Putin calls US sanctions ‘unfriendly act’ and says Russia won’t bend

The 148th Artillery Brigade fires at Russian targets in the Zaporizhzhia region of eastern Ukraine, Oct. 14, 2025. While oil markets reacted strongly to sanctions, analysts said the measures were unlikely to significantly change President Vladimir V. Putin’s war calculations. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)

By IVAN NECHEPURENKO and ANTON TROIANOVSKI

A day after President Donald Trump’s first major punitive action against Russia over its war in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called new U.S. oil sanctions “an unfriendly act” and warned of an overwhelming response if Ukraine gets the powerful missiles it seeks.

Speaking with journalists in Moscow, Putin said the sanctions against the two biggest Russian oil giants would hurt the country’s economy, but that Moscow would never make any concessions under pressure.

“This is an unfriendly act toward Russia, and it doesn’t strengthen relations between Russia and the United States that only began to get restored,” Putin said. “But no self-respecting country and no self-respecting people ever decide anything under pressure.”

Asked about Ukraine’s push to get long-range Tomahawk missiles from the United States or other Western states, a request that Trump has publicly entertained but so far not approved, Putin warned that “this is an attempt at escalation.”

“If a strike is made on Russian territory with such a weapon, the response will be very serious, if not staggering,” he said. “Let them think about that.”

Putin’s comments signaled that the Kremlin was not willing to soften its maximalist demands to end the war in Ukraine. Russia has continued to strike Ukraine daily with drones and missiles, and its troops are still pushing to occupy more Ukrainian territory, even as the Trump administration has demanded that Moscow agree to a ceasefire along the current battle lines.

Still, the Russian leader refrained from directly criticizing Trump, in keeping with a strategy in which the Kremlin has tried to maintain cordial relations and pull the U.S. president back to its side after he has voiced criticism.

Only a week ago, Putin appeared to have the upper hand over Ukraine in diplomacy with the Trump administration. He had outmaneuvered his adversaries yet again with a deftly placed call to Trump that scuttled any expansion in U.S. support for Ukraine.

But on Thursday, Russians awoke to new U.S. sanctions against their oil industry. It was the most direct measure Trump has taken against Russia in his second term, after electing not to follow through on a series of earlier threats.

The sanctions, which take aim at the heart of the Russian economy, dealt one of the biggest blows so far this year to Putin’s effort to cajole Trump into putting pressure on Ukraine in Russia’s favor, including its demand for the concession of territory Ukraine still holds.

Still, analysts who study Putin said the new sanctions were unlikely to change the Russian president’s war goals. Russian companies have long been preparing for the possibility of increased sanctions, said Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik. Putin remains willing to bear enormous losses to accomplish his aims, she said, and Trump may well change his mind again.

“They’ll shrug their shoulders and say, ‘OK, he’ll ripen in three months,’” Stanovaya said of Russia’s reaction to Trump’s sanctions. “For Putin, this war remains existential, and he is ready to endure a lot.”

Oil prices rose sharply Thursday in a sign of the sanctions’ potential potency, which may ultimately depend on how the penalties are enforced and how energy buyers react to them. The new measures target Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, and anyone doing business with them around the world.

The sale of oil and gas accounts for about a quarter of the Russian budget, and the sanctions come at a time when the Russian oil industry is already under stress from increasingly sophisticated long-range strikes by Ukraine. But some analysts in Russia predicted that the new penalties would have a muted impact.

They noted that Russia had become adept at evading restrictions by using a fleet of hundreds of old vessels uninsured by Western companies and by conducting transactions through buffer companies in third countries. And because Russia accounts for about 9% of global oil sales, any restrictions against its exports would cut supply and push prices up, creating incentives for further sanction evasion.

The departing Biden administration enacted similar sanctions in January against two other large Russian oil companies, Surgutneftegaz and Gazpromneft. Those sanctions had a limited impact on those companies, largely because of lax enforcement of the sanctions under Trump, said Sergey Vakulenko, an energy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Lukoil will face serious problems, but these will be Lukoil’s problems, not Russia’s,” Vakulenko said.

But the broader Russian economy does face problems, even if they are not enough to force Putin to change course, analysts say. Before this week’s move, Russia’s oil and gas revenues were already projected to decline to around $100 billion this year from nearly $135 billion in 2024, largely as a result of the lower price of oil. And the Russian central bank’s efforts to dampen inflation by raising rates have halted a wartime boom, bringing the economy’s growth rate to around 1% this year compared with more than 4% in 2023 and 2024.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the country had developed “immunity” to Western sanctions and that the U.S. president risked going down the same path as the Biden administration in trying to pressure Russia.

“If the current U.S. administration starts following the example of its predecessors,” the Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, said, “the result will be exactly the same — disastrous from a domestic political perspective and detrimental to global economic stability.”