5 Things to Know About the Russia Sanctions Bill: Looks Tough, Lots of Carve-Outs Baked In

The bill Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026 (S. 5025) – named for the Ukraine-supporting senator who died shortly before its introduction – is a bipartisan plan for new laws that would strengthen US sanctions on Russia and on countries, companies, and persons that do business with Russia. As written, the bill authorizes the US president to take action to sanction any Russian person or entity he determines is “refusing good-faith peace negotiations with Ukraine…Violating a negotiated peace agreement…Initiating…military invasion of Ukraine…(or) Overthrowing, dismantling, or subverting the Ukrainian government.”JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. 1.) Which Russians are being sanctioned and how would the sanctions work? Among the offices and officials specifically named as falling under sanction are Russia’s president, defense minister, foreign minister, army commander, air force commander and central bank, as well as the semi-commercial financial groups Sberbank, VTB Bank and Gazprombank and their subsidiaries. Individual businessmen assisting in sanctioned activity – for instance Russian oligarchs producing arms or exporting energy for the Kremlin – could be subject to sanctions as well, but the bill doesn’t name them. Owners and operators of Russia’s “shadow tanker” fleet are identified as potential sanctions targets. Any sanctioned financial institution, business or person could be cut off from access to the US-dominated worldwide money transfer system SWIFT. US energy exports to Russia are banned, as is transfer of advanced US oil and gas industry extraction and processing technologies. Most trade of Russian financial and energy instruments, by US business, is made illegal. Other Topics of Interest SBU Strikes Major Russian Oil Refinery 1,500 km From Ukraine The special operation was carried out as part of tasks set by President Volodymyr Zelensky to reduce the military and economic potential of Russia. Analysts say the bill’s language would also expose any third-party company trading with a sanctioned Russian entity to being cut off from SWIFT. Most agree this SWIFT provision could make trade with Russia toxic for many countries and businesses, since a trader caught violating it would risk losing access not just to the US market, but to the means of conducting business anywhere in the world through the SWIFT system. Possible punitive measures available to the US president include tariffs, visa revocation, asset freeze and initiation of prosecution leading to asset confiscation or criminal punishment. A key feature aimed squarely at China approves secondary tariffs up to 100% on goods exported from China to the US from countries importing sanctioned oil and gas from Russia. Language sanctioning any country or organization exporting arms to Russia as subject to sanction would most affect Iran and North Korea, which have shipped Russia large quantities of kamikaze drones and artillery shells, respectively. 2.) Weak link: US government rules, resources and regulations Sanctions imposed by US law are not eternal; they are reviewed, usually by quarter or by year depending on the agency doing the reviewing and the president and executive branch’s perception of the importance of the review. The US government agencies that in the past had been responsible for making judgements like that – including the departments of energy, commerce and state, the CIA, and particularly the National Security Council – have been gutted by mass sackings of staff and promotion of White House-loyal senior managers since early 2025. This has undermined the US government’s ability to review the effects of sanctions on Russia and, by default, shifted evaluation of those sanctions’ effect to possibly biased advisors and commercial media the US national leadership chooses to look at. Possibly the most significant damage done to US sanctions enforcement capacity has been done in the Department of Commerce, where massed firings of staff, sometimes subject matter experts for decades, gutted that agency’s ability to track the location, owners, destinations and customers of Russian “shadow fleet” tankers, particularly in real-time. An imposed sanction can be cancelled because the target was adjudged no longer engaging in sanctions-triggering activity, or, on a situation-dictated basis like allowing humanitarian assistance to reach a sanctioned country to prevent massed disease or famine. The right to modify or cancel a sanction in the interest of US national security is reserved to the president with he and his office making the determination of when US national security interests make softening or removing a Russia sanction is more important than imposing a sanction or leaving an existing sanction in place. That decision must be certified to – but not approved by – Congress. The term used for White House-approved carve-outs of Russia sanctions is “waiver;” this is the same as a loophole. In all cases, as written, the law places the burden of identifying what person or entity is violating a sanction and what punitive actions to take, or not, squarely onto the shoulders of the US president and the executive branch. Politically, with its National Security Agency reduced to a shell and the US-Iran War, the national economy and upcoming mid-term elections dominating White House priorities, the Trump administration in coming months will face serious distractions if called on to give teeth to the Russia sanctions bill and actually enforce it. 3.) Weak link: US President Donald J. Trump US President Donald Trump, even before his second election, was strongly opposed to the US placing substantial pressure on Russia. During his first 18 months in office, the White House’s stance on Russia was strongly pro-Kremlin, at times echoing word-for-word Moscow demands that Ukraine capitulate to Russia so that the Russia-Ukraine War ends quickly. Critics saw a Trump-ordered end to US arms donations to Ukraine, coming into effect within a month of his taking office, as a move to force Ukraine to capitulate to Russia by starving Ukraine of weapons. In August 2025, Trump personally greeted and held talks with his Kremlin counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Anchorage, Alaska, ending at least three years of isolation by NATO/G7 states – some who had treated Putin as a pariah since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and others who had already done so since Russia’s first Ukraine invasion in 2014. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has an active arrest warrant against Putin for his possible complicity in mass kidnapping and transfer to Russia of Ukrainian children from Russia-occupied regions of Ukraine. The US leader ignored the warrant. Trump has frequently called Putin “a good friend,” praised Russia as “a wonderful country,” and even told DC reporters he is more likely to believe information about Russia from Putin than from US intelligence agencies. He has meanwhile declared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator” and blamed him for, purportedly, stymying the peace process by ordering Ukraine’s army to defend Ukraine against Russian invasion. At the outset of Trump’s second occupation of the White House, in April 2025, Trump announced massive tariffs hitting 185 countries (and even a few uninhabited islands) because, in his judgement, those countries took advantage of the US in trade. Russia was excepted. In March 2026, after launching a war with Iran, Trump issued temporary waivers to sanctioned Russian oil headed for export. Based on past behavior and statements, Trump and the US leadership team are unlikely to want a consistently hard line on Russia sanctions. More likely, the Trump White House sees the sanctions bill as a negotiating leverage and as a demonstration of “US toughness” to Putin and other Western states. Thus far in the Trump administration, there has been little evidence of long-term US intent to curb Russian aggression as a matter of US national security, or to prioritize Ukrainian sovereignty or the principle of inviolable national borders. 4.) Weak Link: It’s a big world out there and lots of carve-outs are baked in As written, the bill allows the punitive measure of tariffs up to 100% but targets only the top five Russian crude oil importers led by China and India, and followed by the EU, Turkey and South Korea. Review of the top five takes place every six months. The bill specifically omits from sanctions any country either importing less than 15% of Russia’s natural gas exports and taking “significant steps” to reduce dependence on Russian gas. In practical terms, the exception makes Russian gas exported to South Korea and Japan, though both significant export earners for Russia, immune to the new US sanctions. Other escape clauses make the major Russian LNG importers France, Belgium, Spain, Netherlands, Italy and Portugal immune to the US sanctions on Russian gas exports. Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and the Czech Republic, all major importers of Russian pipeline gas individually, likewise are allowed by the bill to keep on buying Russian natural gas without fear of US sanctions. Aside from targeting shadow tankers, the bill mandates no automatic action for Russian oil traded to evade sanctions via a third-party country, for example by re-routing Russian oil moving by rail through a Mongolian shell company to China, or Russian oil moving by ship to India via a port stop in Vietnam. Per the bill, third-party sanctions could only come into effect after the US government identified a specific sanctions-evader. As written, the bill effectively allows the practice to continue by mandating sanctions only against identified illicit traders, which in all probability are shell companies that will have long gone dormant by the time US investigators identified them. Other Russian energy exports also could be waived as humanitarian/medical aid to the Russian people, exports connected with US intelligence activities, or exports allowed to help the US comply with international obligations like supporting UN missions worldwide. In a Russia-related scenario, an energy oligarch under sanction might attempt to associate himself with a UN humanitarian effort, and possibly even obtain UN-sponsored visa support for travel abroad. 5.) Weak link: Russia’s biggest export customers aren’t too worried about US politics and voters China, the world’s second-biggest economy after the US, has hoovered in massive Russian oil imports post-2022, often via shadow mechanisms. In the tariff war launched by Trump, Beijing stood fast, saying China prefers to export to the US but that access to that market is not worth sacrificing Chinese sovereignty. In the first year of punitive anti-China US tariffs blocking or sharply increasing the price of most Chinese goods in the US market, China increased volumes of its worldwide exports by about 5.5%, even as exports to the US fell by roughly a fifth to a third. China still achieved the largest trade surplus in its history – about $1.2 trillion – undermining a White House narrative that no nation in the world could survive without the US market. Chinese officials have consistently stated that China will never permit the US to dictate where China gets its energy, frequently using the code word “bullying,” a term dating back to the 1800s and colonial policy by industrialized states to dominate and dismember China. Beijing has threatened Washington with a ban on access to rare earth minerals critically needed by US high tech – a world market dominated by China – if Washington attempts to sanction China for buying oil and gas from China’s long-time ally Russia. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian, on July 15, spelled out his government’s stance on the Russia sanctions bill, saying in part: “China firmly opposes unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law or authorization of the UN Security Council…[and] will take necessary measures to safeguard the rights and interests of Chinese companies.” China and India together purchase about 85-90% of Russia’s seaborne crude exports (China about 50% and India about 40%) and about 60% of Russia’s natural gas exports (China about 60%, India little to none). India’s top diplomat, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, on Feb. 14, 2026, at the Munich Security Conference, was asked whether a new trade understanding with the US would push India to cut back on Russian oil imports. “We are very much wedded to strategic autonomy,” he said, calling it “very much a part of our history and our evolution” and something that “cuts across the political spectrum.” On the oil purchases themselves, he added that energy markets are complex, and that companies – in India, Europe, and elsewhere – base their decisions on “availability,” “costs,” and “risks,” not political pressure.