The White House says that there are no plans for a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in the immediate future, the British newspaper announced this Tuesday. The Guardian. The chain NBC had reported a few minutes earlier that talks to plan the meeting in the Hungarian capital were now “on pause.”
Volodímir Zelenski and the European leaders accepted this Tuesday the proposal of Donald Trump to “immediately” pause hostilities to negotiate peace on the basis of the front line. The Ukrainian leader and his continental allies, however, rejected the possibility of modifying the borders, another of the ideas that the president of the United States had proposed to end the war.
“The current line of contact must serve as a starting point for negotiations,” states the joint statement of the European leaders, who reaffirmed their commitment “to the principle that international borders should not be changed by force.” In the writing, however, the Merz, Starmer, Macron, Meloni and company once again questioned the interest of Vladimir Putin in reaching some kind of compromise.
Kyiv reaches out to avoid giving up more territories, but Moscow continues not to budge. “I want to clarify that Russia has not changed its position regarding the understandings reached during the Alaska summit,” the Russian Foreign Minister said this Tuesday. Sergey Lavrovwhich dismissed calls for a truce.
“If everything is simply stopped, that will mean forgetting the root causes of this conflict, which the US Administration clearly understood when Donald Trump came to power,” argued the head of Russian diplomacy, an indication that the Kremlin remains determined to maintain its maximalist stance.
The Anchorage framework that Lavrov rescued comprises a series of territorial exchanges. In other words, it contemplates Ukraine handing over Donbas to Russian troops. “I think 78 percent of the territory is already taken by Russia. Leave it as it is for now, and later you can negotiate something,” Trump himself slipped this Monday.
“For Moscow, control over the Donbas remains non-negotiable. At best, only marginal tactical adjustments are conceivable given the current balance on the battlefield,” explains the analyst. Balázs Jarábik. “Still, Putin is determined to keep the channel open with Trump, aware of both its strategic potential and its risks.”
The Kremlin’s closure, however, puts the summit in Budapest in jeopardy. Five days after the telephone conversation of just over two hours between Trump and Putin, there is still no progress in the preparations.
Last Thursday, the tenant of the White House announced that his Secretary of State, Marco Rubiowould meet this week with his Russian counterpart to finalize the details of the meeting. But the CNN reported this Tuesday that the parties had decided to postpone the preparatory meeting because they had “different expectations” about how to approach the negotiations.
The Kremlin was quick to deny this version. “Listen, we have an understanding between the presidents, but we cannot postpone something that has not been finalized,” the spokesperson commented. Dmitri Peskovwhich justified the delay by claiming that neither Putin nor Trump had given “exact dates” after their conversation.
“You cannot postpone something on which there has been no agreement. There has been no understanding – we have not even approached – about the dates or place of such contact,” he later noted. Sergei Ryabkovhe number two de Lavrov.
According to the Financial Timeswhich quotes a German official, it is expected that Marco Rubio and the Russian Foreign Minister will land in Budapest on Thursday of next week. Although the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharovaasked the press not to participate in the “information show” that revolves around the dates.
The positions of the United States and Russia remain distant, which explains the initial tension that Rubio and Lavrov showed this Monday in their first telephone conversation.
“Washington’s objective is to freeze the war: stop the fighting and contain the escalation. Moscow, however, sees few incentives: it still maintains the military advantage and retains control of the escalation in the energy field,” says Jarábik. “Russia’s objective is different: to keep Trump involved and transform the current dialogue for this in a structured process, one that links Ukraine to a broader security discussion between the United States, Russia and Europe.”
For now, the only thing that has emerged is that the second summit between Putin and Trump will be sometime in the next two weeks and that the parties agreed to hold it in the capital of Hungary. Nothing else. “There were many other worthy options: Switzerland, Austria, the Vatican, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey,” lamented Zelensky this Monday, who, however, showed himself willing to attend the meeting.
“Who proposed Budapest?” the journalist asked him. Huffington Post SV You giveto the White House spokesperson, Caroline Leavitt. “Your mother did it,” Trump’s press secretary responded. The Russian advisor Yuri Ushakov He says the suggestion was made by Trump. Putin accepted it “immediately.”
The choice of Budapest has enormous symbolism. “Trump and Putin intend to meet where the infamous Budapest Memorandum was signed, in which Russia promised in vain to respect Ukraine’s borders in exchange for Ukraine handing over its nuclear weapons,” he explained in conversation with this newspaper. Simon Schlegelan analyst at the Zentrum Liberale Moderne, a Berlin-based think tank.
The then president Leonid Kuchma dispensed with the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, about 2,000 Soviet-era nuclear warheads. Putin, however, violated the agreement with the annexation of Crimea in March 2014. And he did so again eight years later with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“In the midst of conversations about possible ways in which the European Union could block Putin’s trip to Budapest, I wonder if that is actually the Kremlin’s idea. ‘Sorry, Donald, those Europeans are trying to prevent your summit. They want to block your peace plan. They hate you. I guess you’ll have to come to Moscow (or Minsk),’” the specialist slipped Mark Galeottirecently interviewed by this newspaper.
Any trip to Budapest would force Putin to fly over the airspace of other European Union countries, and to date only Bulgaria seems willing to allow it.
“When efforts are made to achieve peace, if the condition for this is to hold a meeting of this type, the most logical thing is that such a meeting be facilitated by all possible means,” declared this Tuesday the Bulgarian Foreign Minister, Gueorgui Gueorguiev. “How do you propose to hold the meeting if one of the participants cannot make it?” he asked.
The rest of the community partners avoid commenting on this possibility, with the sole exception of Poland, whose Foreign Minister, Radosław Sikorskiwanted to make it clear that his Government could not “guarantee that an independent Polish court does not order the forced landing of a hypothetical plane in order to hand over the suspect to the Court in The Hague. I believe that the Russian side knows this and therefore, if this summit is to be held – hopefully with the participation of the victim of the aggression – it will be by another route.”
The post The US and Russia suspend the Budapest summit because Putin refuses the truce and only asks for Ukraine’s surrender appeared first on Veritas News.
