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Putin Defies Trump’s Efforts to
End Ukraine War
Tough, new sanctions MAY NOT BE ENOUGH to bring Moscow to the table, writes Judith Miller.
I
t has been a tumultuous few months for relations between the United States and Russia. Last October, President Don-
ald J. Trump, clearly frustrated by his inability to end Russia’s
aggression against Ukraine, a war he had vowed as a presidential candidate on more than 50 occasions to end with- in 24 hours, did something that even his predecessor had declined to do. Trump announced that he was sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies — Rosneft and Lukoil, which together account for oil exports of over 3 million barrels of oil per day, or roughly half of Russia’s oil. Combined with the sanctions that
former President Joe Biden imposed on Russia’s Gazpromneft and Surgut- neftegaz, the U.S. has now blacklisted Russia’s four largest crude oil produc- ers. Together, they account for be- tween 30% and 50% of Moscow’s total budget revenues. The new sanctions’ goal, said Trea-
sury Secretary Scott Bessent, is to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table to end his aggres-
sion against neighboring Ukraine by targeting entities that are the major funders of what he called the Krem- lin’s “war machine.” The sanctions — the first on Rus-
sia since Trump’s return to the White House — were welcomed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has had a testy relationship with Trump. “We waited for this. God bless, it
will work,” he said in Brussels, where the European Union joined the U.S. in announcing another round of expand- ed sanctions against Moscow. Foreign policy analysts who have
urged Trump to be tougher on Putin also praised his move. “President Trump’s action, though
long overdue, will go a long way to- ward convincing Putin that he cannot continue to wage his war of aggression against Ukraine without bankrupting his own country,” said John E. Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, in an interview. While there is little doubt that the
new sanctions against Russia’s main energy companies, nearly three dozen
of their subsidiaries, and those who do business with them are likely to inflict severe economic pressure on the Kremlin, analysts disagree about whether they will be sufficient, on their own, to force Putin to end his brutal war against a country he consid- ers part of his own. Many doubt that economic pres-
sure alone will suffice, as Putin himself has asserted. Speaking to reporters in Moscow af-
ter the European Union announced its own sanctions, Putin called Trump’s ac- tion an “unfriendly act” that could back- fire by raising the global price of oil. While he acknowledged that the sanctions he called “serious” would negatively affect Russia’s economy, he claimed that their impact would not be “significant” and would not affect his policies. In an editorial soon after the an- nouncement, analysts from the New York-based Council on Foreign Re- lations noted that while economic pressure had “inflicted some pain” on Russia’s economy, sanctions had not caused “widespread economic col-
Speaking to reporters in Moscow aſter the European Union announced its own sanctions, Putin called Trump’s action an “unfriendly act” that could backfire by raising the global price of oil.
DECEMBER 2025 | NEWSMAX 77
PUTIN/CONTRIBUTOR/GETTY IMAGES / FLAG/MASHABUBA
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