WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump schedule a quick meeting Negotiations with Russian leader Vladimir Putin are on hold, a U.S. official said Tuesday, the latest twist in his intermittent efforts to resolve the war in Ukraine.
The meeting was announced last week and is expected to take place soon in Budapest, Hungary. However, the idea was shelved after a call between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, according to the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The decision to postpone a meeting between Trump and Putin will likely come as a relief to European leaders, who have accused Putin of stalling for time with diplomacy while trying to gain ground on the battlefield.
Leaders – including Britain’s prime minister, France’s president and Germany’s chancellor – have said they oppose any attempt to force Ukraine to cede land captured by Russian forces in exchange for peace, as Trump has sometimes suggested.
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They also plan to move forward with plans to use billions of dollars in Russian assets frozen to help finance Ukraine’s war efforts, despite some concerns about the legality and consequences of such a measure.
Trump has not yet publicly commented on the change in plans for his meeting with Putin. They previously met in Alaska in August, but that meeting did little to advance Trump’s stalled attempts to end a war that began nearly four years ago.
The Kremlin also seemed in no rush to bring Trump and Putin together again. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that “preparation is necessary, serious preparation” before a meeting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is trying to strengthen Ukraine’s position by seeking to long-range Tomahawk missiles of the United States, although Trump questioned whether he would provide them.
“We must end this war, and only pressure will lead to peace,” Zelenskyy said in a Telegram message on Tuesday.
He noted that Putin returned to diplomacy and called Trump last week when it appeared Tomahawk missiles were a possibility. But “as soon as the pressure eased a little, the Russians started trying to abandon diplomacy and postpone dialogue,” Zelensky said.
On Wednesday, Trump will speak with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The official provided no details on Trump’s agenda for the negotiations.
The military alliance coordinates arms deliveries to Ukraine, many of which purchased in the USA by Canada and European countries. A meeting of the Coalition of the Willing — a group of 35 countries that support Ukraine — is due to take place Friday in London.
Trump’s position on the war has changed throughout the year. He initially focused on pressuring Ukraine to make concessions, but later became frustrated with Putin’s intransigence. Trump often complains that he thinks his good relations with his Russian counterpart would have made it easier to end the war.
Last month, Trump reversed his long-standing position that Ukraine should cede its land and suggested it could regain all the territory it had lost to Russia. But after a phone call with Putin last week and a subsequent meeting with Zelensky on Friday, Trump changed his position again and called on kyiv and Moscow to “stop where they are” in the more than three-year-old war.
On Sunday, Trump said the industrial region of Donbass in eastern Ukraine should be “carved up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
Trump said Monday that while he believed it was possible that Ukraine could ultimately defeat Russia, he doubts now it will happen.
Ukrainian and European leaders are working 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 for negotiations,” the leaders said in their statement. “We can all see that Putin continues to choose violence and destruction. »
Russia occupies about a fifth of Ukraine, but dividing the country in exchange for peace is unacceptable to officials in kyiv.
Furthermore, a frozen conflict on the current frontline could fester, with occupied areas of Ukraine providing Moscow with a springboard for further attacks in the future, Ukrainian and European officials fear.
The statement from the leaders of Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Denmark and EU officials came at the start of what Zelensky said Monday would be a “very active week in diplomacy.”
New international economic sanctions against Russia are expected to be discussed at the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday.
“We must increase pressure on the Russian economy and its defense industry until Putin is ready to make peace,” Tuesday’s statement said.
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Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed reporting.
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
