

By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
The Russian state news agency Tass has announced the Budapest summit meeting between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump is off for the time being after receiving a call to its Washington bureau from a source it identified as “a US administration official”.
“The US administration has no plans to organize President Donald Trump’s meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the immediate future, a US administration official told TASS, adding that there are no plans for an in-person meeting between the countries’ top diplomat either. ‘[US] Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio and [Russian] Foreign Minister [Sergei] Lavrov had a productive call. Therefore, an additional in-person meeting between the Secretary and Foreign Minister is not necessary, and there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future,’ he said.”
Tass had reported earlier in the day Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as cautioning: “We have the presidents’ understanding [that the summit will take place.] But you cannot postpone what hasn’t been announced.”
Trump is uncharacteristically silent about what had just happened – and not happened. During the day he made no mention of Russia and Putin in a Rose Garden press conference; he did not refer to the summit meeting in a tweet. This is the first time in Trump’s second term that he has cancelled one of his major peacemaking initiatives in silence.
At the end of the afternoon Trump was asked “Do you know what happened there? And does that affect your decision whether or not to send Tomahawks to –“. “No, no,” he replied. “I, I don’t want to have a wasted meeting. I don’t want to have a waste of time. So, I’ll see what happens. But we did all of these great deals, great peace deals. They were all peace deals, agreements, solid agreements, every one of them but this one. And I said go to the line, go to the line of battle, the battlefield lines and you pull back and you go home and everybody takes some time off, because you’ve got two countries that are killing each other. Two countries that are losing 5,000 to 7,000 soldiers a week. So, we’ll see what happens. We haven’t made a determination [on despatch of Tomahawks].”
Reuters reported “a senior White House official told Reuters ‘there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future’, The US propaganda organ claimed the reason was that “Moscow’s rejection of an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine cast a cloud over attempts at negotiations.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte will brief Trump at the White House on Wednesday, October 22, Reuters added. “Two senior European diplomats said the postponement of the Rubio-Lavrov meeting was a sign the Americans would be reluctant to go ahead with a Trump-Putin summit unless Moscow yields its demands.”
The Financial Times reported an unnamed White House official as telling the newspaper what had already been communicated to Tass an hour before.
A meeting of European leaders, with Vladimir Zelensky attending, will follow in London on Friday, October 24.
Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin negotiator for US business deals, has attempted to sound hopeful in a post on his Twitter account. “Media is twisting comment about the ‘immediate future’ to undercut the upcoming Summit. Preparations continue.”
Listen to the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid explaining the reasons for the failure of the Trump summit initiative, accompanied by threats of military and sanctions escalation. Also revealed are the surprises for Washington from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
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