest buyers of Russian oil, according to the International Energy Agency. What is not year clear is whether the measures proposed would be effective once they come into force.
Finland indicated it may have had a role in Trump’s intervention. A day before the interview, Trump had spent time with Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, at the US leader’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The two men had breakfast, lunch and “played a round of golf” together on an unofficial visit, Stubb’s office said.
“My message in the conversations I have with the [US] president is that we need a ceasefire, and we need a deadline for the ceasefire, and then we need to pay a price for breaking a ceasefire,” he told the Guardian. “So, number one, we need a ceasefire date, and I would prefer that to be Easter, say, 20 April, when President Trump has been in office for three months. If by then it’s not accepted or is broken by Russia, there needs to be consequences. And those consequences should be sanctions, maximum sanctions, and we continue the pressure up until the 20th and then we’ll see what happens.”
During a previous interview with NBC, which took place on Saturday, Trump said: “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100%” and argued that while there’s a “good possibility that we could do it without military force”, “I don’t take anything off the table.”
During the election campaign, Trump had said that he could end the Ukraine war within 24 hours, comments he more recently claimed were “a little bit sarcastic”. That has proved elusive and his tactics to force Russia and Ukraine into agreeing a ceasefire have so far been focused on bullying and pressurising Kyiv.
The Ukrainian leader was berated by Trump and the vice-president, JD Vance, at the Oval Office a month ago, which was followed by Washington cutting off intelligence and military aid. Kyiv then signed up to the principle of a 30-day ceasefire, if the Kremlin would reciprocate, in return for intelligence and aid being restored.
Putin said earlier this month that although he was in favour of a ceasefire, “there are nuances” and any halt in fighting should “remove the root causes of this crisis”, a sweeping but vague demand.
The Russian president and his allies have called for the demilitarisation of Ukraine, insisted that the presence of western troops as peacekeepers would be unacceptable and demanded the full annexation of four regions of Ukraine, three of which it only partially occupies.
Two people were killed and 25 were injured in and around Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, in Russian attacks on Saturday night and Sunday morning, with a military hospital treating the wounded also struck. Ukraine’s general staff denounced what it said was a “deliberate, targeted shelling”, a rare acknowledgement of military casualties.
Trump’s intervention follows a difficult week for the White House, when senior administration officials were criticised for discussing bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen on the Signal messaging app, which is not authorised by the Pentagon.
The highly sensitive discussion, which included bombing plans, leaked because a journalist from the Atlantic magazine was mistakenly added to the chat by Mike Waltz, the US national security adviser.
