What happened
President Donald Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 into law on 18 September 2026. The act authorises tariffs of up to 100 per cent on the largest purchasers of Russian oil and natural gas, and provides for sanctions on the Russian president, on government officials, oligarchs, banks and financial institutions, and on the shadow fleet; it also extends sanctions on Iran's energy and weapons sectors. It passed the House of Representatives by 262 votes to 159 and the Senate by 86 to 11. Designations trigger tariffs within thirty days, and the president may waive them or set lower rates at his discretion. No designation had been announced by this brief's cutoff.
THE INSTRUMENT IS NEW; THE POLICY IS NOT YET. Every sanctions measure against Russia's oil revenue until now has acted on Russia, on the vessels that carry the oil or on the entities that finance it. This one acts on the buyers, and it does so through tariffs rather than through the financial system — which places the decision in trade policy, where the executive has the widest discretion and where the countries concerned are among the largest United States trading partners. That is why the discretion matters more than the ceiling: a statute whose central mechanism may be waived at will is a bargaining instrument before it is a sanctions regime, and nothing about its passage establishes that it will be used. What can be said is that the authority now exists in law and did not before, and that the observable is a designation — a named purchaser, a rate and a date — rather than a statement of intent. Its Iran provisions put the same signature on both of Vigil's sanctioned-energy files, which is a fact about the drafting rather than evidence of a joined strategy.
Confidence: High
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