President Donald Trump’s hopes for a quick meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin may be stalled after sources familiar with the matter told CNN that an expected pre-meeting between the world leaders’ key foreign affairs aides this week had been tabled, at least for now.
Trump said Thursday after a call with Putin that the two “agreed that there will be a meeting of our High Level Advisors, next week.”
“The United States’ initial meetings will be led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with various other people, to be designated,” he wrote on Truth Social.
However, that anticipated meeting between Rubio and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov has been put on hold for the time being, a White House official told CNN. It was not immediately clear why the meeting was no longer taking place this week, though one of the sources said Rubio and Lavrov had divergent expectations about a possible end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was also not immediately clear what impact the tabling of the pre-meeting between Lavrov and Rubio would ultimately have on the anticipated Trump-Putin summit in Budapest, Hungary.
“President Trump has consistently worked towards finding a peaceful and diplomatic resolution to end this senseless war and to stop the killing,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told CNN. “He has courageously engaged parties on all sides and will do everything in his power to achieve peace.”
Rubio and Lavrov on Monday had a phone call and discussed “next steps” to follow up on the call between their two presidents last week about a possible end to the conflict in Ukraine, according to a brief US State Department readout of the call. Rubio “emphasized the importance of upcoming engagements as an opportunity for Moscow and Washington to collaborate on advancing a durable resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war, in line with President Trump’s vision,” according to the readout.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, described the call as a “constructive discussion” that dealt with “possible concrete steps to implement the understandings” Trump and Putin reached on the call.
A source familiar with the matter told CNN, though, that officials felt after the Rubio-Lavrov call that the Russian position has not evolved enough beyond its maximalist stance. For now, the source said, Rubio is not likely to recommend the Putin-Trump meeting move forward next week, but Rubio and Lavrov could speak again this week.
It has been more than two months since Trump held his last in-person summit with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska. That meeting, which went on for nearly three hours, ended without a deal as both leaders touted progress.
Trump has since publicly called for Kyiv and Moscow to “stop the war immediately.”
“You go by the battle line, wherever it is. Otherwise, it’s too complicated. You’ll never be able to figure it out. You stop at the battle line,” Trump told reporters Saturday.
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