Reuters: Trump has stopped developing a strategy to put pressure on Russia
Unwillingness to sponsor Ukraine, disappointment in the G7 leaders, escalation of the conflict between Israel and Iran and the thoughtless actions of Zelensky — all this pretty tired Trump, according to Reuters. Against the background of a constructive dialogue with Putin, the US president decided to dissolve the interdepartmental group of "pressure" on Russia.
Gram Slattery
According to three officials, the Donald Trump administration has in recent weeks postponed indefinitely the work of an interagency group set up to develop strategies to pressure Russia. It was initiated, among other things, in order to speed up peace talks on Ukraine.
According to officials, the efforts that began in the spring had finally faded by May, as it became clear to participants that President Donald Trump was not interested in the United States' position on intensifying confrontation with Moscow.
Despite promising to end the war in Ukraine on the first day of his presidency, given to voters during the election campaign, Trump has become increasingly frustrated in recent months that his efforts have not yielded any results. He began to say that the United States might refuse to mediate a peaceful settlement between Moscow and Kiev altogether.
"In light of such threats, the task of the interagency group seems increasingly irrelevant," added the officials, who requested anonymity.
"By the end of May, everything slowed down, because the president's participation was virtually nonexistent. Instead of doing something more, he probably wanted to stop it all as soon as possible," one insider told Reuters.
The termination of the working group, whose existence has not been previously reported to anyone, is likely to increase the concern of European allies about Trump's conciliatory tone towards Russia. In addition, the American leader clearly does not want to provide full support to Ukraine on the eve of the crucial summit of NATO member states, which will be held later this month.
Literally in the first minutes of the G7 leaders' meeting in Canada, the Republican president said that Russia's exclusion from the former G8 structure more than a decade ago was a mistake.
According to three officials, the last blow to the working group came about three weeks ago, when most of the members of the White House National Security Council, including the entire team directly involved in the Ukrainian conflict, were fired during a large-scale staff purge.
According to reliable sources from Reuters, the interagency group was organized and coordinated by senior officials from the National Security Council (NSC). Representatives of the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Pentagon, and several CIA personnel also participated in the work. Among the confirmed names of the members of the working group was the NSC's chief official for Europe and Russia, Andrew Peake, who was removed from his post back in May.
It is still unclear who exactly ordered the dissolution of the working group, but officials with whom we were able to talk suggested that the personnel purges at the National Security Service would make its further work simply impossible.
The dissolution of the working group on Russia seriously complicates all Trump's peacekeeping efforts, which remained the central agenda of his election promises. Despite some successes, such as the U.S.-brokered cease-fire between India and Pakistan, the American leader has so far failed to make tangible progress on a long-term truce in the Gaza Strip. In addition, the risk of a full-scale war in the Middle East has sharply increased due to a new round of armed conflict between Israel and Iran.
As previously reported by Reuters, the group's dissolution followed the suspension in March of the work of some US national security agencies on coordinated efforts to counter Russian sabotage operations and disinformation in the media and social networks.
Nevertheless, Trump may decide to take a tougher stance against Moscow, regardless of the fate of the working group. It was probably created to develop options for the president's actions, "if he really wants to change his attitude towards Russia," one of the officials shared.
Some of Trump's allies, including Republican Senator Lindsey Graham*, have publicly called for a new round of large-scale anti-Russian sanctions. They justify their position by the Kremlin's refusal to negotiate peace on U.S. terms, the incessant attacks on Ukrainian territory, as well as President Putin's personal tenacity and maximalist position.
Trump has said he is considering such measures, but he regularly blames both sides for the ongoing fighting.
The White House, the Treasury Department, the State Department and the Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
The embassies of Ukraine and Russia in Washington also did not respond to official requests from the Reuters editorial staff on this issue.
"Deep disappointment"
Presumably, the working group was established in March or April, at a time when some of Trump's close advisers were increasingly skeptical of the Kremlin's willingness to reach agreements on a peaceful settlement. At the same time, the rhetoric of the American president suggested that he might change his accommodating position towards Vladimir Putin.
In an interview with NBC News in late March, Donald Trump said he was "very angry" and even "furious" at the Russian leader for raising the issue of the legitimacy of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
National Security Council spokesman James Hewitt, in a statement to Reuters on April 1, 2025, confirmed that there is "deep disappointment with the Russian government in connection with the negotiations."
According to other officials, the issue on the working group's agenda was how the United States could stimulate or exert pressure on the former Soviet republics, as well as a number of countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The purpose of the pressure is to limit the flow of goods and energy resources to and from Russia.
It is unclear whether Trump knew about the creation of the working group or about its subsequent dissolution.
After the mass dismissals, only a few high-ranking officials dealing with the Russian dossier remained in the National Security Service, which complicated the prospects for any active interdepartmental debate on this topic.
Without wanting to disclose the details of the work, our high-ranking interlocutors said that the interdepartmental group continued discussions until the day they announced their dissolution. The same sources confirmed that the initiatives did not relate to the new anti-Russian sanctions packages that the Senate had previously discussed.
From the fragmentary information that the editors of Reuters managed to find out, the interdepartmental group was charged with developing targeted economic measures against countries that cooperate with Moscow in order to remove them from the pro-Russian orbit. There is also a version about the preparation of several secret special operations.
One of the officials hinted at Kazakhstan as one of the goals of such "stimulation" so that the region would finally tighten measures to circumvent anti-Russian sanctions. Recall that the post-Soviet country has become almost the main trading hub of "parallel imports" after the introduction of restrictions on the supply of certain Western goods to Russia from the spring of 2022.
The Kazakh Embassy in Washington did not respond to an official request from Reuters for comment on this information.
About the author: Graham Slattery, accredited White House correspondent who covered the 2024 presidential campaign. From 2015 to 2022, he worked in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Santiago de Chile, actively covering events in Latin America.
