Ukraine war
US media: Trump-Putin meeting moved into the distance
Updated 10/21/2025 – 9:56 p.mReading time: 3 minutes
Trump said last week that a meeting with Kremlin leader Putin in Budapest was being prepared. But according to US media, the plans are on hold for the time being.
The meeting with Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin in Budapest announced by US President Donald Trump is shaky. The Republican actually wanted to meet with the Russian “probably in the next two weeks,” as Trump himself announced last Thursday. But this schedule – as the US media now reports – is off the table for the time being.
Several US media outlets cited information from the White House following a phone call between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. This phone call was actually intended as part of the preparations for Budapest. There should also be a personal preliminary meeting between the two ministers. But this has obviously been abandoned again – according to the US media, it has been put on hold. Tenor of the reports: The meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin will not take place in the foreseeable future.
What exactly happened in the meantime is unclear. Trump himself initially did not comment on the changed plans.
The Kremlin had already sent braking signals. So he saw a need for some clarification before such a meeting. “There is still a lot of housework to be done,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Russian state news agency Tass on Monday. Above all, the foreign ministries of both countries would have to address a large number of open questions.
Peskov also emphasized that Russia’s position in the conflict had not changed. Although he did not elaborate, it is clear that Russia claims more land than the areas it has conquered so far in Ukraine. After Crimea, which was annexed in 2014, Moscow declared four more Ukrainian regions to be its own territories shortly after the start of the war, although it still only partially controls them. Peskov was reacting to Trump’s statements that the current front line should be frozen and peace talks should begin.
Now, according to several US media reports, the White House said that the Rubio-Lawrow phone call was “productive”. But: Russia and Ukraine are not ready to hold serious peace talks in the conflict, as NBC News reported.
It is unclear how concrete Russian and US plans for the meeting were when Trump announced it after his phone call with Putin. The phone call took place just a day before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj visited the White House – and may have had an influence on the meeting in Washington.
Zelenskyj wanted to obtain permission from the US President to purchase US Tomahawk cruise missiles. Ukraine wants to take a more offensive role in the war and could fire these weapons deep into the Russian hinterland. But Trump remained vague – he made no commitment and insisted that both sides had to end the war. Zelensky, meanwhile, insists that using tomahawks is the best way to get Russia to back down, as he reiterated in his daily video message on Tuesday evening.
