Mr. Trump canceled the summit with Mr. Putin
US President Donald Trump has just announced the cancellation of the planned summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest (Hungary), because he believes the negotiations are "not appropriate" at this stage.
According to RT, Mr. Trump made the above announcement during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the White House on October 22 (US time). He said that the planned summit in Hungary "feels inappropriate."
“I felt we weren’t going to get where we needed to be, so I canceled it,” Mr. Trump said.
However, President Trump did not rule out the possibility of holding talks with Moscow at a later date. "But we will do it [the summit] in the future," he added, however, without specifying a specific time or location for such a meeting.
Mr Trump's statement came shortly after the US Treasury Department announced additional sanctions against Russia, citing Moscow's "lack of serious commitment to a peace process". The sanctions target two of Russia's largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, and their subsidiaries.
However, the US president admitted he was unsure whether the new sanctions would change Russia's stance on the Ukraine conflict.
"Hopefully he [Putin] will be reasonable, and hopefully [Ukrainian President] Zelensky will be reasonable," Mr. Trump said, adding: "It has to be both sides."
Plans for the Putin-Trump summit were first announced last week after a phone call between the two leaders, although a specific date has not been set.
Earlier, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Russia-US meeting needed to be "seriously prepared", emphasizing that a summit between the two leaders "should not be wasted", because both presidents "are used to working for results".
