Trump's meeting with Putin in Budapest was canceled after the conversation between Lavrov and Rubio
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke on the phone on October 20, and insiders say that the conversation "did not go well," writes the Telegraph. Donald Trump has announced he will hold a second summit with Putin in Budapest on October 16 after a two-hour phone call with the Russian leader yielded what he said was "significant progress".
However, preparations for the summit stalled when Moscow canceled a personal preparatory meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It is assumed that during a tense conversation, Lavrov told Rubio that Russia would not agree to freezing the front line in Ukraine.
However, already on October 21, the White House called the call "productive", while adding: "Therefore, an additional personal meeting between the Secretary of State and the Minister of Foreign Affairs is not necessary, and President Trump does not plan to meet with President Putin in the near future. " An unnamed Western official has already said the cancellation of the Budapest summit is a positive development.
"Russia made it clear that its position has not changed, so why the meeting?" he said. Earlier, during a two-hour phone conversation last week, Putin told Trump that he would give up his claims to unoccupied parts of Zaporizhia and Kherson regions in exchange for full Russian control over Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Steve Witkoff, the US president's peace envoy, who has met regularly with Putin, told Volodymyr Zelenskyi that Russia allegedly has constitutional rights to these lands.
The president of Ukraine has publicly denied this view, as Putin wrote the regions into Russia's constitution following sham referendums held after the full-scale invasion began. After the "unsuccessful" conversation with Marco Rubio, the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry held a press conference for journalists and stated that "Russia has not changed its position compared to the agreements that were reached during the Alaska summit.
" Serhiy Lavrov said that statements are coming from Washington that it is necessary to "immediately stop the conflict in Ukraine, but this would mean forgetting the root causes of the conflict. " "Therefore, when it started to sound from Washington that it should be stopped immediately, there is no need to discuss anything more, stop, and let history judge there.
You understand, if you just stop, it means forgetting about the root causes of this conflict, which the American administration clearly understood and voiced this understanding when Donald Trump came to power," Lavrov said. In his opinion, this is "ensuring the non-aligned, neutral, non-nuclear status of Ukraine, which implies the rejection of any attempts to involve it in NATO. " At the same time, the Kremlin refused to comment on the canceled summit in Budapest.
Putin's press secretary Dmytro Peskov, when asked which venue could be chosen for the meeting between the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry Sergey Lavrov and the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, advised to contact the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, urged "not to make a mess. " And regarding the new meeting between Trump and Putin, Peskov said that the exact date of the meeting has not yet been determined.
"Listen, we have an agreement with the presidents, but we cannot postpone what has not yet been decided. Neither President Trump nor President Putin gave exact dates," Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov said. It will be recalled that earlier it was reported that preparations for the Trump-Putin summit in Budapest had only been "suspended".