White House: Russian Tanker Allowed To Break Cuba Blockade For ‘humanitarian Reasons’

President Donald Trump is allowing a Russian oil tanker to reach Cuba for “humanitarian reasons,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday, insisting that it did not amount to a shift in U.S. policy.

The U.S. has enforced a blockade around Cuba since January in an effort to increase pressure on the country’s government, going as far as to threaten others that attempt to send fuel there and even escorting away a tanker on approach to the island.

But when asked on Monday what was different about this Russian tanker, Leavitt said that decisions “are being made on a case-by-case basis” and insisted that “there has not been a formal change in sanction policy.”

This particular tanker, which is owned by the Russian government and estimated to be carrying around 730,000 barrels of crude oil, was allowed through, Leavitt added, “in order to provide humanitarian needs to the Cuban people.” Cuba’s energy grid has all but collapsed since the blockade began.

Trump and aides have been outspoken about their desire to see Cuba’s communist government fall. Allowing the Russian tanker through the blockade would seem to undercut that endeavor.

“It’s huge,” Lawrence Gumbiner, who led the U.S. Embassy in Havana during Trump's first term, said of the oil delivery, estimating that it buys the country “a month or two” of energy and reduces the pressure on Cuba to make a deal with the U.S. — even as Trump insists the country is on the verge of collapse.

“It’s not that they have the wind at their sails,” he added, speaking about the Cuban government, “but they feel like this is giving them a little bit of breathing room that they believe will help them develop the next steps to stay in power.”

The oil tanker’s arrival at the Cuban port of Matanzas comes after weeks of speculation about how the U.S. would respond once the ship entered the Caribbean. After leaving Russia earlier this month, the Anatoly Kolodkin made a show as it transited the English Channel escorted by a Russian warship before steaming solo across the Atlantic.

People close to the White House, former diplomats and Russia observers framed the Kolodkin’s apparent mission — delivering much-needed oil to Cuba as blackouts roil the country — as secondary to its geopolitical goal of testing how far the U.S. is willing to go in defense of the Western Hemisphere, under the president’s so-called Donroe Doctrine.

Those people had anticipated that the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard would likely intercept the Kolodkin before it reached port, as the vessel itself is sanctioned and also the U.S. has an ongoing oil blockade in Cuba.

That it didn’t, they said, suggests either that talks between the U.S. and Cuba are going well — or that the U.S.’s attention is too divided with war raging in the Middle East to open yet another front in the Caribbean by taking on the Russian-flagged tanker.

The Iran war, Gumbiner said, “does buy [Cuba] time as the U.S. gets more distracted in the Middle East.”

Beyond the impact in Cuba, Trump’s decision continues a pattern of allowing Russia — already seeing billions in additional revenue from the rise in global oil prices — to operate with virtual impunity on the world stage. Moscow’s testing of an American blockade within its own hemisphere coincides with its brazen intelligence sharing efforts on behalf of Iran amid its ongoing war with the U.S. and Israel.

And neither action has drawn any sort of response from Washington.