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The US and Russian leader had been set to meet in Budapest but Moscow has rejected calls for an immediate ceasefire
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Donald Trump has said he did not want to have a “wasted” meeting with Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine, as a proposed summit between the pair was called off.
The President said preparatory talks between senior US and Russian officials showed that the gap between the two countries was too large to begin negotiations over ending the conflict.
“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting,” Trump said. “I don’t want to have a waste of time — so we’ll see what happens.”
His comments followed a phone call between Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during which Lavrov stated that Moscow’s negotiating position remained unchanged since the Alaska summit which failed to yield progress.
A White House official told The Independent on Tuesday that there are no plans for a presidential summit in the “immediate future”.
European leaders have called on Trump to demand an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine based on present battle lines. But Putin has insisted that he wants Kyiv to hand over the entirety of the Donbas, and has previously rejected the idea of a temporary ceasefire.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is to visit Sweden on Wednesday for a meeting with Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.
The Swedish leader told Swedish radio: “My meeting with President Zelensky today takes place at Saab and we will discuss a fairly significant export deal”.
At least two children have been killed in a Russian attack on Kyiv, Ukraine’s state emergency service said on Wednesday.
The attack, consisting of drones and missiles, killed three people overall and targeted the energy sector according to officials.
Ukraine attacked an important Russian chemical plant using British-made Storm Shadow missiles, the Ukrainian military said on Tuesday, calling the facility critical to Moscow’s war efforts.
The strike using Anglo-French Storm Shadow cruise missiles was successful, the armed forces said.
“A massive combined missile and air strike was carried out, including the use of air-launched Storm Shadow missiles, which successfully penetrated the Russian air defence system. The outcome of the strike is being assessed,” the General Staff of the Ukraine Armed Forces said in a post on X.
“The Bryansk chemical plant is a key facility of the aggressor state’s military-industrial complex”, the Ukrainian military said.
Alexander Bogomaz, the governor of Bryansk, where the plant is situated, acknowledged that Ukraine was attacking the region with drones and missiles on Tuesday afternoon. He said no one was injured in the attack and no damage was reported.
At least two people have been killed in a significant Russian drone and missile attack on Ukraine’s capital.
The emergency services in Kyiv said they rescued 10 people in the early hours today after a fire caused by drone debris hit the sixth floor of a 16-story residential building in the Dnipro district of the city, where two people were found dead, local authorities reported.
The attack also blew out windows of a medical facility and debris was found at another residential building, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko reported on his Telegram channel.
In the Darnytskyi district of the capital emergency services were responding after drone debris hit a 17-story residential building causing a fire on five floors. Fifteen people had to be rescued including two children.
The large-scale overnight aerial attack also targeted other cities in Ukraine including Zaporizhzhia and the port city of Izmail in the southern Odesa region.
“Russia’s attacks on civilians have long become the signature of a terrorist entity masquerading as a country. Ukraine has already agreed to the US proposal for a ceasefire. Moscow, however, is doing everything possible to keep the killing going,” Andriy Yermak, top presidential official said in a post on X.
The choice of Budapest as a summit venue had raised various questions ahead of the now-cancelled meeting between Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Perhaps chief among them was the symbolic issue that this same location hosted a 1994 conference at which Russia pledged not to invade Ukraine in exchange for Kyiv giving up nuclear weapons it had inherited after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Budapest has remained an outlier among European capitals since the start of Putin’s war on Ukraine, with Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban maintaining warm relations with an otherwise isolated Russia.
The venue was also potentially problematic because Putin is wanted by the International Criminal Court – of which Hungary is a treaty member. It was considered unlikely that the Hungarian government would cooperate with the warrant, however, as it is in the process of leaving the court.
The matter was also complicated by Budapest’s geography – any trip to the Hungarian capital would require Putin to fly through the airspace of other less friendly EU countries.
Poland said on Tuesday it could force Putin’s plane down and arrest him on the international warrant if he flies over its territory. In the end Bulgaria said Putin could use its airspace to reach the meeting.
“The utter irony of Putin and Trump meeting soon in Budapest to jointly seal Ukraine’s fate should not be lost on anybody,” said Sir Richard Branson, who has been a staunch supporter of Ukraine and critic of the Kremlin.
“This is the very same city where the US, the UK, and Russia came together 31 years ago to give Ukraine ironclad assurances that its territorial integrity would be respected and protected within existing borders in exchange for giving up a third of the world’s nuclear weapons (to Russia!),” he said.
“Ukraine trusted the US, trusted the UK, transferred all its nuclear weapons to Russia, and joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
What a relief that Vladimir Putin is more of a bully than a strategist. Had he been as savvy as Benjamin Netanyahu, he would have suckered the US president into backing a “ceasefire” that meant a victory and impunity.
Instead the White House has announced that planned talks between Donald Trump and Putin to be held in Budapest are off. They were cancelled after the US president said that the current front lines should be frozen as part of an immediate ceasefire.
Putin had reason to believe that he’d renewed backing from the US president for his demand that Ukraine must hand over more territory than Russia has already stolen as part of a deal to stop the shooting – because Trump had earlier said as much.
But now that the Europeans and the UK have made it clear that, alongside Ukraine, a ceasefire can only happen where the fighting actually is going on at the moment, Putin has decided to snub the summit in the Hungarian capital, which had been expected in the next few weeks.
Donald Trump’s now cancelled meeting with Vladimir Putin will come as a relief to European leaders, who have accused the Russian leader 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 most recently has suggested.
They also plan to push forward with plans to use billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets to help fund Ukraine’s war efforts, despite some misgivings about the legality and consequences of such a step.
The US and Russian presidents last met in Alaska in August, but the encounter did not advance Trump’s stalled attempts to end a war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Now, a meeting of the Coalition of the Willing — a group of 35 countries who support Ukraine — is due to take place in London on Friday, where more outcomes are expected in favour of Kyiv.
The statement by the leaders of Ukraine, the UK, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Denmark and EU officials came early in what Zelensky said on Monday would be a week that is “very active in diplomacy.”
More international economic sanctions on Russia are likely to be discussed at an EU summit in Brussels tomorrow.
“We must ramp up the pressure on Russia’s economy and its defense industry, until Putin is ready to make peace,” Tuesday’s statement said.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has been trying to strengthen Ukraine’s position by seeking long-range Tomahawk missiles from the US, although Donald Trump has wavered on whether he would provide them.
“We need to end this war, and only pressure will lead to peace,” Zelensky said yesterday in a Telegram post.
He noted that Vladimir Putin returned to diplomacy and called Trump last week when it looked like Tomahawk missiles were a possibility.
But “as soon as the pressure eased a little, the Russians began to try to drop diplomacy, postpone the dialogue,” Zelensky said.
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