Washington, D.C.- Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, said on Monday that “all options are on the table” when it comes to sanctions on Russia. This is a change from the recent focus on diplomacy. The news comes two weeks after the Alaska Summit, where US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met to try to stop the crisis in Ukraine.
Bessent told media that after the meeting in Alaska and the negotiations that followed, Putin had “in a despicable manner, increased the bombing campaign.” He stressed that the administration will be “examining those [options] very closely this week” now that President Trump’s deadline has passed.
After the Alaska Summit, Trump told Russia they had two weeks to make work on a peace deal. But the deadline passed on Monday, and there was still no evidence that the war was coming to an end.
Putin justified what his country did at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Tianjin, China, at the same time. He said that the issue was caused by a “coup d’état in Kyiv in 2014, which the West started.” Putin also said again that the West’s ongoing efforts to get Ukraine into NATO were a “direct threat to Russia’s security.”
French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also talked about how the deadline was missed. Macron had warned on Friday, when he was next to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, that if Putin didn’t do anything, it would indicate he had “played” Donald Trump again. Zelenskyy agreed with this, noting out that Trump’s first comments gave Putin “a week or two” to answer. The words of both European leaders and the US Treasury Secretary signal that the way the world deals with the crisis may be changing. Instead of begging for peace, they may be thinking about punishing the people responsible.