Just three days after the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to advance the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sweeping sanctions bill designed to force Russia to end the war in Ukraine, Vice President JD Vance called Ukrainian President Zelensky and asked him to stop bombarding oil tankers and terminals in the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
A key backer of the Graham bill, Republican Katie Britt of Alabama, defended the statute passionately on the Senate floor. “We’re going to cut off the flow of money to [Russian dictator Vladimir] Putin,” Britt declared emphatically. But the international partnership that owns the tankers and terminals Vance asked Zelensky to spare, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), generates more than $1.4 billion a year for, among others, the Russian Federation, which owns or controls nearly a 50-percent share.
It’s not technically Russian oil that passes through the CPC’s thousand-mile pipeline and sprawling terminal complex—it’s crude from the vast oilfields in western Kazakhstan. But Russia profits handsomely from dividends, transit tariffs, and port fees. What’s complicated—and the reason Vance picked up the phone—is that U.S. energy giants Chevron and ExxonMobil also own significant shares of the Caspian pipeline.
The timing of Vance’s call made for some confusing U.S. double-speak. But the episode underscores that sanctions are a tricky tool, especially when the target is a country like Russia deeply entwined across the global economy. As one of the world’s largest crude producers, vying for the top spot with Saudi Arabia and the United States, Russia is too connected to fail—which is why the West has had so much trouble using sanctions to punish it for the war in Ukraine without damaging Western interests, too.
No one, Democrat or Republican, mentioned these challenges when the Senate passed the Graham bill by a whopping 86-11 last month. On the contrary, most lawmakers seemed supremely confident the measure would cripple the Russian war machine and end the conflict in Ukraine. Republican Senator Todd Young of Indiana was a little more honest, calling the legislation “an important moral signal” to the long-suffering Ukrainian people. But virtually no leader, in Ukraine or the U.S., went so far as to question the Senate’s hyperbolic promises.
Part of the problem is that the Graham bill isn’t just a package of sanctions—it’s also a far-reaching tariff measure, giving President Donald Trump sweeping powers to impose 100 percent import duties on goods from countries deemed to be aiding the Russian war effort. The 11 senators, Democrat and Republican, who opposed the legislation were driven primarily by concern about this unprecedented transfer of tariff authority from the legislature to an executive branch that has imposed levies promiscuously and without legal authority.
The question for the House, where the package heads next: Can lawmakers preserve and perhaps strengthen the sanctions while limiting the all-but-unchecked tariff power the bill hands the president?
Developed over 18 months of bipartisan politicking and negotiations with Trump officials, the Graham package bundles language and ideas from a wide variety of other legislative proposals and executive actions, including by the Biden White House.
A core goal—and it’s among the bill’s greatest strengths—is to codify measures mandated by the previous administration. Between 2022 and 2025, the Biden White House and Treasury Department levied more than 6,500 individual Russia-related sanctions—on politicians, military leaders, banks, companies, businessmen, oligarchs, and third countries supplying Russian arms makers with semiconductors, microelectronic circuitry, high-precision machine tools, and other essential technology. But virtually none of these restrictions were enshrined in law.
“By codifying them,” Maia Nikoladze, deputy director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, explains, “the Graham package ensures they cannot be revoked or diluted” by a less enthusiastic administration.
Importantly, the Graham bill also doubles down on sanctions imposed by the European Union and United Kingdom—measures designed to address the issue of a Russia that’s too connected to fail.
The West has struggled for four and a half years to find a way to limit the oil revenues Moscow counts on to pay for its war of aggression in Ukraine without restricting the supply of Russian crude so severely that it triggers a global energy crisis.
In the months after the invasion of Ukraine, the G7’s best answer was an oil price cap, the brainchild of then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Under the cap, first imposed in December 2022, Russia could continue selling oil and was expected to remain a top global supplier. But Western maritime shipping services and insurance companies were prohibited from facilitating Russian cargoes selling at above an agreed price limit—originally $60 a barrel.
It was an ingenious idea that didn’t work. Moscow’s end run was to amass a vast “shadow fleet” of aging oil tankers that sail without insurance and under false flags, exporting Russian crude primarily to Asian customers, who often pay nearly as much as European buyers paid before the war.
By mid-2026, estimates suggested Russia was shipping oil on more than 1,000 shadow tankers. Although most Asian importers pretend to comply with the cap’s cost restrictions, many falsify the price they pay. The upshot: Today, almost four years after the cap was imposed, taxes levied on Moscow’s global oil revenue account for some 25 percent of the Russian government’s budget.
Still, despite this disappointing outcome, neither the EU nor the UK have given up on cracking down. Their principal strategy has been to try to keep up with the growth of the shadow fleet by continually imposing restrictions on illicit tankers, banning them from entering European ports and receiving financial services from European providers.
It’s a strategy worthy of the ancient Greek king Sisyphus, doomed to rolling a boulder up a hill and watching it roll back down every time it nears the top. The EU passes new sanctions packages every few months over growing opposition from increasingly recalcitrant member states. The most recent package, approved in July, was the 21st since February 2022.
The bloc is currently sanctioning nearly 700 tankers; the UK more than 600. Both Brussels and London have also significantly lowered their price caps. Both ceilings are now set at $44.10 per barrel—a limit that adjusts automatically over time as global prices change.
What Europe shrewdly recognizes: There can be no perfect, airtight sanctions against a state as large and well connected as Russia. But it still pays to punish Moscow with every tool at hand, raising the cost Putin pays to prolong the war.
If the Graham package passes and is enforced as intended, it will align Washington’s relatively anemic shadow fleet sanctions—we currently designate fewer than 200 ships, according to the Brookings Institution—with Europe’s far more stringent restrictions. The only catch: As negotiated with the White House, the bill’s language leaves implementation to the discretion of the president, who may or may not follow Europe’s lead.
The past two years offer a troubling preview of just how Trump is likely to use his presidential enforcement authority—for both the sanctions and the tariffs in the Graham bill.
Trump officials signaled their view of Russia sanctions early on, in February 2025, when the Justice Department dismantled the interagency Task Force KleptoCapture charged with enforcing restrictions on the Kremlin and its allied oligarchs. Since then, the administration has largely left the Biden-era sanctions regime in place but, crucially, has done nothing to keep it current with Moscow’s unrelenting efforts to evade it.
The Biden approach was a little like Europe’s. Whenever a Russian entity found a way to skirt an American prohibition by shunting business or other activity to, say, a smaller firm or alternative official, the U.S. Treasury Department added those new offenders to its target list.
The classic example was banks. Treasury first sanctioned Russian banks, but when third-country financial institutions stepped in to take over their business, the U.S. designated them too—imposing 111 sets of new sanctions between February 2022 and January 2025. The Atlantic Council’s Nikoladze dubs this approach “sanctions enforcement by more sanctions.” What made it effective—significantly more effective than anything Europe has done—was America’s global financial reach and the power of the dollar.
The Trump administration has deviated sharply from the Biden approach. In nearly two years in office, it has added no new individuals, no new banks, and no new shadow tankers to the U.S. sanctions blacklist.
The one exception to this neglect: In October 2025, the Treasury Department placed Russian energy giants Rosneft and Lukoil on the sanctions list, freezing their U.S. assets and banning Americans from doing business with them. This was a significant step, albeit weakened by a raft of waivers and extended deadlines in the 10 months since.
Far more often, when pressed on sanctions, administration officials have offered excuses and bluster. “[We want to wait and] see where the peace talks go,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote to Congress in February. “I am ready to do major sanctions on Russia,” the president posted on Truth Social just over a year ago, “when all NATO nations stop buying oil from Russia.” (In fact, European imports of Russian oil have dropped dramatically since 2022.)
Ideally, the final version of the Graham package would tweak the sanctions provisions to require more compliance with European and UK standards, while curtailing the measure’s expansive tariff authority. The administration held a hard line through nearly a year of negotiations with the bill’s Senate sponsors—so the House may find it difficult to limit the power it hands the president. But even a few guardrails could make a difference.
As passed by the Senate, the Graham bill significantly expands the president’s tariff authority with two vaguely worded clauses open to interpretation and misinterpretation.
The package opens the door to imposing “up to 100 percent” levies on the world’s top five importers of Russian oil and the top five countries “facilitating Russian oil sanctions evasion.” The problem: Reliable sources differ on even the seemingly simple question of which five nations are the biggest importers—and the bill says nothing about the methodology that should be used to determine them or how to interpret the far more nebulous, catch-all clause about countries “facilitating evasion.”
“Why are we handing matches to a pyromaniac?” my colleague Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, asks incredulously. By his own admission, Trump has never met a tariff he didn’t like, and he has shown scant hesitation to deploy them. The Supreme Court reined in some of his levying of import duties under a previous statute.
Among guardrails the House should consider: a more specific description of what it means to “facilitate evasion”—we should be going after countries like Panama and Liberia that allow shadow tankers to sail under their flags with minimal oversight. Lawmakers could also strengthen the language encouraging the White House to align U.S. shadow fleet sanctions with those of the EU and UK. Perhaps most important—the most significant guardrail—would be requiring congressional approval for any tariffs imposed under the bill.
An overwhelming bipartisan Senate vote for punishing Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is an important step by any measure—despite the gap between lawmakers’ heady confidence and the inherently Sisyphean nature of economic sanctions against a global power like Russia. Every step, no matter how small, to raise the price Putin pays for the war is a step worth taking.
Still, responsible lawmakers should think twice before they let the temptation of virtue signaling get the better of them, handing a well-known abuser like Donald Trump a virtual carte blanche to impose tariffs.
