Now Trump won’t meet with Putin on Ukraine, White House official says
Written by ABC Audio ALL RIGHTS RESERVED on October 21, 2025
(WASHINGTON) — There are no plans for President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet “in the immediate future,” a White House official said on Tuesday — calling off a summit that was expected in Hungary in the coming weeks.
Trump announced on Thursday that he and Putin planned to meet again, and predicted it would occur “within two weeks or so.”
First, he said, discussions would take place among senior advisers on both sides.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, held a phone call on Monday. It’s not expected the two will meet in person at this point.
“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 potential in person meeting between Trump and Putin. The Kremlin said there was never a date set for a summit.
“You can’t postpone what was not scheduled,” a Putin spokesman said.
Meanwhile, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte will be in Washington on Wednesday for a meeting with Trump, according to a NATO news release. A White House official confirmed the meeting.
The two will discuss the war in Ukraine ahead of a meeting of the Coalition of the Willing in London on Friday, a NATO spokesperson said.
Trump, on the heels of a diplomatic achievement in the Middle East, renewed his efforts to bring the Russia-Ukraine conflict to an end as Moscow’s invasion drags on 3 1/2 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 make his case for coveted U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles and other military assets. Zelenskyy said on 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 whether he would be invited to join the now-called off sitdown between Trump and Putin in Budapest.
Trump has called for the Russia-Ukraine war to end along its current battle lines, and denied a report from the Financial Times that he insisted Zelenskyy surrender the entire Donbas region to Russia.
On Monday, Trump softened his previous comments when he said he believed Ukraine could win back all its territory currently occupied by Russia.
“Well they could,” 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 they — 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 side-tabled for now comes just hours after Russia’s top diplomat signaled that the U.S. and Russia are still very far apart with regards to how to end the war with Ukraine.
“Now, Washington is saying that we need to 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 American administration clearly understood when Donald Trump came to power,” Lavrov said.
ABC News’ Chris Boccia, Michelle Stoddart and Alexandra Hutzler contributed to this report.
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