President Donald Trump meeting NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the White House Oval Office in March 2025

Trump Waives Graham Act Russia Sanctions Before Deadline

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The Graham Act Russia sanctions will not take effect for now. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, waiving the tariffs and most of the new penalties in the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, two days before the law’s first duties on buyers of Russian oil were due to start. The White House said Trump certified to Congress that the waiver serves the national interests of the United States.

Graham Act Russia sanctions at a glance

  • What was paused: a 500% increase in duties on goods from Russia; a 100% duty on goods from the five largest importers of Russian crude oil and natural gas that keep buying; a 100% duty on goods from the top five countries helping Russia evade oil sanctions; and most of the law’s sanctions provisions on people and companies.
  • Start date: the waiver took effect with the order on Oct. 16. The oil-buyer tariffs had been set to apply to new purchases made on or after Oct. 18.
  • End date: none. The order says the waivers stay in place until the president or the secretary of state, consulting the Treasury and the U.S. trade representative, decides that “further action is appropriate.”
  • What stays: sanctions imposed under earlier Russia executive orders, including every person and company already listed, are not affected, according to the order.

What the Graham Act would have done

Trump signed the Graham Act into law on Sept. 18, 2026, the order states. The bill was championed by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, who died in July before it passed, The Washington Post reported. Its central idea was secondary pressure. Rather than only punishing Russia directly, it threatened steep tariffs on the countries that keep Moscow’s energy money flowing. CBS News noted that the biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas include China, India and Turkey.

The order lays out that full menu before switching it off. Section 2 sets the duty increases, and Section 4 waives the duties in sections 112 and 113 of the law, along with the sanctions provisions in sections 102, 103 through 111 and 117. Reuters reported that the law lets the president set aside its sanctions by telling Congress they are not in the national interest, which is the route Trump took.

Monitoring instead of tariffs

The order does not repeal anything. It directs the trade representative, working with the secretaries of state, Treasury and energy, to keep tracking which countries buy Russian crude and gas and which help Russia dodge sanctions, and to report regularly to the president. It also assigns the law’s powers to specific cabinet officials, so parts of it could be switched back on without new legislation.

The move follows a series of steps easing pressure on Russian energy. One week earlier, the administration eased sanctions on Russian diesel and announced a deal to bring Russian diesel into the U.S. market, CBS News reported. The Boston Report covered that US-Russia diesel deal and its 180-day license, and analysts said the volume equals about 10 days of U.S. diesel demand. CBS also reported that with oil prices still high after the Iran war, the president has argued that the war in Ukraine has pushed up energy prices.

What the waiver means for Ukraine

The order lands during an open rift between Washington and Kyiv. Last weekend Trump urged Russia and Ukraine to stop striking each other’s energy infrastructure, calling it an “energy ceasefire.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy first said Ukraine was willing to go along, but after Russian strikes continued he said this week that Ukraine would no longer hold off on hitting Russian refineries, according to CBS News. Russian attacks on Ukraine’s grid have kept coming, including the Oct. 14 strike that left 600,000 people without power. Trump has said of Zelenskyy that he is “not a big fan.”

With the new tariffs on hold, the main tools left are the sanctions already on the books from earlier executive orders. Those remain in force. What is paused, with no end date, is the law’s threat to penalize third countries such as China and India, the part designed to cut Russia’s oil income at the buyer’s end.

Reactions

Kirill Dmitriev, an envoy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, welcomed the decision on Saturday, calling the suspension “an important and truly historic moment” in a social media post, CBS News reported.

Zelenskyy called the decision “unfortunate” and said the Graham Act “could have helped enormously.” In the same post he said that easing pressure on Russia and handing Putin financial rewards “only encourages him to keep attacking.”

Criticism in Congress had been building before the order. Earlier in the week a bipartisan group of senators called the diesel waivers a “betrayal of the people of Ukraine” and urged the president to enforce the Graham law, writing that its powers would apply economic pressure on Russia and “the chief enablers of its war, in particular China.” The Associated Press reported that the waiver drew sharp condemnation from congressional Democrats.

Sources