The USA imports more from Russia, and duty-free

From Progressive Policy:

"U.S. imports from Russia are up 30% this year, likely to hit $5 billion

Ed Gresser, October 8, 2025

FACT: U.S. imports from Russia are up 30% this year, likely to hit $5 billion.

THE NUMBERS: U.S. fertilizer imports,
January – July 2025* –

Total	25.3 million tons
Canada	7.9 million tons
Russia	3.3 million tons
Saudi Arabia	0.8 million tons
Qatar	0.7 million tons
All other	12.7 million tons

* U.S. International Trade Commission Dataweb

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio used a September 23 NBC appearance to term it “absurd” that some EU countries are still buying Russian energy. As the EU develops a new set of sanctions on Russian use of cryptocurrency, “shadow fleet” oil transport, and banking, the Trump administration has cited these purchases to avoid new sanctions on Russia itself. A day before Rubio’s appearance, though, Politico trade reporter Doug Palmer published a startling find about the United States’ trade with Russia:

“Russia’s fertilizer exports to the United States are rebounding in 2025 after falling in 2023 and 2024, according to Commerce Department data. The data also shows that U.S. imports of Russian enriched uranium and platinum are on their way to higher levels this year. In total, imports from Russia are up nearly 30 percent from 2024, and could reach close to $5 billion by the end of the year.”

Not only have U.S. imports from Russia jumped, but the Russian fertilizer and  specialty metals — mainly platinum-group metals palladium and rhodium, used in catalytic converters, along with the uranium — still arrive duty-free despite the tariffs the Trump administration has imposed on similar goods from allies and other suppliers...

The Trump administration’s April tariff decrees, meanwhile, exempted Russian goods on the unconvincing grounds that the U.S. already sanctions Russia in other ways. In practice, that means leaving Russian fertilizer and metals duty-free. Mr. Trump’s July 31 decree then taxed identical stuff from other sources at 10% and up: 10% on fertilizer from Saudi Arabia or Qatar, and 15% if it’s from Nigeria, Israel, or Trinidad; 30% on South African palladium and rhodium. (Canadian fertilizer and potash remain duty-free for now under the bruised-but-still-in-force “U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement”.) So Russia is now picking up market share at their expense. In sum, as Palmer notes, imports from Russia are up about 30% this year and are likely accelerating.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the EU — after some strong persuasion of the populist semidemocrats in Hungary and Slovakia, the main European buyers of Russian oil and gas — is supposed to stop buying Russian energy altogether by the end of 2027. Mr. Rubio isn’t wrong to urge them to stop sooner, though it’s hard to see why that means the U.S. should hold back on financial and shipping sanctions. And with U.S. imports of Russian fertilizer and metals jumping this year, Europeans aren’t alone in earning adjectives like “absurd.”"