DONALD TRUMP HAS no immediate plans to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, days after the US president said they would meet within two weeks in the Hungarian capital of Budapest.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke by telephone yesterday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, after Trump said that the two top diplomats would be meeting this week to arrange a Budapest summit.

“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,” a Trump administration official said on condition of anonymity.

The official nonetheless called the call between Rubio and Lavrov “productive.”

The Kremlin also said there was no “precise timeframe” for a summit between Trump and Putin.

Trump later said: “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.”

The Russian leader spoke by telephone on Thursday with Trump, who met the following day with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss providing US-made Tomahawk missiles that could penetrate deep into Russia.

Trump hailed the call with Putin as progress and quickly posted on social media that they would meet within weeks. 

It marked the latest abrupt shift by Trump, who in August welcomed Putin to Alaska – his first time on Western soil since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Trump has acknowledged his frustrations with Putin after long boasting that he could end the war within a day of returning to the White House due to his personal chemistry with the Russian leader.

- © AFP 2025