The administration of United States President Donald Trump has announced new economic sanctions on Tehran, describing the measures as an “economic D-Day” as the US war on Iran approaches the six-month mark.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the sanctions on Monday, alongside a naval blockade of Iranian ports.
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Bessent said the sanctions target key sources of Iran’s revenue, including its oil and gas industry, and called on countries around the world to cut economic ties with Tehran.
The Treasury Department said the sanctions will target Iran’s aviation, digital assets, gold, technology and shipping sectors, as well as impose sanctions on 60 specific individuals and vessels.
“The main point is that Iran seems to have much less room than it did in previous years to simply work around sanctions,” Peiman Salehi, a Tehran-based geopolitical analyst, told Al Jazeera.
Bessent also said on Monday that the new sanctions expose Tehran’s trade partners to secondary penalties. According to a Treasury Department release on Monday, the targets include ships based in or associated with countries including Singapore, China, and Hong Kong.
“Today’s sanctions are mostly incremental, but are part of trying to intimidate remaining trading partners into cutting ties [with Iran],” said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank.
“There’s a lot of signalling and bluster aimed at getting other countries to crack down on entities involved in grey-zone trade, but new measures are mostly incremental for now,” she said. Grey-zone trade refers to both illegal, underground trade and trade that is unsanctioned but difficult.
The Treasury Department said Iran has used cryptocurrency to circumvent its longtime sanctions and facilitate transactions involving the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and members of the Iranian regime. The department also said Iran has used gold to help prop up the value of its currency amid economic instability.
The new shipping sanctions target Iran’s state-linked shipping fleet, which the Treasury Department alleges is being used to transport oil as well as “sensitive weapons components”.
The technology sanctions are intended to restrict Iran’s acquisition of materials that could be used in its weapons programmes. The aviation sanctions target Iranian airlines that the Treasury Department alleges are being used to transport weapons and military personnel, as well as financial resources to Iran’s proxies.
Washington also indefinitely suspended several broad exceptions to its ongoing sanctions on Iran, including those covering academic exchanges, personal money transfers and certain sporting activities. Organisations currently engaged in those activities have until September 8 to wind down their operations.
Ziemba says these measures “will have more effect on Iranians, not just the regime”.
Washington’s sanctions on Iran have been in place since 1979, after students took hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran, and increased over the next 45 years. Sanctions were briefly paused, however, after the administration of President Barack Obama and world powers signed a nuclear deal with Tehran in 2015. But the Trump administration withdrew from the deal during its first term, in 2018, bringing back old penalties while adding new ones.
Washington imposed new sanctions during Trump’s second term, many of them before the US and Israel first struck the country on February 28.
In February 2025, the Treasury Department sanctioned 30 individuals and vessels involved in the “brokering [of] the sale and transportation of Iranian petroleum-related products”, according to a department release. The targets were based in several countries, including India and China.
In December 2025, Washington sanctioned 29 vessels it accused of being part of a so-called shadow fleet used to transport Iranian petroleum. It also sanctioned Egyptian businessman Hatem Elsaid Farid Ibrahim Sakr over his businesses’ alleged ties to seven of those 29 vessels. The measures continued the 1979 sanctions campaign against Iran’s oil industry.
The Treasury Department stepped up the sanctions again in April 2026, targeting another two dozen individuals, companies and vessels operating within the network of Iranian oil shipping magnate Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani, the son of now-deceased senior Iranian security official Ali Shamkhani.
Later that same month, the Treasury also targeted what it described as “regime-linked cryptocurrency” and said it had seized nearly half a billion dollars from so-called “shadow banking networks”.
Pressure on the Iranian oil market, both through existing sanctions as well as the current war, has tightened the rest of the globe’s oil supply and affected countries that buy Iranian oil.
China, for example, is the primary destination for Iranian oil, buying roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports. Beijing bought 1.4 million barrels per day in 2025.
At the same time, Asian markets, China included, also heavily rely on oil travelling through the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, where roughly one-fifth of the globe’s oil transited before Iran choked off the route.
This has put pressure on the global oil supply, meaning the benchmark for crude oil has ticked up, translating to higher prices on fuel and food.
For US consumers, that has been most apparent at the petrol pump. The average price for a gallon of petrol (3.78 litres) is $4.09, up from $2.98 on February 28 when the US and Israel first struck Iran, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), which tracks daily petrol prices.
Experts warn that if Iran retaliation accelerates, it could hit Americans hard.
“If sanctions provoke Iranian retaliation against Gulf shipping, materially reduce oil exports, or cause insurers and shipping companies to avoid the region, then Americans could feel it very quickly through gasoline, diesel, airfares, freight costs and ultimately inflation,” John Deal, managing director of capital markets at Post Oak Group investment bank, told Al Jazeera.
The economy and Iran are emerging as key issues heading into the US midterm elections, with voters expressing dissatisfaction on both fronts. That could put pressure on Republicans in competitive races, including in traditionally red states such as Texas.
A late-July Reuters/Ipsos poll suggested that only about a third of Americans supported the war, while just 28 percent of respondents in a CNN poll approved of Trump’s handling of Iran.
On the economy, an AP/NORC poll suggested that 32 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s performance. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, meanwhile, suggested that Democrats were narrowly ahead of Republicans on which party voters trust more to handle the economy—the first Democratic advantage in roughly a decade.
The latest sanctions announcement is weighing on Wall Street as well as the oil and gold markets.
On the heels of the announcement, the price of gold, largely considered a safe investment during times of economic uncertainty, jumped by 0.8 percent to $4,639.49 per ounce (28 grams) in midday trading, ticking up to its highest level since mid-May.
As for oil, prices pulled back on Monday after two weeks of gains. The price of the global benchmark Brent crude tumbled by more than 2 percent on Monday to $85.22 a barrel.
On Wall Street, the major indices are mixed amid the latest sanctions news as well as Trump’s announcement of new tariffs on Canada. The Nasdaq is down 0.5 percent, and the S&P 500 is down 0.2 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, however, is trending in positive territory, 0.2 percent higher than the market open on Monday.
The oil sector is taking a hit. Chevron is down 0.8 percent, ExxonMobil tumbled 0.9 percent, BP fell more than 2 percent, and Shell is down 0.2 percent.
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Surging demand for electricity from AI data centers, combined with equipment backlogs, permitting delays, tariffs, and multiyear waits to connect to the grid, are pushing up construction costs for every type of power plant, The Wall Street Journal said in
Ukraine appeared to have begun large-scale strikes against Russian shadow tankers attempting to supply occupied Crimea with fuel, as an energy crisis on the peninsula worsens.
At the same time, Ukraine has continued to cause fuel shortages in Russia itself, striking refineries deep inside the country, including, for the first time, the Omsk refinery in Siberia, Russia’s largest, 2,500km (1,553 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
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Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert Brovdi said his forces had struck 19 Russian tankers, a cargo ship and a ferry between July 6 and 8, including nine tankers on the night of July 7.
Ukrainian Navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk told newspaper Suspilne that Russia had rerouted fuel supplies to Crimea after Ukraine deprived it of overland routes.
“They had few options left. It’s either a land corridor or a sea connection,” Pletenchuk said. “As far as we know, they don’t use the Kerch Bridge for such transportation in the necessary volumes,” he said, referring to the bridge connecting Crimea to Russia.
Ukraine detonated a truck on the bridge in 2022, setting alight a fuel train that had been travelling alongside it and demonstrating the risk of using the bridge for large volumes of fuel.
Ukraine pivoted to attacking Crimea in the past few weeks after disabling the oil offloading terminal at Novorossiysk, on the opposite Russian coast, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Financial Times.
“We were slowing down the militarisation of our peninsula occupied by Russia,” he said. “We cut off the logistics and took control of the fuel and energy complex. We showed what it means to operationally control the sky at a specific point, at a specific time.”
The Ukrainian Presidential Office in Crimea said these strikes had caused “a management crisis on the peninsula”.
In Sevastopol, fuel has stopped being sold to civilians, and more than a dozen Crimean regions are suffering from electricity blackouts.
Ukraine continued strikes on the peninsula in the past week, destroying seven Sukhoi aircraft and two sheds containing Shahed aerial drones at the Saky airfield on July 3, the Kerch oil transhipment terminal on July 6 and three hangars at the Guardsman airfield on the same day.
Ukraine also kept up pressure on Russia, launching what mayor Sergei Sobyanin said was its largest strike on Moscow in two years.
More than 400 Ukrainian drones were downed while heading for the city on July 7, which was the first day of a NATO summit in Ankara.
“When our drones weren’t flying to Moscow and St Petersburg, [Russian president Vladimir] Putin didn’t think much about it. He understood that the war was far from the Kremlin,” Zelenskyy told the Financial Times.
“When not a hundred drones, but a thousand would start flying to Moscow, and when he would feel and see this, he would be advised to move somewhere beyond the Urals. This would be a moment like a new page on the path to ending the war.
Ukraine struck several energy targets during the week, furthering its twin goals of starving Russia of petrol and export revenue from oil.
The SBU said it struck and set alight the St Petersburg oil terminal on July 4, which it described as “one of the largest oil product transshipment terminals in the Baltic region”. Zelenskyy posted video purporting to show the terminal in flames.
On Sunday, Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces had struck the Slavneft Yanos refinery in Yaroslavl, 700km (430 miles) from Ukraine, the Ust-Luga refinery on the Baltic Sea, and the Omsk Refinery. Russia’s defence ministry said it had shot down 613 of 625 Ukrainian drones detected in the airspace overnight.
Ukraine’s Air Force said that Russia had lost 42.7 percent of its refining capacity over the past year, and suffered $13.5bn of damage to oil infrastructure.
These strikes have cumulatively caused petrol and diesel shortages in the Russian market, with consumers in urban hubs lining up to fill their cars.
During the week, Ukraine also struck the Kremny EL Group in Bryansk, which it said manufactured microchips, semiconductors and other electronics for the armed forces.
Zelenskyy said the air war would prove “decisive”, because in 2026 Ukraine’s ground troops had effectively stopped Russia’s slow advance of the last two years.
Independent assessments have suggested that Russia gained a total of 97 square kilometres (37 square miles) in the first six months of the year.
“The war is ongoing, but the front line is no longer moving. When the front line is almost not moving, and the enemy cannot invade by sea, the sky remains,” Zelenskyy said.
US President Donald Trump handed Zelenskyy a major victory at the NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday, saying he would license Ukraine to produce interceptor missiles for anti-air systems.
Zelenskyy has been campaigning for a licence to build Patriot interceptors, which he believes Ukraine can do faster and more cheaply than the US or European manufacturers.
But Zelenskyy said Patriots ultimately are not the answer for European air defence, announcing his intention to develop FREYA, a Ukrainian-designed anti-ballistic system like Patriot “but with a higher production capacity and at a lower cost”.
Zelenskyy’s commander-in-chief warned against dismissing Russia too easily.
“It’s still too early to talk about a qualitative turning point in the war,” Oleksandr Syrskii wrote on his Telegram messaging channel. “The aggressor is showing signs of exhaustion, but retains significant offensive potential,” adding that Russia “plans to extend the front line, which already exceeds 1,250 kilometres (777 miles).”
Putin relaunched the narrative that Moscow will overrun the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, four-fifths of which Russia already controls.
In a televised meeting with his top generals on July 3, Putin was told that Russia has seized 3,000sq km (1,160sq miles) of Ukraine so far this year, and “liberated” 133 settlements. His commander in chief, Valery Gerasimov, also claimed to control the cities of Kupiansk in Kharkiv, and Kostiantynivka in Donetsk.
The Institute for the Study of War, which uses geolocated footage to assess advances, estimated that Russian forces have a presence in 2.4 percent of Kupiansk and 37 percent of Kostiantynivka – and most of that in the form of infiltrations, not firm control.
The Ukrainian military has estimated the number of Russian servicemen in Kostiantynivka at between 100 and 250.
Putin was told that Russian forces seized 636sq km (245sq miles) of Ukraine in June alone. The ISW estimates the real number at 30sq km (11sq miles).
Kostiantynivka is politically important to the Kremlin because it is the first of four heavily fortified cities, including Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, which Moscow must seize to take control of Donetsk – which Putin considers a puppet state and has repeatedly prioritised.
“The capture of Kostyantynovka by the troops of the South battlegroup opens a direct road for further advance to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, other fortified areas in the Donbas, and is, of course, the key to liberating the entire territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” Putin said.
The Donbas includes Donetsk and Luhansk, which Putin mistakenly claimed to have taken in its entirety.
“I understand that we should no longer speak of the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk-Kostyantynovka line, but simply of the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk line,” Putin told the gathering.