President Trump needs to know he won’t be “wasting his time” before he commits to another in-person summit with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, he told reporters Saturday.
“We’re going to have to know that we’re going to make a deal,” Trump said aboard Air Force One.
“I’m not going to be wasting my time. I’ve always had a great relationship with [Putin], but this has been very disappointing.”
Trump said he thought he would’ve been able to broker a deal between Russia and Ukraine “long before [attaining] peace in the Middle East — referencing his 20-point peace plan that Israel and Hamas agreed to on Sept. 29.
“I thought [the Hamas-Israel cease-fire deal] would have been more difficult than Russia and Ukraine, but it didn’t work out that way,” he added.
Trump announced earlier this week that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would lead a high-level US delegation to in-person talks with their Russian counterparts following a call with Putin.
Those discussions were meant to set the stage for a face-to-face between Trump and Putin in Budapest, Hungary. But both sides walked away from the planned meeting after Moscow rejected Trump’s demand to stop the war in Ukraine along the current battle lines.
The cancellation followed a Monday call between Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which a source familiar with the conversation said demonstrated the Kremlin’s unwillingness to commit to Trump’s strategy for peace.
In front of the world, Trump and Putin first met in Alaska in an August summit that failed to yield a cease-fire or peace agreement.
The US, meanwhile, is hammering out a deal with Ukraine to supply the war-torn country with Patriot interceptor missiles, a critical need for Ukrainian cities’ air defense systems.
The Trump administration also hit Russia’s two biggest oil companies with sanctions on Wednesday — looking to slow the industry bankrolling Putin’s war machine.
Approaching its fourth winter, Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine erupted in February 2022.
“There’s a lot of hatred between the two, between [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and Putin,” Trump told the press corps.
“There’s tremendous hatred.”
