When President Donald Trump revealed new important tariffs on Wednesday, a great economy that was not imposed was Russia.
The secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besent, told Fox News on Wednesday that Moscow had been saved because the sanctions imposed to the country after the large -scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 meant that trade between the United States and Russia had practically stopped. North Korea, Cuba and Belarus, which are also subject to hard sanctions, were also excluded from the new levies.
Commercial data paint a more complicated panorama. The value of the United States trade with Russia has fallen to its lowest level in decades after the invasion. But last year, Russia continued to export goods worth about 3000 million dollars to the United States, according to US commercial figures, mainly fertilizers and platinum.
This figure is significantly higher than the value of American imports from some smaller countries that Trump chose as a goal, such as Laos and Fiyi, which has raised doubts about whether the decision of the White House not to include Russia was a strategic choice.
Trump recently threatened to impose tariffs on Russian oil buyers, an industry that is the livelihood of the country’s war machinery, if President Vladimir Putin did not cooperate with US efforts to negotiate a high fire in Ukraine. Such tariffs would significantly complicate foreign trade in the country.
It is possible that Trump is holding new economic restrictions to Russia to use them in the peace conversations, said Alexandra Prokopenko, a member of the Carnegie Center Russia Eurasia de Berlin and former official of the Russian Central Bank.
“It seems to me that it is a political decision,” said Prokopenko. “Trump doesn’t want to climb while his conversations with Putin last.”
The idea that Trump is using tariffs as a geopolitical negotiation tool seems to be supported by the treatment he gives to Iran, another goal of his negotiating ambitions. He placed Iran at the lowest level of the new tariffs, with a 10 percent tax, which is lower than the rate imposed on Israel, a firm ally of the United States.
The composition of Russian exports could also have influenced. Russia is the third largest foreign supplier of fertilizers to the United States, and the total amount of fertilizer exports has increased in the last year.
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Trump has been weighing how to protect American farmers – a key voting base – of the effects of their commercial wars. Keeping under the cost of fertilizers could be part of that strategy.