The incoming US president may overturn some measures just because they were initiated by his predecessor, officials told the paper
The European Union is concerned that incoming US President Donald Trump may overturn some of the sanctions imposed on Russia during Joe Biden’s presidency, the Financial Times reported on Friday. Russia has been targeted by as many as 40,000 Western sanctions.
According to the British paper, EU officials reportedly fear that Trump might reverse some of his predecessor’s decisions “simply because they were taken by Biden.”
Brussels is therefore scrambling to analyze hundreds of Biden-era sanctions and executive orders to assess which reversals could have the most significant impact on the bloc, the article says. Some officials also reportedly believe that Trump may completely ignore EU interests when he reviews Biden’s foreign policy decisions.
“The concern is he decides to reverse things just because Biden had done them,” a source told the FT. “We need to know how that could affect us.”
A major worry for the EU is that Trump could undermine sweeping sanctions imposed on Russia over the Ukraine conflict. However, officials in Brussels hope that the incoming US president will keep those restrictions in place as leverage for possible negotiations with Moscow.
Since the outbreak of hostilities in February 2022, Biden introduced a series of consecutive restrictions, which sought to send Russia’s economy into a tailspin. In particular, the sanctions froze a significant portion of Russia’s sovereign assets, targeted the country’s largest banks and key industries, and blacklisted numerous top officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Russia has condemned the sanctions as “illegal” while labeling the asset freezes as “theft.” Putin has also said the country’s economy has been able to withstand unprecedented Western pressure, noting that it had encouraged the development of domestic industry.
Some US sanctions on Moscow predate 2022, with former US President Barack Obama targeting Russia with a raft of measures after Crimea seceded from Ukraine and voted to join Russia following a Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. During his first term, Trump largely kept the restrictions in place, with his administration introducing new sanctions against some Russian officials.
