Summary
Russia was excluded from Trump’s sweeping tariff list due to existing U.S. sanctions that limit trade, White House officials claimed.
Despite lower trade volumes, countries like Syria were still included, prompting skepticism.
Trump has prioritized ending the war in Ukraine and threatened 50% tariffs on nations buying Russian oil. Russian state media framed the omission as sanctions-based, not favoritism, with some mocking Trump’s harsher stance on allies.
Ukraine, meanwhile, faces a 10% tariff despite the country’s strategic partnership with the U.S.
FFS people, sanctioned countries were not included. Somalia, Burkina Faso…also not included.
Let them deal in baseless conspiracy. Please deal in fact here.
Maybe the fertilizer president wants freedom of fertilizer?
Yep, it’s fertilizer and related exempt at inputs. Prior to the war trade with Russian was closer to $30B.
The trade sanctions exist outside of tariff policy, so it’s probably too complicated for ChatGPT (and therefore these clowns) to sort out easily.
There’s a possibility that someone used an LLM to formulate the tariff percentages. That’s not baseless, there’s evidence based on replication and similar language in the USTR site.
Which makes it a funny joke to suggest that they did the entire tariff plan top to bottom in ChatGPT.
There’s also a much stronger possibility that Trump simply didn’t want to piss off Putin.
Why are you trying to find a more complicated answer?
President Biden also took a lot of flack from Europe when he maintained trade in Russian uranium despite their putting rules into effect concerning Russian oil. There are a few things that both parties aren’t willing to give us regarding Russia.
Iran and Syria were included.
And so were uninhabited islands. I’m not saying these people are geniuses. I’m saying that Grok probably said to skip sanctioned countries and they got that mostly right.
Or, much more simply, Trump didn’t want to make Putin mad.
Why? Isn’t that the easiest lowest hanging fruit possible?