Trump Blocks the Russia Sanctions Two Days Before They Bit
The president signed an order on 16 October waiving sanctions that Congress passed and he had signed into law in September. “I am in the process of negotiating Peace,” he wrote, saying he did not want to “drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table”. His secretary of state calls it a sixty-day pause while the economic impact is assessed.
The administration is now pressing the argument back onto Kyiv. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told American television that Volodymyr Zelensky should “be very careful about making statements like this that aren’t true” and that it was “very reckless” of him to allege the satellite slowdown had been ordered in Washington — a charge the Ukrainian president repeated at the weekend and which no American or corporate source has confirmed. Mr Zelensky’s own framing has hardened: he told one broadcaster that American support for Vladimir Putin would be a “historic mistake” and another that “steps have been taken to convince Ukraine to capitulate”. A Russian envoy called the waiver “an important and truly historic moment”, which is Moscow’s characterisation and not a fact. The sharpest assessment is from the Institute for the Study of War, which judges that the order “does not support Trump’s stated foreign policy objectives of ending the war in Ukraine and will only enable Russia to continue financing and protracting the war”.