Vladimir V. Putin’s tactical triumph didn’t last long.
A week ago, it looked as if the Russian president had outmaneuvered his adversaries yet again with a deftly placed call to President Trump that scuttled any expansion in American support for Ukraine.
But on Thursday, Russians awoke to new American sanctions against their oil industry. It is the most direct punitive measure that Mr. Trump has taken against Russia in his second term, after electing not to follow through on a series of earlier threats.
The sanctions, which take aim at the heart of the Russian economy, dealt one of the biggest blows so far this year to Mr. Putin’s effort to cajole Mr. Trump into forcing Ukraine to capitulate to Russia’s main demands, including the concession of territory Ukraine still holds.
But analysts who study Mr. Putin said the new sanctions were unlikely to change the Russian president’s war goals. Russian companies have long been preparing for the possibility of increased sanctions, said Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik. Mr. Putin remains willing to bear enormous losses to accomplish his aims, she said, and Mr. Trump may well change his mind again.
“They’ll shrug their shoulders and say, ‘OK, he’ll ripen in three months,’” Ms. Stanovaya said of Russia’s reaction to Mr. Trump’s sanctions. “For Putin, this war remains existential, and he is ready to endure a lot.”
Oil prices rose sharply on Wednesday in a sign of the sanctions’ potential potency, which may ultimately depend on how the penalties are enforced and how energy buyers react to them. The new measures target Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, and anyone doing business with them around the world.
The sale of oil and gas accounts for about a quarter of the Russian budget, and the sanctions come at a time when the Russian oil industry is already under stress from increasingly sophisticated long-range strikes by Ukraine. But some analysts in Russia predicted that the new penalties would have a muted impact.
They noted that Russia had become adept at evading restrictions by using a fleet of hundreds of old vessels uninsured by Western companies and by conducting transactions through buffer companies in third countries. And because Russia accounts for about nine percent of global oil sales, any restrictions against its exports would cut supply and push prices up, creating incentives for further sanction evasion.
“Lukoil will face serious problems, but these will be Lukoil’s problems, not Russia’s,” said Sergey Vakulenko, an energy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The latest turn in the volatile U.S. approach to Mr. Putin came after the Russian president appeared to succeed last week in convincing Mr. Trump that a Ukraine peace deal might be within reach. Mr. Trump declared after his call last Thursday with Mr. Putin that they would soon meet in Budapest and that he was not ready to provide Ukraine with the powerful Tomahawk cruise missiles that it was seeking.
But this week, Russia made it clear that there still was no quick cease-fire in the offing. Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said Russia remained focused on addressing the war’s “root causes” before stopping the fighting, a reference to Russia’s demand both for more Ukrainian land and for a decisive say over Ukraine’s future.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday called on Russia to agree to “an immediate cease-fire” as he announced the new sanctions. But Mr. Putin appears unwilling to stop the war at the current front lines, as Mr. Trump has demanded, with Russian troops advancing — slowly and at great cost — on the battlefield.
Still, Ukraine welcomed the sanctions on Thursday, after another round of Russian drone and missile strikes killed at least one person and injured 51 others.
“We were waiting for them — God bless, I hope they will work,” President Volodymyr Zelensky told journalists in Brussels, where he joined a European Union leaders’ summit.
“The new U.S. sanctions against Russia’s oil giants are a clear signal that prolonging the war and spreading terror come at a cost,” Mr. Zelensky said on social media. “This is a fair and absolutely deserved step,” he added.
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.
Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The Times. He writes about Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Ivan Nechepurenko covers Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the countries of the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
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