Global prices soar as US hits Russian oil giants with sanctions

Planned summit with Putin is off, says Trump after sharp policy shift to end war in Ukraine

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President Donald Trump hit Russia’s two biggest oil companies with sanctions in his latest sharp policy shift on Moscow’s war in Ukraine, prompting global oil prices to rise by 5 per cent on Oct 23 and India to consider cutting Russian imports.

The sanctions target oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil, which between them account for more than 5 per cent of global oil output, and mark a dramatic U-turn by Mr Trump, who said only last week that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin would hold a summit in Budapest, Hungary, soon to try to end the war in Ukraine.

But Mr Trump, in his latest about-face on the conflict, said on Oct 22 that the planned summit was off because it would not achieve the outcome he wanted and complained that his many “good conversations” with Mr Putin did not “go anywhere”.

“We cancelled the meeting with President Putin — it just didn’t feel right to me,” Mr Trump told reporters at the White House.

“It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get (to). So I cancelled it, but we'll do it in the future.”

Russia called the new US 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 — remained unchanged.

The conflict raged on as European Union leaders were preparing to meet in Brussels on Oct 23 to discuss funding for Ukraine, with momentum building to use frozen Russian assets to provide a €140 billion (S$210.9 billion) loan to Kyiv.