President Trump has cancelled a planned summit with Vladimir Putin, signaling a complete breakdown in negotiations between Washington and Moscow to end the war in Ukraine.
“We cancelled the meeting with President Putin,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “It didn’t feel right to me. It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get.”
The cancellation was accompanied by the Trump administration’s first major sanctions against Russia. The Treasury Department targeted Rosneft and Lukoil, the country’s two largest oil companies, to cut revenue for the “Kremlin’s war machine.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blamed “President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war” for the new measures and called for an “immediate ceasefire.”
The US action goes further than the EU’s, which has not sanctioned the privately-owned Lukoil due to exemptions for Hungary and Slovakia. However, the EU is preparing its own 19th sanctions package, which will target Russian LNG.