THE NEW COLD WAR IS PRICE-CAPPED

Sanctions redraw the battlefield: barrels, banks and bandwidth replace tanks, as Washington squeezes Rosneft-Lukoil, Moscow pivots East, and India balances discounts with deterrence-era diplomacy today.

- TDG NETWORK

Lukoil oil refinery in Volgograd, Russia.

In late October 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed sweeping new sanctions on Russia's two biggest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.

Moscow's leaders immediately denounced the move as “unfriendly” and vowed to shrug off its effects. The measures prompted Chinese state oil firms to halt Russian crude purchases and pushed India - by far Russia's largest buyer of seaborne oil - to announce sharp cuts in imports. Putin played down the impact on Russia's economy, warning only that Western consumers might soon feel pain from higher prices. This new front in the U.S.-Russia struggle - an economic and energy “war” waged with sanctions and price caps - underscores how today's conflict still bears the imprint of Cold War-era rivalry.

The underlying contest goes back to 1945. After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union went from uneasy allies to arch-adversaries. As Britannica notes, the Cold War (roughly 1947-1991) was “an ongoing political rivalry” in which the two superpowers each amassed nuclear arsenals capable of mutual annihilation. Washington backed its new allies in Western Europe and Asia (through NATO and doctrines of containment), while Moscow set up a communist bloc in Eastern Europe. The standoff played out mostly via proxy wars, espionage and propaganda rather than direct battle; it only wound down when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But the decades of confrontation left deep legacies - from military alliances and missile defences to mutual distrust and ideological posturing - that continue to shape policies today.