Robert Wilkie, who leads President Donald Trump’s transition team, said Trump intended to call Putin and press him to end the three-year conflict.
“The flow of American Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) to Europe will begin, and the US presence on the world oil market will drive the price of oil down – that will bankrupt the Russian economy,” Wilkie told the BBC on Tuesday. “That is going to put an incredible strain on Putin’s wartime economy.”
“He should make a deal…I think Russia’s going to be in big trouble,” said Trump, adding that Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, “wants to make a deal”.
“The only way conflicts like this end is not in public pronouncements,” he said. “They end in hard, vibrant diplomacy that the US seeks to engage in, in the hopes of bringing an end to this conflict that’s sustainable, in a way that assures the security of Ukraine and our partners in the region, but that stops the killing and the dying and the destruction that we’ve been seeing for quite a while now.”
Few details have been shared of Trump’s plan to end the war but they are believed to involve at least temporary territorial concessions from Ukraine.
President Donald Trump signed a raft of executive orders on the first day of his second term – including a 90-day suspension of foreign aid (Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
Trump has separately vowed to boost US energy exports, and threatened Europe with tariffs if it does not buy more American fuel.
European imports of Russian LNG reached a record high last year of 17.8 million tonnes, according to figures from the research firm Rystad Energy.
The outgoing Biden administration also imposed new sanctions on the Russian fuel sector in one of its final acts, targeting oil and gas facilities, companies and shipping.
Michael Mulroy, a former official at the Defence Department in Trump’s first term, said plans to target Russian energy were a logical step.
Such a move would “align with two policy initiatives” of the new administration, Mulroy added. “Ending the war and increasing US energy production.”
Trump campaigned on a promise to end the Ukraine war on ‘Day One’ of his term (Photo: Francois Nascimbeni/AFP/Getty)
Anton Barbashin, editorial director of Riddle, a Russian political analysis journal based abroad, suggested Washington could struggle to force Russia to capitulate through economic coercion and the policy could have undesired effects.
“In order to collapse the Russian economy Trump will need to wage an all-out economic war and it won’t be easy to convince the rest of the world to participate – but he can surely increase costs to the Russian economy.”
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Read More“The Kremlin will see this as Trump’s hard bargaining,” he said. “None of this would be taken at face value.”
The impact for Ukraine and elsewhere was not immediately clear, with commitments to recipients such as Israel and Egypt part of long-term agreements.
“The executive order signed by US President Trump to suspend international aid for 90 days does NOT apply to military aid to Ukraine,” he wrote on Telegram.
The US State Department did not immediately respond to an enquiry.
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