US President Donald Trump has no immediate plans to meet Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, a US official said, days after Trump said they would meet within two weeks in Budapest.
Trump had said that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov would be meeting shortly to arrange a Budapest peace summit, AFP reported.
“An additional in-person meeting between the secretary and foreign minister is not necessary, and there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future,” a Trump administration official said yesterday on condition of anonymity.
A White House official told CBS News that Rubio and Lavrov had a “productive call” on October 20 and a future in-person meeting between them was now not needed.
“There are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin,” the official said.
“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting,” Trump told reporters yesterday in the Oval Office when asked why the Putin encounter had been put on ice. “I don’t want to have a waste of time, so I’ll see what happens.”
Asked by an AFP journalist what had changed his mind, he said: “A lot of things are happening on the war front. And we’ll be notifying you over the next two days as to what we’re doing.”
Trump spoke with Putin a few days ago, after which he announced he would meet the Russian president in Budapest, Hungary, to discuss a possible end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The US President called his discussion with Putin “very productive.” It came one day before he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House.
State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said yesterday: “The secretary [Rubio] emphasised the importance of upcoming engagements as an opportunity for Moscow and Washington to collaborate on advancing a durable resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war, in line with President Trump’s vision.”
But Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov indicated the same day that a meeting may be a long way off.
“Preparation is needed, serious preparation,” he told reporters, according to the Associated Press.
Some reports suggested Trump’s talks with Zelensky had been a “shouting match”, with sources suggesting the US President had pushed him to give up large areas of territory in eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, known as the Donbas, as part of a deal with Russia, the BBC reported.
Zelensky, though, has always said Ukraine cannot relinquish the parts of the Donbas it still holds, on the grounds that Russia could later use the area as a springboard for further attacks.
On October 20, Trump embraced a ceasefire proposal backed by Kyiv and European leaders to freeze the conflict on the current front line.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “I said: Cut and stop at the battle line. Go home. Stop fighting, stop killing people.”
Moscow was only interested in “long-term, sustainable peace”, Lavrov said yesterday, implying that freezing the front line would only amount to a temporary ceasefire.
Russia has repeatedly pushed back against freezing the current line of contact.
Peskov said the idea had been put to the Russians repeatedly but that “the consistency of Russia’s position doesn’t change” – referring to Moscow’s insistence on the complete withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the embattled eastern regions.
The “root causes of the conflict” needed to be addressed, Lavrov said, using Kremlin shorthand for a series of maximalist demands that include the recognition of full Russian sovereignty over the Donbas as well as the demilitarisation of Ukraine – a non-starter for Kyiv and its European partners.
Earlier yesterday, European leaders put out a statement with Zelensky saying that any talks on ending the war in Ukraine should start with freezing the current front line.
In a joint statement, leaders including France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that Russia was not “serious about peace”.
“We strongly support President Trump’s position that the fighting should stop immediately, and that the current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations,” the statement said.
EU leaders are set to close ranks in support of Ukraine at a Brussels summit tomorrow, followed a day later by a “coalition of the willing” meeting of European leaders in London to discuss the next steps to help Kyiv.
Trump and Putin last met in Alaska in August during a hastily organised summit that yielded no concrete results.
The White House decision to shelve plans for a second Trump-Putin meeting may have been an attempt to avoid another similar scenario.
“I guess the Russians wanted too much and it became evident for the Americans that there will be no deal for Trump in Budapest,” a senior European diplomat told Reuters.
