The Kremlin seems to have convinced itself that the US President , Donald Trump , did not have the strength to put real pressure on Moscow to end the bloody war in Ukraine .
After all, a phone call from the Kremlin to the White House last week was what convinced the American president to back down from his threats to provide Kiev with long-range Tomahawk missiles. The missiles could have changed the balance of power on the battlefield.
But the US Treasury Department's new sanctions on the two largest Russian oil companies may now force Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin to reconsider his stance towards his American counterpart, if not his entire war in Ukraine.
Already, Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and current deputy chairman of the Security Council, has launched an attack on Trump, calling him a talkative peacemaker who is now walking the path of war against Russia. This is his war now, not old Biden's, he added in a post on social media.
It's not that these sanctions are particularly harsh in themselves, CNN notes. Indeed, oil is a vital source of revenue for the Russian economy, which finances the Kremlin's costly war in Ukraine. And indeed, Rosneft and Lukoil, along with dozens of their sanctioned subsidiaries, are the country's main oil producers.
However, Russia has proven very capable of circumventing such restrictions in the past and, according to Russian officials, will attempt to do so again.
This decision will not create any particular problems for us. Our country has developed strong immunity to Western sanctions and will confidently continue to develop economically and energetically, said Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The biggest problem for the Kremlin, however, is that its tried-and-true strategy for influencing the White House—promising peace talks for Ukraine and economic opportunities while relentlessly pursuing the war—appears to have reached its limits.
The American president, who had suspected for months that the Kremlin was not being honest with him on the Ukrainian issue, decided to act.
In addition to the first substantive sanctions against Russia since the invasion, Trump also canceled a planned meeting with Putin in Budapest. Just hours earlier, Russian officials had assured that there were no obstacles and that preparations for the meeting were proceeding normally, dismissing any suggestion of postponement.
In retrospect, this optimism looks like wishful thinking on the part of the Kremlin. Putin continues to seek to show, both domestically and internationally, that – despite sanctions and an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes – he is not isolated.
When Trump hosted him in Alaska in August, the Kremlin strongman had scored an easy diplomatic victory, offering little in return to the White House. But this time, there will be no new meeting in Budapest, unless there is real progress on the Ukrainian front.
The US Treasury Department even hinted that even tougher sanctions may follow, in order to further pressure Moscow to sit at the negotiating table.
Perhaps this is the beginning of what critics of Trump's Russia policy have long called for: a more decisive strategy that leverages American influence to force Putin to back down from his maximalist war aims.
These include the Kremlin's demands that Kiev hand over strategic areas in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, which is a red line for the Ukrainian government and its European allies.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the US moves"very important" and "decisive" in bringing Russia to the negotiating table, while European officials welcomed Washington's seemingly tougher stance.
However, in Kiev, Brussels and Moscow , few doubt that in Trump's unpredictable world, a new phone call from Putin could change the tables again at any moment.
