Trump: ‘It was time’ for Russia sanctions, Putin meeting ‘didn’t feel right’

President Trump said Wednesday he felt it was the right time to slap sanctions on Russia as a part of the administration’s effort to push Moscow to end its war with Ukraine. 

“I just felt it was time. We waited a long time. I thought that we’d go long before the Middle East,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, speaking next to NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office. 

Trump’s comments came shortly after the Treasury Department slapped sanctions on Russia’s two biggest oil companies, Open Joint Stock Company Rosneft Oil Co. (Rosneft) and Lukoil OAO (Lukoil). The move is an effort to get Russia to end the conflict. 

“It’s a very big day in terms of what we’re doing,” Trump said. “These are tremendous sanctions. They’re big, these are against their two big oil companies and we hope they won’t be on for long. We hope that the war will be settled. We just answered having to do with various forms of missiles and everything else that we’re looking at, but we don’t think that’s going to be necessary.”  

“We would like to see them just take the line that has been formed over quite a long period of time and just go home,” he continued. 

On Tuesday, the White House said there were no plans for Trump to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin despite talks of a potential summit in Budapest, Hungary.

Additionally, Russia launched another round of missile and drone attacks on Ukraine overnight Tuesday, killing six people, including two children.

Trump told reporters Wednesday that the proposed summit with Putin did not “feel right” to him. 

“It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place where we have to get, so I canceled it, but we’ll do it in the future,” Trump said.