There are no plans for President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet “in the immediate future,” a White House official said Tuesday, canceling a summit expected in Hungary in the coming weeks.
Trump announced Thursday that he and Putin planned to meet again, predicting it would happen “within about two weeks.”
First, he said, discussions would take place between senior advisers from both sides.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, had a phone call on Monday. The two are not expected to meet in person at this time.
President Donald Trump in Washington, October 10, 2025 and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, October 16, 2025.
EPA/Shutterstock/Reuters
“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.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Kremlin downplayed a possible in-person meeting between Trump and Putin. The Kremlin said there was never a date set for a summit.
“You cannot postpone what was not scheduled,” a Putin spokesman said.
Trump, following a diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East, renewed his efforts to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as Moscow’s invasion drags on three and a half years later.
But it appears little has changed since his phone call with Putin last Thursday and his face-to-face meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Friday.
Zelenskyy was in Washington to defend coveted Tomahawk cruise missiles and other American military assets. Zelenskyy said Monday that the Trump administration decided not to provide Ukraine with the long-range Tomahawks that would give kyiv the ability to strike deeper inside Russia, but said “the issue is not off the table.”
Still, Zelenskyy described the White House meeting as positive and said he was waiting to see if he would be invited to join the now-cancelled meeting between Trump and Putin in Budapest.
Trump has called for the war between Russia and Ukraine to end on its current battle lines and denied a Financial Times report that insisted Zelenskyy hand over the entire Donbas region to Russia.
On Monday, Trump softened his previous comments when he said he believed Ukraine could take back all of the territory currently occupied by Russia.
“Well, they could do it,” Trump said. “They could still win it. I don’t think they will, but they could still win it. I never said they would win it. I said… anything can happen. You know war is a very strange thing. A lot of bad things happen. A lot of good things happen.”
Tuesday’s announcement that a second Trump-Putin summit is postponed for now comes just hours after Russia’s top diplomat noted that the United States and Russia are still far apart on how to end the war with Ukraine.
“Now, Washington is saying that we should 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 US administration clearly understood when Donald Trump came to power,” Lavrov said.
ABC News’ Alexandra Hutzler and Michelle Stoddart contributed to this report.
