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.
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