Petro Oleschuk: Trump Is Pushing Russia Out Of The Oil Market

• 29.07.2025, 15:38

The political analyst pointed to an important event that preceded the new ultimatum of the US president.

US President Donald Trump has issued a new ultimatum to Putin to make peace with Ukraine - 10-12 days.

Why did the US president decide to shorten the deadline? The website Charter97.org talked about it with Ukrainian political scientist, professor of Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University Peter Oleshchuk:

- Trump justified it quite logically: there is no sense in waiting 50 days, as there was no progress. We saw how the last negotiations in Istanbul ended. Some agreements on the exchange of prisoners were reached, but no more.

There is no talk beyond the exchange of prisoners, there are no real ceasefire agreements. The continuation of all this is not very good from the point of view of the reputation of the US President, because everyone understands perfectly well - in the remaining days Russia will launch more than one missile and drone strike on the territory of Ukraine. Moreover, they have already started to move to outright provocations, for example, with regard to Lithuania.

I am referring to the latest Shahedaheda flight into the territory of the Baltic country. The real situation looks like Russia is beginning to escalate the escalation, which already includes threats directly to NATO countries.

Another question is what will Trump do. This is a question that no one has an answer to. Originally, when Trump issued his ultimatum, he was talking about secondary sanctions against buyers of Russian oil. Will Trump impose them? After all, this should mean imposing corresponding sanctions against significant countries: India, China. I have a hypothesis as to why it is now that Trump has raised the issue of lowering this deadline.

An agreement between the EU and the US has been concluded. Under this agreement, the European Union is making major commitments to buy American energy resources. And accordingly, this means that the United States is finally pushing Russia out of the relevant European market. We know that at the beginning of the Trump administration there was discussion that Russia and the United States could cooperate in the oil and gas sector. That is, the U.S. would lift sanctions and participate in the development of Russian energy resources. Moreover, it was discussed that the United States would take over the so-called Nord Stream.

Accordingly, would be a kind of intermediary between Russia and Europe in terms of selling Russian gas. This was a kind of carrot for Putin for which he might, in the Trump administration's view, agree to a cease-fire. But the new realities show that the United States is on a path that precludes any energy cooperation with Russia. After all, instead of cooperating and jointly selling gas to Europe, they are pushing Russia out of the European market.

In this situation, the introduction of any sanctions looks quite logical. There is little point in stalling. But there is a question of India's position, as it has already stated earlier that it can do without Russian oil. Now the EU together with the U.S. should negotiate with India on how it will give up Russian oil.

Then the theses about secondary sanctions would become more important, because the U.S. could really raise the issue of secondary sanctions that would affect China. Then there is room for maneuver from Beijing's point of view, so that China would seek a ceasefire from Russia.

To summarize, I attribute all this to two factors.

First, the U.S. has changed its strategy and no longer wants to cooperate with Russia in the energy sphere, it is more focused on pushing Russia out of this sphere.

Secondly, it is Putin's lack of flexibility. He does not want to make any minimal concessions. In this situation, Trump is wasting his reputation on, let's say, trying to negotiate with someone who clearly does not want to negotiate with you on anything serious, but makes some inadequate demands.

Putin really had a chance to negotiate with Trump on very favorable terms, but he did not want to.

- The Kremlin responded to the U.S. president with Medvedev. The latter threatened war altogether. Previously, Russia tried to restrain itself from verbal escalation. Why did they decide to respond to Trump this time?

- Medvedev has made statements before, including attacks on Trump. This is probably some kind of test, a test of the American administration, how they will react to this.

Maybe they will back off, maybe, on the contrary, the rhetoric will become more aggressive. If the rhetoric is more aggressive, the Russians may back off. After all, this is a game of nerves. The key argument they are using is nuclear blackmail. Again, this is an attempt to put pressure on Trump through his voters. They say that the US president's actions could lead to war.

- What options do you see after Trump's ultimatum expires?

- There could be different options, because we don't know if Trump will actually impose these secondary sanctions. He will probably have to do something. Some sanctions he will have to impose.

How extensive these sanctions will be, it's hard for me to say. But I think the subject of the relevant negotiations will be India and China. Trump expects that his bluff will work and that Russia's key economic partners will agree that Russia should be pressured to agree to a ceasefire.

I think that we will see a lot of different diplomatic statements, meetings, and negotiations. Everybody will be bluffing in this situation. But if Trump is serious, will not back down at the last moment (as he also sometimes does), and will promote this thesis, the situation for Putin may worsen. India will definitely not, risking relations with the EU, protect Putin.

I think that eventually some sanctions will be imposed. Perhaps Russia can be squeezed out of the Indian market for starters. As for China, everything will be complicated, but there will be a rather complicated confrontation, where Beijing may decide that it is not very profitable to start another trade war with the U.S.

Beijing, for example, may put pressure on Putin to go for at least some kind of ceasefire. Although the situation does not look so obvious now, I still consider that right now the probability of a ceasefire is not zero.