WASHINGTON – As President Donald Trump’s deadline for Russia to move toward a peace deal in Ukraine approaches, a new, more targeted sanctions strategy is being proposed in Washington policy circles. The plan aims to cripple Russia’s energy exports without causing the massive disruption to global trade that a broader, more punitive approach would entail.
The proposal comes as the Trump administration is threatening to impose severe “secondary” sanctions on countries that continue to purchase Russian oil and gas, most notably China and India. However, there is widespread skepticism among economists and foreign policy experts that the U.S. can afford to impose duties as high as 100 percent on all imports from these key trading partners, a move that could damage trade relationships with more than two dozen countries and destabilize the U.S. economy.
The new plan offers a potential solution to this dilemma. Instead of imposing a blanket tariff on all goods from a country that buys Russian energy, the proposal calls for a more surgical approach: linking the value of the new tariffs directly to the amount of money a country pays to Moscow for its energy resources.
This would create a proportional penalty system. For example, based on 2024 trade figures, India exported $115 billion in goods and services to the U.S. while paying Russia $49 billion for oil. Under this new model, the U.S. would impose tariffs on $49 billion of Indian goods, which would translate to an effective additional tariff of 42.6% on its total exports to the U.S.
Applying the same logic, China, which exported $513 billion to the U.S. and bought $76 billion in Russian energy, would face an effective additional tariff of 14.8%. The European Union, with its massive $939 billion in exports to the U.S. and $34 billion in Russian energy purchases, would face a much smaller effective tariff of just 3.6%.
Proponents of this strategy argue that these figures, while significant, are far more manageable than the blanket 100% tariffs that have been threatened. They contend that this approach would still be powerful enough to achieve its primary goal: doubling the price of Russian oil for its major customers and rendering Moscow’s “shadow tanker fleet,” which is used to circumvent other sanctions, effectively useless.
The total value of the new duties would equal Russia’s total energy exports, which stood at $261.9 billion in 2024. Spread across the United States’ $4.11 trillion in combined imports, this would represent an overall additional tariff of less than 6.5%—a price that supporters argue is a fair one to pay to dismantle Russia’s status as an “energy superpower.”
The proposal is being framed as a potential amendment to the bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), which calls for a more radical and less differentiated approach.
Advocates believe that if President Trump were to adopt such a targeted plan by his updated August 11 deadline, it could destroy Russia’s energy export revenues within two to three years, putting Vladimir Putin’s war economy on the brink of collapse without ruining America’s critical trade relationships with its major commercial partners.
