Russia Matters, 4/4/25

1. Donald Trump is “running out of patience” with Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine ceasefire, FT reported, citing Finland’s president Alexander Stubb, who spent seven hours with Trump on March 30.¹ In fact, Trump himself said on that day that he was so “pissed off” at Putin over his call for a temporary U.N. administration in Ukraine that he was considering secondary 25%–50% tariffs on buyers of Russian oil. Trump—who has been advised by his staff not to talk to Putin until he commits to the broad ceasefire—was echoed by Marco Rubio, who insists that the White House needs to “begin to see real progress” from the Kremlin soon, asserting that “we will know soon enough—in a matter of weeks, not months—whether Russia is serious about peace or not.” To increase the Trump administration’s leverage vis-à-vis the Kremlin on this issue, some 50 Republican and Democratic senators introduced a bill that would slap a 500% tariff on imports from countries that buy Russian oil if Putin refuses to engage in good-faith ceasefire negotiations or breaches an eventual agreement, according to Bloomberg. However, these thinly veiled threats appeared to have produced no immediate impact, at least publicly. While a Kremlin spokesman declared on March 31 that Putin remains open to talks with Trump, Russia’s deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov asserted on April 1 that Moscow cannot accept U.S. proposals for a ceasefire without addressing what Russian leaders describe as the “root causes” of the war.² Nor did Kirill Dmitriev indicate any radical change in Russia’s position on conditions for the ceasefire when this week he became the most senior Russian official to visit Washington since the start of the Ukraine war. The U.S. is now waiting for Dmitriev, who met with Steve Witkoff and other senior U.S. officials, to report to Putin before the two sides move forward with any next steps, according to Bloomberg.³ Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced Beijing’s readiness to mediate in the Ukraine conflict during talks in Moscow with Sergei Lavrov, according to AFP.
2. Import tariffs, which Trump slapped on about 90 countries, had some surprise omissions, and one of them is Russia. That Russia was spared made many wonder why, prompting U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to claim that Russia was spared because the sanctions imposed on the country after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine mean that U.S.-Russian trade had effectively stopped. Yet, low levels of trade didn’t prevent Trump from slapping tariffs on other countries. For instance, the U.S. exported $526 million worth of goods and services to Russia in 2024, while importing $3,007 million, with America’s deficit in this bilateral trade totaling $2,481 million that year. In comparison, the volume of Angola’s trade with the U.S. ($2.6 billion in goods last year) was lower than America’s trade with Russia, as was the deficit ($1,000 million), but this African country still found itself with a 32% import tariff. So, low levels of trade don’t quite explain why Russia was spared. Perhaps the structure of U.S. imports does? As NYT’s Anatoly Kurmanaev has reminded us, Russia is a Top 3 supplier of fertilizer to the United States. However, Russia’s share in U.S. imports of this commodity has not exactly been game-changing; Russia accounted for 16% of $9.97 billion worth of fertilizer that the U.S. imported in 2023. Perhaps there has been another factor in the confluence of drivers of Trump’s decision to spare Russia from the tariffs. It could be that Trump continues to harbor hopes that, despite having stalled so far in the negotiations on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Putin may eventually agree to implement Trump’s vision of first embracing a temporary but full ceasefire, and then using that halt to negotiate a permanent cessation of hostilities.
3. Ukraine is holding strong defensively and improving its ability to reinforce its positions, though a full Ukrainian victory is unlikely, as is a collapse, according to NATO SACEUR Gen. Christopher Cavoli’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 3. Cavoli warned that U.S. aid to Ukraine is vital, especially for missile interception and intelligence. “It would obviously have a rapid and deleterious effect on their ability to fight,” the general said when asked what would happen if the Trump administration were to refuse to provide military aid to Kyiv. Cavoli also acknowledged that Russia’s defense industry is outproducing the U.S. in categories such as tanks and shells. Russia is expected to roll out 1,500 tanks and 3,000 armored vehicles (as well as 200 Iskander ballistic and cruise missiles) this year, while the U.S. produces only 135 tanks per year and no Bradley’s, DefenseScoop quoted Cavoli as telling U.S. senators. “Additionally, we anticipate Russia to produce 250,000 artillery shells per month, which puts it on track to build a stockpile three times greater than the United States and Europe combined,” Cavoli said. Thus, while the Russian military is estimated to have lost an estimated 3,000 tanks, 9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems and over 400 air defense systems in Ukraine in the past year, Moscow is on pace to replace those losses, according to Cavoli.
4. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reoriented the U.S. military to prioritize deterring China, while leaving it to Europe to defend itself from potential Russian aggression, according to a secret internal Pentagon guidance memo signed by Hegseth earlier this month. “Hegseth’s guidance acknowledges that the U.S. is unlikely to provide substantial, if any, support to Europe in the case of Russian military advances, noting that Washington intends to push NATO allies to take primary defense of the region,” WP’s Alex Horton and Hannah Natanson reported March 29. The U.S. will support Europe with nuclear deterrence against Russia, and NATO should only count on U.S. forces that are not required for homeland defense or China deterrence missions, according to the two journalists’ description of the memo.⁴
5. As if to punctuate the Russian president’s disinterest in a peace deal, Putin this week moved to expand the size of his military, issuing a spring call-up for 160,000 men ages 30 and younger from April to July—the highest number of conscripts since 2011, according to WP’s April 4 editorial. The Kremlin and Defense Ministry insist conscripts are not sent into combat and that the draft is unrelated to the war in Ukraine. However, Ukraine has repeatedly claimed to have captured Russian conscripts, according to AFP. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict has depleted Russia’s military personnel so much that the Kremlin has been relying on prison inmates and North Korean soldiers, according to the WP editorial. Importantly, while the bulk of conscripted soldiers are not sent into combat while serving for 12 months unless they agree to sign contracts to become professional soldiers for several years, their conscription frees up more professional soldiers in units inside Russia to be sent into combat.
6. Russia gained 99 square miles of Ukraine’s territory (about 1 Nantucket island) in the past month, and overall picked up the pace of its advance. Last week’s gain of 47 square miles by Russian forces is a threefold increase over the previous week’s gains, according to the April 2, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. As of April 3, 2025, Russian forces occupied 112,487 square kilometers (43,431 square miles), which constituted 18.63% of Ukrainian territory and which is roughly equivalent to the state of Virginia, according to Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT group’s map.
7. A New York Times investigation has revealed that the United States’ involvement in the Ukraine war was far deeper than previously understood. Here are the newspaper’s five takeaways from the investigation led by its journalist, Adam Entous.
   1. A U.S. base in Wiesbaden, Germany, supplied the Ukrainians with the coordinates of Russian forces on their soil.
   2. U.S. intelligence and artillery helped Ukraine quickly turn the tide against the Russian invasion.
   3. The Biden administration kept moving its red lines.
      1. In October 2022, U.S. intelligence overheard Russia’s then Ukraine commander, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, talking about indeed doing something desperate: using tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the Ukrainians from crossing the Dnipro and making a beeline to Crimea. Until that moment, U.S. intelligence agencies had estimated the chance of Russia’s using nuclear weapons in Ukraine at 5 to 10%. Now, they said, if the Russian lines in the south collapsed, the probability was 50%.
   4. Ultimately, the U.S. military and CIA were allowed to help with strikes into Russia.
   5. Political disagreements in Ukraine contributed to the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive’s collapse.
8. A new study by BOFIT has revealed that the level of Russians’ satisfaction with their household and personal circumstances has hit its highest in a decade. In more good news for the Russian workers, real wages in their country grew by a solid 6.5% year-on-year in January, according to preliminary Rosstat data cited by BNE. Some of their richest employers have also been enjoying an increase in income. The number of Russian billionaires grew from 110 in 2024 to a record high of 125, despite Russia’s enduring status as the most sanctioned country in the world, according to Forbes’s Russian edition. The sanctions must have played a role, however, in the fact that 24 former “Russian” billionaires in Forbes’ updated ranking are now listed as citizens or residents of other countries, according to MT.