President Donald J. Trump welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Anchorage, Alaska, August 15, 2025 (DoD photo by Benjamin Applebaum)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s plan for a swift meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin is on hold, a U.S. official said Tuesday, the latest twist in his stop-and-go effort to resolve the war in Ukraine.
The meeting was announced last week and was supposed to take place in Budapest, Hungary, in the near future. However, the idea was paused after a call between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, according to the official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The decision to hold off on a meeting between Trump and Putin will likely relieve European leaders, who have accused Putin of stalling for time with diplomacy while trying to gain ground on the battlefield.
The leaders — including the British prime minister, French president and German chancellor — said they opposed any push to make Ukraine surrender land captured by Russian forces in return for peace, as Trump has occasionally suggested.
They also plan to push forward with plans to use billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets to help fund Ukraine’s war efforts, despite some misgivings about the legality and consequences of such a step.
Trump has not yet commented publicly about the change in plans for his meeting with Putin. They previously met in Alaska in August, but the encounter did not advance Trump’s stalled attempts to end a war that began almost four years ago.
The Kremlin didn’t seem to be in a rush to get Trump and Putin together again either. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that “preparation is needed, serious preparation” before a meeting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been trying to strengthen Ukraine's position by seeking long-range Tomahawk missiles from the U.S., although Trump has waffled on whether he would provide them.
“We need to end this war, and only pressure will lead to peace,” Zelenskyy said Tuesday in a Telegram post.