This week, the United States for the first time in Donald Trump's second term imposed significant sanctions against Russia This was a direct result of the fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, rather than Special Envoy Stephen Witkoff, is now responsible for negotiations with the Kremlin in the White House, writes Bloomberg with references to your own sources.

The publication notes that throughout 2025, Trump resisted the idea of imposing new sanctions against Russia, believing in the possibility of a diplomatic agreement with Putin to end the war in Ukraine. This belief of the US president was fueled by his longtime business friend Steve Witkoff, whom Trump brought to the White House and entrusted with negotiations with Russia.

But in August, Witkoff's incompetence led to a rift between the White House and the Kremlin. Trump had arranged the summit in Alaska because Witkoff had assured him that the Russians were willing to negotiate. As it turned out, Witkoff had messed up everything, and Putin arrived at the summit confident that the United States was ready to accept the Kremlin's plan for Ukraine's surrender.

So this time, when Trump agreed with Putin on a new summit in Budapest, the organization of the meeting was entrusted not to Witkoff, but to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, an experienced political functionary. And he needed only one conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to understand that Russia's positions had not changed since the Alaska days.

A Bloomberg source familiar with the Kremlin’s thinking said that after a phone call between Putin and Trump last week, Moscow was convinced that the US president was ready to accede to Russia’s demand to hand over the rest of Donbas in exchange for modest territorial concessions from Moscow. But the next day, after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said he wanted a ceasefire along the current front lines. Lavrov tried to explain to Rubio the unacceptability of such a position, which led to the collapse of the Budapest summit.

"Last time, it took the US a meeting in Alaska to realize that there was no flexibility on the Russian side. This time, that realization came before the meeting, which is a good step," said Liana Fix, a senior fellow at the American think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations.

Just two days after Rubio's conversation with Lavrov, the US imposed sanctions on Russia's largest oil producers, blacklisting state-owned oil giant Rosneft and Lukoil.

"Every time I talk to Vladimir [Putin], I have good conversations and then they just go nowhere," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday after announcing the sanctions.

Trump's policies: latest news

As UNIAN reported, today it became known that the Kremlin's special envoy Kirill Dmitriev suddenly arrived in the USA for official talks with representatives of the Donald Trump administration. This came just two days after the US imposed new sanctions, the significance of which Putin publicly downplayed.

We also told you that Trump is pressuring his girlfriend, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Malone , persuading her to have Rome join a new arms procurement program for Ukraine.