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The White House announces the cancellation of the planned Budapest summit between Trump and Putin.

Tuesday, October 21


Alternative Takes

Reasons for Cancellation/Diplomatic Obstacles

Poland's Opposition and Airspace Restrictions

Ukraine War Diplomacy and Ceasefire Issues


The presidents of the United States, Donald Trump, and Russia, Vladimir Putin, will not be meeting face to face. At least for now. The White House announced this Tuesday that, following a conversation between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, there are"no plans" for a summit in Budapest in the coming weeks.

The announcement comes just four days after Trump announced plans for his second meeting with the Kremlin leader in two months with great fanfare. The planned meeting in the Hungarian capital was agreed upon during a conversation between the two leaders on Thursday, the day before the American met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, attempting to pressure him into agreeing to cede the eastern region of Donbas to the invading country, according to the Financial Times.

Following that meeting, Trump had urged both sides on social media to sign a ceasefire now and leave the front lines as they are.

The conversation between Rubio and Lavrov was supposed to serve as a preparation for a summit Trump intended to hold in"a couple of weeks." The call only appears to have revealed significant differences, although the White House made no reference to a disagreement between the two governments in its announcement.

“Secretary Rubio and Foreign Minister Lavrov had a productive call. Therefore, a face-to-face meeting between the two [leaders] is not necessary,” said a senior White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future,” he added.

Before the meeting was cancelled, Trump continued to pressure kyiv to surrender Russian-occupied territory in exchange for a truce, and the European Union and Ukraine called in an open letter for an unconditional ceasefire. Moscow's response was that peace was insufficient, as it aspired to subjugate, directly or indirectly, the entire country."An immediate ceasefire would mean abandoning the root causes of the conflict and leaving most of Ukraine under Nazi rule," Minister Lavrov said on Tuesday, echoing the Kremlin's familiar rhetoric.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Tuesday. DPA via Europa Press (DPA via Europa Press)

Kremlin officials have already hinted at the possibility of canceling the meeting."What hasn't been agreed upon can't be rescheduled," said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, regarding reports suggesting the meeting would be postponed.

Major European leaders and Zelensky have urged Trump to ensure that Ukraine does not give ground before peace negotiations begin. Lavrov, however, stressed that no truce is part of the Kremlin's plans."The ceasefire is exactly the opposite of what [Russian President] Putin and Trump agreed upon at [their meeting in] Alaska" in August, the Russian foreign minister emphasized, before noting that kyiv could rearm during the lull in fighting.

The diplomat insists that Moscow wants to satisfy what he calls the"root causes of the conflict." These, in Kremlin parlance, do not mean the conquest of a specific territory, but rather the surrender of all of Ukraine as a sovereign state. At the outset of his full-scale invasion in 2022, Putin emphasized that his objectives were the disarmament of kyiv, which would leave it at its mercy, and its"denazification," a false pretext for replacing the elected government of Volodymyr Zelensky, recognized even by the Kremlin after the 2019 presidential elections, with a Russian representative.

Russia rejects a pause in its war, while Trump calls for an immediate truce. “Let it stay cut off as it is, it's already cut off. I think 78% of the territory [in the Donetsk region] is already taken by Russia. Leave it as it is,” Trump declared this Sunday after speaking with Putin by phone and meeting with Zelensky in Washington the previous days.

"They can negotiate something later. I told them to stop on the front lines. Go home, stop fighting, stop killing people," Trump added.

According to the American press, the American leader allegedly tried to convince Zelensky to give up the territories occupied by Russia in exchange for “Ukraine not being destroyed.” The Washington Post reported that Putin allegedly offered Trump to cede part of the controlled area in the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions in exchange for kyiv handing over Donetsk and Lugansk completely.

Officially, the Kremlin's position so far is that all four Ukrainian regions, including areas it does not control, are part of Russia after Putin signed their annexation into the Russian constitution in September 2022.

"We have agreed to continue telephone contacts to better understand where we are and how best to move in the right direction," Lavrov said after declaring himself surprised by the CNN scoop and accusing Western media of being "dishonest."

Putin and Trump agreed last week that the meeting between the foreign minister and the secretary of state would prepare for a hypothetical summit between the two presidents in Budapest. Washington had taken this meeting, which has since been canceled, for granted, while Moscow was more cautious and spoke of"a possible meeting."

"The timing of the Putin-Trump summit is important, but the objectives agreed upon in Alaska are even more so," Lavrov emphasized before the White House announcement.

Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has refused to reveal Russia's demands and concessions ahead of a possible meeting with Trump, which will now not take place as quickly as expected."Russia will not announce its proposals for the summit over the loudspeaker; this would undermine the peace process," the official said.

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