Trump ‘could threaten war on Russian fuel to force Putin into Ukraine deal’
Trump’s transition team leader said the US President could bankrupt the Russian economy by flooding the market with gas unless Putin agreed to a deal on Ukraine
A top Trump official has said the new US administration will threaten Russia’s fuel sector to force President Vladimir Putin into a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
Robert Wilkie, who leads President Donald Trump’s transition team, said Trump intended to call Putin and press him to end the three-year conflict.
This would be backed by a threat to “unleash American energy power” if the Kremlin does not co-operate.
“The flow of American Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) to Europe will begin, and the US presence on the world oil market will drive the price of oil down – that will bankrupt the Russian economy,” Wilkie told the BBC on Tuesday. “That is going to put an incredible strain on Putin’s wartime economy.”
Trump said after his inauguration on Monday that the war was “destroying Russia” and urged Putin to end it.
“He should make a deal…I think Russia’s going to be in big trouble,” said Trump, adding that Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, “wants to make a deal”.
Trump’s new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said on Tuesday that ending the war would become official US policy but that it would be “complicated” because both sides would “have to give something”.
“The only way conflicts like this end is not in public pronouncements,” he said. “They end in hard, vibrant diplomacy that the US seeks to engage in, in the hopes of bringing an end to this conflict that’s sustainable, in a way that assures the security of Ukraine and our partners in the region, but that stops the killing and the dying and the destruction that we’ve been seeing for quite a while now.”
Trump said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would end the war in Ukraine on “day one” of his term, although his advisers have since revised the goal to ending the war in several months.
Few details have been shared of Trump’s plan to end the war but they are believed to involve at least temporary territorial concessions from Ukraine.
Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said this month it was not “realistic to say that we’re going to expel every Russian off every inch of Ukrainian soil, even from Crimea”.

Trump has separately vowed to boost US energy exports, and threatened Europe with tariffs if it does not buy more American fuel.
“Large scale purchase of our oil and gas. Otherwise, it is TARIFFS all the way!!!” he posted on social media last month.
European imports of Russian LNG reached a record high last year of 17.8 million tonnes, according to figures from the research firm Rystad Energy.
The increase has preceded moves to limit the flow, including Ukraine shutting down a major pipeline through its territory, and new EU sanctions targeting Russian LNG that will come into force in March.
The outgoing Biden administration also imposed new sanctions on the Russian fuel sector in one of its final acts, targeting oil and gas facilities, companies and shipping.
Russia’s energy industries account for up to half of total federal budget revenue, making them “the most important single source of cash for the Kremlin”, according to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies think-tank.
Michael Mulroy, a former official at the Defence Department in Trump’s first term, said plans to target Russian energy were a logical step.
“As Senator John McCain said, Russia is essentially an army with a gas station. Anything that could be done to reduce what they can sell gas and oil for will reduce their ability to maintain their unlawful and unprovoked war in Ukraine,” he told The i Paper.
Such a move would “align with two policy initiatives” of the new administration, Mulroy added. “Ending the war and increasing US energy production.”
Dr Georgy Ostapkovich, a leading Russian economist at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, predicted that a Trump-led increase in US fuel exports could lead to sharp drop in the price of Russian oil “from the current $77 to $65 per barrel in 2025” and further “weakening of the ruble”.

Anton Barbashin, editorial director of Riddle, a Russian political analysis journal based abroad, suggested Washington could struggle to force Russia to capitulate through economic coercion and the policy could have undesired effects.
“We don’t know how much the US can drive the price down,” he said. “To swamp the market they would need to refrain from a hard stance on Iran and maybe even allow Venezuela off the sanctions hook. But this will be beneficial to China as they are the main energy importer. Hardly what Trump wants.”
“In order to collapse the Russian economy Trump will need to wage an all-out economic war and it won’t be easy to convince the rest of the world to participate – but he can surely increase costs to the Russian economy.”
But Barbashin added that Putin was unlikely to be concerned by Wilkie’s comments.
“The Kremlin will see this as Trump’s hard bargaining,” he said. “None of this would be taken at face value.”
Some of Trump’s early moves have raised concerns in Ukraine, such as an executive order for a 90-day suspension in US foreign aid pending a review to ensure funding programmes are “consistent with US foreign policy”.
The impact for Ukraine and elsewhere was not immediately clear, with commitments to recipients such as Israel and Egypt part of long-term agreements.
Lieutenant Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s military disinformation department, said military assistance would not be affected.
“The executive order signed by US President Trump to suspend international aid for 90 days does NOT apply to military aid to Ukraine,” he wrote on Telegram.
But a Ukrainian military analyst at a government-run think tank said he was not sure if or how the order would affect Ukraine.
The US State Department did not immediately respond to an enquiry.