The Kremlin denied Tuesday that it was holding up President Donald Trump’s latest push to end the war in Ukraine, and insisted it had not changed its demands ahead of possible talks.
Trump had announced that Russia and the United States’ top diplomats would meet this week, with his own summit with Vladimir Putin to follow in Budapest, Hungary.
Russian officials have now said there was no date set for either meeting.
“We cannot postpone what has not been agreed upon,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Russia’s TASS state news agency early Tuesday.
He was responding to a CNN report that the meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had been put on hold indefinitely.
Ryabkov said there had been no clear agreement on when or where such a meeting might take place.
“Everything is in progress, internal work is ongoing. As new information becomes available, we will keep you informed,” he told state media journalists.
The White House did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov echoed Ryabkov’s comments when talking about the Trump-Putin summit in Budapest.
“You can’t postpone something that hasn’t been agreed upon,” Peskov said in his daily briefing.
“You heard statements from both the American side and our side that this may take time. Therefore, no precise timeframe was initially set,” he said.
Rubio and Lavrov held a call Monday where they discussed the “next steps” in preparing a summit between the two presidents, according to the State Department.
“Marco Rubio and I discussed the current situation and how we could prepare a mutually agreed framework for the next meeting between the presidents of Russia and the United States,” Lavrov said in a news conference on Tuesday.
“The key point is not the venue or timing, but how we will proceed substantively on the tasks that were agreed upon and on which broad understanding was reached in Anchorage,” he said, referring to Trump and Putin’s meeting in Alaska in August.
“We agreed to continue these telephone contacts to better assess where we currently stand and how to move forward in the right direction,” he added.
Lavrov emphasized that the country’s position remains consistent with understandings reached between Putin and Trump during the Anchorage talks.
“Those understandings are based on the agreement achieved at that time, which President Trump very succinctly formulated when he said that what is needed is a long-term, sustainable peace, not an immediate ceasefire that would lead nowhere,” he said.
On Sunday, after both a call last week with Putin and then a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Washington, Trump said he supported the immediate halt to fighting as called for by Kyiv and its European allies.
For now both sides should “stop at the battle line — go home, stop fighting, stop killing people,” he told reporters on board Air Force One. “They can negotiate something later on down the line,” he said.
Leaders of European nations, including Britain, France, Germany, Ukraine, and the European Union issued a joint statement Tuesday supporting Trump’s efforts to end the fighting, and suggesting that Russia appeared unwilling to pursue a peace agreement at this stage.
“We strongly support President Trump’s position that the fighting should stop immediately, and that the current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations,” said the statement, published by the British government.
“We must ramp up the pressure on Russia’s economy and its defense industry, until Putin is ready to make peace,” it said.
In an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” taped Friday, Zelenskyy urged Trump to get tougher with Putin and said he was ready to join their summit in Budapest.
Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, was in Washington on Tuesday. He posted on Facebook: “We have some serious days ahead.”
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