By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
The trick to making Budapest goulash is in the paprika – too little, and it’s just another meat-and-veg stew; too much, and it will burn the tongue, trigger heartburn, cause flatulence.
Sources in Moscow in a position to know believe that President Vladimir Putin convinced President Donald Trump on the telephone last week of three things. The first is that they can strike terms for a settlement of the Ukraine war by the time they meet in Budapest. The second is that Budapest can be a peace agreement for which Putin will nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. The third is that if Trump won’t agree on terms and escalates with more weapons, more Americans on the ground, and more sanctions, he will lose the war, lose the lives of the Americans, and be forced into his very own Saigon 1975 and Kabul 2021 – that’s to say, MALA, Make America Lose Again.
“It’s going to happen now,” the Russian sources say. When Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meets Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a few days’ time, the sources expect “there will be a deal from the Russian side.”
The catch, they also say, is that Putin can make his deal concessions so attractive that Trump is bound to agree, but at least three of his decision-makers may not. The Russian sources believe they are Vice President JD Vance, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, and White House advisor Stephen Miller. Others include the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge Colby. Together, the sources believe, they can be persuaded that the peace will in fact be a temporary pause in their all-fronts war against Russia. The sources say the temporariness of the peace and the pause in combat operations are also what the Russian General Staff will accept. No heartburn, no flatulence in the war rooms of Moscow and Washington; big relief in Russian business circles for the anticipated stop to sanctions enforcement, with snap back.
“We’ll be talking about what took place yesterday with my phone call with President Putin,” Trump said at beginning of his business lunch with Vladimir Zelensky on Friday. “And I think that things are coming along pretty well. It began with Alaska where I think certain guidelines were discussed and we want to see if we can get this done. This was long ago into the Biden administration. I came here and we inherited this and we’d like to see if we could finish it, end it. We want it ended.”
A reporter asked Trump: “What if Mr. President — or President Putin doesn’t agree to peace in Hungary? What do you do then? Do you have –.” “Well, let’s see what happens,” Trump replied. “I mean, you know, what if? I think he will. I think that President Putin wants to end the war, or I wouldn’t be talking this way. I think he wants to end the war. I spoke to him yesterday [October 16] for 2.5 hours. We went through a lot of details; he wants to get it ended.”
Trump went on to offer Putin a concession – he will refuse to supply long-range Tomahawk missiles through NATO to be fired at Russian targets from the Ukraine. If Putin refuses, Trump repeated his confidence that cut-off of Indian oil purchases will follow. “India is not going to be buying Russian oil anymore…India will not be buying oil from Russia. And they’ve already de-escalated and they’ve, more or less, stopped. They’re pulling back. They bought about 38 percent of the oil and they won’t be doing it anymore.”
About his communication with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Trump had said the day before, on October 15: “we were not happy with him buying oil from Russia because that let’s Russia continue on with this ridiculous war where they’ve lost a million and a half people…So I was not happy that India was buying oil, and he assured me today [October 15] that they will not be buying oil from Russia. Modi is a great man. He loves Trump. Now I don’t know if the word love — I don’t want you to take that any different. I don’t want to destroy his political career, OK…my friend has been there now for a long time, and he is — and he’s assured me, there will be no oil purchased from Russia. I don’t know, maybe that’s a breaking story. Can I say that, would you say? There will be no oil. He’s not buying his oil from Russia. It started — you know, you can’t do it immediately. It’s a little bit of a process, but the process is going to be over-with soon. And all we want from President Putin is stop this — stop killing Ukrainians and stop killing Russians because he’s killing a lot of Russians.”
Modi has not responded. Instead, the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi announced: “India is a significant importer of oil and gas. It has been our consistent priority to safeguard the interests of the Indian consumer in a volatile energy scenario. Our import policies are guided entirely by this objective.” This was followed by a statement by the Ministry spokesman that “as per my information, there was no phone conversation between PM Modi and President Trump yesterday [October 15].”
This was neither confirmation nor denial of Trump’s claim of what Modi had communicated.
An Indian source in Delhi says the communication of the intention to cut Russian oil purchases did come from Modi to Trump, but by messenger, not by telephone. The source claims Trump was told by the Minister of State for External Affairs, Kirti Vardhan Singh, when he represented Modi at the Sheikh el-Sheikh Gaza pact conference, and met there with Trump on October 13.
Source: https://ddnews.gov.in/
For a detailed Indian review of the issue, including a statement by the Russian Ambassador to India, Denis Alipov, click to watch this. Alipov is at Minute 9:50: “The policy of the Indian Government,” he told the press in Delhi, “first of all represents the Indian people, the interests of the national economy, and those goals do not contradict the Russia-India relations.”
Russian sources acknowledge that a cut-off of oil sales to India is a fresh concern ahead of Putin’s planned visit to Delhi on December 6. There’s another catch, the sources warn.
In his last word shortly after the Zelensky meeting, Trump reverted to the demand for immediate ceasefire on the line of contact which was repeated at the White House by Zelensky on Friday. That had been the demand of German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz when he was at the White House with other European leaders on August 19, four days after the Anchorage summit. “We all would like to see a ceasefire [at] the latest from the next meeting on,” Merz said, repeating the word as if Trump were hard of hearing. “I can’t imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire. So, let’s work on that and let’s try to put pressure on Russia because the credibility of these efforts — these efforts we are undertaking today are depending on at least a ceasefire from the beginning of the serious negotiations from next step on. So, I would like to emphasize this aspect and would like to see a ceasefire from the next meeting, which should be a trilateral meeting wherever it takes place.”
In the Oval Office on August 19, 2025 front left to right: President Trump, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Chancellor Friedrich Merz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH0TOSx-OsE
Ceasefire before negotiations and ceasefire in place have been rejected by the Russian negotiators, including Putin.
Trump has not used the term for weeks until last Friday evening, when he landed in Florida to spend the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago home. “Stop right now at the battle line,” the President told reporters. “I told that to President Zelensky. I told it to President Putin.”
What exactly Trump had told Zelensky earlier in the day, after the press left the Cabinet Room, has been reported by the Financial Times on Sunday evening in a version dictated in Kiev through “European officials briefed on the meeting”, “a European official with knowledge of the meeting”, and “three other European officials briefed on the White House discussions”.
In their retelling, “the meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents descended many times into a ‘shouting match’, with Trump ‘cursing all the time’, people familiar with the matter said. They added that the US president tossed aside maps of the frontline in Ukraine, insisted Zelenskyy surrender the entire Donbas region to Putin, and repeatedly echoed talking points the Russian leader had made in their call a day earlier. Though Ukraine ultimately managed to swing Trump back to endorsing a freeze of the current front lines, the acrimonious meeting appeared to reflect the capricious nature of Trump’s position on the war and his willingness to endorse Putin’s maximalist demands.”
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/7960c6aa-dbfa-4a55-91e8-ae44601842ec
“During Friday’s meeting, Trump appeared to have adopted many of Putin’s talking points verbatim, even when they contradicted his own recent statements about Russia’s weaknesses, said European officials briefed on the meeting. According to a European official with knowledge of the meeting, Trump told Zelenskyy that the Ukrainian leader needed to cut a deal or face destruction. The official said that Trump told Zelenskyy he was losing the war, warning: ‘If [Putin] wants it, he will destroy you.’ At one point in the meeting, the US president threw Ukraine’s maps of the battlefield to one side, the official familiar with the encounter said.”
In Zelensky’s version of what Trump said had been discussed during the telephone call between Trump and Putin the day before, “Putin made a new offer to Trump on Thursday under which Ukraine would surrender the parts of the eastern Donbas region under its control in exchange for some small areas of the two southern frontline regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. The Russian proposal marks a small concession from that made during Putin’s last meeting with Trump in Alaska in August, where he said he would agree to freeze the line of contact elsewhere on the frontline if Ukraine surrendered the Donbas… ceding the remainder of the Donbas still under Ukrainian control would be a non-starter for Ukraine… Trump’s belligerent repetition of Putin’s rhetoric on Friday dashed hopes among many of Ukraine’s European allies that he could be convinced to increase support to Kyiv.”
In Moscow on Sunday morning, a source was predicting: “Let’s wait and see what Europeans do — that will tell us what happened in the room [White House] and what will happen in the Lavrov- Rubio meeting.”
The report from the Financial Times, a Japanese-owned London outlet which has been a long-time propagandist for the wars against Russia, China, and India, followed ten hours later. “The White House and the Ukrainian president’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment,” the newspaper has added.
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