Zelenskyy open to joining Putin, Trump at Hungary summit, rejects ‘another Budapest scenario’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he would be ready to join Russian President Vladimir Putin and US counterpart Donald Trump at their summit in Hungary if he is invited.
Trump and Putin said they would meet in the Hungarian capital, possibly in a matter of weeks, as the US leader continues to try to broker a peace deal to end the three-and-a-half-year war.
“If I am invited to Budapest — if it is an invitation in a format where we meet as three or, as it’s called, shuttle diplomacy, President Trump meets with Putin and President Trump meets with me — then in one format or another, we will agree,” Zelenskyy told reporters in remarks released on Monday.
Kyiv has previously said it is ready to join a three-way meeting between Zelenskyy, Putin and Trump in a number of neutral countries, including Turkey, Switzerland and the Vatican.
“Another ‘Budapest’ scenario wouldn’t be positive either,” Zelenskyy said, referring to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Moscow pledged security assurances to Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in exchange for their surrender of Soviet-era nuclear weapons.
