The Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, which the House will likely vote on this week, looks like a no-brainer for supporters of Ukraine who have been calling for President Trump to get tougher on Russia.A large majority of America’s existing sanctions on Russia, which target thousands of government officials and companies, are currently enforced by executive order, meaning that the president can remove them whenever he wants. The Graham bill would turn those sanctions into law: If Trump wanted to end them, he would need Congress’s approval. It also targets a few Russian officials and companies by name, further reducing Trump’s discretion. These provisions help explain why the late Senator Graham, one of Ukraine’s strongest defenders in Congress, originally championed the bill. President Volodymyr Zelensky himself has urged legislators to pass it, as have more than 30 national-security and foreign-policy experts who argue that it’s in Kyiv’s best interest.But the bill is not what it seems. The legislation would impose no significant new sanctions on Russia, and it would allow Trump to waive any of its measures simply by claiming that doing so is in the national interest. In other words, a law that appears to handcuff Trump would offer him a key to free himself. What’s more, its most important provisions are about not sanctions per se, but tariffs. The bill could provide Trump with the same kind of sweeping authority to impose tariffs that the Supreme Court took away from him in February, allowing him to intensify his trade war with many of America’s allies and partners.The legislation would give the president authority to impose levies of up to 100 percent on the five largest importers of Russian crude oil and and the five largest importers of Russian natural gas, which include China, India, France, Japan, Hungary, and Slovakia. It also allows him to impose tariffs on the five countries that are deemed to be the biggest facilitators of Russia’s evasion of oil sanctions—a vague provision largely subject to presidential discretion. (There are a few carve-outs for the natural-gas category, but not for the others.)[Andrew Ryvkin: Russia’s real strategy in Europe]Peter Harrell, a trade lawyer who served in the Biden administration, told me that the bill “gives Trump much more flexibility on tariffs than traditional tariff laws. There are no guardrails or restrictions.” The simplest reading of the legislation suggests that Trump can impose tariffs on only the countries that appear in the various top-five lists. But Harrell noted that Trump’s second-term track record suggests that he might try to interpret the law more expansively, perhaps by treating the European Union as a single country and imposing tariffs on the entire bloc all at once. Harrell also warned that the administration might use the law as a pretext to impose tariffs on countries that have little or nothing to do with Russia evading sanctions.It wouldn’t be the first time that Trump has employed such a pretext. Consider his 25 percent tariff on India, which the Supreme Court has since struck down. The levy was ostensibly meant to punish the country for importing oil from Russia. But reporting suggests that the decision had more to do with Trump’s annoyance that Prime Minister Narendra Modi didn’t give him credit for the cease-fire that India and Pakistan signed last year.Going beyond the letter of the Graham bill could well result in litigation for the administration. But Trump would still have ample reason to take an aggressive approach. For one thing, the legal process takes a long time—most trade lawyers think that the February ruling came at warp speed, even though it was a year in the making. While the case was moving through the courts, they consistently allowed the Trump administration to continue collecting tariff revenue in the meantime. In all likelihood, Trump would be free to use the tariff tool expansively for most of the rest of his term.Trump is evidently less worried about Russia evading sanctions than he is about oil prices. At the start of the Iran war, he waived some sanctions on Russian oil in an attempt to keep prices from going up. There is little reason to think that he will act more forcefully against Russian energy now, because oil prices remain high and the midterms are just a month away. Indeed, he has failed to update and enforce sanctions that are already on the books, despite bipartisan support. Moreover, Trump recently sent Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to Moscow to dangle the prospect of sanctions relief in exchange for some modest steps toward deescalating the war.[Ken Harbaugh: The warrior-witches of Ukraine’s resistance]Still, supporters of the bill believe that the benefits outweigh the risks. Eric Ciaramella, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served on the National Security Council as an adviser on Ukraine policy in the first Trump administration, told me, “If Trump wanted to hurt Europe, he has lots of ways to do that already. This is just a marginal increase in that risk, and it adds some political pressure on him to get tougher on Russia.” Whether such pressure would get Trump to change, however, is another question.Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of the bill is simply that the Ukrainians want it. The legislation would no doubt serve as a symbol of Congress’s support. But Ukraine needs material, not symbolic, support—particularly weapons such as air-defense interceptors and greater economic assistance to survive the winter. Trump has the power to provide both, but he has chosen not to. Turning the Graham bill into law isn’t likely to give him a sudden change of heart.Yesterday, Democrats tried but failed to introduce amendments that would exempt the EU from being treated as a country, tighten the national-security waiver, and scrap the broad allowances for tariffs on countries other than Russia. Without those measures, the bill amounts to little more than a permission slip for Trump to restart his trade war with America’s allies and partners. That’s not a price worth paying just to give Ukraine a symbolic victory.