A senior official in the Trump White House has said he was not aware of any plans to lift sanctions on Russia and did not think it would be a “smart” thing to do in the absence of any change in Moscow’s behaviour.



Kevin Harrington, the newly appointed deputy assistant to the president for strategic planning, cautioned on Monday that the fact he had not seen any draft plans to relax pressure on Moscow did not mean they did not exist, but he stressed he did not think it would be good policy.

“[There’s] nothing that I have seen, nothing that I am aware of,” said Harrington, a former investment fund manager for Pieter Thiel, a prominent Trump backer. “It doesn’t mean there aren’t things going on. It’s early days in the administration. Obviously it’s going to rethink a lot of things in the long run.

“It’s smart to look at things from fresh angles, as it’s a fresh administration, but that doesn’t mean you should drop things for no improvement in behaviour anywhere. That wouldn’t be smart either,” Harrington said at a conference on sanctions organised by the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies.

There were reports in the first week of the Trump administration that the White House had drafted an executive order that would lift some or all of the sanctions imposed on Moscow by the Obama administration for its military intervention in Ukraine and its hacking of the US election.

After lobbying from congressional Republicans and the British prime minister, Theresa May, during her visit to Washington on 27 January, Trump appeared to backpedal on the issue, saying it was “very early” to start considering sanctions relief on Moscow.

However, the president has avoided any serious criticism of Russian actions in Syria or in Ukraine.

In official White House accounts of Trump’s phone conversations with the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and Nato secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, the Ukrainian conflict is portrayed as a border dispute between Ukraine and Russia.

US allies, in contrast, view the annexation of Crimea and the military support for pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine as acts of Russian aggression – a position which was shared by the Obama administration.

Trump and Vladimir Putin have consistently defended each other from criticism. It was reported in Moscow on Monday that the Kremlin had named a high-ranking new ambassador to Washington, deputy foreign minister Anatoly Antonov. Antonov had been the public face of Russian intervention in Syria in his previous job as deputy foreign minister, and both governments have emphasised their common objective in combating terrorism in the Middle East.

In its first few weeks, the Trump administration has, however, differed markedly from Putin in its attitude to Iran, a close ally of Moscow which the White House has singled out as an adversary, expanding sanctions against Tehran last week in retaliation for a ballistic missile test and Iranian support for Houthi rebels in Yemen.

In his remarks on Monday, Harrington argued that the test launch showed Iran was not taking seriously the 2015 nuclear deal it agreed with US and five other major powers, and he suggested that US respond by also ceasing to abide by the “spirit of the agreement”, though he did not describe how that might be done.

That deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), does not address missile development, though a UN resolution endorsing the deal “called on” Iran to refrain from developing or testing missiles that could potentially carry nuclear warheads. The Trump administration insists that the missile test on 29 January fitted that description.

“This very provocative series of missile tests Iran is engaged is are basically a signal that is not taking the JCPOA all that seriously,” Harrington said. “So we need to take account of that and maybe operate less in the spirit of the agreement as well in response.”