The White House responded to requests for information about Trump’s upcoming summit with Putin in Budapest in typical fashion—with a string of childish insults.
Trump announced plans to meet with Putin over the next few weeks, with talks set to be held in the same city where Russia once signed an agreement promising it would never invade Ukraine.
One expert from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for a New American Security said few people would consider Budapest neutral.
But when asked who chose to hold the meeting in Budapest, a location with great historical significance to both Russia and Ukraine, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt simply told HuffPost, “Your mom did.”
Her playground-level response was echoed by White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, who also responded to the query with a curt, “Your mom.”
Trump’s announcement came during a press conference on Thursday evening, ahead of a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Friday.
“We’re gonna be meeting in Hungary, Viktor Orban is going to be hosting, and it’s going to be really something,” Trump said of the summit, which will be the first time he and Putin will have met face-to-face since peace talks in Alaska back in August failed to produce any meaningful results.
When asked whether the president is aware of the significance of Budapest in terms of Russia-Ukraine relations, analyst Jim Townsend of the Center for a New American Security told HuffPost, “I’m sure Trump doesn’t know and doesn’t care.”
“Trump likes Orban and probably thinks he’s doing him a solid,” he added. “Also, Putin is an Orban friend. Most of the world would not consider Budapest neutral ground for such a meeting, but I guess Trump and Putin do.”
Orbán, a right-wing autocrat, has borrowed heavily from both Trump and Putin’s playbooks to dismantle much of Hungary’s democracy.
Since the start of the war, Orbán has used his position to delay military aid to Ukraine and act as a prominent pro-Russian voice in European politics.
In April, Hungary voted to withdraw from the International Criminal Court, meaning they are no longer required to uphold the arrest warrant issued for Putin in 2023 over his abduction of Ukrainian children.
Although the exact agenda of the meeting is not yet known, the catalyst appears to be the U.S. decision to supply Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles, which would allow Kyiv to strike targets deep within Russia on an unprecedented scale.
In a press briefing, Putin’s foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, said the Russian president had directly raised the matter of providing Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine with Trump.
“Vladimir Putin reiterated his point that Tomahawks would not change the situation on the battlefield but would cause significant harm to relations between our countries, not to mention the prospects for peaceful settlement,” Ushakov told reporters at the Kremlin.
Zelensky, meanwhile, taunted the Russians, writing on Telegram that “We can already see that Moscow is rushing to resume dialogue as soon as it hears about Tomahawks.”
Elsewhere during the press briefing, Trump once again expressed confusion that Zelensky has a poor relationship with Putin, who has repeatedly announced intentions to annex and ethnically cleanse all of Ukraine.
“I mean, we have a problem. They don’t get along too well, those two,” he told reporters. “This is a—this is a terrible relationship the two of them have, and it’s one of those things.”
Signed in 1994, the Budapest Memorandum bound the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and provide it with security assurances, contingent upon its dismantling of the vast nuclear arsenal it inherited after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Russia first violated the agreement when it annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014, and again when it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for further comment.
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