Oil Gains as White House Meeting Dims Ukraine Ceasefire Outlook
(Bloomberg) -- Oil rose as US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy tempered expectations that a resolution to the conflict with Russia will be reached quickly.
West Texas Intermediate advanced about 1% to trade above $63 a barrel after Zelenskiy said during a meeting at the White House that the countries need to find diplomatic ways to end the war.
“Zelenskiy’s latest comments may have lowered already-slim ceasefire odds even further,” said Rebecca Babin, a senior energy trader at CIBC Private Wealth Group. “Crude traders have been whipsawed by alternating ceasefire hopes and sanction threats for years, leaving risk appetite limited in either direction.”
Talks about resolving the Ukraine war, which could allow Russia’s crude to trade more freely, have injected uncertainty into the market and kept oil trading in a narrow range recently. Still, futures are down more than 10% this year on concerns about the fallout from Trump’s trade policies and OPEC+ plans to rapidly return barrels to the market.
Trump said after his talks with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday that he would urge Zelenskiy to make a quick deal and sounded receptive to the Russian leader’s demand that Ukraine give up large swathes of land. But in a show of support for Ukraine, leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte joined the high-stakes meeting in Washington.
Prior to the summit in Alaska, Trump told allies that reaching a ceasefire would be his key demand, and he threatened to walk out of the talks and impose tough new measures on Moscow and countries buying its oil if it wasn’t met. On Friday, the US president signaled he was in no hurry to implement penalties.
So far, Trump has singled out India for buying Russian crude, imposing hefty tariffs on the South Asian nation for doing so. His trade adviser strongly criticized India’s purchases of Moscow’s barrels in the Financial Times on Monday. However, the US president said in a Fox News interview on Friday that he will hold off on increasing levies on Chinese goods due to the country’s purchases of Moscow’s crude.
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