The US administration announced this Tuesday that there are no immediate plans for a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Budapest, Hungary, as planned. The sudden change was advanced by the international press, including theWashington Post ea AP.
A White House source told the “Washington Post” that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had a “productive conversation”, but a face-to-face meeting between the two would not be necessary. It stays like this postponed sine the a date. THE turnaround stems from deep disagreements between Moscow and Washington over how to end the war in Ukrainereveal the same sources.
After Trump proposed an immediate ceasefire along the combat line, Lavrov rejected the approach, stating that such a measure “would be forgetting the root causes of the conflict”, namely Ukraine’s non-aligned and non-nuclear status (Russian demands already known).
The preparatory meeting between Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov – which was scheduled for this week as a prior step to the Trump-Putin summit – ended up being postponed indefinitely, according to sources also cited by CNN and other agencies. It ended with a phone call between the two, after which Rubio will have concluded that the Russian position remains practically unchanged and does not show sufficient signs of change to allow the summit to go ahead.
According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “preparation is needed, serious preparation” and no date has been set for the Trump-Putin meeting, indicates the Reuters.
European and Ukrainian reactions
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and some European leaders have accused Russia of using “dragging tactics” in negotiations and reaffirm that international borders cannot be changed by force. Trump’s diplomatic ambiguities – who changed his position several times, from pushing for a ceasefire to suggesting that Ukraine cede part of the Donbas – will have increased uncertainty surrounding the process.
In a post on the X network, analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, from the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, considers that Putin continues to play the same game, getting closer to Trump whenever he shows impatience. According to the investigator, Putin will try to pressure Trump into forcing Ukraine to cede Donbass, and then demand even more. “This is just the initial phase. The real question remains how far Ukraine will be forced to go,” he concluded.
Without a summit scheduled, the risk of the situation becoming stagnant increases.