Trump signs sweeping Russia-Iran sanctions law hours after deadly strike on Ukrainian city

President Donald Trump signed a sweeping new sanctions law targeting Russia and Iran on Friday evening, hours after a Russian guided bomb killed two city employees and wounded at least seven people in an apartment building in Sumy, Ukraine. The White House confirmed the signing of H.R. 5334, the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, in a brief statement issued after an Oval Office ceremony.

The measure, more than a year in the making, gives the administration broad new authority to sanction Russian officials, banks and defense-linked companies, and lets the president impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on countries that continue buying Russian oil and gas. It also extends the Iran Sanctions Act for another five years, through 2031. The law arrived on the president's desk on the same day Russian forces struck three separate Ukrainian targets, including the residential block in Sumy where a bomb tore through the building between the third and fourth floors.

The bill cleared the Senate 86-11 in August and the House of Representatives 262-159 on September 16, with 203 Republicans, 58 Democrats and one independent voting in favor, according to the vote record. Trump signed it at 6:01 p.m. Eastern time on September 18 in the Oval Office, flanked by lawmakers including Senator Katie Britt of Alabama, Senator Darline Graham of South Carolina and Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, according to a statement from Britt's office.

Roughly two hours earlier, Ukrainian officials said Russia had fired six to seven guided aerial bombs at Sumy, a regional capital near the Russian border. One struck a multistory apartment building in the city's Kovpakivskyi district. Sumy Mayor Artem Kobzar said the two people killed were employees of the city council. President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media that rescuers pulled four people, including a child, from the rubble, and that a 13-year-old girl was among roughly seven to eight wounded, three of them seriously. Russian strikes the same evening also hit a medical clinic in Pavlohrad and logistics infrastructure in the Kyiv region, Zelensky said.

The numbers

• H.R. 5334 passed the Senate 86-11 on August 7 and the House 262-159 on September 16.
• The law authorizes tariffs of up to 100 percent on goods from countries found to be significantly purchasing Russian crude oil, natural gas or petroleum products, or helping Moscow evade sanctions.
• It extends the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 for five years, through 2031.
• The Sumy strike killed two and wounded seven to eight people, three seriously, according to regional officials.

The text of the legislation, published by the Government Publishing Office, also directs new sanctions at Russian financial institutions, defense-related networks and the so-called shadow fleet of tankers used to move sanctioned oil while masking its origin. The president retains discretion to waive individual sanctions or tariffs if he determines doing so serves the national interest, provided he notifies Congress.

Context and impact

The bill is named for Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who spent more than a year building bipartisan support for it before his death in July at age 71. Trump delivered Graham's eulogy. After Graham's death, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster appointed Graham's sister, Darline Graham, to fill the vacant Senate seat; she was elected in her own right the following month and stood beside Trump at Friday's signing.

Trump had for months resisted signing sanctions legislation drafted by Congress, arguing it could complicate his efforts to broker a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Asked why more than four years of on-and-off diplomacy had failed to end the war, he told reporters at the signing that the holdup was less about policy than personality. "The holdup is two people that hate each other," he said, referring to President Vladimir Putin and Zelensky. "I think more than anything else, it's two people that hate each other."

Russia's war in Ukraine, launched in February 2022, has ground into a war of attrition in which Moscow has increasingly relied on glide bombs and long-range strikes on cities far from the front line to pressure Kyiv, even as ceasefire talks have periodically resumed and stalled. Graham himself had spent much of his final year in the Senate pressing colleagues in both parties to back the bill, arguing that sanctions relief should only follow a genuine end to the fighting rather than precede it, a position Trump had at times resisted as he pursued direct talks with Moscow.

The law's tariff provisions are aimed squarely at the largest remaining buyers of Russian crude: China and India, which together account for the bulk of Russia's seaborne oil exports since Europe and the United States cut most direct purchases after the 2022 invasion. Trump is scheduled to host Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House on September 24, a meeting that will now take place with the threat of steep new tariffs hanging over the bilateral relationship. Indian officials have separately warned the measure could complicate ongoing trade negotiations with Washington.

The bill's sanctions on Russia's shadow fleet could also ripple through global shipping and insurance markets, since many of the tankers involved operate with opaque ownership structures registered outside traditional maritime authorities specifically to avoid Western enforcement. Energy analysts have said in the run-up to the signing that the practical bite of the law will depend less on its text than on how consistently the Treasury Department applies it against buyers who have so far continued purchasing discounted Russian barrels despite years of prior sanctions.

In Sumy, the law's passage offers no immediate relief. Rescue crews continued working through the night at the apartment block, and regional officials said additional people may still have been trapped under rubble hours after the strike. Sumy has been repeatedly targeted since Ukrainian forces launched and then withdrew from an incursion into Russia's neighboring Kursk region, leaving the border area within easier range of Russian glide bombs.

Reaction

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, responding after the House vote, said the sanctions fell into the category of "unfriendly" actions and would "complicate" efforts to reach a peace settlement, according to reporting from independent outlet The Moscow Times, which described the measure by the nickname Russian officials have given it: the "sanctions from hell" bill.

Britt, in her statement, said the signing sent "a clear message to Russia, and any countries that help fund its war machine, that the United States stands unified in our opposition to their acts of aggression against Ukraine." Zelensky, writing before the signing, urged American lawmakers to act, tying the legislation directly to the strike unfolding in Sumy as he wrote.

"Right now, America has a chance to send the aggressor the right signal that there will be just pressure and that the war must end."

Ukrainian officials, according to the Kyiv Independent's reporting on the strike, said they hoped the law's leverage over Russia's oil revenue would eventually help force Moscow toward genuine negotiations, even as they mourned the two council employees killed overnight.

What happens next

Implementation now shifts to the Treasury and State Departments, which must decide how aggressively to use the law's tariff and sanctions authorities, and how much of that authority Trump chooses to waive. The law gives him wide latitude to hold off on the harshest measures, meaning the practical effect on Russian oil revenue, and on China and India, will depend heavily on decisions made inside the administration rather than by Congress. Trump's meeting with Xi next week is likely to be an early test of how the new leverage is used. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continues with no ceasefire in place, and Sumy's regional administration said Friday it was assessing the extent of damage to the apartment building and to the clinic in Pavlohrad, with officials warning that further Russian strikes remained possible in the days ahead.