US Sanctions Russian Oil Majors Over Ukraine, Prompting India Jitters And Moscow Fury

• U.S. President Donald Trump hit Russia's two biggest oil companies with sanctions in a sharp policy shift on Moscow's war in Ukraine, prompting global oil prices to rise by 5% on Thursday, October 23, 2025, and India to consider cutting Russian imports.
• The sanctions target oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil, which, between them, account for more than 5% of global oil output, and mark a dramatic U-turn by Trump, who said only last week that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin would soon hold a summit in Budapest to try to end the war in Ukraine.
• But Trump, in his latest about-face on the conflict, said on Wednesday that the planned summit was off because it would not achieve the outcome he wanted and complained that his many "good conversations" with Putin did not "go anywhere". "We cancelled the meeting with President Putin — it just didn't feel right to me," Trump told reporters at the White House. “It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get. So I cancelled it, but we’ll do it in the future.”
• Russia called the new U.S. sanctions unproductive and signalled that its conditions for ending its war in Ukraine - terms which Kyiv and many European countries regard as tantamount to surrender - remain unchanged. The conflict raged on as European Union leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met in Brussels on Thursday to discuss funding for Ukraine, with momentum building to use frozen Russian assets to provide a 140 billion euro ($163 billion) loan to Kyiv.
• Moscow said it would deliver a "painful response" if the assets were seized. Russian drones attacked the Ukrainian capital for a second night, wounding nine people, officials said, while Russian air defence forces were reported to have shot down 139 Ukrainian drones.
• Unveiling the oil sanctions, Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, made clear Washington was targeting Russia's ability to fund what has become Europe's biggest land war since World War Two and was ready to take further action.
• "Given President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine," Bessent said in a statement. "We encourage our allies to join us in and adhere to these sanctions."
• Russian oil and gas revenue, currently down by 21% year-on-year, accounts for around one quarter of its budget and is the most important source of cash for Moscow's war in Ukraine, now in its fourth year. However, Moscow's main revenue source comes from taxing output, not exports, which is likely to soften the immediate impact of the sanctions on state finances. Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, shrugged off the likely impact, saying Moscow had developed what she called a "strong immunity" to such restrictions.

(Source: Reuters)