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President Vladimir Putin’s delegation for high-level talks with U.S. President Donald Trump in Alaska was forced to pay cash for jet fuel to return home despite the U.S. temporary easing sanctions to allow the visit, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC.
According to calculations by NBC, fueling a single long-haul aircraft could cost around $85,000 at current jet fuel prices.
The Russian president typically travels with a fleet of three planes, meaning the total bill could easily have reached into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“When the Russians landed in Alaska … they had to offer to pay in cash to refuel their airplanes because they can't use our banking system,” Rubio told NBC. “They face consequences every single day.”
Rubio noted however that sanctions have not altered the trajectory of the war in Ukraine.
“That doesn’t mean those sanctions were inappropriate, it means it hasn’t altered the outcome of it,” he said.
Members of the Russian delegation and Russian journalists who accompanied them also reported being unable to use local mobile networks or to use their bank cards during their time in the U.S.
U.S. authorities temporarily lifted travel restrictions on sanctioned Russian officials through Aug. 20 in order to facilitate the Aug. 15 summit between Trump and Putin in Anchorage.
Earlier this year, Washington granted a similar exception for the Kremlin’s special economic envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who visited the U.S. capital for talks with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff in April despite being on the sanctions list.
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