WASHINGTON—President Trump said Tuesday that meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin would be a waste and that he would reveal his new thinking on the Ukraine war within two days.
“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting. I don’t want to have a waste of time til I’ll see what happens,” he said Tuesday at the White House.
Putin wants the war to end, he said, as does Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “I think it’s going to end,” he said.
Trump’s statement came hours after the White House said it no longer had immediate plans for a summit between Trump and Putin. Last week, Trump announced that he would imminently meet with Putin in Budapest for a second meeting between the two leaders in as many months.
A Monday call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov revealed that the Kremlin is clinging to its long-held positions, namely that Ukraine hand over control of the entire Donbas region as part of any settlement, the officials said. After the discussion, Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security adviser, briefed White House officials that an imminent summit with Putin would unlikely yield positive results in peace negotiations.
Lavrov on Tuesday told reporters that Russia’s view was firm. “I believe American officials have concluded that Russia’s position has remained largely unchanged over time and remains within the bounds of its initial maximalist demands,” he said, noting that Moscow’s stance was the same as when Trump and Putin met in Alaska two months ago without progress.
Russia still prefers a comprehensive peace agreement to a cease-fire, Lavrov said, a stance that critics say allows the Kremlin to keep fighting while failing to negotiate in good faith.
A senior administration official said Lavrov’s comments confirm what the administration already surmised: Russia is still not willing to make a deal. However, the official added that in last week’s call with Trump , Putin signaled that he was open to discussing some matters that could bridge the divide between the U.S. and Russian positions.
That provided some hope for a new Trump-Putin summit in the future, the officials said, even if it wouldn’t come as quickly as Trump first indicated after announcing a coming meeting in Budapest.
Trump had previously said that the war would be an easy conflict to solve quickly. After the Alaska summit, he had hoped that Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would meet and strike a final deal, but no meeting materialized. Trump has since sought to revive his high-profile diplomatic effort, expressing frustration that he has had success in brokering a cease-fire in Gaza before quieting the guns in Ukraine.
Both Rubio and Lavrov are slated to be in Malaysia later this month at a summit organized by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, but senior administration officials said there are currently no scheduled meetings between the two diplomats. These officials said Rubio and Lavrov will continue to engage each other to map out plans for a possible Trump-Putin summit.
Trump’s position on the war in Ukraine continues to shift. In recent weeks, he blamed Russia for prolonging the war and even weighed deliveries of long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, a sign that his patience with Putin had run thin. But Trump’s approach changed after the call with Putin last week, a day before Zelensky arrived at the White House.
In that meeting, Trump told Zelensky that his main priority was that the war end, urging a freeze of the conflict at the current battle lines—a position Ukraine has previously endorsed but less than what Russia wants. Russia, according to Trump, controls about 78% of the Donbas.
Trump also informed Zelensky that Ukraine wouldn’t receive Tomahawks soon.
