Trump is telling the G7 that they must impose heavy tariffs on India and China and Turkey, Russia’s major energy clients, if the US is to do the same. Also that Europeans have to stop consuming Russian oil, which they currently do in the form, mainly, of LNG, and supplies from India whose oil is mixed with Russian.
The US has already imposed heavy tariffs on India thus creating a curious disparity in levels of punishment that could but so far has not create or add to frictions between China and India (whose leaders two weeks ago in Beijing decided they were partners).
Neither Russia nor China look remotely inclined to bow to US pressure. China has the imposing weapon of rare earths at its disposal to push back against Trump. India looks a bit more vulnerable to possible maneuvers with India’s regional rivals Pakistan (but which is an ally of China), Bangladesh and Nepal (both these recently subject to regime change shenanigans that favor Neocon interests.
Nor does it seem at all likely that further sanctions or tariffs are going to have any impact on Russia. Ukraine’s recent escalation of drone attacks on Russian refineries could yet change this calculus although in the immediate term all that seems to be happening is that Russia is greatly escalating the scale of its regular drone and missile attacks on Ukraine - to which the European reaction seems to be to magnify the importance of otherwise trivial and unintentional Russian drone incursions into Poland and Romania (assuming these are not false flag operations, which they may very well be).
Europe either reacts in this way because (most likely and mistakenly) they think this pressures Trump into resuming previous levels of weapons flow to Ukraine, even at European expense, or because they think, given growing public resentment against Macron, Merz, Starmer and Tusk (whose political ends are as proximate as a hovering guillotine blade), this may play well to the gallery, or again, because they think the more “real” the Russian “threat,” the less malevolently silly they themselves may seem. The longer and further that the Europeans persist with their farce the more likely Russia will be obliged to call their bluff with one or two devastating attacks on NATO assets in Europe itself. Or worse.
Trump’s purpose in pressuring Europe may be to force its leaders to allow full sunlight upon their own hypocrisy (since they keep begging the US to make life hell for Russia while continuing, as fanatical warmonger Senator Lyndsey Graham likes to say, to help Russia finance itswar with Ukraine). Of course the reality is that the people who have to stop the proxy Ukraine are those that provoked it - the NeoCon cabal and its sponsors who still control Washington.
We shall soon see what the reaction from the G7 is going to be but until now it has looked like the Europeans, suicidal as they are, would shoot themselves in both feet, again, by relying more and more on an energy supplier, the US, whose own sources of shale fuel have likely peaked and are set to decline.
The consequences for global energy prices will not favor European interests, that is for sure. There is also the question of Turk Stream dependence on Russian and Azeri oil: if Turkey is forced to cut itself off from Russian oil, that will, first, be very bad news for Hungary and Slovakia who are very dependent on Turk Stream to make up for the impact of Ukrainian destruction of the pipeline that carried their previous Russian source across Ukraine.
US concern about the long-term future of its own domestic sources may help explain the current US pressure - whose direction is regime change - on Venezuela. Failing that (I think it will fail) the US has the easier prospect of messing around with oil supplies in neighboring Guyana.
Particularly in view of ecocidal US hostility to efforts to contain the advance of global warming and corresponding efforts to subdue demand for gasoline cars by removing subsidies for the purchase of EVs, erecting high tariff barriers against cheap Chinese EV competitors, and creating a semi monopoly for overpriced domestic producer - and not overlooking US management of genocide in Palestine at the instructions of Natanyahu - the question of fossil fuel remains the electric rail on which humanity capacity for rational thought has perished.