(PARIS, FRANCE) – The United States has exempted Russia from major new sanctions set out in a law passed by Congress in September, a decision that removes penalties on an aggressor responsible for daily war crimes and hands Moscow a fresh lifeline as it presses its assault on Ukraine.
The exemption, signed on 16th October, came as US President Donald Trump faced the prospect of defeat in the midterm elections on 3rd November, largely because of inflation caused by his war against Iran. Critics say he chose to sacrifice Ukrainian civilians while holding to the belief that buying Russian diesel will bring down fuel prices at the pump in the US.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has described the decision as a betrayal. European countries are now the only ones supporting Ukraine, and they can only echo his assessment. With Russian forces now funded in part by American money, the war machine can operate at full capacity. The consequences will be measured in human lives, killed in cities that are relentlessly bombed.
By pursuing the war on Iran, the US president has already served President Vladimir Putin’s interests. The surge in energy prices triggered by the unwinnable war gave Russia its first lifeline. To protect its allies on the Arab side of the Gulf from Iranian retaliation, the US also used large quantities of air defence munitions, leaving Kyiv short of interceptors as it faces its most massive bombardments since February 2022.
Trump could have heeded intelligence reports that the Iranian regime had received Russian logistical support in this war. He chose instead to deny the obvious. When a compromise to reopen the Strait of Hormuz collapsed, and the resulting spike in fuel prices, especially diesel, stirred discontent in the US, Trump blamed Zelensky, the leader of a country fighting for its freedom.
Calls for Zelensky’s resignation, an energy deal with Russia and reports of malfunctions in Starshield, a military system vital for Ukraine’s defence that relies on Elon Musk’s satellite constellation, all now serve Moscow’s interests, to the point that the world’s leading power is being reduced to an auxiliary of the Kremlin. The argument that talking to Russia might distance it from China, even if such talks yield no results, is repeatedly contradicted by the facts.
This is not a strategic shift for Trump. For a decade a Russian shadow has loomed over his presidency. A straight line connects the 2018 Helsinki summit, where the US president aligned himself with Putin’s positions, to the Anchorage summit in August 2025, where Trump rolled out the red carpet for his Russian counterpart and got nothing in return.
Not long ago, US presidents took pride in presenting themselves as the leader of the free world, a legacy of the Cold War. Under Trump, the word freedom, much like democracy, has vanished from Washington’s vocabulary, according to an opinion article in Le Monde.
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