Trump says he will meet with Putin in Budapest in bid to end Ukraine war

WASHINGTON — President Trump announced Thursday that high-level US and Russian officials will meet next week — and that he will talk face-to-face with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hungary to try again to end Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

Trump, 79, did not say exactly when either meeting would take place, but suggested the Budapest sitdown would happen, “within two weeks or so, pretty quick.”

The call appears to have dimmed the chances that Trump will supply Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with US-made Tomahawk missiles to strike deep inside Russia.

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Zelensky will meet with Trump Friday at the White House and had been expected to make the rockets a top priority.

“We need Tomahawks for the United States of America, too. We have a lot of them, but we need them. I mean, we — we can’t deplete for our country,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office hours after the Putin call wrapped.

“So I don’t know what we can do about that.”

Trump added that he made a “light-hearted” reference to the weapons while speaking with Putin.

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“I did actually say, ‘Would you mind if I gave a couple of thousand Tomahawks to your opposition?’ I did say that to him. I said it just that way. He didn’t like the idea. He really didn’t like the idea,” he recalled.

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“No, I said it that way. You have to be a little bit light-hearted sometimes. But no, he doesn’t want [that]. The Tomahawk is a vicious weapon. It’s a vicious, offensive, incredibly destructive weapon. Nobody wants Tomahawks shot at them.”

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It was a starkly different tone from Tuesday, when Trump jokingly said the US had so many Tomahawks that it would be willing to send some to Argentina.

Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, who would play host to the Budapest gathering, has been one of the NATO leaders most deferential to Putin throughout the three-and-a-half-year-old conflict. 

Orbán tweeted Thursday afternoon that “I just got off the phone with President @realDonaldTrump. Preparations for the USA-Russia peace summit are underway. Hungary is the island of PEACE!”

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Trump said the US would have “separate but equal” talks with Putin and Zelensky because of the “terrible relationship the two of them have.”

Trump previously felt confident that Putin, 73, was prepared to end his nearly four-year invasion of Ukraine after the men met Aug. 15 in Anchorage, Alaska. 

At that meeting, Putin agreed in principle to an international peacekeeping force, including French and British troops, that would serve as a de facto security guarantee to Kyiv — but the summit left unresolved Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede all of its eastern Donetsk province.

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Diplomatic progress after the Alaska summit also sputtered when Putin balked at Trump’s demand that he subsequently meet with Zelensky — prompting Trump to threaten increased economic pain, including tariffs and pressure on other countries to stop buying Russian oil.

Russia now controls virtually all of Ukraine’s Luhansk region and partially controls the Zaporizhia and Kherson regions, giving it a contiguous strip of territory all the way to the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow seized in 2014.

Trump urged Zelensky for months to give up Kyiv’s claims on Russian-controlled regions in exchange for peace, but the US president surprisingly pivoted on Sept. 23 by saying he had come to believe that Ukraine could reclaim its lost land up to its internationally recognized borders.