US President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2025. (Photo by Reuters)
US President Donald Trump has signed a decree extending some of anti-Russia sanctions until March 6, 2026 ahead of his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House Friday.
The decree, which is set to be published in the US Federal Register on Friday, extends the 10-year-old state of emergency over the situation in Ukraine.
The sanctions were first declared on March 6, 2014 under then-President Barack Obama in response to the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea joining Russia. The decree also extends related sanctions imposed by Obama.
Trump was about to meet the Ukrainian leader for whom he said has a "lot of respect" after recently calling him a "dictator".
The meeting comes after the Trump administration shocked its Western partners by holding the first high-level US talks with Moscow since the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out just over three years ago.
Trump had appeared to blame Zelensky for the war and chided him for not starting peace talks earlier.
He has said his Friday meeting with the Ukrainian president has in store a potential “trillion-dollar deal” offering the US easy access to a bonanza of rare earth minerals.
“We’ll be dig, dig, digging,” Trump told reporters on the eve of Zelensky’s visit. “The American taxpayers will now effectively be reimbursed for the money and hundreds of billions of dollars poured into helping Ukraine defend itself.”
This is at odds with the widespread assessment of current and former US officials who say there’s little actual evidence of great rare earth and other mineral wealth in Ukraine. They say much of what does exist will be difficult, even impossible, to exploit in the eastern war-torn part of the country.
On February 12, Trump said negotiations to end the Ukraine war will start “immediately” after holding a “lengthy and highly productive” telephone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
Last week, diplomats from the two countries held the first round of US-Russia talks over Ukraine in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
On Thursday, Russian and US officials met in Istanbul to discuss normalizing the operations of their respective diplomatic missions which in recent years were hit hard by mutual expulsions of large numbers of diplomats, closures of offices, and other restrictions.
Putin, speaking on Thursday at a meeting with the Federal Security Service (FSB), hailed the Trump administration’s “pragmatism and realistic view” compared to his "stereotypical" predecessors.
“The first contacts with the new US administration encourage certain hopes,” the Russian leader said.
“There is a mutual readiness to work to restore relations and gradually solve a colossal amount of systemic strategic problems in the global architecture,” he added.
The Russian leader warned that “parts of Western elites are still determined to maintain global instability” and could make attempts to “disrupt or compromise the dialog that has begun.”
Ties between Moscow and Washington plummeted to their lowest levels since the Cold War in 2014 after Crimea separated from Ukraine and joined Russia after a referendum.
The US and its European allies have maintained tough sanctions on Moscow and Russian officials since 2014.
The anti-Russia sanctions then intensified after Moscow launched its special military operation in eastern Ukraine in February 2022 to stop NATO's eastward encroachment on Russia.
