On October 21st, U.S. president Donald Trump said that he had decided to postpone a proposed summit in Budapest with Russian president Vladimir Putin, arguing that he did not want to take part in a “wasted” meeting.
The reversal came only days after Trump announced he would meet Putin in the Hungarian capital within two weeks, following what he described as a productive telephone call aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.
During “tense” talks in Washington last Friday, Trump reportedly urged Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to consider giving up the eastern Donbas region in exchange for peace, according to a senior Ukrainian official.
However, a White House official confirmed that there were now “no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future,” despite earlier statements about the Budapest summit.
“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office:
I don’t want to have a waste of time, so I’ll see what happens.
Asked by a journalist what had changed his mind, Trump replied: “A lot of things are happening on the war front. And we’ll be notifying you over the next two days as to what we’re doing.”
The White House also confirmed that U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov had cancelled their preparatory meeting for the Budapest meeting after speaking by phone on Monday.
Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó told Hungarian media that there are a lot of “fake news” around and plenty of efforts to undermine a peace summit in Budapest, adding that the planned peace talks in the Hungarian capital are not off the table. Szijjártó is currently in Washington, and is slated to meet with his U.S. counterpart today.
