The Trump administration has prepared additional sanctions targeting Russia’s economy if President Vladimir Putin continues to stall on ending the war in Ukraine. The planning follows Wednesday’s sanctions on oil giants Lukoil and Rosneft, which helped push global oil prices higher, and comes as Washington urges European allies to intensify pressure on Moscow before escalating further.
President Donald Trump’s administration imposed sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, Lukoil and Rosneft, on Wednesday—its first Russia sanctions since Trump returned to office in January. Treasury’s announcement, accompanied by Secretary Scott Bessent’s call for allies to join the effort, targeted key revenue sources for the Kremlin amid halting diplomacy over Ukraine. Oil prices rose by more than $2 per barrel after the move, and major buyers in China and India began seeking alternatives, Reuters reported. The decision followed a White House meeting with Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to a senior administration official.
The measures capped a turbulent week in U.S. Ukraine policy. Trump spoke with Putin and announced plans for a meeting in Budapest, catching Kyiv off guard, before meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Washington. Reuters reported that U.S. officials pressed Zelenskiy to concede territory in the Donbas as part of a land swap; Zelenskiy resisted, and Trump left the meeting favoring a freeze along current front lines. Russia then sent a diplomatic note reiterating earlier peace terms. Days later, Trump said he canceled the Budapest meeting because “it just didn’t feel right to me,” while Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev told CNN the summit was merely postponed and claimed Russia, the United States and Ukraine were “close to a diplomatic solution.”
According to U.S. officials cited by Reuters, the administration has prepared additional steps focused on Russia’s banking sector and the infrastructure that moves oil to market. Ukrainian officials recently pitched Washington on cutting all Russian banks off from the dollar-based system; it remains unclear how seriously those proposals are being weighed. U.S. officials have also told European counterparts they support using frozen Russian assets to buy weapons for Kyiv and have discussed how to leverage Russian assets held in the United States.
Inside the administration, some officials want Europe to move first with new measures—whether sanctions or tariffs—before Washington escalates again, a senior U.S. official told Reuters. In unveiling the U.S. sanctions, Bessent urged allies to align with Washington’s steps, and U.S. officials broadly have pressed EU and NATO countries to take more decisive actions. A senior EU official, noting Lukoil’s extensive footprint, said fully blocking the company would be harder for Europe than for the U.S. because Lukoil owns refineries in Bulgaria and Romania and has a large retail network across the continent: “I think we need to find a way to disengage… before we can fully sanction,” the official said.
Kyiv welcomed the action. “Dismantling Russia’s war machine is the most humane way to bring this war to an end,” Halyna Yusypiuk, spokesperson for Ukraine’s Embassy in Washington, wrote in an email. On Capitol Hill, senators are reviving a bipartisan Russia sanctions package; people familiar with internal deliberations told Reuters that Trump is open to endorsing it, though action is unlikely this month. Separately, Congress is weighing the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025, a broad framework that would mandate sweeping penalties if Moscow refuses to negotiate in good faith.
Reuters also reported that, behind the scenes, the U.S. approval process for providing targeting data for Ukraine’s long-range strikes inside Russia has shifted from the Pentagon to U.S. European Command in Germany—seen by some U.S. and European officials as more hawkish on Moscow. Even so, Trump has said he is not ready to provide Ukraine with U.S. Tomahawk missiles.
Trump has cast himself as a peacemaker but has acknowledged the war—now in its fourth year—has been harder to end than anticipated. After a fruitless August session with Putin in Alaska, he said he would not meet again unless a real peace deal looked likely. For now, the administration appears poised to watch how Moscow reacts to this week’s oil sanctions before deciding whether to tighten the screws further.