Putin Tests How Far Trump Will Go Against Europe on Sanctions

The Kremlin has a deliberate strategy to test how far US President Donald Trump is willing to go in pressing Europe to ease sanctions, according to people familiar with the situation.

Russia is demanding the reconnection of one of its largest state banks to the SWIFT international messaging system as a condition for accepting a US-brokered truce in the Black Sea. 

The purpose in picking Russian Agricultural Bank was to see if Trump would firstly engage with the idea and then whether he could bring the European Union on board, said two people close to the Kremlin. The EU has jurisdiction over SWIFT which is headquartered in Belgium.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is checking what it’s possible to achieve with Trump and success with SWIFT may lead to a gradual weakening of the sanctions regime as a whole, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing sensitive issues.

The EU ordered RSHB, as the bank is also known, and other major Russian lenders cut off from SWIFT in 2022 as part of sweeping economic sanctions in response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. A coalition of European leaders ruled out the possibility of easing restrictions on Russia at a summit in Paris on Thursday. 

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said they had instead discussed ways to intensify sanctions to bring “further pressure” on Russia to come to the negotiating table. Finnish President Alexander Stubb said that leaders were already working on a new package of measures.

“Putin agreed to President Trump’s proposal to revive the Black Sea Initiative,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday, referring to the 2022-2023 grain-export deal brokered by the United Nations and Turkey that broke down when Russia quit the agreement. 

“As for SWIFT, it is an integral part of the Black Sea Initiative, which both the Europeans and the Americans went along with at that time,” Peskov said. “Now it feels like everyone has switched roles and the Europeans are no longer going for it. But this is not Russia’s business.”

After three days of negotiations in Saudi Arabia this week, the US announced on Tuesday that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to the Black Sea truce as the next stage in Trump’s efforts to end the war, following their acceptance of a 30-day halt to strikes on energy infrastructure.

While Ukraine said it would immediately observe the ceasefire, the Kremlin appeared to catch the White House off guard by declaring that its participation was dependent on removing sanctions on RSHB and other financial institutions involved in foreign trade in food and fertilizers. That included being reconnected to SWIFT, it said.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Wednesday that some of the Russian conditions “include sanctions that are not ours. They belong to the European Union.” Officials would consider “what the Russian position is or what their ask is in exchange” and then Trump would decide on the next step, he said.

“This is a test for Trump,” said Pavel Danilin, a political analyst who works with Kremlin officials. “The Kremlin wants to see how Trump will cope with his promises.”

Russia raised the issue of reconnecting its banks to SWIFT at the talks with US officials in the Saudi capital Riyadh and “the Americans took it calmly,” Grigory Karasin, one of the heads of the Russian delegation at the negotiations, told state television on Friday.

The current US administration is “interested in dialog with us, in finding joint approaches and solutions,” said Karasin, a former Russian deputy foreign minister. “Then, you’ll see, Europe will slowly start to return to common sense, to some kind of realism.”

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.