By Kristen Holmes, Jennifer Hansler, Kylie Atwood

(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s hopes for a quick meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin have stalled out, with an administration official telling CNN on Tuesday there were “no plans” for a summit between the two “in the immediate future.”

The change in posture comes after Trump said the leaders would meet “within two weeks or so, pretty quick” following a Thursday phone call. Now, it appears, that timeline is unlikely.

Trump also said the US and Russia had “agreed that there will be a meeting of our High Level Advisors, next week,” and officials had expected Secretary of State Marco Rubio would meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, to lay the groundwork for the Trump-Putin summit. But multiple officials told CNN that diplomatic engagement, too, was no longer happening — at least for the time being — and one source said Rubio and Lavrov had divergent expectations about a possible end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rubio and Lavrov spoke by phone Monday.

“Secretary Rubio and Foreign Minister Lavrov had a productive call. Therefore, an additional in-person meeting between the Secretary and Foreign Minister is not necessary, and there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future,” the administration official said Tuesday.

Although the US described the call as “productive,” a source familiar with the matter told CNN that officials felt afterward that the Russian position had not evolved enough beyond its maximalist stance, and there was a sense that Rubio was not likely to recommend moving forward on a Putin-Trump meeting next week. The source said Monday that Rubio and Lavrov could speak again this week.

On Tuesday, Lavrov rejected the notion of freezing the conflict — a stan put forward by Trump after a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week and backed by Kyiv and Europe as part of negotiations toward an end to the war.

The Kremlin had previously sought to tamp down expectations of a rapid Trump-Putin summit, saying after the US president first announced it that it “may happen within two weeks or a bit later.” It added at the time that talks between Rubio and Lavrov would mark the first step toward organizing the Russia-US summit in Budapest, Hungary.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that the summit cannot be postponed, because no date was ever set.

“You cannot postpone what has not been scheduled,” he told reporters.

The White House stressed Trump was still committed to brokering peace in Ukraine.

“President Trump has consistently worked towards finding a peaceful and diplomatic resolution to end this senseless war and to stop the killing,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told CNN. “He has courageously engaged parties on all sides and will do everything in his power to achieve peace.”

For his part, Zelensky asserted that Russia “became less interested in diplomacy” after the United States declined to provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles, at least for now.

“As soon as the issue of long-range capabilities became a little further away for us — for Ukraine — Russia almost automatically became less interested in diplomacy,” Zelensky said Tuesday in his daily address. “This is a signal that this very issue — the issue of long-range capabilities — may be the indispensable key to peace.”

“The greater Ukraine’s long-range capabilities,” Zelensky added, “the greater Russia’s willingness to end the war.”

Even before revealing there were no immediate plans for Trump and Putin to meet, the Trump administration had come to believe that a big stand-alone meeting between Rubio and Lavrov was not essential to set the table for a summit. That is largely because Lavrov is not empowered to meaningfully move the process along, a senior administration official said.

The administration views calls between the two aides as effective to get a sense of where the Russian side is on certain topics, but it does not believe a big meeting between the two would be useful, the source said.

A European diplomat described Lavrov as someone who is “100% loyal to Putin but who’s never in the room when real important decisions are being taken.”

“To negotiate with Lavrov is somewhat a diversion while the important discussions are only with Putin himself,” the diplomat said.

Still, the conversations about setting up a meeting between the two diplomats remains fluid, a senior administration official said, adding that it is possible they meet on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders organized by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, which is set to take place next week in Malaysia.

In Rubio and Lavrov’s Monday phone call, they discussed “next steps” to follow up on the call between their two presidents last week about a possible end to the conflict in Ukraine, according to a brief US State Department readout. Rubio “emphasized the importance of upcoming engagements as an opportunity for Moscow and Washington to collaborate on advancing a durable resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war, in line with President Trump’s vision,” according to the readout.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, described the call as a “constructive discussion” that dealt with “possible concrete steps to implement the understandings” Trump and Putin reached during their conversation.

It has been more than two months since Trump held his last in-person summit with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska. The nearly three-hour meeting ended without a deal as both leaders touted progress.

Trump has since publicly called for Kyiv and Moscow to “stop the war immediately.”

“You go by the battle line, wherever it is. Otherwise, it’s too complicated. You’ll never be able to figure it out. You stop at the battle line,” Trump told reporters Saturday.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

The-CNN-Wire
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