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 said Wednesday.
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,” Bessent told reporters at the White House.
Bessent later told Fox Business: “This will be one of the largest sanctions that we have done against the Russian Federation.”
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 Putin by telephone last Thursday.
“President Putin has not come to the table in an honest and forthright manner, as we’d hoped,” Bessent told Fox Business.
Bessent said that when the two leaders met in Alaska in August, “President Trump walked away when he realized that things were not moving forward.”
“There have been behind-the-scenes talks, but I believe that the president is disappointed at where we are in these talks,” Bessent added.
The treasury chief said he would not give any details of what the sanctions would target until they were formally announced. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The European Union said Wednesday it was also imposing new sanctions on Russia.
They include a ban on importing liquefied natural gas from Russia by 2027, the blacklisting of oil tankers used by Moscow and travel curbs on Russian diplomats.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has repeatedly dangled the threat of sanctions against Russia without pulling the trigger as he seeks an elusive end to Russia’s three-and-a-half-year war.
Trump had held out hope of a ceasefire deal last week after speaking to Putin, saying that the two leaders had agreed to meet in Budapest within two weeks.
Repeating a pattern of pivoting between Moscow and Kyiv, the US president at the same time stepped up the pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump pushed Zelensky to give up territory, a Kyiv official told AFP, and turned down his plea for long-range Tomahawk missiles to strike deep into Russia.
But Trump shifted once again on Tuesday, saying that he did not want to have a “wasted meeting,” ending the immediate prospect of a Putin summit.
