Russia’s Escape From Trump’s Tariffs Raises Questions

When President Trump unveiled major new tariffs on Wednesday, one big economy that he did not target was Russia.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News on Wednesday that Moscow was spared because sanctions imposed on the country after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 mean that U.S.-Russian trade had effectively stopped. North Korea, Cuba and Belarus, which are also subject to tough sanctions, were also excluded from the new levies.

Trade data paints a more complicated picture. The value of U.S. trade with Russia has fallen to its lowest level in decades following the invasion. But last year, Russia still exported about $3 billion worth of goods to the United States, according to U.S. trade figures, mostly fertilizer and platinum.

That figure is significantly higher than the value of U.S. imports from some smaller countries that Mr. Trump targeted, such as Laos and Fiji, prompting questions about whether the White House’s decision to spare Russia was a strategic choice.

Mr. Trump recently threatened to impose tariffs on buyers of Russian oil, a trade that is the lifeline of the country’s war machine, if President Vladimir V. Putin did not cooperate with U.S. efforts to broker a cease-fire in Ukraine. Such tariffs would significantly complicate the country’s foreign trade.

Mr. Trump may be holding back new economic restrictions on Russia as leverage in the peace talks, said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin and a former official at the Russian central bank.

“I think it’s a political decision,” Ms. Prokopenko said. “Trump does not want to escalate while his talks with Putin are ongoing.”

The idea that Mr. Trump is using tariffs as a geopolitical bargaining tool appears to be supported by his treatment of Iran, another target of his deal-making ambitions. He put Iran in the lowest tier of the new tariffs, 10 percent, which is lower than the rate imposed on Israel, a staunch U.S. ally.

The composition of Russia’s exports could have also played a role. Russia is the third largest foreign supplier of fertilizer to the United States, and the total amount of its fertilizer exports has increased over the past year.

Mr. Trump has been weighing how to protect American farmers, a key constituency, from the effects of his trade wars. Keeping the cost of fertilizer low could be part of that strategy.