By Anastasiia Malenko, Steve Holland and Dan Peleschuk
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. “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.”
His threat to impose so-called secondary sanctions on Russia, if carried out, would be a major shift in Western sanctions policy. Lawmakers from both political parties in the United States are pushing for a bill that would authorise such measures.
Throughout the more than three-year-old war, Western countries have cut off most of their own financial ties to Moscow, but have held back from taking steps that would restrict Russia from selling its oil elsewhere. That has allowed Moscow to continue earning hundreds of billions of dollars from shipping oil to buyers such as China and India.
“We’re going to be doing secondary tariffs,” Trump said. “If we don’t have a deal in 50 days, it’s very simple, and they’ll be at 100%.”
A White House official said Trump was referring to 100% tariffs on Russian exports as well as secondary sanctions on other countries that buy its exports.
Trump, who returned to power this year promising a quick end to the war, said his shift was motivated by increasing frustration with Putin, who, he said, had talked about peace but continued to strike Ukrainian cities.
“We actually had probably four times a deal. And then the deal wouldn’t happen because bombs would be thrown out that night and you’d say we’re not making any deals,” Trump said.
(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)
