“Another face-to-face meeting between the two foreign ministers is unnecessary, and there are currently no plans for President Donald Trump to meet President Vladimir Putin anytime soon,” a White House official told AFP on October 21, speaking on condition of anonymity.
An earlier meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov had been scheduled for this week to prepare for the summit in Budapest, Hungary. The meeting did not take place, but the White House official emphasized that the two foreign ministers held an “effective phone conversation” on October 20.
When asked by reporters about the reported delay of the summit, Trump said he “didn’t want to have a meeting that would be a waste of time.”
“I don’t want to waste time, so I’ll wait to see what happens. There’s a lot going on at the frontlines. In the next two days, we’ll announce what we’re doing,” the U.S. president said.
Meanwhile, Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special envoy, wrote on social media that “preparations for the summit are still ongoing.” The Kremlin earlier said there was currently “no specific timeframe” for the meeting.
Last week, Trump held a phone call with Putin and later announced that the two leaders would meet in Budapest within two weeks to work toward a peace agreement for the war in Ukraine. Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov later confirmed that Moscow and Washington were “in the process of preparing” for the event.