(Bloomberg) – Oil swung between gains and losses as traders awaited a meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, with the Ukrainian leader facing U.S. pressure to agree to ceding territory to Russia.
Russian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy
West Texas Intermediate futures were little changed near $63 a barrel after fluctuating in a roughly $1 range. In a show of support, European leaders including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte will join the high-stakes meeting in Washington.
The U.S. president said after his talks with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday that he’ll urge Zelenskiy to make a quick deal and sounded receptive to the Russian leader’s demand that Ukraine give up large swathes of land.
“We’re still a long ways off,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took part in the summit, told Fox News on Sunday. “We are not at the precipice of a peace agreement. We are not at the edge of one. But I do think progress was made.”
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 told European leaders after the meeting that the U.S. could contribute to any security guarantees, and that Putin was prepared to accept that. However, it remains unclear what kind of guarantees are being discussed with the Russian leader and what the Kremlin is willing to accept.
In a Truth Social post late Sunday, Trump said Zelenskiy “can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight.” He also made a reference to Crimea, without providing further details.
Prior to the summit in Alaska, Trump told allies that reaching a ceasefire would be his key demand, and 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
“Russia retains the upper hand,” said Tamas Varga, an analyst at brokerage PVM. “As long as that remains the case, no bullish impetus will come from this part of the world.”
