Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Wednesday that the decision on a potential meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in Budapest will be made once the “content” of the meeting has been prepared.
After an unscheduled phone call with Putin on Oct. 16 – which lasted for more than two hours – Trump announced that they would meet in Budapest within two weeks. Within a week, however, it became clear that the meeting would not go ahead.
“Once we have prepared the content, I’m confident the presidents will decide on their meeting. As for the timing and location, Budapest has certainly been mentioned publicly. However, we’ve emphasized from the very beginning that the content is what truly matters,” Ryabkov said on Wednesday, as per Russian state media TASS.
Putin’s Oct. 16 phone call to Trump came shortly before President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to the White House to lobby Trump for US Tomahawk long-range missiles – a meeting which did not immediately bear fruit.
However, after an Oct. 20 phone call between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CNN reported that the Trump-Putin meeting had been postponed.
At the time, Ryabkov played down reports of delay as overblown – claiming that the meeting had not been postponed because it had never been scheduled to begin with. However, Trump later told reporters that he had “cancelled” the Budapest meeting because “it didn’t feel right” and he did not believe it would lead to a deal.
The Kremlin has not acknowledged Trump’s comments. Last week, Ryabkov said that preparations for the Trump-Putin meeting were “continuing.”
However, Ryabkov has not always been so optimistic. On Oct. 9, he lamented that the “powerful momentum” towards a US-brokered peace deal in Ukraine created by Trump and Putin’s previous meeting in Alaska was “largely gone” – blaming Europe for its interventions in support of Ukraine for the impasse.
The Kremlin has a history of reneging on its promised participation in peace talks. In May, Putin offered to attend talks with Zelensky in Istanbul as an alternative to a 30-day ceasefire proposed by Europe, before sending a delegation of lower-level officials in his stead.
After the Alaska summit on Aug. 15, Trump said that Putin had agreed to trilateral talks with himself and Zelensky. As every deadline set by Trump for Putin has come and gone, no such meeting seems likely to take place.