By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
If there was any trepidation in the White House over the
prospect that a second face-to-face meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir
Putin would turn out to be as unproductive as the first, it looks like the
administration doesn’t have to worry about it. A proposed bilateral summit
between the two presidents in Budapest seems to be on hold.
Late last week, Trump revealed that he and Putin had
“agreed that there will be a meeting” as soon as this week, but on Monday, the
Kremlin scuttled a preparatory meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio
and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. Moscow subsequently informed the
White House that the timing of a potential second Trump-Putin summit would have
to remain up in the air for now. The Russians
are dragging their feet, and why wouldn’t they? Putin already got what he
wanted from Trump: an indefinite pause on the provision of
Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine.
The Putin call amounted to a rushed and, apparently,
successful effort to preemptively complicate last Friday’s sit-down meeting
between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Kyiv’s
representatives hoped to secure American Tomahawks.
A four-bylined item in the Financial Times paints a grim
portrait of the proceedings. The meeting reportedly devolved into a “shouting
match” in which Trump was described as “cursing all the time” while insisting
that Russia would “destroy” Ukraine unless Zelensky surrendered unconquered
territory to Moscow.
Trump was said to have “tossed aside maps of the front
line in Ukraine.” He put an ultimatum to Zelensky, demanding Kyiv abandon
highly defensible parts of the Donbas that Russia could not take by force
throughout eleven years of war. When Zelensky balked, as he has consistently,
with the understanding that the concession amounts to giving Russia a
springboard from which it can launch new offensives deep into Ukraine, Trump
took American long-range cruise missiles off the table.
“According to a European official with knowledge of the
meeting, Trump said to Zelenskyy that Putin had told him the conflict was a
‘special operation, not even a war,’” the FT reported, contributing to
the impression that Trump is still willing to not only “endorse Putin’s
maximalist demands” but ratify his alternative version of reality.
The Financial Times’s account of the meeting was
dismal — perhaps too dismal. As one European Union diplomat told Politico, the meeting was actually “not as bleak as
reported.” Indeed, two GOP foreign policy hands conveyed their impression that
the “meeting was a dud for the Ukrainians rather than a disaster.” They said
that there was “no swearing” from Trump. “Trump did not toss any war maps,”
another source said. “He just said he was tired of different maps.” Trump’s
reluctance to provide Ukraine with long-range cruise missiles was framed as
temporary and possibly ephemeral. And, when Zelensky again refused to hand over
fortified positions in the Donbas to Russia, Trump was said to have backed off
the demand — settling instead on another attempt to establish a ceasefire “on
the current line” of contact between the opposing forces.
On the facts of the meeting, these two reports do not
diverge substantially. Rather, they present a conflicting account of the tone
of the meeting and the relative emotional pique of its participants. All told,
despite all the drama of the Zelensky meeting and the Putin phone call, we can
deduce that what happened last week was nothing at all.
That seems to have come as a surprise to congressional
Republicans who, for now, seem content to follow the president’s circuitous
lead.
Just five days ago, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) announced that
his conference would move forward with long-delayed legislative sanctions
targeting Moscow. “I think we need to move,” the senator said pointedly on the
news that Putin had reopened his line to the president. Thune even dismissed
the notion that Trump should bless the effort, telling reporters that their
maneuver might not observe “perfect timing.” It was nevertheless imperative to
impose additional pressure on Putin in the “next 30 days.”
So much for that. “Thune says he’s talked to [Senator
Lindsey] Graham about timing and Republicans hitting ‘pause button’ on it for
now,” Politico’s Burgess
Everett reported. Graham is “working with the White
House trying to determine whether or not that meeting that happens in a couple
of weeks will be a fruitful one and will help move the process forward,” Thune
confessed. Everett inferred from the remark that Thune’s Republican conference was still
queasy about getting ahead of the president’s diplomatic initiatives. Even if
some Republicans are willing to buck Trump, there aren’t enough of them to get
a sanctions bill to the floor without the president’s explicit imprimatur.
Trump’s reluctance to menace Putin with sticks as well as
to tempt him with carrots now stands in stark relief against the conditions he
engineered into existence in the Middle East. Trump spent last week basking in
global affection for what he himself described as his willingness not only to
back Israel’s defensive initiatives to the hilt but also to execute his own
offensive operations against Iran. He still maintains that “we” — by which he has said he means Israel with
America’s unqualified support — will disarm Hamas by any means necessary,
including those which are “fast, furious, and brutal.”
It seemed that Trump had internalized the notion that the
application of military force against a committed opponent can create the
conditions in which previously unforeseeable diplomatic initiatives gain
equally unexpected traction.
That record bears little resemblance to the president’s
approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Trump evinces no consistency when it comes
to that conflict. He vacillates wildly between defiance and servility, a stance that seems contingent on which party to
the conflict he’s more annoyed with at any given moment. Trump is unmoved by
Ukraine’s tactical genius — an improvisatory martial acumen that is arguably rivaled only by Israel’s. He conspicuously
withholds from Zelensky the “we” that he is willing to grant Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Whereas Trump did appear to view Jerusalem’s fight
against Iran’s proxy forces as a war against America’s enemies, too, the
president just does not view Putin’s Kremlin in those terms.
Trump helped secure something that looks a lot like
victory in the Middle East because he got the sequence of events right. As we
put it in our editorial on the matter: “defeat
Israel’s enemies first and make peace with them second.” But when it comes to
Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine, Trump is sticking with Joe Biden’s failed
formula for peace — a formula predicated on the faulty notion that genuine
victory in war, at least this war, is impossible. Putin doesn’t see it that
way, nor does Zelensky. Unless Trump revises that approach, the peace he seems
to genuinely desire will prove frustratingly elusive.
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