‘No plans’ for Trump-Putin meeting ‘in the immediate future’ despite president’s claims of Hungary summit: White House
The White House is walking back President Donald Trump’s plan for talks on ending the four-year-old Russian war against Ukraine just days after he claimed he would meet with Vladimir Putin in Budapest next month.
A White House official told The Independent there are “no plans” for a sit-down between Trump and Putin “in the immediate future” because Secretary of State Marco Rubio had conducted a “productive call” with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov which made an in-person meeting between the two top diplomats “not necessary.”
News of the scrapped meeting plans comes just days after what Trump described as a similarly “productive” call with Putin on the eve of last Friday’s visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
At the time, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “great progress was made” in his push to end the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict and claimed he would meet with Putin in the Hungarian capital to discuss a peace settlement following a preparatory meeting between Rubio and Lavrov.
The choice of Budapest as a venue had raised questions because it was the same location as a 1994 conference at which Russia pledged not to invade Ukraine in exchange for Kyiv giving up nuclear weapons it had inherited after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The venue was also potentially problematic because Putin is wanted by the International Criminal Court, though the Hungarian government was unlikely to cooperate with the warrant as is in the process of leaving the court.
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