AP Photo/Evan Vucci
President Donald Trump announced a long list of new tariffs on Wednesday, and observers swiftly noticed a rather glaring omission.
In a Rose Garden press conference Wednesday afternoon, the president declared it to be “Liberation Day” and announced a series of sweeping new tariffs, including 10% on virtually all imported goods, 25% on foreign automobiles, and a long list of what he described as “reciprocal tariffs” on dozens of countries around the world.
The markets were rattled after Trump’s plans were confirmed, with U.S. stock futures plummeting in after-hours trading. CNN reported that gold, “considered a safe having amid economic and political uncertainty,” went the opposite direction, and “the most actively traded gold futures contract in New York briefly rose above $3,200 a troy ounce, a record high.”
Numerous commentators have criticized the new tariffs for not just the economic havoc they were poised to spark, but for falsely categorizing value-added taxes and other sales or corporate taxes as tariffs.
The White House tweeted a series of tweets with the countries included in the “reciprocal tariffs.”
Not on the list? Russia. Also absent: Belarus, which has been actively allied with Russia in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine is on the list, as are many other former Soviet satellites and republics. Multiple social media accounts posted about Russia’s absence from Trump’s list of the new tariffs.
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright reported that a White House official claimed that the reason for Russia’s omission was that sanctions imposed after the war with Ukraine began had “already rendered trade between the two countries as zero.”
That does not seem to be accurate.
Trade between Russia and the U.S. did in fact drop significantly after the invasion of Ukraine, but not to zero. A Forbes article from Jan. 2024 described it as “plummeting to lowest levels since [the] demise of Soviet Union,” but still reported that the November YTD total at that time was $4.81 billion.
The website for the Office of the United States Trade Representative provides an even lower number for 2024, but the total was still several billion dollars and showed a trade deficit:
U.S. total goods trade with Russia were an estimated $3.5 billion in 2024. U.S. goods exports to Russia in 2024 were $526.1 million, down 12.3 percent ($73.5 million) from 2023. U.S. goods imports from Russia totaled $3.0 billion in 2024, down 34.2 percent ($1.6 billion) from 2023. The U.S. goods trade deficit with Russia was $2.5 billion in 2024, a 37.5 percent decrease ($1.5 billion) over 2023.
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