U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for a swift meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin is on hold, a U.S. official said Tuesday, the latest twist in his stop-and-go effort to resolve the war in Ukraine.
The meeting was announced last week and was supposed to take place in Budapest, Hungary, in the near future. However, the idea was paused after a call between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, according to the official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The decision to hold off on a meeting between Trump and Putin will likely relieve European leaders, who have accused Putin of stalling for time with diplomacy while trying to gain ground on the battlefield.
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The leaders — including the British prime minister, French president and German chancellor — said they opposed any push to make Ukraine surrender land captured by Russian forces in return for peace, as Trump has occasionally suggested.
They also plan to push forward with plans to use billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets to help fund Ukraine’s war efforts, despite some misgivings about the legality and consequences of such a step.
Trump has not yet commented publicly about the change in plans for his meeting with Putin. They previously met in Alaska in August, but the encounter did not advance Trump’s stalled attempts to end a war that began almost four years ago.
The Kremlin didn’t seem to be in a rush to get Trump and Putin together again either. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that “preparation is needed, serious preparation” before a meeting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been trying to strengthen Ukraine's position by seeking long-range Tomahawk missiles from the U.S., although Trump has waffled on whether he would provide them.
“We need to end this war, and only pressure will lead to peace,” Zelenskyy said Tuesday in a Telegram post.
He noted that Putin returned to diplomacy and called Trump last week when it looked like Tomahawk missiles were a possibility. But "as soon as the pressure eased a little, the Russians began to try to drop diplomacy, postpone the dialogue,” Zelenskyy said.
Trump's stance on the war has shifted throughout the year. He initially focused on pressuring Ukraine to make concessions, but then grew frustrated with Putin's intransigence. Trump often complains that he thought his good relationship with his Russian counterpart would have made it easier to end the war.
Last month, Trump reversed his long-held position that Ukraine would have to give up land and suggested it could win back all the territory it has lost to Russia. But after a phone call with Putin last week and a subsequent meeting with Zelenskyy on Friday, Trump shifted his position again and called on Kyiv and Moscow to “stop where they are” in the more than three-year war.
On Sunday, Trump said the industrial Donbas region of eastern Ukraine should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
Trump said Monday that while he thinks it is possible that Ukraine can ultimately defeat Russia, he’s now doubtful it will happen.
Ukrainian and European leaders are trying hard to keep Trump on their side.
“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 leaders' statement said. “We can all see that Putin continues to choose violence and destruction."
Russia occupies about one fifth of Ukraine, but carving up their country in return for peace is unacceptable to Kyiv officials.
Also, a conflict frozen on the current front line could fester, with occupied areas of Ukraine offering Moscow a springboard for new attacks in the future, Ukrainian and European officials fear.
The statement by the leaders of Ukraine, the U.K., Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Denmark and EU officials came early in what Zelenskyy said Monday would be a week that is “very active in diplomacy.”
More international economic sanctions on Russia are likely to be discussed at an EU summit in Brussels on Thursday.
“We must ramp up the pressure on Russia’s economy and its defense industry, until Putin is ready to make peace,” Tuesday’s statement said.
On Friday, a meeting of the Coalition of the Willing — a group of 35 countries who support Ukraine — is due to take place in London.
