A Russian official will attend a G20 energy meeting in Houston next week, a White House official said on Friday.
Last month, the U.S. welcomed Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov to a meeting of G20 countries in North Carolina. The move upset European officials, as it was the first time Russia’s finance minister had attended the forum in person since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
The G20 Ministerial Meeting on Energy Abundance will take place from Monday to Wednesday with U.S. officials including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and White House official Jarrod Agen. The White House did not immediately say who would attend next week’s meeting from Russia.
Energy officials from Europe and Asia are also expected to attend. European Union efforts to become independent from Russian oil and gas are faltering, just as it heads into winter with unusually low gas stocks, its auditors said this month.
Despite the meeting’s name, the wars in Ukraine and Iran have made energy security a worry for many countries. U.S. diesel hit a record of more than $6 a gallon this week, Iran has largely closed the Strait of Hormuz to oil and natural gas shipments, and construction of U.S. data centers is straining power supplies.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he had a “great” conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier in the week and that the Russian leader wanted to make a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
Despite recent visits by U.S. envoys to Moscow and Kyiv, intelligence officials in the U.S., Ukraine and throughout Europe doubt Putin is seriously interested in ending the war.
The U.S. House of Representatives will likely vote on fresh Russian sanctions during the G20 meeting, but it is uncertain if the bill will pass that chamber as it did in the U.S. Senate. The Trump administration first imposed sanctions on Russia over its war in Ukraine in October 2025, blocking transactions and freezing assets of its top two oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.
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