Russia tired of Trump-Putin talks. Now, Moscow is worried

Russia scrambled Wednesday to save the possibility of personal talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, which were unceremoniously postponed.

Trump said on Tuesday that he did not want to have a “wasted meeting” with Putin, which was scheduled to take place in Hungary in the next few weeks, as it became clear that Russia opposes the idea of ​​an immediate ceasefire with Ukraine.

“I don’t want to waste time — so we’ll see what happens,” Trump said Monday after a call between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

After the call, Russia’s top diplomat told reporters in Moscow that he had told Rubio that “Russia has not changed its position.” Trump and Putin met in Alaska in AugustAnd while Moscow wanted “permanent and lasting peace,” it was not interested in an “immediate ceasefire” that would lead to nothing.

After those comments, and as Trump poured cold water on the idea of ​​meeting Putin again, the Kremlin insisted on Wednesday that the dates for the summit in Budapest were “not set,” but that preparations were still underway.

“It has yet to be done. It requires careful preparation before that. It takes time,” Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters in comments translated by NBC News.

“No news yet; obviously it’s all surrounded by a lot of gossip, rumours, and more, which are completely untrue. No news yet,” he added.

There was smugness and schadenfreude in Moscow, and Russian state mediaLast week when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s one-on-one talks with Trump appeared to have soured last Friday.

Especially after Russia went there first and effectively derailed the talks, the “very productive” phone call that got Trump’s ear — as Trump described it — was with Putin. It was during that call that the leaders agreed to meet in person in two weeks.

After that call, Trump and his team appeared displeased with their support for Ukraine, with Zelensky leaving the White House the next day empty-handed, without long-range Tomahawk missiles as requested, and worried that he might be pressured to leave occupied territory in eastern Ukraine.

Those fears grew last weekend when Trump invoked the partially Russian-occupied region of Donbas, the epicenter of fighting in the three-and-a-half-year-old war. “Cut as it is.”

“It’s cut off right now, I think 78% of the land is already taken by Russia,” the president said on Air Force One on Sunday. “They should stop on the battlefield right now. … Go home, stop killing people and be done.”

Ukraine and a group of European allies pushed back, warning against Trump’s stance In a joint statement On Tuesday, Russia was using “stalling tactics” to prolong the war. While wary of alienating Trump, he praised his efforts to bring both sides to the negotiating table.

“We strongly support President Trump’s position that fighting should stop immediately and that the current line of contact should be the starting point for negotiations. We are committed to the principle that international borders should not be changed by force,” the European leaders noted.

“The media is spinning comments about the ‘immediate future’ to downplay the upcoming summit. Preparations continue,” said Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy and CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. X commented on the social network.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova offered a similar argument, telling Radio Sputnik on Wednesday that an “information circus” surrounded the Trump-Putin summit.

“This whole information circus that, by the way, they haven’t finished yet, is still going on: fake leaks, self-corrections, confirmations, denials, once again exist to support Zelensky with information,” she said, in comments translated by NBC News.