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.”
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