Zelensky criticises waivers

Volodymyr Zelensky said the United States has weakened pressure on Russia by renewing a waiver that lets some already-loaded Russian oil cargoes be delivered and sold. (france24.com) Speaking on April 19, Zelensky said more than 110 tankers were at sea carrying over 12 million tonnes of Russian crude, which he valued at about $10 billion. He said that money would be “directly converted into new strikes against Ukraine.” (kyivpost.com) The waiver came from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control on April 17 as General License 134B. It authorizes transactions involving Russian crude oil and petroleum products that were loaded on vessels by April 17 and extends that permission through May 16. (ofac.treasury.gov) Washington has described the move as a limited carveout tied to market disruption, not a broader rollback of sanctions on Moscow. Reuters reported the renewal was aimed at easing energy shortages and price shocks linked to the Iran war and risks around the Strait of Hormuz. (politico.com) The dispute turns on how oil sanctions are supposed to work. The Group of Seven price-cap system was designed to keep Russian oil flowing to world markets while cutting the Kremlin’s revenue by restricting shipping, insurance and other services for cargoes sold above the cap. (home.treasury.gov) Russia has spent the past two years building a “shadow fleet” of aging tankers with opaque ownership to keep exports moving outside normal Western shipping channels. Brookings wrote in 2025 that the United States, European Union and United Kingdom had been racing to sanction more of those ships as Moscow expanded the fleet. (brookings.edu) The United States had tightened pressure earlier this year. On January 10, 2025, Treasury announced sanctions on more than 180 vessels as part of a broader push against Russia’s oil production and exports. (home.treasury.gov) The latest waiver also exposed mixed signals inside Washington. Reuters and other outlets reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had said on April 16 that the administration would not renew the temporary waiver, only for the license to be reissued a day later. (themoscowtimes.com) Zelensky said that kind of exception creates “operational flaws” in the sanctions regime and gives Moscow reason to think time is on its side. His argument was that a sanctions system with temporary escape hatches is harder to use as leverage in a war now in its fourth year. (rferl.org) For now, the waiver does not erase the wider sanctions architecture around Russian energy. But Zelensky’s complaint was narrower and immediate: if those tankers can unload and sell their cargoes by May 16, Russia gets cash before the next round of pressure arrives. (ofac.treasury.gov)