‘Purely counterproductive’: Russia fumes over Trump sanctions on its oil companies

Russia reacted with outrage on Thursday after the United States sanctioned its two largest oil companies, the first economic penalties slapped on Moscow by President Donald Trump in his second term. The new sanctions earned the wrath of Russian officials and the country’s largely state-controlled media. If anyone “still harboured illusions—here you go,” said the hawkish ex-President Dmitry Medvedev, who serves as the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council. “The USA is our adversary, and their loquacious ‘peacemaker’,— meaning Trump — “has now fully taken up the path of war with Russia,” Medvedev wrote in a social media post.

“We view this step as purely counterproductive,” added Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in a news briefing Thursday. “If the current US administration decides to follow the example of its predecessors, the outcome will be exactly the same: a failure, both politically at home and harmful to global economic stability,” she said.

The measures “will not cause any particular difficulties,” she said. “Our country has developed a strong immunity to Western restrictions and will continue to steadily strengthen its economic and energy potential.”

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Experts said it remains to be seen how much damage the new sanctions cause to the Russian economy as Trump aims to pressure Moscow to halt its assault on Ukraine.

After cancelling his planned summit with Putin in Budapest, citing a lack of progress in negotiations, Trump took the major step by effectively blacklisting Rosneft and Lukoil. The sanctions’ announcement was welcomed by Kyiv and its European allies, which added their own new raft of sanctions on Russia, which has so far managed to withstand Western sanctions.

Trump has often expressed frustration with Putin, accusing him of making positive diplomatic noises and then bombing Ukrainian civilians again, but had till now not taken direct action.

This week, he said that meeting the Russian leader would be a “waste of time,” after Russia rejected the American demand that a ceasefire should come before talks.

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“We cancelled the meeting with President Putin. It just didn’t feel right to me,” Trump said at a White House gathering of reporters. “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.” The sanctions drew praise from Ukraine and its supporters.

“We waited for this. God bless, it will work. And this is very important,” Zelensky said in Brussels.

The Biden administration, along with the European Union and others, had tried to squeeze Russia’s banking and energy sectors, attempting to isolate it from the global market, which caused Russia some pain as its oil and gas revenues declined.

Moscow responded by increasing sales to China and India and using its so-called “shadow fleet” of vessels to carry exports off-book.

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