Top officials in Russia say it can withstand the secondary tariffs that President Donald Trump has threatened if Russian leader Vladimir Putin does not reach a Ukraine war deal soon.
Trump had on Monday told reporters that if no peace deal is agreed upon in 50 days, he would introduce a 100% tariff on Russia, as well as sanctions on buyers of Russian oil.
“Well, at the end of 50 days, if we don’t have a deal, it’s going to be too bad,” he said, calling the economic penalties “very severe.”
The Kremlin’s biggest voices have, in return, openly scoffed at the threat.
“Trump issued a theatrical ultimatum to the Kremlin. The world shuddered, expecting the consequences,” wrote Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president, on social media on Tuesday.
“Russia didn’t care,” added Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, second in rank to Putin.
At a bilateral meeting in China on Tuesday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said his country was already holding out against the slew of Western sanctions imposed for the invasion of Ukraine.
“We are coping, I have no doubt that we will cope,” Lavrov said, per Russian state media outlet TASS.
Sergey Mironov, a prominent politician in Russia’s state duma, mocked Trump’s tariffs as likely calculated by “a random number generator” or generative artificial intelligence.
“Russia will certainly take the threats into account, but this will not affect the course and goals of the SVO,” Mironov wrote on Telegram, referring to the war, which Russia calls a “special military operation.”
A Reuters report on Tuesday also cited three unnamed sources close to the Kremlin, who said that Putin believes Russia’s economy and military will shake off the new measures Trump proposed.
Everyone is frustrated, except Russia
The Russian response comes as Trump says he’s growing annoyed with Putin at the lack of progress on a deal. In January, the president said he’d been confident he could broker a Ukraine peace agreement just days after his inauguration.
On Monday, the president told reporters he’d tried to strike a deal with the Russian leader four times.
“My conversations with him are very pleasant, and then the missiles go off at night,” Trump said. This year has seen a marked surge in the number of missiles and drones fired by Russia at Ukrainian cities per night.
Given the heavy sanctions already imposed by the West on Russia, Trump’s new tariffs would have a more noticeable impact on China and India, who are by far the largest buyers of Russian oil. Turkey and Brazil are also customers.
The 50-day deadline barely seemed to shake the Russian markets, with the Moscow Exchange Index jumping 2.73% on Monday and another 1.58% on Tuesday.
In Ukraine, front-page headlines painted the ultimatum as too tepid to inspire faith among Ukrainians, who know the president can often change his mind on foreign policy.
Konstantin Kosachev, a Russian senator, wrote on Monday of the grace period: “And in 50 days, oh how much can change both on the battlefield and in the mood of those in power in the US and NATO.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
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