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After refusing to pressure Russia for nine months, U.S. President Donald Trump has finally unsheathed a sanctions weapon against the country’s all-important energy sector in a bid to starve Moscow’s war machine and bring it back to the negotiating table.

The U.S. sanctions, the first new ones of Trump’s second term, blacklisted Russia’s two largest oil companies—Rosneft and Lukoil—and most of their subsidiaries, and they have already spooked both of Russia’s main customers. Refiners in India and China said they would begin cutting oil trade with Russia in the wake of the U.S. sanctions. Coupled with fresh rounds of sanctions from the European Union (approved Wednesday) and the United Kingdom (announced earlier this month), the Western chokehold on Russia’s golden goose is finally taking devastating shape.

After refusing to pressure Russia for nine months, U.S. President Donald Trump has finally unsheathed a sanctions weapon against the country’s all-important energy sector in a bid to starve Moscow’s war machine and bring it back to the negotiating table.

The U.S. sanctions, the first new ones of Trump’s second term, blacklisted Russia’s two largest oil companies—Rosneft and Lukoil—and most of their subsidiaries, and they have already spooked both of Russia’s main customers. Refiners in India and China said they would begin cutting oil trade with Russia in the wake of the U.S. sanctions. Coupled with fresh rounds of sanctions from the European Union (approved Wednesday) and the United Kingdom (announced earlier this month), the Western chokehold on Russia’s golden goose is finally taking devastating shape.

And while the Trump administration has given customers of Russian oil a month before the sanctions take effect, oil markets clearly believe that the hammer has dropped. Benchmark crude oil prices jumped 5 percent on Thursday, back to the mid-$60s a barrel, as the market expects at least some of the Russian barrels that formerly made their way to India and China will now be left unsold.

The question now is whether the concerted economic pressure—and increasing kinetic pressure from Ukraine on Russian energy and industrial assets—will be enough to coax Moscow back to the negotiating table that it seemingly just walked away from, or whether the Kremlin will try to brazen it out. Influential voices in Moscow, who believed that they had at least a nonhostile interlocutor in Trump, if not a friendly hand, are struggling to adjust to what seems to be, for now, a new........

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