European leaders said on Monday that the current frontlines in Ukraine should be the starting point for any peace talks, amid obstacles to preparations for a summit between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, Reuters reported, quoted by BTA.
Trump, who spoke by phone with Putin last week and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said he wanted to meet with the Russian leader in the Hungarian capital Budapest within two weeks to pressure him to end the war in Ukraine. But preparations for the meeting appear to have stalled after a preliminary meeting between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, which was due to take place in Budapest on Thursday, was postponed. Lavrov and Rubio spoke by phone yesterday. Lavrov's deputy, Sergei Ryabkov, said today that it was premature to talk about dates and a timetable for a possible meeting between them.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó, who is visiting Washington today, wrote on Facebook: "Serious days are ahead of us".
Ukraine's European allies are concerned that Trump could meet Putin for a second time without getting serious concessions from the Russian leader. The Russian president rejected his US counterpart's call for a ceasefire when the two met in Alaska in August, Reuters recalls.
The leaders of European powers, including Britain, France, Germany and the EU, said in a joint statement on Tuesday that they "strongly support President Trump's position that the fighting must stop immediately and that the current line of contact (between the forces of the two sides) should be the starting point for negotiations."
Kiev and its European allies have long demanded an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine along the current front lines before peace talks begin – a position that Trump publicly adopted last Friday after meeting with Zelensky at the White House.
Moscow has said it wants Ukraine to cede more territory as one of several conditions it has set for a ceasefire.
Reuters and other news agencies reported that during Trump’s closed-door meeting with Zelensky last week, the two argued, with the U.S. president repeatedly using profanity and pressuring Zelensky to accept some Russian demands. But the Ukrainian leader declared the meeting a success, as it ended with Trump publicly supporting a ceasefire along the current front lines – a long-standing position of Kiev.
Later this week, Zelensky will visit several European capitals for talks with European leaders. First, he will attend an EU summit, then attend a meeting of the “Coalition of the Willing.” The talks will discuss sending security forces to Ukraine after the war ends. Russia has rejected the deployment of such international security forces.
The choice of Budapest within the EU to host the Putin-Trump meeting is also controversial, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is one of the few European leaders to maintain warm relations with Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Any trip to Budapest would require Putin to fly through the airspace of other EU countries. Poland said on Monday that if he flew over its territory, it could force the Russian president’s plane to land and arrest him under an arrest warrant. Bulgaria, however, said Putin could use Bulgarian airspace to reach the meeting.