KYIV/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump announced new weapons for Ukraine on Monday, and threatened to hit buyers of Russian exports with sanctions unless Russia agrees a peace deal in 50 days, a major shift in policy brought on by disappointment with Moscow.
Sitting side-by-side with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters that he was disappointed in Russian President Vladimir Putin. Billions of dollars in weapons would be distributed to Ukraine, he said.
“We’re going to make top-of-the-line weapons, and they’ll be sent to NATO,” Trump said, adding that Washington’s NATO allies would pay for the weapons.
The weapons would include Patriot air defence missiles which Ukraine has urgently sought to defend its cities from Russian air strikes.
“It’s a full complement with the batteries,” Trump said when asked whether he would send Patriot missiles specifically.
“We’re going to have some come very soon, within days… a couple of the countries that have Patriots are going to swap over and will replace the Patriots with the ones they have.”
“We’re going to be doing secondary tariffs. If we don’t have a deal in 50 days, it’s very simple, and they’ll be at 100%,” Trump said.
A White House official said Trump was referring to 100% tariffs on Russian exports as well as so-called secondary sanctions, which target third countries that buy a country’s exports.
Such secondary sanctions are widely seen as likely to have a far more severe impact on Russia’s economy than measures that have been imposed previously, which have allowed Russia to continue selling oil to buyers such as China and India, earning hundreds of billions of dollars.
(Additional reporting by Frank Jack Daniel in Kyiv, Kevin Lamarque in Washington, Sabine Siebold in Berlin and Lidia Kelly in Warsaw, Writing by Timothy Heritage and Peter GraffEditing by Gareth Jones and Andrew Heavens)
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