New Russia Sanctions Could Hurt Peace Deal Chances, US Says

Rubio, speaking two days after President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Alaska, said new sanctions against Moscow “may make people feel good for a couple hours” but will destroy the possibility of a ceasefire in the short term.

“Here’s what you’re basically saying. You’re saying talks are over. For the foreseeable future, for the next year or year and a half, there’s no more talks,” Rubio said, according to a State Department transcript of an Aug. 17 interview with Fox Business.

Rubio said there is “only one leader in the world that has any chance of bringing these two sides together,” and that’s Trump. “And you forfeit that role the minute you put additional sanctions on” Russia, he said. “We may get to that point, unfortunately, but if we do, it means that peace talks are no longer possible, and that would be very unfortunate.”

His comments came one day after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, where the two sides continued to say Russia should face severe financial and trade restrictions until it ends the war.

“As long as the bloodshed in Ukraine continues, Europe will maintain diplomatic and, in particular, economic pressure on Russia,” von der Leyen said. “We will continue to strengthen sanctions.” She said the EU is working on a new sanctions package against Russia that the commission expects to unveil next month.

“We know that sanctions are effective, we have already put Russia's immobilised assets to work for the benefit of Ukraine, and we will continue to put pressure on Russia's war economy to bring President Putin to the negotiation table,” she said.

Von der Leyen, Zelenskyy and other European leaders met with Trump at the White House late into the afternoon Aug. 18 to discuss ending the war. Before they began private talks, Trump said the countries would do their "best" and added that Putin also wants to end the war.

"In a certain period of time, not very far from now, a week or two weeks, we're going to know whether or not we're going to solve this, or is this horrible fighting going to continue," he said.

Some analysts continued to call for more U.S. sanctions, including Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. Kendall-Taylor, former deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia with the U.S. National Intelligence Council, said there’s still “tremendous room still to apply more pressure” against Russia.

“I think Trump underestimates the amount of leverage that the United States, along with Europe, have, and we haven't fully explored the range of costs that the U.S. and Europe together can apply on Russia,” she said during an Aug. 18 event hosted by Foreign Policy. If Trump is “serious” about bringing an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, “it's going to have to be by raising the costs to convince Putin that he can't continue this war indefinitely.”

The U.S. can apply more pressure against Russia’s financial services sector, Kendall-Taylor said, noting that “20% of banks can still be sanctioned.” It can also ramp up enforcement of its oil sanctions, including against the Russian shadow fleet of vessels illegally moving Russian energy. It can also target China for continuing to buy Russian oil and supplying Russia’s defense industrial base.

“If all of these things come together, to me, the Russian economy can be a vulnerability that’s showing signs of strain,” Kendall-Taylor said.

She said now is a pivotal time for the U.S. to raise sanctions, because after the Trump-Putin summit in which no peace deal was reached and no consequences were announced against Russia, Putin likely “believes that now he'll have four years of a relatively permissive environment to continue this war.”

“The most decisive thing the U.S. could do is if Trump could really credibly convince Putin that we're flipping the script, we're ready to apply pressure,” Kendall-Taylor said. “And I think at least, on the margins, that could influence Putin’s calculus.”

Sergey Radchenko, an expert on Russian and Chinese foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, noted that if the U.S. imposed secondary sanctions, including tariffs, against China and other purchasers of Russian oil, the Trump administration should expect retaliation. “I fully expect that China will retaliate, and that will escalate very quickly,” he said during the Foreign Policy event.

Rubio said on Fox that the U.S. has heard “concerns” from allies about the potential negative global economic impacts if the administration decides to move forward with secondary sanctions and tariffs against purchasers of Russian oil. Asked whether the U.S. can turn to other sanctions levers, such as designating Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, Rubio said “those designations can be useful from time to time, but in this particular case, it’s not going to change the course of the war.”

“Look, can the U.S. inflict greater pain on the Russian economy going after the banking sector, the oil companies, and things of this nature? Of course we could. Of course we can. And that always remains, unfortunately, an option,” Rubio said. “But just understand: If we get to the point where we’re doing that, O.K., it may make people feel good, and it may have an implication on Russia in the long term, but in the short term, what it means is that talks are over, that at this point we are basically now stuck with another year and a half or two of war, of death, of destruction. That’s what it means.”