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Import tariffs, which U.S. President Donald Trump slapped on about 90 countries on April 2 and which some of America’s previously friendly neighbors described as attempts to make their economies “collapse,” had some surprise omissions. One of them has turned out be Russia, which made many wonder why. To hear U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explain it, Russia was spared because the sanctions imposed on the country after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 mean that U.S.-Russian trade had effectively stopped, according to NYT. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered a similar explanation, telling Axios that Russia was left off the list because U.S. sanctions already "preclude any meaningful trade."

But low levels of trade didn’t prevent Trump from slapping tariffs on other countries.1 For instance, the U.S. exported $526 million worth of goods and services to Russia last year, while importing $3,007 million, with America’s deficit in this bilateral trade totaling $2,481 million that year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 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 billion), 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 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 still harbors hopes that, despite having stalled so far in the negotiations on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Russian President Vladimir 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.

Whatever the reasons, Trump’s decision to spare Russia has not been lost on Russia’s ruling elite. Moreover, some top members of that elite, such as Dmitry Medvedev, could not help gloating over how some of America’s traditional allies were reeling from Trump’s tariffs, while Russia was untouched. Russian markets also, arguably, welcomed the omission of Russia from the trade war, with the Moscow Exchange and RTS indices rising by 1.1% after opening on April 3.