Ahead of Zelenskyy’s White House visit, Trump says will hold second summit with Putin on Ukraine in Budapest

WASHINGTON, DC: Ahead of his meeting on Friday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House, US President Donald Trump said that his country cannot deplete its own stockpile of Tomahawk cruise missiles by supplying them to Ukraine.

Following an hour-long telephone call with Putin in which “great progress” was made, Trump said that the two leaders will meet in Hungary in the coming few weeks.

“President Putin and I will…meet in an agreed-upon location, Budapest, Hungary,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. Trump and Putin had previously met in Alaska.

Kremlin aide said that Trump proposed a meeting in Budapest and Putin “immediately supported” the idea.

The US President noted that the issue of supplying US Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine was discussed in the call. “We need Tomahawks for the US too. We have a lot of them, but we need them,” he said as cited by a report in TASS.

“I mean, we can’t deplete for our country. So, you know, they’re very vital, they’re very powerful, they’re very accurate, they’re very good, but we need them too, so I don’t know what we can do about that,” Trump was cited as saying by the Rusian state media.

Kremlin aide Ushakov told reporters that Putin had raised the issue of a possible supply of Tomahawks to Ukraine in his call with Trump on Thursday.

He stressed that Putin told Trump the Tomahawks would not change the situation on the battlefield, but would harm US-Russian relations and the chance to move forward in the peace process.

Zelensky has repeatedly asked the US to increase supplies of missiles for Patriot systems and to transfer Tomahawk missiles to Kiev. Last week, the US president has stated that before making a final decision on Tomahawk missiles, he should most likely discuss it with the Russian president.

Tomahawk missiles have a range of up to 1,500 miles, putting even Moscow easily within Ukraine’s reach.

TASS reported that the Trump-Putin call was the eighth between the two leaders since the beginning of this year.

According to Trump, top advisers of both the countries would meet next week to discuss the situation in Ukraine, with the US represented by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Kremlin aide Ushakov said that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will speak to Rubio in the coming days to start working on the summit. (ANI)