Donald Trump and his surrogates have suggested that they would considergiving Vladimir Putin a multibillion-dollar gift by lifting some of Washington’s onerous sanctions on Russia. And the incoming president’s pick for secretary of state, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, has ties to Putin and has pannedsanctions against Moscow in the past. All of which raises a question: Could Trump actually lift sanctions on Russia, giving the country’s weak economy a much-needed lift and setting the stage for a far closer relationship with Putin?
The short answer is that it depends on which sanctions Trump wants to lift. The US has different types of measures in place against Moscow, each motivated by a different kind of Russian misbehavior. Trump could definitely remove some of them on his own, but giving Russia a complete free pass would require persuading Congress that Putin had changed his stripes. That would be a tough sell given that many of Trump’s fellow Republicans believe the Russian leader is a foe of the US and is acting more ruthlessly than ever before. “Vladimir Putin is a thug, a bully and a murderer, and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying," Sen. John McCain said during comments in December describing Tillerson’s nomination as a “matter of concern.” Trump could give Putin a helping hand, but many in the GOP would almost certainly try to block the new president from letting him off the hook entirely.
The US has a lot of sanctions on Russia because Russia has done a lot of things the US dislikes
When Trump moves into the Oval Office on January 20, he’ll have three main types of Russia sanctions at his disposal. The first relates to Moscow’s sale of weapons to states that Washington wants to isolate in the global arena, such as North Korea; the second to the Kremlin’s human rights violations; and the third to Putin’s backing of separatists in east Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. The sanctions are all administered by the executive branch, but Trump’s power to do away with them varies. The measures put in place because of Russia’s weapons sales and human rights misdeeds were passed by Congress, which means Congress is also needed to overturn them.
But that’s not the case with the sanctions tied to Moscow’s adventurism in Ukraine. Those ones — which impose crippling penalties on Russia’s banks and oil companies — were put in place through executive orders by President Obama and can be revoked with a stroke of the pen by Trump. Politically, though, eliminating them would be significantly harder.
Lawmakers from both parties see Putin as an autocrat responsible for ensuring that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad retains power and blocking numerous US attempts to find a diplomatic solution to Syria’s brutal civil war. They also worry about the prospect of the Russian president invading one of Eastern Europe’s NATO members and daring Washington and its allies to respond. And the CIA’s and FBI’s assessments that Putin deliberately sought to help Trump win the presidency have prompted growing calls for formal congressional probes into Russia’s espionage in the US and interference in the 2016 elections.
Some Russia experts believe that Trump may still try to drop the Ukraine-related measures, but Congress could end up pushing back by crafting legislation intended to reapply some or all of the ones lost through Trump’s executive orders. In the recent past, sanctions legislation against Russia has passed Congress by enormous margins, which makes it seem plausible that lawmakers could form a veto-proof majority in the near future as well. In other words, it’s not far-fetched to suggest that they could reestablish sanctions against Trump’s will. kraine, though, is far from the only bit of Russian behavior Washington has tried to punish in recent years.
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