White House says no Putin-Trump summit any time soon

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The Trump administration said Tuesday that President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have “no plans” to meet in the near future, marking an abrupt postponement of a meeting that Trump said days ago was supposed to take place in Hungary.

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The statement came hours after Russia's top diplomat signaled a deep divide between Moscow and Washington over ending the war in Ukraine. The Trump administration, while confirming the postponement of the meeting, made no mention of the diplomatic row between the longtime adversaries.

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“Secretary Rubio and Foreign Secretary Lavrov had a productive conversation,” a White House spokesman said. “Therefore, an additional face-to-face meeting between the Secretary of State and the Foreign Secretary is not necessary, and President Trump has no plans to meet with President Putin in the near future.”

Russia on Tuesday rejected Trump's call to freeze fighting in Ukraine on its current front lines, signaling that the Kremlin has not significantly changed its demands for peace after Trump said last week that he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted an agreement.

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Lavrov said Trump's demand for an “immediate ceasefire, which suddenly became a topic of discussion again,” contradicted what was agreed to at the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska in August, when Trump abandoned pressure on Putin to stop fighting ahead of the talks.

“You see, if we just stop, it means forgetting the root causes of this conflict, which the American administration clearly understood,” Lavrov complained. “I mean ensuring Ukraine’s non-aligned, nuclear-free status, which implies a rejection of any attempts to drag it into NATO.”

He added that freezing hostilities now “would mean only one thing: most of Ukraine would remain under Nazi rule,” indicating Russia's continued push for regime change in Kyiv.

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Trump on Saturday said both sides must stop fighting – after he abandoned his calls for a ceasefire following an August summit with Putin in Alaska – and said Kyiv and Moscow must “stop the war immediately” on current front lines. “Both sides must go home to their families and stop the killing.”

A joint statement released on Tuesday morning and signed by the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and top EU officials backed Trump's proposal for a ceasefire along the existing line of contact before any negotiations.

The statement also expressed skepticism about Russia's negotiating efforts over the past nine months and its interest in ending the conflict.

“Russia's containment tactics have shown time and time again that Ukraine is the only party taking peace seriously. We all see that Putin continues to choose violence and destruction,” the statement said.

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Disagreements over a combat freeze may have delayed a planned face-to-face meeting this week between Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to pave the way for a proposed Trump-Putin summit in Budapest.

On Tuesday, Lavrov said only that telephone contact with Rubio would continue.

CNN reported that plans for a meeting between Lavrov and Rubio this week were postponed due to differences over the end of the war and Russia's continued hardline stance.

On Tuesday, Lavrov insisted that any peace deal must be based on what the Kremlin calls “the roots of the problem.”

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Russia also demanded a veto of security guarantees for Ukraine, as well as its own security guarantees, even though it is the aggressor in the war.

Ukraine and its European supporters strongly opposed these conditions.

At the Alaska summit, Trump accepted Putin's rejection of the ceasefire, writing on Truth Social that it had been decided that the best way to end the war was to “move directly to a peace agreement that ends the war, not just a ceasefire agreement that often doesn't hold.”

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But it gave Russia the opportunity to escalate its attacks on Ukraine, and it has resisted Trump's calls for a meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to move the peace process forward.

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In a phone call with Trump on Thursday, Putin again demanded that Ukraine surrender the entire Donetsk region, including areas not yet conquered, senior U.S. officials said.

In a subsequent tense meeting at the White House on Friday with Zelensky, Trump called on him to surrender all of Donbass, including the Donetsk region, to make a deal or see his country destroyed by Russia, according to people familiar with the talks.

But Trump still walked out of the meeting with Zelensky, calling for a ceasefire along the front line. The Ukrainian president supported this position, but seemed to anger Lavrov.

Trump's position on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has changed several times over the past year. Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russian Eurasian Center, said that whenever Trump seemed to be losing patience with Putin, the Russian leader offered peace — but strictly on Russia's terms.

“Russia's position hasn't changed one bit – it's the same as it was six months or even a year ago. They still want everything they've been demanding all along. So we're entering the third round of the same game,” she wrote on X. Putin, she said, will continue to push Trump to force Ukraine to cede territory in the Donbass to Russia – and then he will push for even more.

“This is just a starting point; other demands will follow later. The real question remains the same: how far will Ukraine have to go?” she wrote.

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