Just days after he floated another round of Ukraine peace talks, President Trump has called off plans to meet with Vladimir Putin.
A White House official confirmed that Trump is not meeting his Russian counterpart "in the immediate future" after Trump suggested a summit in Hungary, ABC reported.
Trump's reversal comes after a phone call on Monday between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
"Secretary Rubio and Foreign Minister Lavrov had a productive call. Therefore, an additional in person meeting between the Secretary and Foreign Minister is not necessary, and there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future," the White House official said.
Trump has called for an immediate cease-fire along the current line of conflict, a proposal that Ukraine backs, and Russia opposes.
The cease-fire became a point of contention during Rubio's phone call with Lavrov, who says the Trump administration has grown less receptive to Russia's point of view.
"Now, Washington is saying that we need to stop immediately and not discuss anything further. We need to stop and let history decide. You see, if we just stop, we will forget about the root causes of this conflict, which the American administration clearly understood when Donald Trump came to power," Lavrov said.
While Trump is touting a cease-fire in Gaza, securing peace in Ukraine has proven more difficult.
In August, Trump and Putin met in Alaska for a peace summit that led to no conclusive results. After a phone call with Putin last Thursday, Trump announced another meeting "within two weeks or so" to try to hash out an end to the war.
Just hours after Trump confirmed he would not be meeting with Putin in Budapest, Russia conducted strikes in Ukraine that killed at least seven, including two children.
In comments to reporters Tuesday, Trump said that meeting with Putin right now would be a waste of time.
“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting; I don’t want to have a waste of time,” Trump said at the White House.
Ukraine's president Zelensky has argued that Putin is stalling for time and that he is not facing enough pressure to end the war.
Zelensky returned to the White House last Friday to lobby Trump for Tomahawk missiles that can strike deep inside Russia, but Trump has declined to provide them, for now.
