NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Wednesday warned that countries including India, China and Brazil could be hit hard by secondary sanctions if they continued to do business with Russia, Reuters reported.
The remarks came during a meeting with senators in the US Congress after United States President Donald Trump threatened secondary tariffs of 100 percent on the buyers of Russian exports unless there is a peace deal in 50 days.
"My encouragement to these three countries, particularly, is, if you live now in Beijing, or in Delhi, or you are the president of Brazil, you might want to take a look into this, because this might hit you very hard," Rutte told reporters.
"So please make the phone call to Vladimir Putin and tell him that he has to get serious about peace talks, because otherwise this will slam back on Brazil, on India and on China in a massive way," Rutte added.
The US president on Tuesday also said that he plans to impose over 10 percent tariffs on smaller countries, including nations in Africa and the Caribbean. “We’ll probably set one tariff for all of them,” Trump said, adding that it could be “a little over 10% tariff” on goods from at least 100 nations.
While addressing Trump's goal of reducing trade imbalance with the rest of the world, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the tariff plan would revolve around countries in Africa and the Caribbean that generally do a modest level of trade with the United States and their contribution in trade balances are relatively insignificant countries in Africa and the Caribbean that generally do a modest level of trade with the United States and their contribution in trade balances are relatively insignificant, AP reported.
Trump has already been sending letters to about two dozen countries and the European Union notifying them of their revised tariff rate set to take effect from August 1. The deadline was previously set at July 9, but was extended by the Trump administration to have room for discussion and broker deals with trading partners interested in lowering tariffs.
The US president informed about the tariffs to be imposed on pharmaceutical drugs and asserted that they will be announced by the end of this month. He also said that he would start out at a lower tariff rate and give companies a year to build domestic factories before they faced higher import tax rates.
Trump also announced a trade deal with Indonesia on Tuesday, imposing a 19 percent tariff on goods from the nation. He had previously imposed a tariff of 32 percent on imports from the South Asian country.
