Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán celebrated the announcement that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will meet in Budapest to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.
“The planned meeting between the American and Russian presidents is great news for the peace-loving people of the world,” Orbán said in a post on X on Thursday. “We are ready!”
Trump said he and Putin had held a lengthy phone call earlier in the day, in which “great progress was made,” and that the two leaders had agreed to meet in the Hungarian capital.
Putin is in favor of a meeting, Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said, according to state-controlled news agency Interfax.
“President Trump was the first to mention Budapest, and our president immediately supported the idea of holding a possible summit in this European capital,” Ushakov said.
The Budapest summit would follow an initial round of meetings between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian counterparts next week at a location to be determined, the U.S. president said.
The call with Putin came ahead of Trump’s scheduled White House meeting on Friday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has said he hopes to convince Washington to provide Tomahawk missiles and other weapons systems that would enable Ukraine to attack deeper into Russia.
Zelenskyy posted on X late Thursday that he had arrived stateside, and while not referring directly to the proposed Trump-Putin meeting observed that “We can already see that Moscow is rushing to resume dialogue as soon as it hears about Tomahawks.”
Ian Garner, an expert on Russia at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw, cautioned that Trump’s recent outreach to Putin may prove as fruitless as an Aug. 15 summit the U.S. leader held with his Russian counterpart in Alaska. At that meeting Trump rolled out the red carpet to Putin, breaking the Russian leader’s international isolation, but walked away with no major concessions from Moscow.
“We’re back where we were in the summer, where the interest in peace from Trump is driven by a desire for spectacle,” Garner said. “What we don’t see is any indication that Trump has, in any way, reflected on the shortcomings of the meeting in Alaska in the summer, which ultimately didn’t seem to change Russia’s behavior. “There’s [also] no indication that Trump is considering the role of European allies in any of the discussions or peace negotiations. So it’s very hard to see this becoming the great peace deal he thinks it will be.”
This story has been updated. Gabriel Gavin contributed reporting.
The post ‘We are ready’: Orbán hails planned Trump-Putin meeting in Budapest appeared first on Politico.
