The order raised duties on Russian goods by 500%. The same order then waived them. That, in miniature, is where Western sanctions on Russia stood on Oct. 16, 2026, when Donald Trump signed a broad waiver under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, according to the Kyiv Independent. The statute was meant to tighten the screws. It also hands the president wide discretion to impose or waive penalties and tariffs, and he used the second half of that sentence.
What the waiver did
The executive order set a 500% duty on goods from Russia and 100% on goods from the five biggest buyers of Russian crude oil and gas. Then it largely suspended both measures. Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat, wrote on X that Trump had waived “all of the sanctions” in the law “just as I and others warned he would”, and urged Congress to “fix” what he called a flawed statute. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a co-author, said the waivers had “nothing to do with our national security”.
Moscow read it differently. Kirill Dmitriev, Russia’s economic negotiator, called the suspension “an important and truly historic moment” and said the U.S.-Russia economic dialogue would go on.
The waiver did not arrive alone. On Oct. 9, following a call with Putin, Trump announced that Moscow would ship millions of tons of diesel fuel to American and global buyers. On Oct. 13 a bipartisan group of senators asked him to cancel the purchase. Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Oct. 16 that the diesel arrangement could open the door to more relief for Moscow: “Because gas deals will follow,” he said. “After gas, they will lift sanctions on other things as well.”
A trade map already redrawn
The technical difficulty is that the sanctions regime had already pushed Russian commerce somewhere else. DW, drawing on the Observatory of Economic Complexity, reported that in 2021 almost 50% of what Russia sold abroad went to Europe, mostly energy. By 2023 Europe took barely 15%. China and India had become the two main customers, at 32.7% and 16.8% of exports, together half the total. India’s share had been just 1.56% two years earlier.
Part of the story never shows up in official statistics. The Kyiv School of Economics estimates that at least 70% of Russia’s seaborne crude exports travel on the shadow fleet, and that India, China and Turkey take up to 95% of those cargoes. Turkey’s share of Russian exports climbed from 4.18% in 2021 to 7.86% in 2023.
The EU did its part of the rerouting. Its imports of Russian crude have fallen by 90% since the invasion, and the Russian share of its gas supply shrank from 40% in 2021 to 15% in 2024. Zsolt Darvas of the Bruegel think tank described “a major diversion of trade away from the West” toward countries that had not imposed sanctions. Elina Ribakova of the Peterson Institute for International Economics put the consequence bluntly: “Russia is now China’s vassal.”
So a sanctions system aimed at isolating Moscow now faces two problems at once. Buyers outside the coalition absorb the oil, and the biggest coalition member has just shown it can switch the penalties off by decree.
Sources
- Trump waives latest Russia sanctions amid growing Ukraine-US tensions (The Kyiv Independent, Volodymyr Ivanyshyn)
- How has Russia's economy dodged Western sanctions? (DW)
