A New Chill: Trump Cancels Putin Meeting, Hits Energy Giants

A new chill has descended on US-Russia relations as President Trump cancelled a planned summit with Vladimir Putin and his administration imposed sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.
“We cancelled the meeting with President Putin,” Trump confirmed 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.” This cancellation signals a breakdown in high-level negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.
Concurrently, the US Treasury targeted the “Kremlin’s war machine” by sanctioning the two energy giants. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blamed Putin’s “refusal to end this senseless war” for the new measures, which are the first of Trump’s new term.
The US is now more aligned with the UK, which sanctioned both firms last week. The EU, by contrast, has only sanctioned the state-owned Rosneft, leaving the private Lukoil untouched to protect energy supplies to Hungary and Slovakia.
The administration’s actions were clouded by a separate controversy. Trump took to social media to deny a story about the US lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of British Storm Shadow missiles inside Russia. “The U.S. has nothing to do with those missiles,” he insisted.