U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order invoking a national-interest waiver to suspend the main new economic penalties in the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, two days before they were due to take effect.
This Trump move is not ordinary, as the order came just a few days after his good Russia-U.S. Deal.
Zelenskyy in the days that followed also criticized the diesel arrangement, calling the deal a Trump gift to Putin.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) said Trump waiving the waiver didn’t surprise him at all, according to him the president acted just as he had warned and predicted he would.
“Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent,” Don Beyer said.
The law remains in place, but its main power and penalties will not be enforced while the waivers are in effect.
That means no enforcement, for now, of the 500% tariff on Russian goods or the 100% tariffs on goods from countries that buy the most Russian oil and gas or help the country evade oil sanctions.
Most of the law’s new sanctions, which targeted Russian officials, banks, energy trade, investment and sovereign debt, are now on hold with Trump’s new order.
But in practice, it does not lift existing sanctions imposed under earlier executive orders addressing Russian government activities, which remain in force.
In an Oct. 15 letter to Trump, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Emeritus Michael McCaul, R-Texas, Rep. Jim Costa, D-California, and 20 other members, had hoped that Trump would act, unknown to them the president had separate plans in mind.
“We ask that any waiver be narrow, time-limited, and tied to measurable reductions in support for Russia’s war, and that no waiver be used to defer the law’s core provisions,” the letter said.
In the letter, they pushed that China and India remained the largest purchasers of Russian crude and pressed the administration to apply the law to its fullest extent without delay. In the same letter, they urged the administration to revoke a separate diesel authorization.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a co-author of the act with the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, wasn’t happy after the order was signed:
“These waivers have nothing to do with our national security, & everything to do with sucking up to Vladimir Putin”, Blumenthal said. “I hope my Republican colleagues will join me in condemning this craven, cowardly action.”
The waivers in other words have no end date. They stay in effect until the president, or the secretary of state in consultation with Treasury and the Trade Representative, decides further action is needed.
Trade Representative, working with State, Treasury and Energy, is to track who is buying Russian oil and gas and who is helping evade sanctions, and to alert the president if developments warrant revisiting the waivers.
Congress passed the Graham Act to cut revenue financing Russia’s war in Ukraine by combining direct penalties on Russian imports with secondary penalties aimed at major buyers and facilitators. It passed the Senate 86-11 and the House 262-159 and was signed Sept. 18. The law was named for Graham, the South Carolina Republican who died in July. The act required action within 30 days of enactment, which put the initial deadline at Oct. 18.
That loophole in the law is the method Trump used. Because it allowed the president to waive the measures without Congress’s power to object, he just had to submit a certification to Congress that the waiver is in the U.S. national interest, which is what the president did.
A separate diesel authorization came from the Graham Act waiver. On Oct. 9, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued General License 135, authorizing transactions involving the sale, delivery, offloading and importation of Russian-origin diesel, including into the United States, through 12:01 a.m. Eastern on April 7, 2027.
The license states it does not authorize debits to accounts of Russia’s central bank,
