WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said Tuesday he had shelved plans for a summit in Budapest with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on the Ukraine war because he did not want a wasted meeting.
Trump’s reversal came just days after he announced that he would meet Putin in the Hungarian capital within two weeks following what he called a productive phone call to end Russia’s war.
The US leader pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to give up the eastern Donbas region in exchange for peace during tense talks last Friday in Washington according to a senior Ukrainian official.
A White House official said Tuesday that there were now no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future despite the Budapest announcement.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he did not want to have a wasted meeting or a waste of time when asked why the Putin encounter had been put on ice.
The US president said he would see what happens regarding future meetings with the Russian leader.
Trump explained that a lot of things are happening on the war front when asked by an AFP journalist what had changed his mind about the Budapest summit.
The White House said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also called off an expected meeting to arrange the Budapest summit after speaking by phone on Monday.
Trump has counted on personal chemistry with Putin to reach a Ukraine peace deal but has found himself frustrated time and again by the Russian leader.
Ukraine and its European allies have been left scrambling to keep up with the mercurial US president amid the diplomatic uncertainty.
Zelensky’s talks with Trump at the White House last week were not easy according to the senior Ukrainian official who spoke to AFP.
The official added that diplomatic efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war felt like they were being dragged out and going in circles.
Trump called last week for both Moscow and Kyiv to stop the war at their current battle lines and publicly made no references to Ukraine giving up territory.
The Ukrainian official confirmed that Trump urged Zelensky to pull out of land that Ukraine still controlled when asked about this key Russian demand.
Zelensky left the meeting empty-handed after Trump denied his request for long-range Tomahawk missiles and pressured him into making a deal.
Ukraine considers the Donbas region spanning its eastern Lugansk and Donetsk regions an inseparable part of its territory and has rejected the idea of ceding it many times.
The Kremlin said Tuesday there was no precise date for any new meeting between Trump and Putin who held talks in Alaska in August but failed to reach a breakthrough on Ukraine.
European leaders have rejected the idea of Ukraine giving up land instead backing the proposal that fighting should be frozen on the current front lines.
Leaders including France’s Emmanuel Macron Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Britain’s Keir Starmer warned in a joint statement that Russia was not serious about peace.
The European leaders strongly supported President Trump’s position that the fighting should stop immediately and that the current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations.
NATO leader Mark Rutte was heading to Washington on Tuesday for a meeting with Trump according to a statement from the military alliance.
EU leaders are set to close ranks in support of Ukraine at a Brussels summit on Thursday followed by a coalition of the willing meeting of European leaders in London on Friday.
Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 describing it as a special military operation to demilitarise the country and prevent NATO expansion.
Russia now occupies around one fifth of Ukrainian territory with much of it ravaged by fighting while tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers have been killed. – AFP
