US President Donald Trump has said the possibility of a fruitless meeting had led him to put plans for a summit with Russia's President Vladimir Putin on hold.
"I don't want to have a wasted meeting," he told reporters on Tuesday at the White House when asked why the encounter was shelved.
"I don't want to have a waste of time, so I'll see what happens."
The US president alluded to his demand for an immediate ceasefire that would freeze the frontlines in Ukraine, saying: "I said, 'Go to the line. Go to the line of battle, the battlefield lines, and you pull back, and you go home and everybody takes some time off, because you got two countries that are killing each other, two countries are losing five to 7,000 soldiers a week.'"
Earlier on Tuesday, a White House official said plans for a second summit between Trump and Putin were put on hold after a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the official described as "productive."
On October 16, following a phone call with Putin, Trump announced plans to meet the Russian president in Budapest, Hungary, within two weeks and said Lavrov and Rubio would meet this week to iron out the details for the meeting. That sit-down was also nixed, according to the official.
The reasoning for the abrupt change was not immediately clear, but Russia has baulked at Trump's insistence on a ceasefire in Ukraine that would keep in place existing frontlines in the Kremlin's over three-and-a-half-year war.
Lavrov told reporters Tuesday that the insistence on an immediate ceasefire is contradictory to prior commitments made by the Russian and American leaders during an August summit in Alaska.
'Not made a determination'
The Russian foreign minister suggested that European officials urge their American counterparts to change their stance, seeking a temporary cessation rather than a lasting resolution.
Trump added that he has "not made a determination," but it is unclear to what he was referring.
Ukraine has requested the US provide it with Tomahawk cruise missiles to strike deep inside of Russia, while the Senate has separately readied a bill to impose a new tranche of sanctions on the Kremlin that Majority Leader John Thune said is awaiting White House approval.
The sanctions package is all but certain to rapidly clear the Senate when and if it is introduced in the chamber. It currently has 85 co-sponsors in the 100-member body.
Trump is slated to meet NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte at the White House on Wednesday.
