Seoul Gazette - Trump says doesn't want 'wasted' meeting with Putin

Trump's reversal came just days after he announced that he would meet Putin in the Hungarian capital within two weeks, following what he called a productive phone call to end Russia's war.

The US leader pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to give up the eastern Donbas region in exchange for peace during "tense" talks last Friday in Washington, a senior Ukrainian official told AFP.

But on Tuesday, a White House official said that there were now "no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future" despite the Budapest announcement.

"I don't want to have a wasted meeting," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked why the Putin encounter had been put on ice. "I don't want to have a waste of time, so I'll see what happens."

Asked by an AFP journalist what had changed his mind, Trump said: "A lot of things are happening on the war front. And we'll be notifying you over the next two days as to what we're doing."

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also called off an expected meeting to arrange the Budapest summit after speaking by phone on Monday, the White House said.

- 'Going in circles' -

Trump has counted on personal chemistry with Putin to reach a Ukraine peace deal, but has found himself frustrated time and again by the Russian leader.

Ukraine and its European allies, meanwhile, have been left scrambling to keep up with the mercurial US president.

Zelensky's talks with Trump at the White House last week were "not easy," the senior Ukrainian official told AFP, adding that diplomatic efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war felt like they were being "dragged out" and "going in circles."

Trump called last week for both Moscow and Kyiv to stop the war at their current battle lines, and publicly made no references to Ukraine giving up territory.

But when asked if Trump urged Zelensky to pull out of land that Ukraine still controlled -- one of Putin's key demands -- the Ukrainian official said: "Yes, that's true."

Zelensky left the meeting empty-handed after Trump, who spoke with Putin the day before, denied his request for long-range Tomahawk missiles and pressured him into making a deal.

Ukraine considers the Donbas -- a largely industrial area spanning its eastern Lugansk and Donetsk regions -- an inseparable part of its territory and has rejected the idea of ceding it many times.

- 'Line of contact' -

The Kremlin said Tuesday there was no "precise" date for any new meeting between Trump and Putin, who held talks in Alaska in August but failed to reach a breakthrough on Ukraine.

European leaders have rejected the idea of Ukraine giving up land -- instead backing the proposal that fighting should be frozen on the current front lines.

In a joint statement published Tuesday, leaders including France's Emmanuel Macron, Italy's Giorgia Meloni and Britain's Keir Starmer warned that Russia was not "serious about peace."

"We strongly support President Trump's position that the fighting should stop immediately, and that the current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations," the statement said.

NATO leader Mark Rutte was heading to Washington on Tuesday for a meeting with Trump, the military alliance said in a statement.

EU leaders are then set to close ranks in support of Ukraine at a Brussels summit on Thursday -- followed a day later by a "coalition of the willing" meeting of European leaders in London to discuss the next steps to help Kyiv.

Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, describing it as a "special military operation" to demilitarize the country and prevent the expansion of NATO.

Russia now occupies around a fifth of Ukrainian territory -- much of it ravaged by fighting -- while tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers have been killed.

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P.Hwang--SG