US President Donald Trump is slapping Russia with one of the biggest ever packages of US sanctions after concluding that Vladimir Putin was not being "honest and forthright" in Ukraine talks, the US treasury chief has said.
Scott Bessent announced the sanctions a day after a planned Trump-Putin summit Budapest was shelved, adding that the US leader was "disappointed" by the progress of ceasefire negotiations with Moscow.
"We are going to either announce after the close this afternoon, or first thing tomorrow morning, a substantial pickup in Russia sanctions.
"Given President Putin's refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia's two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin's war machine," Mr Bessent said in a statement announcing the sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil.
While Mr Trump said that his conversations with his Russian counterpart on ending the Ukraine war are "good" but ultimately "don't go anywhere".
"Every time I speak with Vladimir, I have good conversations, and then they don't go anywhere," Mr Trump told journalists at the White House, sitting alongside NATO chief Mark Rutte.
Mr Bessent later told Fox Business: "This will be one of the largest sanctions that we have done against the Russian Federation."
Mr Trump has held off on new sanctions for months, saying he hoped to persuade Russian president Putin to make peace despite growing frustration with the Kremlin leader.
But the 79-year-old Republican's patience apparently ran out in the space of the six days since he spoke to Mr Putin by telephone last Thursday.
"President Putin has not come to the table in an honest and forthright manner, as we'd hoped," Mr Bessent told Fox Business.
EU agrees new sanctions on Russia
It comes as the EU agreed to impose new sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine aimed at crimping Moscow's oil and gas revenues, said Denmark, which holds the EU's rotating presidency.
The European Union package - the 19th from the EU since the Kremlin's 2022 invasion - includes a ban on importing liquefied natural gas from Russia by 2027, the blacklisting of oil tankers used by Moscow and curbs on travel by Russian diplomats in Europe.
Slovakia had held up adoption of the EU package over a separate issue as it sought protections for its car industry from EU climate legislation.
Trump's front line proposal 'good compromise' - Zelensky
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he backed Mr Trump's proposal that the current front line should be the basis for negotiations with Russia, but said he doubted President Vladimir Putin would accept it.
Mr Trump "proposed 'Stay where we stay and begin conversation'," Mr Zelensky told reporters during a brief visit to Oslo.
"I think that was a good compromise, but I'm not sure that Putin will support it, and I said it to the president."
Mr Trump said he had shelved plans for a summit in Budapest with Mr Putin on the Ukraine war because he did not want a "wasted" meeting.
The reversal came just days after he announced that he would meet Mr Putin in the Hungarian capital within two weeks, following what he called a productive phone call to end Russia's war.
The US leader had pressured Mr Zelensky to give up the eastern Donbas region in exchange for peace during "tense" talks last Friday in Washington, a senior Ukrainian official said.
But yesterday, a White House official said that there were now "no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future" despite the Budapest announcement.
"I don't want to have a wasted meeting," Mr Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked why the Mr Putin encounter had been put on ice. "I don't want to have a waste of time, so I'll see what happens."
Asked by an AFP journalist what had changed his mind, Mr Trump said: "A lot of things are happening on the war front. And we'll be notifying you over the next two days as to what we're doing."
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also called off an expected meeting to arrange the Budapest summit after speaking by phone on Monday, the White House said.
Mr Zelensky's talks with Mr Trump at the White House last week were "not easy," the senior Ukrainian official said, adding that diplomatic efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war felt like they were being "dragged out" and "going in circles."
Mr Trump called last week for both Russia and Ukraine to stop the war at their current battle lines, and publicly made no references to Ukraine giving up territory.
But when asked if Mr Trump urged Mr Zelensky to pull out of land that Ukraine still controlled - one of Mr Putin's key demands - the Ukrainian official said: "Yes, that's true."
Mr Zelensky left the meeting empty-handed after Mr Trump, who spoke with Mr Putin the day before, denied his request for long-range Tomahawk missiles and pressured him into making a deal.
Ukraine considers the Donbas - a largely industrial area spanning its eastern Lugansk and Donetsk regions - an inseparable part of its territory and has rejected the idea of ceding it many times.
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The Kremlin said there was no "precise" date for any new meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Putin, who held talks in Alaska in August but failed to reach a breakthrough on Ukraine.
European leaders have rejected the idea of Ukraine giving up land - instead backing the proposal that fighting should be frozen on the current front lines.
In a joint statement published yesterday, leaders including France's Emmanuel Macron, Italy's Giorgia Meloni and Britain's Keir Starmer warned that Russia was not "serious about peace."
"We strongly support President Trump's position that the fighting should stop immediately, and that the current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations," the statement said.
NATO leader Mark Rutte was heading to Washington yesterday for a meeting with Mr Trump, the military alliance said in a statement.
EU leaders are then set to close ranks in support of Ukraine at a Brussels summit tomorrow - followed a day later by a "coalition of the willing" meeting of European leaders in London to discuss the next steps to help Ukraine.
Mr Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, describing it as a "special military operation" to demilitarise the country and prevent the expansion of NATO.
Russia now occupies around a fifth of Ukrainian territory - much of it ravaged by fighting - while tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers have been killed.
