On Tuesday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “The Record,” Special Presidential Envoy for Russia and Ukraine Keith Kellogg said that the United States has not really gone after Russia’s money flows from oil that hard and that the level of sanctions is medium, but the enforcement level is low and “if you start enforcing those sanctions, they start to bite.” And he thinks President Donald Trump will move in the direction of stronger economic action on Russian oil.
Kellogg stated, “[W]e really haven’t pushed hard on the economic piece of the oil. It’s a petro state. They export about 7 million barrels of oil a day and a lot of it goes through what we call the dark fleet. And I think if you start to move in that direction, I think the President will. That’s just a belief on my part. I haven’t talked to him on that.”
Kellogg also stated that “if you talk to the secretary of the treasury, if you look at sanctions, and Secretary Bessent has said that, if you look at them between one and ten, one being low, ten being high, they’re probably at about a level of six. But the enforcement’s about a level three. So, if you start enforcing those sanctions, they start to bite.”
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