The second U.S.-Russian summit was agreed to by presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin by telephone on October 16. But after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on October 20 ahead of the planned summit in Budapest, the meeting was canceled. On October 22, Trump signed off on new sanctions against Russia—something he had avoided doing since returning to the White House—and just a few days later, Trump and Putin were threatening each other with new weapons and nuclear tests.
Lavrov’s approach—and its failure—are typical of Russian wartime diplomacy. A similar, albeit smaller-scale, failure occurred in Italy at around the same time. When part of Rome’s medieval Conti Tower collapsed, killing one person, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova prompted outrage in Italy by linking the incident to Italy having sent aid to Ukraine and suggesting that all of Italy would soon collapse for the same reason.
When Italy’s foreign minister summoned the Russian ambassador for an explanation, the embassy sent one of its much lower-ranking consuls to the meeting in a flagrant violation of diplomatic etiquette. Then, when the Italians criticized the Russian diplomats’ clear efforts to ingratiate themselves with their Kremlin bosses, the Russian side accused Italy of Russophobia.
Lavrov essentially performed the same trick at a higher level when he spoke with Rubio. Trump had ended his call with Putin under the impression that the latter was prepared to end hostilities, most likely because the Russian leader emphasized that Russia was seeking to “end the war as soon as possible”—without ruining their chat by actually specifying any conditions. It was surely this misunderstanding that motivated Trump to propose the Budapest summit.
Lavrov was tasked with preparing the meeting, and with informing Rubio of the terms under which Russia intended to “end the war as soon as possible.” In other words, Lavrov faced the unenviable mission of ensuring that the incompatibility of their positions did not become apparent at the summit. To achieve that, he was forced to produce a list of Russian demands—and to do so in the manner that has become typical of Russian diplomats amid the war, where the most prized skill is the ability to put Western interlocutors in their place, express indignation, threaten, and invent offensive names for Ukraine and other opponents.
Having been briefed on Russia’s ideas about Ukraine’s “Nazi regime,” the ancient root causes of the conflict, constitutional territories, referendums, and indeed everything except a willingness to cease hostilities, Rubio and Trump concluded that it was too early to meet with Putin.
Blame Game
On October 21—the day after the unsuccessful conversation with Rubio—Lavrov made some exceptionally frank comments on Ukraine. An immediate ceasefire, he explained at length, would mean that “a vast portion of Ukraine remains under Nazi rule.” This clearly implies that to stop the fighting, more of Ukraine would have to be conquered or the leadership in Kyiv would have to change.
Just like Zakharova in the Italian tower scandal, Lavrov and the Foreign Ministry portrayed the reaction to their own words and actions as unprovoked aggression. Other propagandists took up Lavrov’s argument that Trump, swayed by the Europeans, had reversed his approach and abandoned his promises made at the Alaska summit with Putin to end the war by addressing its root causes. However, what the Russian side saw as avoiding putting the blame on Trump, Washington viewed as an attempt to accuse him of being unable to negotiate and reneging on his words.
Trump’s response was his October 22 executive order imposing harsh sanctions on Russian oil companies and his October 23 announcement canceling the summit.
Lavrov’s excessive frankness about the reasons for the war’s continuation and his attempt to shift the blame to Trump smack of an attempt to publicly respond to private accusations from Putin of having let Trump slip away.
Lavrov’s mission, however, was impossible. After all, the people who really manipulated Trump were not the Europeans, but the Russian negotiators in Alaska—led by Putin himself. They managed to convince the U.S. president and his inexperienced team that a long-term peace that eliminated the causes of the war would be far better, but they concealed the fact that by “eliminating the causes” they meant either continuing the war until victory, or Trump handing that victory over to them diplomatically on a platter, along with Zelensky’s head.
As a result, Trump stopped insisting on a ceasefire and agreed to negotiations without ending the fighting. In return, he got neither a ceasefire nor negotiations.
After Alaska, however, Moscow began publicly attributing its own position to Trump, presenting it as a shared stance agreed upon at the summit. Ahead of the next summit, Russia’s demands were sent as a written memorandum to the White House, presented as a record of and follow-up to the Alaska meeting. Faced with such blatant manipulation, Trump simply returned to his original idea of a ceasefire.
Going Nuclear
The summit’s cancelation immediately triggered a military escalation. Three working days later, footage was released of Putin holding a meeting in the bunker from which the war against Ukraine is being directed—at which two successful tests of a nuclear-powered wonder weapon were discussed. The date for the successful test was supposedly October 21: the very day it had become clear that Lavrov had failed to reach an agreement with Rubio.
Whether by accident or design, Trump apparently understood this as being about the testing of new nuclear weapons, rather than nuclear-powered weapons, and on October 30, he ordered the resumption of U.S. tests of nuclear weapons, saying “with others doing testing, I think it’s appropriate that we do also.”
“Others” could hardly refer to anyone other than Russia, since the other established nuclear powers, including Russia itself, haven’t done any tests since the 1990s. Even North Korea hasn’t conducted a test since 2017.
Ever since the failure of the Ukrainian blitzkrieg, Russia has been pursuing two related strategies. The first is to try to marginalize the war and return to normalcy on new terms. The second is to complement the attack on Ukraine with a new Cuban Missile Crisis—to make the West so scared for itself that it would hand over Ukraine to Russia and come to an agreement over everything else at the same time. When the blitzkrieg failed, Russia began to climb the ladder of nuclear escalation, testing and regularly referring to its nuclear-powered Burevestnik and Poseidon systems.
It has announced and then deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus, changed its nuclear doctrine to remove the provision for the use of nuclear weapons only in retaliation, and promoted and justified the possibility of a first strike both in Ukraine and beyond.
But now it is Trump who has leapt onto the next level of nuclear escalation, which Moscow had been holding in reserve: nuclear testing.
At a Security Council meeting on November 5, State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin brought up the U.S. testing and proposed resuming nuclear testing. Asked by Putin to explain Russia’s response, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov turned to the tried and tested model used by the Foreign Ministry over the Italian tower and so many times before that over the war Russia itself started: i.e., of justifying earlier actions by the subsequent reaction to them. This dialectic of preemptive response prevailed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and in all subsequent Russian actions.
America, Belousov explained, is aggressively rearming and testing new systems, and putting them into service. Accordingly, in response to Trump’s provocative statements, Russia has long been prepared for its own nuclear tests, which could be launched any day now. Belousov proposed “beginning preparations for full-scale nuclear tests immediately”—i.e., without even waiting for the United States to conduct its own tests.
A Failed Gamble
For Russia, Trump’s escalation up the nuclear ladder looked like it could be exactly the kind of crisis the Kremlin had been waiting for that would allow everything to be resolved. But the day after the Russian Security Council meeting, Trump reaffirmed his own order to begin nuclear testing. Realizing that its U.S. adversary was once again failing to extend a hand of friendship, the Kremlin began to fear it had gone too far, and extended one of its own. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained that there was no immediate prospect of testing; rather it was the subject of long-term consideration. The Kremlin reiterated its readiness to unilaterally adhere to the restrictions of New START, the strategic arms limitation treaty that expires in February 2026, for another year, and even to a moratorium on nuclear testing.
The failure of the Budapest summit is not Lavrov’s fault, but the inevitable result of the Russian system of artificially creating a foreign policy crisis and resolving it on its own terms to achieve a desired outcome. When one such crisis proves insufficient to intimidate the enemy and make it possible to dictate terms, a new one is needed—and the greater the crisis, the greater the result. This thinking is exactly how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, and what led to the hybrid harassment of NATO countries in 2025.
This strategy has run into two unexpected obstacles. First, it is being used no less provocatively by Trump himself, through trade wars and tariff negotiations, territorial claims to Denmark and Canada, threats against Panama and Venezuela, military action against Iran, and threats of nuclear testing.
The second obstacle is that despite all the tragedies of the Ukraine war, after almost four years, it has been localized and has ceased to be the crisis that would force the West to renegotiate with Russia on new terms that would reverse the results of the Cold War. Europe and the United States are keeping Ukraine from losing, but they are also keeping enough distance to prevent Putin’s war from becoming a trap for themselves.
In looking for someone to blame for losing Trump, Putin is overlooking himself. He was the one who refused to end the war on the practically victorious terms Trump proposed in the spring of 2025. Russian diplomacy is doing a decent job of facilitating the pivot to the East and, at a symbolic level, successfully replacing Western politicians with those of the Global South. But it cannot ensure Russia a strategic outcome within the parameters set by the Kremlin—without a military victory in Ukraine or without teetering right on the brink of world war.
It turns out that diplomacy focused on the domestic consumption of a belligerent leader is not fit for purpose. The Kremlin demands that diplomats successfully mislead and dictate terms, but such diplomacy is not sustainable. Instead, it fully corresponds to the domestic myth that Russia wins on the battlefield but loses in negotiations and in the media. When negotiations are required to achieve a military result, their failure and the collapse of the entire system into the logic of force are entirely expected, since they themselves are rooted in it.
