Trump says he will meet with Putin in Budapest to continue negotiations on Ukraine.

WashingtonAfter a "long" call with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump has announced that next week a US delegation led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with senior Russian officials to continue negotiations on the future of Ukraine. The US president also stated that, after this meeting, he and Putin will meet in Budapest. "President Putin and I will meet afterward at an agreed location, Budapest, Hungary, to see if we can end this 'infamous' war between Russia and Ukraine," he wrote on Truth Social. The exact dates and location have yet to be finalized.

The meeting in the Hungarian capital would mark Putin's first time in the European Union since the war began, and the choice of location is no coincidence: hanging over the Russian leader's head an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Ukraine, and although Hungary invoked the Rome Statute, it has previously violated other criminal cases. Furthermore, this move also represents a symbolic recognition by Trump of his loyal follower within the EU, the far-right leader Viktor Orbán, who is also the closest to the Kremlin within the bloc.

Trump described the call with the Russian president as "productive," using the same qualifier used by the Kremlin. In a parallel statement, Putin's special envoy, Kiril Dmitriev, described the conversation as "very productive" and emphasized that it served to clearly establish the next steps. For his part, presidential adviser Yuri Uyzakov said that the meeting "could" take place in Budapest and added that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his US counterpart, Marco Rubio, will speak by phone in the coming days to implement the agreement. According to Uyzakov, Putin and Trump have spoken on the phone at the request of the Russian president.

The call came one day before Volodymyr Zelensky's trip to Washington, where he will meet with the Republican for the third time to ask for greater support from the United States in the war at a time whenRelations with Moscow appear to have cooled. In fact, Trump has assured that tomorrow he will discuss with Zelensky "my conversation with President Putin and many other issues" and added: "I think great progress has been made today with the telephone conversation."

The threat of long-range missiles

During his visit, Zelensky is seeking to obtain US-made long-range Tomahawk missiles, which would put Moscow within his reach amid intensifying Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy systems. Trump, frustrated with the stalled talks on ending the war, recently said he could supply Kiev with such weapons if Putin doesn't agree to come to the negotiating table.

"Would you like Tomahawks flying toward them [Russia]? I don't think so. If the war doesn't stop... maybe we will, maybe we won't," Trump warned in one of his usual open threats. Be that as it may, this is the Republican's strongest warning yet about the possibility of arming Ukraine with missiles capable of being fired 2,500 kilometers away and hitting deep into Russia. The about-turn is notable considering that earlier this year, Trump suspended military and economic aid to Ukraine, as well as intelligence collaboration. All with the intention of pressuring Kiev to give in in the negotiations. Now, Trump is once again applying the same logic, but in the opposite direction: he hopes that with the threat of a possible delivery of the Tomahawks to Kiev, the Kremlin will mobilize and unblock the situation.

In fact, Zelensky is confident that the US president will "use the same instruments as in the Middle East" to pressure Moscow and that the prospect of Kiev having high-precision cruise missiles will push Putin to negotiate seriously. Since the announcement last August, when Trump assured that he was beginning to work on preparations for a future meeting between Zelensky and Putin that the talks have once again reached a standstill.

This isn't the first time the Kremlin has managed to buy time to continue the invasion at the cost of promises of strikes or minimal agreements with Trump. This already happened in the spring with the ceasefire to stop attacking energy infrastructure—which Russia quickly broke—and during the Alaska summit, where the Republican practically left empty-handed, if we understand that the objective of the meeting was to discuss the end of the war and not other business with Moscow. In the wake of the repeated conversations between the US and Russian leaders, the idea of resuming trade relations also arose. An idea that Trump mentioned again in his assessment of the call: "We have also spent a lot of time talking about trade between Russia and the United States when the war with Ukraine is over."

A few days after Trump announced this possible face-to-face meeting between the two leaders, the Kremlin was already dampening expectations. During his last visit to the White House, where Zelensky was accompanied by a delegation of European leaders in a gesture of support, the Ukrainian president went all in on the fact that Putin would never agree to sit at the same table with him. The eventual meeting between the leader of the invaded country and the aggressor country meant that Kiev would have to accept that he would have to cede some territories, which has always been a red line for the Ukrainian. On his second visit, Zelensky not only corrected his attire, but also began to understand how to approach the tycoon to stay in the game.

As a result of the cooling off with Moscow, Trump has not only spoken about the possibility of supplying long-range missiles to Ukraine, but after meeting with Zelensky at the UN, he also made a radical change and He said Kiev could recover all its borders. if he had European support. In the comment, which ended with a "good luck to everyone," Trump seemed to be backing away from the war—tired of failing to end it—and placing all the responsibility on the EU, encouraging it to spend more to continue arming Ukraine.