Trump says he doesn’t want ‘wasted meeting’ with Putin, delaying summit

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he will not meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in the immediate future, declaring that he didn’t want to have a “wasted meeting” after saying a few days ago that he would soon meet his Russian counterpart in Hungary.

The abrupt postponement appeared to be a blow to Trump’s efforts to wrestle Ukraine and Russia into a ceasefire and peace deal, after a phone call with Putin and a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made clear that the warring sides remained far apart.

Trump’s acknowledgment of the scrapped meeting came hours after Russia’s top diplomat signaled a wide chasm between Moscow and Washington on ending the war in Ukraine. But the president downplayed a diplomatic row between the longtime adversaries.

“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting. I don’t want to have a waste of time here. I’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I said, go to the line. Go to the line of battle, the battlefield lines. And you pull back and you go home and everybody take some time off, because you’ve got two countries that are killing each other. ... So we’ll see what happens. We haven’t made a determination.”

Last week, Trump asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to lay the groundwork for a summit with Putin. But the two diplomats appeared to get little further than a phone call.

Rubio and Lavrov “had a productive call,” said a White House official, who was not authorized to speak to the media, before Trump spoke on Tuesday. “Therefore, an additional in-person meeting between the secretary and foreign minister is not necessary, and there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future.”

Russia on Tuesday rejected Trump’s call to freeze the fighting in Ukraine on the front line, signaling that the Kremlin has not significantly changed its demands for peace, after Trump said last week that he believed Putin wanted a deal.

“You see, if we just stop, it means forgetting the root causes of this conflict, which the American administration clearly understood,” Lavrov said. “I am referring to ensuring Ukraine’s nonaligned, nonnuclear status, which implies refraining from any attempts to draw it into NATO.”

He added that freezing the fighting now “would mean only one thing: a large part of Ukraine would remain under Nazi rule,” suggesting Russia’s continuing desire for regime change in Kyiv.

Trump on Saturday said both sides should stop fighting — after he abandoned his ceasefire calls following the August summit with Putin in Alaska — and said Kyiv and Moscow had to “stop the war immediately.”

“Both sides should go home, go to their families, stop the killing,” he said.

A joint statement issued Tuesday morning signed by the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Poland, as well as top E.U. officials, backed Trump’s proposal for a ceasefire along the existing line of contact ahead of any talks.

“Russia’s Stalling Tactics have shown time and time again that Ukraine is the only party serious about peace,” the statement said. “We can all see that Putin continues to choose violence and destruction.”

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte plans to meet Trump on Wednesday at the White House, a trip that was announced at the last minute. Rutte’s visit repeated a pattern in which European leaders have rushed to Washington to meet with Trump to try to reset course following meetings with Zelensky that haven’t gone well.

Lavrov insisted Tuesday that any peace deal be based on what the Kremlin calls “the roots of the problem,” vague shorthand it uses to refer to Moscow’s demands that Ukraine surrender more territory, permanently disavow joining NATO, accept tight restrictions on the size of its military and get no future Western military assistance. Russia has also demanded a veto over Ukrainian security guarantees. It does want its own security guarantees, even though it is the aggressor in the war.

Ukraine and its European supporters have strenuously opposed these conditions.

At the Alaska summit, Trump accepted Putin’s rejection of a ceasefire, writing on Truth Social that it had been decided that the best way to end the war was to “go directly to a peace agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere ceasefire agreement, which often times do not hold up.”

“Both sides should go home, go to their families, stop the killing,” he said.

In Thursday’s phone call with Trump, Putin again demanded that Ukraine surrender all of the Donetsk region, including territory not occupied by Russia, according to two senior officials familiar with the conversation who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door talks.

In a subsequent tense White House meeting Friday with Zelensky, Trump urged him to surrender all of Donbas, which includes the Donetsk region, to get a deal or see his country destroyed by Russia, according to people familiar with the exchange.

But Trump still emerged from the meeting calling for a ceasefire along the front line, a stance that the Ukrainian president endorsed but appears to have incensed Lavrov.

Trump’s position on the Russia-Ukraine conflict has changed several times over the past year. Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said that whenever Trump appeared to be losing patience with Putin, the Russian leader reached out to offer peace — but strictly on Russia’s terms.

Putin, she said, would continue pushing Trump to force Ukraine to give up territory in Donbas to Russia — and then he would push for even more.

“That is only the starting point; the remaining demands will follow later,” she wrote. “The real question remains the same: how far will Ukraine be forced to go?”