Russia's two largest oil companies hit by US sanctions
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The US has announced new sanctions targeting Russia's two largest oil companies in an effort to persuade Moscow to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine.
The announcement came one day after US President Donald Trump said a planned meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Budapest would be shelved indefinitely. Could this put pressure on Vladimir Putin to end his war with Ukraine?
Also in the programme: A former British paratrooper has been found not guilty of murdering two people in shootings at a civil rights march in Northern Ireland in 1972 - an event which became known as "Bloody Sunday"; and the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Malala Yousafszai, tells us what it was like being accompanied by a security detail at university.
(Photo shows US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington DC on 17 October 2025. Credit: Aaron Schwartz/EPA)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.3 | Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:12.5 | We're coming to you live from London. |
| 0:14.4 | I'm James Menendez. |
| 0:15.8 | And we're going to begin today with efforts to end the war in Ukraine |
| 0:18.9 | as a fourth winter of conflict approaches. |
| 0:22.5 | Keeping track of the diplomacy involved, especially when it comes to Washington's position, |
| 0:28.3 | is a tricky business. |
| 0:29.4 | At the start of the week, it was reported that President Trump had in another fiery encounter, |
| 0:34.7 | told his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zel Zelensky to accept Russia's terms or face |
| 0:40.1 | destruction. Now the US has announced that it's imposing sanctions on Russia's two biggest |
| 0:45.8 | oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoyle, in order to put pressure on President Putin to agree to a truce. |
| 0:52.7 | This was the reaction of President Zelensky. |
| 0:55.7 | This is a good signal to other countries in the world to join the sanctions. You know that |
| 1:00.7 | not only energy, we need shadow fleet and etc. and continue and continue until Putin will |
| 1:06.3 | stop this war. So these are decisions very important. Seasfire is possible, of course. And I think all of us needs this war. So these are decisions very important. ceasefire is possible, of course. And I think all of us need ceasefire. But we need more |
| 1:15.6 | pressure on Russia for ceasefire. Russia's reacted by saying the sanctions were counterproductive |
| 1:20.9 | that they sent the wrong signal and that anyway, said a government spokeswoman, Russia had built |
| 1:26.7 | up a strong immunity to Western |
| 1:29.0 | restrictions. Others, though, say these are much tougher measures. Andrei Fedorov is a former Russian |
| 1:35.2 | deputy foreign minister and former Putin advisor. The situation is serious because Luke oil and |
| 1:41.4 | Rosnevd, it's about 80% of Russian oil export, and these two companies |
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