By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
The Russian state news agency Tass has announced the Budapest summit meeting between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump is off for the time being after receiving a call to its Washington bureau from a source it identified as “a US administration official”.
“The US administration has no plans to organize President Donald Trump’s meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the immediate future, a US administration official told TASS, adding that there are no plans for an in-person meeting between the countries’ top diplomat either. ‘[US] Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio and [Russian] Foreign Minister [Sergei] 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,’ he said.”
Tass had reported earlier in the day Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as cautioning: “We have the presidents’ understanding [that the summit will take place.] But you cannot postpone what hasn’t been announced.”
Trump is uncharacteristically silent about what had just happened – and not happened. During the day he made no mention of Russia and Putin in a Rose Garden press conference; he did not refer to the summit meeting in a tweet. This is the first time in Trump’s second term that he has cancelled one of his major peacemaking initiatives in silence.
At the end of the afternoon Trump was asked “Do you know what happened there? And does that affect your decision whether or not to send Tomahawks to –“. “No, no,” he replied. “I, I don’t want to have a wasted meeting. I don’t want to have a waste of time. So, I’ll see what happens. But we did all of these great deals, great peace deals. They were all peace deals, agreements, solid agreements, every one of them but this one. And I said go to the line, go to the line of battle, the battlefield lines and you pull back and you go home and everybody takes some time off, because you’ve got two countries that are killing each other. Two countries that are losing 5,000 to 7,000 soldiers a week. So, we’ll see what happens. We haven’t made a determination [on despatch of Tomahawks].”
Reuters reported “a senior White House official told Reuters ‘there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future’, The US propaganda organ claimed the reason was that “Moscow’s rejection of an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine cast a cloud over attempts at negotiations.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte will brief Trump at the White House on Wednesday, October 22, Reuters added. “Two senior European diplomats said the postponement of the Rubio-Lavrov meeting was a sign the Americans would be reluctant to go ahead with a Trump-Putin summit unless Moscow yields its demands.”
The Financial Times reported an unnamed White House official as telling the newspaper what had already been communicated to Tass an hour before.
A meeting of European leaders, with Vladimir Zelensky attending, will follow in London on Friday, October 24.
Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin negotiator for US business deals, has attempted to sound hopeful in a post on his Twitter account. “Media is twisting comment about the ‘immediate future’ to undercut the upcoming Summit. Preparations continue.”
Listen to the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid explaining the reasons for the failure of the Trump summit initiative, accompanied by threats of military and sanctions escalation. Also revealed are the surprises for Washington from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Before the White House withdrew, Russian Foreign Ministry officials were flashing early warning signs. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters: “What has not been agreed cannot be postponed. We do not confirm what some Western sources wrote yesterday. We never had any understanding as to when and where such contact could take place. It exists as an idea, certainly, all this is essential.”
“It requires preparation exactly because the significance of this event is very high. And we are working on it. The minister’s phone conversation with the Secretary of State yesterday was dedicated to it…It is still too early to speak about any schedule of a meeting between Lavrov and Rubio…The phone conversation between [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin and [U.S.] President [Donald] Trump last week included the issue of subsequent steps, among other topics. One of the aspects of such steps is of course Foreign Minister Lavrov’s contact with Secretary of State Rubio. This contact took place yesterday [October 20]…We are now working on what the Minister and the Secretary of State discussed, but the issue of a meeting was not raised in any specific way either before the phone conversation or during the phone conversation yesterday. It exists as an idea, but it is premature to speak about its schedule. And, once again, any contact of such significance ought to be prepared properly; it requires carefully completing the ‘homework’ phase. This is what we are doing now.”
Ryabkov was followed by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who told the press on Tuesday morning: “With Secretary Rubio, we reviewed the current state of affairs and explored how to finalise the broadly agreed-upon framework for another meeting, which the US President proposed should be held in Budapest. Naturally, the focus is not on the location – though the venue does matter in this context, given the commotion stirred by those who oppose the European Union as an association of sovereign states and prefer all decisions to be made by its Brussels bureaucracy. The key issue, however, remains not the place or the timing, but how we advance on the substantive tasks agreed upon – those which garnered broad consensus in Anchorage. We agreed to continue these telephone consultations to better assess where we stand and determine the right way forward. I wish to officially confirm that Russia has not altered its positions from the understandings achieved during the extensive negotiations between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Alaska.”
“These understandings are grounded in the agreements reached at the time, which President Trump succinctly summarised when he stated that what is needed is a long-term, sustainable peace – not an immediate ceasefire that would lead nowhere. We remain fully committed to this formula, as I reiterated yesterday in my conversation with Secretary Rubio. Now, voices from Washington suggest that we must halt immediately, cease all further discussion, and let history judge. But stopping now would mean ignoring the root causes of this conflict – causes clearly understood and articulated by the US administration.”
Lavrov rejected calls for Russia to accept an immediate ceasefire, which had included Trump himself. “We think,” the President had said in flight on his aircraft on October 19, “that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines. You have a battle line right now and the rest is very tough to negotiate. If you’re going to say you take this, we take that, you know, there’s so many different permutations. So what I say is they should stop right now at the battle lines, go home, stop killing people and be done.”
Such a “truce”, Lavrov said, “would not only allow for the rearmament of the Kiev regime but also encourage its terrorist activities – strikes on civilian infrastructure, attacks on civilians on Russian soil, sabotage operations like the Nord Stream bombings. The Polish government continues to provoke Vladimir Zelensky and his team into pursuing such actions…Let me reiterate: an immediate ceasefire, suddenly back on the agenda, as opposed to addressing the root causes of the conflict, would mean only one thing – that a vast portion of Ukraine remains under Nazi rule.” https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/2054623/
CORRECTION OF ERROR ON NATO SPENDING TOTALS: In the podcast I made a calculation mistake in reporting NATO spending on defence. The 2024 expenditure is $1.55 trillion which is estimated at 2.2% of the GDP of the alliance member states. At the Trump-dictated target spending level for the alliance of 5% of GDP, that amount would rise to $3.52 trillion. Accordingly, the difference between current and target spending – so long as the war against Russia continues — would amount to $1.97 trillion.
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