The U.S. president Donald Trump seems to have announced the end of the oil embargo against Cuba this Sunday.
The president confirmed that his administration will allow the arrival of the Russian tanker Anatoly Kolodkin to Cuba, a sanctioned vessel that transports between 700,000 and 730,000 barrels of crude oil and is expected to dock at the port of Matanzas on Tuesday.
When asked by a journalist during a press meeting aboard Air Force One whether it was true that the United States would allow the tanker to pass, Trump responded bluntly: "If a country wants to send some oil to Cuba, I have no problem with that."
When the journalist asked him if he was concerned that this would benefit Putin, the president dismissed it: "It doesn't help him. He's losing an oil ship. That's all it is. It doesn't bother me."
Trump justified the decision with a humanitarian argument: "I prefer to let him in, whether he is from Russia or any other country, because people need heating, cooling, and all the other things you need."
At the same time, the president was emphatic about the Cuban regime: "Cuba is finished. They have a bad regime. They have very poor and corrupt leadership. And whether they receive an oil ship or not, it won’t matter."
The president also stated this Sunday that the Cuban regime will collapse soon and that the United States will be ready to intervene. "In a short time, it will fail, and we will be there to help," Trump declared when asked about his previous assertion that "Cuba will be next" on his administration's agenda.
The statement marks a nuance in the president's discourse: instead of talking about "taking" Cuba, Trump adopts a tone of future assistance, albeit within the framework of a maximum pressure strategy aimed at the regime's collapse without direct military intervention.
The U.S. Coast Guard, which had at least two ships deployed north of Cuba, received instructions not to intercept the tanker, according to sources cited by The New York Times.
The Anatoly Kolodkin, sanctioned by the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, departed from the Russian port of Primorsk on March 8 with a declared fictitious destination. Its arrival would mark the first significant fuel supply that Cuba has received in over three months.
The oil blockade was imposed by Trump through the Executive Order 14380, signed on January 29, 2026, which declared a national emergency and threatened tariffs on any country that supplied crude oil to the island.
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