View from the West: Trump plan for a second Putin meeting undercuts Ukraine push

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The press in the US and Britain is actively discussing the telephone conversation between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump that took place yesterday.

BLOOMBERG

President Donald Trump has his sights once again on ending the war in Ukraine, announcing another meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin after a first summit in Alaska failed to yield progress.

The president framed the decision, announced after he spoke with Putin for more than two hours Thursday, as a plan to bring peace at last to a conflict that he once claimed he’d solve within a day. But it also deflates any pressure that had been building on Putin in recent weeks as Trump vented frustration with the Russian leader’s foot-dragging to end the war.

Zelenskiy believes Trump’s growing frustration with Putin could lead him to apply the pressure the White House has so far resisted. He’ll renew pleas for air defense and assistance in sourcing new energy supplies along with the coveted Tomahawks.

But Trump has yet to sign off on issuing those to Ukraine, and Putin in his call with Trump warned the US president doing so “would cause significant damage to relations between our countries, not to mention the prospects for a peaceful settlement,” according to a readout by the Kremlin.

Trump noted the two leaders spoke extensively about the prospects for trade after the war ends. According to the Kremlin, Trump stressed the economic opportunities would be “colossal.”

The venue of Trump’s planned summit with Putin — Budapest — is also likely to be viewed with skepticism from European allies as an attempt by the Russian leader to drive a wedge between the US and Europe. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been the target of fierce criticism from European Union and NATO allies for maintaining close ties with Russia, even after Putin invaded Ukraine. This has included speaking out against EU sanctions on Moscow, barring the delivery of weapons to Ukraine and locking Hungary into a long-term gas contract with Russia.

Orban plans to call Putin on Friday, he told public radio, as the prime minister starts preparations to host the summit. US and Russian leaders may come to Budapest by the week after next following talks between foreign ministers, he said, citing his call with Trump late on Thursday.

Despite the European tensions, Trump has long seen Orban as a close ally on the world stage, part of a small cohort of MAGA-allied foreign leaders. As such, the American president may see Budapest as friendly territory for a summit with his Russian counterpart.

‘THE GUARDIAN’

Vladimir Putin’s surprise phone call with Donald Trump on Thursday appeared to undercut Ukrainian hopes of receiving Tomahawk missiles as Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads to Washington to meet the US president and discuss the issue.

After strikingly voicing his frustrations with Putin in recent weeks and hinting that he was ready to supply Zelenskyy with Tomahawk missiles, Trump on Thursday night appeared to walk back the possibility.

“We need Tomahawks for the United States of America too. We have a lot of them but we need them. I mean, we can’t deplete for our country,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

After his chat with Putin, Trump also announced that he was planning to meet the Russian president in the Hungarian capital on a date still to be determined in an effort to end the war.

Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, on Friday morning said that the summit could take place “within two weeks or later”.

Peskov said Putin had already discussed the planned meeting with Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister. Orbán – an outlier among European leaders with warm ties to Trump and Putin – said he had also spoken to Trump about the summit: “Preparations for the USA-Russia peace summit are under way.”

Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said on Friday that Putin would be able to enter and leave the country. “There is no need for any kind of consultation with anyone, we are a sovereign country here. We will receive [Putin] with respect, host him and provide the conditions for him to negotiate with the American president,” he told a press briefing.

“Zelenskyy must be pulling his hair out. Today’s meeting with Trump is now completely overshadowed and overtaken by the Budapest meeting,” said John Foreman, a former British defence attache to Moscow and Kyiv.

Despite Trump’s typically upbeat rhetoric that peace may be within reach, the US vice-president, JD Vance, struck a more cautious note on Thursday, saying that “the Russians and the Ukrainians are just not at the point where they can make a deal”, and that a settlement “remains possible but will require a lot more work”.

In an interview with the conservative network Newsmax, Vance spoke of what he called a “misalignment of expectations”, saying “the Russians tend to think they’re doing better on the battlefield than they actually are”.

‘THE WASHINGTON POST’

Trump and Putin will meet in Hungary “to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I believe great progress was made with today’s telephone conversation.” Trump is seeking another diplomatic breakthrough days after brokering a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

Trump has long courted Putin even as he has faulted him for not ending the war. The president in August rolled out a red carpet for Putin in Anchorage, where the two joked and sat for hours of discussions. Russian attacks on Ukraine have increased since, and Trump has become increasingly critical of the Russian leader in recent weeks. Thursday’s discussion was an opportunity for Putin to regain the initiative and promote Russian narratives before Zelensky’s visit on Friday.

Putin has offered little in return so far, sticking to his maximalist demands that Ukraine must be demilitarized and neutral, as he fights on to force Kyiv back into Moscow’s sphere of political influence.

The Kremlin signaled Thursday that it was leveraging trade to incentivize Trump’s cooperation, a tactic Putin has used as a way to attack a president who likes to brag about how much money he is bringing back to the United States through deals with other countries. Russian leaders have sought to lure Trump with promises of billions of dollars in American investments in Russia’s energy industry.

“One of the American president’s main points was that ending the conflict in Ukraine would open up enormous — I emphasize, enormous — prospects for developing economic cooperation between the U.S. and Russia,” Putin adviser Yuri Ushakov told reporters after the call.

“Russian armed forces fully control the strategic initiative along the entire line of contact. Under these circumstances, the Kyiv regime is resorting to terrorist methods, striking civilian targets and energy infrastructure, to which we are forced to respond accordingly,” Ushakov said, complaining about Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries that have taxed Russian energy production.

Trump’s conversation with Putin came as congressional leaders said they would be likely to move forward on legislation that would strengthen U.S. sanctions against Russia and buyers of its energy.

Trump on Thursday said the legislation may not be necessary if he can strike a deal between Ukraine and Russia.

‘THE TELEGRAPH’

Donald Trump’s announcement that he will meet Vladimir Putin in Budapest to discuss Ukraine will be felt as a painful blow in Europe.

Meanwhile, Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, must feel like the cat who got the cream.

Often derided as Putin’s closest ally in the European Union, Mr Orban has regularly clashed with Volodymyr Zelensky and railed against Western sanctions.

He has repeatedly broken ranks with his allies in Nato and the EU, where summits on Ukraine now routinely end with conclusions agreed by all except Hungary in a breach of convention.

Relations with president Zelensky are at subzero. Mr Orban has vowed to block Ukraine’s accession to the EU and accuses Kyiv of persecuting the Hungarian ethnic minority.

In August, Ukraine hit a key Russian pipeline carrying oil to Kremlin-dependent Hungary, which repeatedly demanded immediate peace negotiations in a war it says Kyiv can never win.

But, crucially, Mr Orban has never fallen out with Donald Trump since nailing his colours firmly to his MAGA mast when he won his first term in office.

He remained loyal during Mr Trump’s “exile” between terms, a period in which he clashed with Joe Biden. He became a darling of US conservatives, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference and hosting the summit in Budapest.

Mr Orban was the only EU leader to endorse Mr Trump before he was re-elected.

The Hungarian has styled himself as a campaigner for peace and this summit of superpowers is a huge feather in the cap for a leader of a small country of just 9.5 million people.

That will be a blow for those in the EU who were hoping Mr Orban could be unseated by Peter Magyar, the pro-EU conservative, who has a lead over the bloc’s longest-serving leader in the polls.

Mr Orban has relished his role as the bad boy of Brussels, founding a pan-EU group of Eurosceptic parties dedicated to reclaiming national powers from the European Commission.

The choice of Hungary for the summit will have wiped the smile off the EU’s face.

The bloc has been largely sidelined in the Ukraine peace talks and is smarting at the peripheral role it played in the Gaza peace plan.

A country almost all EU members and institutions has ostracised has now been given centre-stage by Mr Trump, who believes the bloc was set up to “screw” the US.

Giving Mr Orban the gift of the peace summit isn’t just a reward for loyalty it will also boost the White House’s drive to take MAGA global.

It has the added advantage of “triggering the libs” in the EU and beyond.

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