The Trump administration is poised to roll out what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called a “substantial pickup” in sanctions against the Russian Federation as President Donald Trump’s push for talks to bring about an end to Moscow’s four-year-old war against Ukraine appears to be at a standstill.
Bessent told reporters at the White House that the new sanctions would be announced either after the close of U.S. markets on Wednesday afternoon or on Thursday morning.
The Treasury secretary’s announcement comes just one day after the White House walked back Trump’s prior claim that he would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest in the coming weeks.
A White House official told The Independent there were “no plans” for a sit-down between Trump and Putin “in the immediate future” because Secretary of State Marco Rubio had conducted a “productive call” with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which made an in-person meeting between the two top diplomats “not necessary.”
Trump later told reporters at a Diwali celebration late Tuesday that he did not want to have “a wasted meeting” or “a waste of time” but did not rule out a meeting in the future.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said, adding later that there could be updates on a possible sit-down in “the next two days.”
Just days earlier, Trump had touted a similarly “productive” call with Putin ahead of last Friday’s White House meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky after which he wrote on Truth Social that he and Putin would meet in the Hungarian capital in hopes of finding a way to “bring this ‘inglorious’ war … to an end.”
But according to administration officials, it was decided to scrap the planned meeting between Rubio and Lavrov — and the summit between Trump and Putin which was to follow — after it became clear that Russia would not agree to give up its insistence that any ceasefire agreement with Kyiv give Moscow the entirety of Ukraine’s Donbas province even though that area is still very much contested between the two countries’ armies.
Bessent’s tease of new sanctions also follows moves by the Senate to advance a series of anti-Russia measures, with the upper chamber’s foreign relations committee bills to disrupt Russia’s ties to China and speed up efforts to use frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s defense.
The panel passed the measures on a bipartisan basis, with Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen calling the development “a clear sign that Congress is ready and willing to act” by holding Putin accountable by legislation if Trump refuses to act.
“I’m glad President Trump cancelled his proposed summit with Putin—it never should have been scheduled in the first place without a ceasefire in place. But words aren’t enough. Now is the time to act,” she said.
