Trump’s hopes for quick second summit with Putin have stalled out

Kristen Holmes, Jennifer Hansler, Kylie Atwood

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President Donald Trump’s hopes for a quick meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin have stalled out, with an administration official telling CNN on Tuesday there were “no plans” for a summit between the two “in the immediate future.”

The change in posture comes after Trump said the leaders would meet “within two weeks or so, pretty quick” following a Thursday phone call. Now, it appears, that timeline is unlikely.

Trump said Tuesday he didn’t want the meeting to be “a waste of time.” He may still meet with the Russian leader, he implied, but he indicated it was no longer a top priority. “We’ll be notifying you over the next two days as to what we’re doing,” the president told reporters.

Trump said after the Thursday call that the US and Russia had “agreed that there will be a meeting of our High Level Advisors, next week,” and officials had expected Secretary of State Marco Rubio would meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, to lay the groundwork for the Trump-Putin summit.

But multiple officials told CNN that diplomatic engagement, too, was no longer happening — at least for the time being — and one source said Rubio and Lavrov had divergent expectations about a possible end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rubio and Lavrov spoke by phone Monday.

“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 administration official said Tuesday.

Although the US described the call as “productive,” a source familiar with the matter told CNN that officials felt afterward that the Russian position had not evolved enough beyond its maximalist stance, and there was a sense that Rubio was not likely to recommend moving forward on a Putin-Trump meeting next week. The source said Monday that Rubio and Lavrov could speak again this week.

On Tuesday, Lavrov rejected the notion of freezing the conflict — an idea put forward by Trump after a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week and backed by Kyiv and Europe as part of negotiations toward an end to the war.