Donald Trump cancelled a summit with Vladimir Putin after the Russian leader sent a memo with longstanding maximalist demands and refused to hold negotiations with Ukraine, according to a report.
US President Donald Trump cancelled a summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin over his maximalist demands and refusal to negotiate, according to a report.
The Financial Times has reported that Russia sent a memo to the United States that listed Putin’s terms to end the war. These terms were what Putin and his aides have long referred to as ‘root causes’, a euphemism for demands essentially call for Ukraine’s surrender of sovereignty and nationhood.
After the Trump administration received the memo, Secretary of Marco Rubio had a tense call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Following their call, Rubio told Trump that Russia did not have any willingness to negotiate, according to FT.
After assessing that Putin did not wish to negotiate and wanted to press his longstanding maximalist demands, Trump cancelled the summit in Hungary that he had previously announced after a call with the Russian leader, the report stated.
Following the cancellation of the summit, Trump had said that he did not go ahead with it because he did not want to have a “wasted” meeting with Putin.
While Trump has called for a ceasefire on current battle lines as a starting point of negotiations, Putin has continued to stress that Ukraine must surrender the entire Donbas region in the country’s east and make a host of other concessions that would mean the end of its nationhood.
This is a developing story.
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