No confirmation from Kremlin that meeting will go ahead; Trump suggests US air power might enforce security guarantee. What we know on day 1,274
The Russian leadership continued to obfuscate on Wednesday, after European leaders and Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin had agreed to a one-on-one meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy to kickstart peace talks. Sergei Lavrov said Moscow did not reject any format for Ukraine peace talks but the Russian foreign minister appeared to apply the brakes, saying any leaders’ meeting “must be prepared with utmost thoroughness”. On Tuesday, a Kremlin aide said only that Putin was open to the “idea” of “raising the level of representatives of the Ukrainian and Russian sides” at a future meeting.
The White House also announced that Viktor Orbán, the pro-Putin Hungarian prime minister, and Trump had discussed the possibility of talks being held in Budapest. As with the Kremlin, there was no apparent confirmation of this conversation from the Hungarian side. A war crimes warrant could oblige Hungarian authorities to arrest a visiting Putin, but Hungary is withdrawing from the international criminal court. Orbán explicitly committing to play host could place further unwanted pressure on the Russian ruler from one of his few allies to accept the meeting as an inevitability.
