The United States has cancelled a planned Budapest summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin following Russia's firm stance on hardline demands regarding Ukraine, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
The decision came after a tense call between the two countries' top diplomats, the Financial Times said.
Reuters could not immediately verify the FT report.
However, the Kremlin later commented that only official statements from Russia's Foreign Ministry and the US State Department should be followed, not media reports.
Trump says no meeting with Putin until deal can be reached
President Donald Trump said on Saturday he does not plan to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin until he thinks a deal is in place to secure peace between Russia and Ukraine.
"You have to know that we're going to make a deal, I'm not going to be wasting my time," Trump told reporters in Doha.
Earlier this month, Trump claimed that he cancelled the summit in Budapest.
“It just... it didn’t feel right to me,” Trump said. “It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get. So I canceled it.”
Last week, in what the Kremlin has viewed as a dramatic shift, Trump announced sanctions on two Russian oil companies. “I just felt it was time,” he stated.
Moscow then sent senior Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev to attempt to "continue the US–Russia dialogue," according to a statement from him.
"Any attempts to put pressure on Russia are simply pointless," Dmitriev said, adding that some forces were trying to disrupt the dialogue between Moscow and Washington.
"We confirm that a solution to the Ukrainian conflict is possible only if the root causes of this conflict are eradicated," Dmitriev said.
Moscow then blamed Kyiv for the impasse in peace talks.
"We are currently unable to assess the prospects of resuming the negotiation process, because we have repeatedly stated that the current pause is caused by the Kiev regime's unwillingness to continue the negotiation process, " said Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed back on Moscow's assertions and stated that Kyiv was ready for peace talks, just not ones that would require it to cede land.
"It's absolutely clear that we're approaching diplomacy only from the position where we currently stand. We will not take any steps back and leave one part of our state or another," Zelensky said.
"And the important result is that the American side finally made this a public signal: President Trump came out with such a message."
Corinne Baum contributed to this report.