WASHINGTON — President Trump no longer plans to hold a second in-person summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin “in the immediate future” after Russia rejected Trump’s demand to stop the war in Ukraine along the current battle lines.
“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting,” Trump told reporters Tuesday afternoon when asked why he axed the sitdown. “I don’t want to have a waste of time.”
The cancellation followed a Monday call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which a source familiar with the conversation said demonstrated the Kremlin’s unwillingness to commit to Trump’s strategy for peace.
“Secretary Rubio and Foreign Minister Lavrov had a productive call,” a White House official told The Post 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.”
Hours later, NATO announced the alliance’s Secretary General Mark Rutte — who shares a warm relationship with Trump — would be in Washington Tuesday and Wednesday for previously unannounced discussions.
No further information was provided about the nature of Rutte’s visit, but the alliance has been focused on ending the war in Ukraine since the conflict began.
“A lot of things are happening on that front, on the war front, with Ukraine and Russia, and we’ll be notifying you over the next two days as to what we’re doing,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “A lot of things are happening on Ukraine.”
Trump on Thursday had announced that Rubio would lead a high-level US delegation to in-person talks with their Russian counterparts this week following a call with Putin. Those talks were meant to lay the groundwork for a face-to-face between Trump and Putin in Budapest, Hungary.
The Trump-Putin call took place a day before the third White House meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which the parties were expected to discuss the US providing long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine to further pressure Russia to end its war.
However, Trump’s interest in sending the missiles faded rapidly following his call with Putin, with the president saying Friday that he did not expect to send them anytime soon.
In turn, Zelensky argued Tuesday, the Kremlin’s willingness to take actionable steps to end the war fizzled out after Tomahawks were taken off the table.
“The frontline can spark diplomacy. Instead, Russia continues to do everything to weasel out: as soon as the issue of long-range capabilities for Ukraine became less immediate, their interest in diplomacy faded,” he wrote in a post to X. “This signals that deep strike capabilities may hold the key to peace.”
While Zelensky said Tomahawks were discussed in his meeting with Trump, Kyiv’s leader said the US and Ukrainian sides agreed not to discuss details publicly.
“Discussion on Tomahawks turned out to be a major investment in diplomacy – we forced Russia to reveal that Tomahawks are the card they take seriously,” Zelensky wrote on X Tuesday, vowing Ukraine would “continue engaging with Europeans and Americans on long-range capabilities.”
“The greater Ukraine’s long-range reach, the greater Russia’s willingness to end the war. These weeks reaffirmed it,” he added.
After Friday’s meeting, Trump exhorted both sides to lay down their arms and freeze the conflict in place. The Ukrainian president immediately agreed to the idea, but the Kremlin rebuked the call for peace, which would see Kyiv keep the roughly 22% of the Donbas region that Russia has been unable to occupy in more than 11 years of war.
“I said, ‘Go to the line, go to the line of battle — the battlefield lines. And when you pull back, you go home, and everybody takes some time off,’” Trump said Thursday. “Because you got two countries that are killing each other, losing 5,000 to 7,000 soldiers a week so we’ll see what happens.”
Still, Trump said he had not closed the door on ever meeting Putin in the future.
On Tuesday, Zelensky put out a joint statement supporting Trump’s plan with the leaders of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, the European Commission and the European Council.
“We strongly support President Trump’s position that the fighting should stop immediately, and that the current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations,” the group said.
The leaders went on to call out “Russia’s stalling tactics,” saying they have “shown time and time again that Ukraine is the only party serious about peace.”
“We can all see that Putin continues to choose violence and destruction. Therefore we are clear that Ukraine must be in the strongest position possible — before, during and after any cease-fire.”
The leaders are expected to meet later this week to discuss ways to pressure Moscow to stop the violence, including the possible use of frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine.
“We must ramp up the pressure on Russia’s economy and its defense industry until Putin is ready to make peace,” the group said in the statement. “We are developing measures to use the full value of Russia’s immobilized sovereign assets so that Ukraine has the resources it needs.”
