Europe says current front lines in Ukraine should be starting point for peace talks

2025-10-21 14:35:58, Kosova & Bota CNA

Europe says current front lines in Ukraine should be starting point for peace

European leaders said on Tuesday that the current front lines in Ukraine should be the starting point for any peace talks.

Their request comes as preparations for a meeting between United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin appear to have hit a snag.

Trump - who last week spoke by phone with Putin and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky - has said he intends to meet the Russian leader in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, within two weeks as part of efforts to end the war in Ukraine.

But preparations for the meeting between them appear to have been suspended, after a preliminary meeting between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was postponed.

This meeting was expected to be held in Budapest on Thursday.

Lavrov and Rubio spoke by phone on Monday. Lavrov's deputy, Sergei Ryabkov, said on Tuesday that it was too early to talk about the timing of any face-to-face meeting between them.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto was in Washington on Tuesday, where he wrote on Facebook: "We have some very serious days ahead."

Ukraine's European allies have expressed concern that Trump could meet Putin a second time without securing any significant concessions from the Russian leader. Putin had rejected Trump's call for a ceasefire when the latter hosted him in Alaska in August.

In a statement on Tuesday, leaders of major European powers, including Britain, France, Germany and the EU, said they "strongly support President Trump's position that the fighting must stop immediately and that the current line of contact should be the starting point for negotiations."

Ukraine and its European allies have long called for an immediate ceasefire along the current front lines before peace talks begin - a position that Trump publicly supported last Friday after meeting with Zelensky at the White House.

Moscow has said it wants Ukraine to hand over more land to it as part of several conditions Russia has set for reaching a ceasefire.

Reuters and other media outlets reported that Trump's closed-door meeting with Zelensky last week was tense, and that the US president had at times used harsh language and pressured Zelensky to accept some of Russia's demands.

However, Zelensky has presented the meeting as a success, as it ended with Trump's public support for a ceasefire on the current front lines - which is Kiev's long-standing position.

European leaders are expected to meet this week with Zelensky as their guest, first at an EU summit and then at a meeting of the "coalition of the willing" of countries that are discussing the creation of a security force to guarantee a post-war settlement in Ukraine.

Russia opposes such an international force./REL