What Trump must now do to force Putin's hand

Telegraph

2 days ago

If Donald Trump is serious about imposing punitive sanctions on Russia, there is one immediate diplomatic move that he could make. He could dispatch an envoy not to Moscow but to Beijing to warn China's leaders that they are only 50 days away from US tariffs of 100 per cent unless they stop buying Russian oil.
Xi Jinping might then turn to his junior partner, Vladimir Putin, and suggest that Russia avoids this outcome by agreeing to a ceasefire in Ukraine.
But there is no public sign of anything like this happening and the danger remains that after the 50 days have elapsed, Mr Trump will fail to act on his words. The war on Ukraine will go on as before, with Putin escaping the heaviest sanctions that America can enact.
We have, after all, been here before. Mr Trump has often criticised Putin's intransigence and threatened more sanctions. On May 29 he said that 'within two weeks we're going to find out whether or not [Putin is] tapping us along'.
Two weeks passed with no action. The new 50-day countdown could end in the same way.
It remains a remarkable fact that Mr Trump has not imposed a single new sanction on Russia since he regained the White House six months ago. All regimes of this kind are vulnerable to circumvention as the target country finds ways around the restrictions.
The only way to respond is by constantly updating and extending the sanctions, closing loopholes as soon as they open. Hence Britain and the EU announce new measures against Russia every few months.
But Mr Trump has done nothing since he took office in January 2025, allowing American sanctions to wither on the vine.
And now, despite the build-up, there will be nothing for the next 50 days. No wonder the Moscow stock exchange reacted to the president's announcement by rising sharply.
Yet markets can be wrong and everything could be different this time. If, as seems possible, Mr Trump now supplies Ukraine with advanced weaponry, including long range missiles capable of striking targets in Russia – and if he allows Kyiv to use them for that purpose – then Putin will know that American policy really has changed.
He should by now have realised that Mr Trump is genuinely exasperated by the bone-headed obduracy of Russian diplomacy. Speaking in the Oval Office, the president emphasised how he thought that a peace deal in Ukraine was in sight 'about four times', but 'here we are still talking' and 'it just keeps going on and on'.
That would not worry Putin if Mr Trump was inclined to blame Volodymyr Zelensky for the deadlock. But the penny seems to have dropped that Ukraine accepted America's proposed ceasefire as long ago as March 11, while all that Putin has done is fire ever more killer drones and ballistic missiles at Ukraine's cities.
In the struggle to influence Mr Trump's perceptions, from which all US policy flows, Putin for the first time, seems to be losing. Mr Trump is no longer inclined to exonerate his Russian counterpart.
Putin's own view of Mr Trump's threatened sanctions will soon become clear. If Russia returns to the negotiating table with a modified set of demands, perhaps conceding that it will never gain another inch of Ukrainian territory, then Mr Trump will have succeeded in forcing Putin to change his position.
But it remains equally possible that Putin will sit tight and wait for the latest deadline to pass as uneventfully as the last one.