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United States President Donald Trump has backed a bill to impose sanctions\u00a0on\u00a0countries that buy Russian oil,\u00a0including China and India,\u00a0an influential\u00a0Republican senator has said.<\/p>\n
Lindsey Graham, a senator for the US state of South Carolina, said on Wednesday that Trump had \u201cgreenlit\u201d\u00a0the bipartisan bill\u00a0following a \u201cvery productive\u201d meeting.<\/p>\n
Graham\u2019s Sanctioning Russia Act, drafted with Democrat Richard Blumenthal, would give Trump the authority to impose a tariff of up to 500 percent on imports from countries doing business with Russia\u2019s energy sector.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis bill will allow President Trump to punish those countries who buy cheap Russian oil, fueling Putin\u2019s war machine,\u201d Graham said in a statement, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis bill would give President Trump tremendous leverage against countries like China, India and Brazil to incentivise them to stop buying the cheap Russian oil that provides the financing for Putin\u2019s bloodbath against Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n
China and Russia continue to be chief buyers of Russia\u2019s oil despite US and European sanctions imposed on the Russian energy sector in response to Moscow\u2019s war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
China bought nearly half of Russia\u2019s crude oil exports in November, while India took about 38 percent of exports, according to an analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Brazil dramatically ramped up its purchase of subsidised Russian oil after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but those imports have fallen substantially in recent months.<\/p>\n
Catherine Wolfram, a former US Treasury official who worked on sanctions under former President Joe Biden, called the use of tariffs as a form of sanctions an \u201cuntested tool\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI worry that Russia and India will call the US government\u2019s bluff and continue to import Russian oil, if perhaps at a slight discount, as the cost to the US of carrying through on the threat, especially in the middle of trade negotiations with China, is nontrivial,\u201d Wolfram told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0latest\u00a0US\u00a0push to increase\u00a0pressure on Russia comes as Moscow and Kyiv are\u00a0engaged in\u00a0Washington-brokered negotiations to bring an end to the\u00a0nearly\u00a0four-year\u00a0war.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, the Trump administration for the first time gave its backing to European proposals for binding security guarantees for Ukraine, including post-war truce monitoring and a European-led multinational force.<\/p>\n
Russia, which has repeatedly said it will not accept any deployment of NATO member countries\u2019 soldiers in Ukraine, has yet to indicate that it would support such security measures.<\/p>\n
In his statement on his bill, Graham said the legislation was timely in light of the current situation in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will be well-timed, as Ukraine is making concessions for peace and Putin is all talk, continuing to kill the innocent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trump backs bill to sanction China, India over Russian oil, US senator says Trump has \u2018greenlit\u2019 bipartisan push to sanction countries that buy Russian energy exports, Lindsey Graham says. United States President Donald Trump has backed a bill to impose sanctions\u00a0on\u00a0countries that buy Russian oil,\u00a0including China and India,\u00a0an influential\u00a0Republican senator has said. Lindsey Graham, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":424,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions\/424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}