President Trump has personally canceled a planned summit with Vladimir Putin, a clear sign of a breakdown in negotiations between Washington and Moscow. Speaking to reporters, Trump said flatly, “It didn’t feel right to me.”
“It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get so I cancelled it,” Trump explained in the Oval Office, alongside the NATO secretary general. While he left the door open to a future meeting, the cancellation marks a significant diplomatic freeze.
The scrapped summit was followed by a major economic escalation. The Trump administration announced it was sanctioning Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two largest oil companies, to cut off funding for the war in Ukraine.
This one-two punch of diplomatic and economic pressure suggests the administration’s frustration with Putin’s “maximalist demands” has boiled over. The policy has now shifted from encouraging a settlement to actively punishing Moscow.
The move was praised by European allies, who have been urging the US to take a harder line. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the sanctions, combined with the EU’s own forthcoming measures, represented “collective pressure on the aggressor.”