For a notoriously thin-skinned president who rarely hesitates to hit back, Donald Trump was notably quiet over the weekend after Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that his government would seize two United States diplomatic properties in Moscow and ordered hundreds of American diplomats to leave the country. Days earlier, Congress had overwhelmingly passed a new sanctions bill targeting Russia for its interference in the 2016 election, outraging Putin. “It was the time to show that we’re not going to leave that without an answer,” he said Sunday during an interview on state television. Trump himself has not responded.

The escalating tensions come at a critical time for the West Wing, which is embroiled in scandal over federal investigations into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The president is in a bind, with no option but to sign a veto-proof bill that the White House originally objected to as a dangerous check on the administration’s ability to negotiate better relations with Russia. “President Donald J. Trump read early drafts of the bill and negotiated regarding critical elements of it,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Friday, spinning the final bill as a compromise rather than a loss. “He has now reviewed the final version and, based on its responsiveness to his negotiations, approves the bill and intends to sign it.”

Nevertheless, the episode marks a major setback for the president, who now finds his hands tied by his own party. The bill, which both imposes fresh sanctions on Russia and restrains Trump’s power to lift them, passed the House and the Senate with votes of 419 to 3 and 98 to 2, respectively—a significant rebuke just six months into his presidency. With a number of Trump’s associates under investigation in the ongoing F.B.I. probe into whether his campaign colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 election, Trump would have risked political embarrassment had he fought the new sanctions. “It would have been foolhardy for the Trump administration to veto this bill,” Edward Fishman, a former Obama State Department official who worked on Russia sanctions policy, told Politico. “Congress would have overridden the veto, and all it will do is fuel the fire of the Russia scandal in Washington.”

The response from Russia was swift. After the bill survived Congress, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the U.S. would have to reduce “the total number of American diplomatic and consular office employees in the Russian Federation” to 455 people. In an interview with Russian media, Putin said, “Because more than 1,000 workers—diplomats and support staff—were working and are still working in Russia, 755 must stop their activity in the Russian Federation.”