Mara Whitlock Our earlier report covered the Senate's 86-12 procedural vote clearing the way for debate on the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026, named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham. What's new: Majority Leader John Thune is now pushing for a final passage vote before the chamber's summer recess, expected to start around 6 August, while the House will not return from its own break until after that date — pushing any presidential signature into September at the earliest, according to OilPrice.
A narrower tariff, still wide enough to sting
The bill would let President Donald Trump invoke emergency economic powers to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on the five countries that buy the most Russian oil and gas, plus those judged to be helping Moscow dodge existing sanctions, according to RFE/RL. That is a retreat from an earlier draft that threatened a blanket 500 percent tariff on any country buying Russian fossil fuels — a threat the European Commission said in 2025 it was confident of avoiding, telling Euronews that the bloc's own phase-out of Russian fossil fuels should keep it clear of the penalty.
The narrowed version exempts countries whose Russian gas purchases fall below 15 percent of Moscow's total gas exports and that are actively cutting them further — a bar designed to spare the EU and Japan, per Al Jazeera. But the exemption is not automatic, and it is not the same as a clean exit. Twelve EU member states still import some form of Russian energy — Hungary and Slovakia take pipeline gas and oil, while Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary and Finland still rely on Russian nuclear fuel — according to Euronews. The Commission's own roadmap does not eliminate Russian energy purchases entirely until the end of 2027, per the same reporting.
Democrats call it a Trojan horse
Democratic doubts have slowed, not stopped, the bill's momentum. Senator Maggie Hassan argues the tariff authority would burden American businesses and consumers without doing much to help Ukraine win the war, per RFE/RL. Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, went further: This is not so much a sanctions bill as it is a massive backdoor authority for President Trump to impose more tariffs, including on our European allies, that hurt American families, he said in a statement, calling it a Trojan horse for tariff authorities he has repeatedly abused, according to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His central objection: there is no mechanism for Congress to disapprove individual tariffs, and the presidential authority does not expire.
A test of transatlantic unity
The bill sits atop a broader pattern of friction dressed up as cooperation. Washington and Brussels have converged repeatedly this year on squeezing Russian revenue — European officials have pointed to G7 coordination in Evian as the backdrop for the sanctions push, per The Hill — even as Trump's own trade agenda keeps colliding with EU interests. The tariff mechanism gained new relevance after the US Supreme Court struck down Trump's earlier reciprocal-tariff policy, leaving national-security legislation like this bill as one of the few remaining legal routes to broad trade penalties, according to Modern Diplomacy.
HYPOTHESIS: an open-ended, non-expiring tariff authority aimed nominally at Russia's energy buyers gives the White House a standing lever it could point at EU trade disputes unrelated to Ukraine, not just at Moscow's revenue. Supporting this: the authority has no sunset date and no congressional veto, per Meeks' statement above, and it arrives as the administration's other tariff tools face legal limits. Against this: the bill's own exemption thresholds were written specifically to keep the EU and Japan out of the blast radius, and senators from both parties say the design was deliberately narrowed after allied pushback, per OilPrice. Which reading holds will depend less on the statute's text than on how the White House chooses to use it.
President Volodymyr Zelensky, present in Washington for the procedural vote, called it an honour to be present as the votes were counted — 86 senators supported the bill, per Al Jazeera. What to watch: whether Thune secures final Senate passage before the 6 August recess, how the House — not due back until 31 August — handles the tariff provisions Democrats are contesting, and whether any EU member state ends up on the wrong side of the 15 percent exemption line once the Treasury has to name names.
