The New Statesman.

Less than a week after Donald Trump announced plans to meet Vladimir Putin in Budapest,

the proposed summit has already fallen apart.

So why is the US president scupering his own efforts to negotiate peace?

I'm Katie Stallard, and this is the New Statesman podcast. I'm here with

Freddie Hayward to talk this through. Hi, Freddie. Hello. So Katie, you've written about

this summit or this summit this week. I mean, what's happening? Why is, why are we making or

seem to make some progress on the Russia-Ukraine war? Is it my suspicion is that Trump's come out of the Gaza seized by a deal.

He wants to build on that momentum and thinks that he is the deal-maker who can finally push this through.

What's happened?

I think that is probably how Trump sees it.

Here in the real world, I would say that nothing has really changed.

I think what has become clear over the past week is that Russia is still just not interested in ending the war,

is categorically uninterested in a ceasefire and seems to believe with some evidence that it can

play Trump. So if we just back up a little bit, there's a bit of a pattern that I think is

becoming evident here. So you have, you know, Trump seems preconditioned to believe the absolute

best in Vladimir Putin, but periodically

he gets fed up, he loses patience. So you had back in the summer, back in July, then Trump for

the first time saying, Putin is feeding us a lot of bullshit. Like we have all these lovely phone

conversations and I get off the phone and I say,

well, it was a great talk. And then he bombs Kiev or somewhere else. So he started seeming to

get fed up then and he set a 50 day timeline and then a 10 day timeline for Putin to agree to a ceasefire

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