US President Donald Trump still holds “many more” cards beyond sanctions to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin into peace talks aimed at bringing the war in Ukraine to a close, the US ambassador to NATO said on Tuesday.
Matthew Whitaker, Washington’s permanent representative to NATO, hinted that the White House is prepared to escalate punitive measures against Moscow if it continues to defy calls for negotiations.
Trump last week announced sweeping sanctions on state-run oil producers Rosneft and Lukoil – Russia’s two largest oil producers – in what he described as a renewed effort to choke off the Kremlin’s wartime revenues and force a diplomatic breakthrough.
The move marked the first major sanctions package imposed on Russia since Trump’s return to office, and it has reportedly already begun to reverberate through global markets, with major Indian refiners set to see Russian oil deliveries drop to near zero and Lukoil set to sell its international assets.
Lukoil and Rosneft have lost a combined $11.5 billion in market values since the sanctions were imposed, despite Moscow’s claims that the Russian economy is immune to such penalties.
“We have implemented those sanctions. We plan to enforce them,” Whitaker said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Crude prices spiked after the sanctions announcement, though overall market reaction has remained cautious amid uncertainty of how strictly the administration will police the new measures.
“This will maybe be the thing to unlock President Putin coming to the table and ending this war, and at least entering into a ceasefire so we can negotiate a final resolution,” Whitaker speculated.
The US and European allies have been pushing for a ceasefire and halting the war along the current battlelines, but Kremlin officials have snubbed the calls, saying that such a proposal would “ignore the root causes” of the conflict.
Whitaker suggested that if sanctions fail to shift Russia’s calculus, the administration is prepared to tighten the screws further through fresh penalties.
“President Trump holds all the cards, this is just one card that he’s playing,” the envoy said. “There are many more.”
On Monday, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said that Ukraine is in a “better place” after the sanctions.