Plans for Trump-Putin meeting shelved days after Budapest talks proposed

There are “no plans” for US President Donald Trump to meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin “in the immediate future”, a White House official has stated.

Last Thursday Trump said he and the Russian president would hold talks in Budapest within two weeks to discuss the war in Ukraine.

A preparatory meeting between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov was due to be held this week – but the White House said the two had had a “productive” call and that a meeting was no longer “necessary”.

The White House did not share any more details on why the talks had been put on hold.

Trump had discussed a Budapest summit over the phone with Putin, a day before meeting Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House.

Some reports suggested his talks with Zelensky had been a “shouting match”, with sources suggesting Trump had pushed him to give up large areas of territory in eastern Ukraine as part of a deal with Russia.

However, on Monday 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.

Russia has repeatedly pushed back against freezing the current line of contact.

Moscow was only interested in “long-term, sustainable peace”, Lavrov said on Tuesday, implying that freezing the front line would only amount to a temporary ceasefire.

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.

Zelensky said discussions about the front line were the “beginning of diplomacy” but that Russia was “doing everything to avoid diplomacy”.

He also said the only topic that could make Moscow “pay attention” was that of the supply of long-range weapons to Ukraine.

Putin’s unscheduled call with Trump last Thursday came ahead of speculation that the US was preparing to send long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine that could potentially strike deep into Russia.

Zelensky said it was the Tomahawks issue that had forced Russia to engage in discussion. The talk about the missiles had turned out to be a “strong investment in diplomacy”, he added.