Less than a week after Donald Trump announced plans to meet Vladimir Putin in Budapest, the proposed summit has already fallen apart.
The proximate cause appears to have been a phone call between the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and his US counterpart, Marco Rubio, on Tuesday (21 October), during which the former made clear that Moscow is not interested in a ceasefire in Ukraine along the current battle lines. The underlying message is equally clear: Russia has no plans to end its war on Ukraine.
Trump himself bears significant responsibility for this dismal outlook. While he has periodically signalled stronger support for Ukraine in recent months – suggesting in a social media post in September that the country could yet win back all its original territory and telling reporters on 12 October that he might supply long-range Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv – Putin has reason to doubt the US president’s commitment to a serious fight.
Instead, Trump has repeatedly telegraphed his impatience with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, at times veering into outright hostility as he has called him a “dictator” and accused him of provoking the war. During their now infamous encounter in the Oval Office in February, which must have been watched – and re-watched – with unrestrained glee inside the Kremlin, Trump berated Zelensky for “gambling with World War Three” and told him he didn’t “have the cards” before ordering him out of the White House. Their latest meeting, on 17 October, was, mercifully, not televised, but the Financial Times has reported that it, once again, descended into a “shouting match”, with Trump repeatedly cursing and, at one point, sweeping aside the maps Zelensky was trying to show him of the current front line.
By contrast, the US president has demonstrated a remarkable propensity to see the very best in Putin, with whom he has long claimed to have a “great relationship”. Even after their summit in Alaska in August, which was reportedly cut short after Putin rejected the US proposal for a ceasefire and lectured him on the medieval history of Ukraine, Trump was overheard, 72 hours later, insisting that the Russian leader “wants to make a deal for me” on Ukraine.
Trump has occasionally seemed to weary of Putin’s intransigence. Back in July, for instance, he acknowledged that his Russian counterpart was feeding him “a lot of bullshit.” As he recounted their conversations, “I always hang up and say, well that was a nice phone call, and then missiles are launched into Kyiv or some other city… and after that happens three or four times, you say, ‘the talk doesn’t mean anything.’”
Yet he has consistently failed to follow through on his threats to get tough on Putin. On 15 July, Trump warned that Russia would face “very severe” economic consequences if the Kremlin did not agree to a peace deal within 50 days. On 29 July, he shortened that deadline to 10 days. But just as it was about to expire, he announced that they had agreed to hold a high-profile summit in Alaska instead and the threatened consequences failed to materialise. (Trump did impose so-called “secondary” tariffs on India over its continued purchase of Russian oil.) Heading into that summit, Trump was convinced that they needed to agree to a rapid ceasefire, and he was “not going to be happy if it’s not today.” But after just three hours in a room with the Russian president, he explained that he no longer saw the need for “a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which oftentimes do not hold up,” and they would work towards a comprehensive peace agreement instead.
Putin presumably sees the pattern here, along with Trump’s marked susceptibility to flattery. After their most recent phone call on 16 October, for instance, when they supposedly agreed to meet in Budapest, Trump noted that Putin had congratulated him “on the Great Accomplishment of Peace in the Middle East,” which he said, “has been dreamed of for centuries.” He then insisted his “Success in the Middle East will help in our negotiation in attaining an end to the War with Russia/Ukraine.”
Alas, in the real world, the lesson that Putin is likely taking from Trump’s second term so far is that there are no ultimatums from this White House that cannot be eased by another charming phone call, or perhaps, if the need arises, another statesmanlike meeting face-to-face. With no new US sanctions, no prospect of new US military aid packages for Ukraine, and a US president with little interest in this war and a demonstrably short attention span, Putin has no real impetus to reconsider his initial assumption that he can outlast western unity and press ahead with his original objective in this war: the subjugation of Ukraine.
In fact, the collapse of the promised Budapest summit will likely be greeted with relief in Kyiv and many other European capitals. The war grinds on, and Ukraine is ever more dependent on European backing now that the US cannot be relied upon, but this is preferable to Putin getting another opportunity to put his case to Trump in person and Zelensky being strong-armed into another bad agreement in the Hungarian capital. (The Budapest Memorandum signed by Russia, the US, the UK and Ukraine in 1994 promised to respect the country’s territorial integrity and vowed that none of the signatories would ever use force against Ukraine.)
The most optimistic scenario for Ukraine is that Putin’s overconfidence, buoyed by his apparent ability to manipulate Trump, will cause him to overplay his hand, as he has done, repeatedly, since the start of this war. By sticking to his maximalist demands and refusing any prospect of a ceasefire, perhaps, eventually, the message will get through to the White House that Putin was never seriously interested in peace. The diplomatic counter-offensive from Europe is already underway to persuade Trump that Putin has been playing him all along, and perhaps, ever so delicately, to suggest that by repeatedly letting his Russian counterpart off the hook, the American president is undermining his own fitful efforts to negotiate peace.
[Further reading: Give Donald Trump the credit]
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