Trump and Putin: Something happened on the way to the Forum

Stephen Bryen

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Something happened that caused Donald Trump to “cancel” the expected meeting between himself and Vladimir Putin in Budapest.

Consider this: Plans were moving ahead for the meeting. Hungary’s Foreign Minister arrived in Washington to work on planning for the meeting. While he was still here, Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a “productive” phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – and then recommended that Trump cancel the Putin meeting.

The primary issue is over the US demand for a ceasefire in place. The Russians, said Lavrov, would never agree to any such thing, so Rubio told the President a meeting in Budapest would not be successful.

The Rubio-Lavrov exchange was on Monday, October 20. It came after Zelensky met with President Trump on October 17th, a meeting that was fraught with conflict.

While there is no definitive readout on the Zelensky meeting, most of the leaks to the press focused on two things: the President told Zelensky he was not releasing Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine and he also told Zelensky that Ukraine had to accept territorial concessions for any peace deal to happen.

Zelensky had come to the White House equipped with maps showing targets inside Russia for the American-supplied Tomahawks. He fully expected Washington to agree to the plan to hit Russia’s infrastructure, military-industrial complex and, quite probably its main decision-making organs, including the Kremlin. Zelensky was looking for US approval of the targets.

One recalls that on May 3rd, 2023 Ukraine launched an audacious drone attack on the Kremlin, specifically targeting Putin’s office. Because drones fly slowly and carry limited amounts of explosives, the attack was not successful.

Tomahawks, on the other hand, fly much faster than drones because they are jet powered. They fly close to the ground and can maneuver around air defenses and other obstacles, and have a unitary high explosive 1,000-pound warhead capable of destroying hardened targets, with blast effects and fragmentation that can kill in a large swath, making the Kremlin target likely a high Ukrainian priority.