President Trump on Wednesday threatened to impose tariffs and sanctions on Russia if President Vladimir V. Putin does not reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine.

 

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Jan. 22, 2025, 2:23 p.m. ET13 minutes ago

Zolan Kanno-YoungsReporting from Washington

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/22/us/trump-news#elon-musk-trump-stargate-ai-announcement

 

President Trump on Wednesday threatened to impose tariffs and sanctions on Russia if President Vladimir V. Putin does not reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine.

 

Mr. Trump has yet to unveil a detailed strategy to end the war, which he promised on the campaign trail to do in 24 hours.

 

In a post on social media, Mr. Trump said he was “not looking to hurt Russia” but warned that if Mr. Putin did not make a deal “soon” that he had no choice than to put “high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States.”

 

There is little trade between the United States and Russia to tariff. The entire trade between the two nations in the first 11 months of 2024 was just $3.4 billion, compared to, for example, $700 billion in the same time period between the United States and Canada, according to U.S. census data. Russia’s minuscule trade with the U.S. has already fallen from $36 billion in 2021, the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

 

The United States has also already issued sweeping tariffs on Russian metals, and the Biden administration imposed extensive sanctions to cripple the Russian economy. The efforts have failed to push Mr. Putin to halt his invasion of Ukraine.

 

Hours after he was inaugurated on Monday, Mr. Trump issued some of his most critical comments he had ever made about Mr. Putin when he said the Russian president was “destroying Russia” by waging war in Ukraine. The comments were notable given Mr. Trump’s history of speaking warmly about Mr. Putin, and in 2018 he accepted the Russian leader’s word over his own intelligence agencies at a summit in Helsinki.

 

The next day, Mr. Trump said sanctions against Russia were “likely.” He dodged a question, however, about whether he thought the war in Ukraine should be “frozen.”

 

“The war should have never started,” Mr. Trump said at the White House on Tuesday.

 

In his Truth Social post on Wednesday, Mr. Trump still made time to compliment Mr. Putin.

 

“I love the Russian people, and always had a very good relationship with President Putin,” Mr. Trump said.

 

Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington.