President Trump announced on Wednesday that he was imposing significant new sanctions on Russia for the first time in his second term, underscoring a new degree of frustration with President Vladimir V. Putin after a plan for the two leaders to meet in Budapest fell apart.
The new sanctions were announced just as the president sat down in the Oval Office with NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, who had flown to Washington on behalf of a coalition of European leaders desperate to keep Mr. Trump on the side of Ukraine.
The sanctions targeted Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. “Now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate cease-fire,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an announcement that described the oil companies as twin engines of “the Kremlin’s war machine.”
Mr. Trump’s irritation with the Russian leader was evident on Wednesday. “Every time I speak with Vladimir, I have good conversations, and then they don’t go anywhere,” he said. “They just don’t go anywhere.”
He explained his decision to scupper the Budapest summit that had been planned for some time in the coming weeks. “It just it didn’t feel right to me,” Mr. Trump said. “It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get. So I canceled it.”
As for the sanctions?
“I just felt it was the right time,” he said.
The sanctions are among the most significant measures that the United States has taken against the Russian energy sector since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The Biden administration avoided levying sanctions against the companies to allow for legal purchases of Russian oil by American allies; targeting the companies could make a meaningful dent in Russia’s oil revenues.
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