Key events
Andrew Roth
The US has sanctioned Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two largest oil companies, as the Trump administration increased pressure on the Kremlin to negotiate an end to its war against Ukraine.
The sanctions were the first against Russia since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, and were targeted to cut key revenues from oil sales that finance the Russian war machine.
The move against Russia marks the latest swing of the pendulum under the Trump administration from coercing Kyiv to sue for peace to growing frustration with Vladimir Putin’s maximalist demands.
“Now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate ceasefire,” said the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, in a statement announcing the sanctions against Russia. “Given President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine. Treasury is prepared to take further action if necessary to support President Trump’s effort to end yet another war. We encourage our allies to join us in and adhere to these sanctions.”
The British government sanctioned Rosneft and Lukoil last week. The EU has sanctioned Rosneft, the Russian state-owned oil company, but not Lukoil, which is privately owned, largely due to exemptions for Hungary and Slovakia, which buy Russian oil.
Trump, speaking in the Oval Office with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, on Wednesday, also confirmed he had cancelled a planned summit with Putin in another sign of a breakdown in negotiations between Washington and Moscow.
“We cancelled the meeting with President Putin,” Trump said. “It didn’t feel right to me. It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get so I cancelled it. But we’ll do it in the future.”
Hugo Lowell
The US military has for the first time attacked and destroyed two boats on the Pacific side of South America, as part of its controversial fight against what it says are drug-trafficking activities.
The strikes – on Tuesday night and then early on Wednesday – killed five people, according to the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth. They came on top of at least seven other strikes in the Caribbean that have killed at least 32 people and raised tensions with Colombia and Venezuela.
Hegseth released a brief video of the Tuesday night strike, showing a small boat, half-filled with brown packages, moving along at sea. Several seconds into the video, the boat explodes and is seen floating motionless in flames.
In a post on social media, Hegseth took the unusual step of equating the alleged drug traffickers to the terror group that conducted the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001.
“Just as al-Qaida waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people,” Hegseth said, adding that “there will be no refuge or forgiveness – only justice”.
The Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, who is in the midst of a spat with Donald Trump over the boat strikes and tariffs, said: “The attack on another boat in the Pacific … killed people. It is murder. Whether in the Caribbean or Pacific, the US government strategy breaks the norms of international law.”
Venezuela is a major drug transit zone, but the eastern Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean, is the primary area for smuggling cocaine.
Eric Berger
The University of Virginia (UVA) has become the latest institution to agree to the Trump administration’s demands concerning discrimination in admissions and hiring following significant pressure from the justice department.
The deal, which the department announced on Wednesday, comes after the president of the esteemed public university resigned in June to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
If the president, Jim Ryan, had stayed in the job, he was told “hundreds of employees would lose jobs, researchers would lose funding, and hundreds of students could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld”, according to Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia.
The deal means the justice department will end its investigation into the school, while the school agreed “not engage in unlawful racial discrimination in its university programming, admissions, hiring or other activities. UVA will provide relevant information and data to the Department of Justice on a quarterly basis through 2028,” the announcement states.
The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Brown had already reached agreements with the Trump administration to have federal funding, which had been cut, restored in exchange for settlements concerning claims of alleged antisemitism. They also agreed to demands such as adopting the administration’s definitions of male and female.
Trump poised to send scores of federal agents to San Francisco
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I am Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with the news that the Trump administration appears poised to send dozens of federal agents to the San Francisco Bay Area for a major immigration enforcement operation, prompting condemnation from California leaders.
Details of the deployment were still emerging, but it will reportedly involve more than 100 federal agents, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The agents are reportedly set to begin using the US Coast Guard base in Alameda, a city located across the bay from San Francisco. It remained unclear whether national guard troops would also be involved.
The deployment follows weeks of threats by Donald Trump to target the Democratic-run city. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, criticised the move, calling it “right out of the dictator’s handbook”.
“He sends out masked men, he sends out border patrol, he sends out ICE, he creates anxiety and fear in the community so that he can lay claim to solving for that by sending in the [national] guard,” Newsom said in a video statement. “This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”
Mia Bonta, the state assembly member who represents Alameda, denounced the arrival of federal agents in her district as “authoritarian theatrics”. “This is against our values as Alamedans to have our city used as a staging ground to inflict fear, terror and state-sponsored violence across the Bay,” she said.
San Francisco is the latest major city targeted by Trump’s campaign of mass immigration arrests. The deployment is expected to trigger a showdown between the administration and local leaders, who have pledged to block militarized immigration enforcement in the city.
San Franciscans have been readying for months for Trump to make good on repeated threats to send troops to the city. At a Wednesday afternoon press conference, San Francisco’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, reiterated that the city was prepared.
“For months, we have been anticipating the possibility of some kind of federal deployment in our city,” said Lurie, adding that he had taken further executive actions on Wednesday to “strengthen the city’s support for our immigrant communities, and ensure our departments are coordinated ahead of any federal deployment”.
Read our full story here:
In other developments:
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Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin was not being “honest and forthright” in Ukraine talks, the US treasury chief has said. The sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil came a day after a planned Trump-Putin summit in Budapest was shelved, with Washington expressing its disappointment at the lack of progress in ceasefire negotiations with Moscow.
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Trump administration officials confirmed to various outlets on Wednesday that the White House’s East Wing will be demolished “within days”, a revelation given that the administration has not submitted plans for the new ballroom to the federal agency that oversees construction of federal buildings.
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The president declared himself the arbiter of whether or not his own administration should pay him damages over past federal investigations, telling reporters that any such decision “would have to go across my desk”. Trump insisted on Tuesday that the government owed him “a lot of money” for previous justice department investigations into his conduct, while at the same time asserting his personal authority over any potential payout.
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A small boat half-filled with brown packages is seen moving along at sea and then explodes and floats motionless in flames, in a brief video released by the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth. The operation happened off coast of Colombia, marking the first such strike in the Pacific. Seven previous attacks in Caribbean killed at least 32 people.
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The University of Virginia (UVA) has become the latest school to agree to the Trump administration’s demands concerning discrimination in admissions and hiring after significant pressure from the justice department.
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Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Maine, said on Wednesday that a tattoo on his chest has been covered to no longer reflect an image widely recognised as a Nazi symbol.
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Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley spoke for nearly 23 hours on the Senate floor to press the case that Trump is acting as an authoritarian by prosecuting political enemies and deploying the military into Merkley’s home town of Portland.
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