Overview
- Russia says it remains ready to hold a Budapest summit if it is grounded in the August Alaska understandings, but no date is set and contacts continue.
- U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says any leaders’ meeting must deliver a concrete, verifiable result and assesses that Russia currently is not seeking a peaceful settlement.
- G7 foreign ministers call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and for the current line of contact to serve as the starting point for talks.
- Sergey Lavrov rejects a Financial Times report that a Russian memo derailed the summit, saying the paper misstated the sequence of events and that backchannel briefings swayed the decision.
- Corriere della Sera declined to publish Lavrov’s interview, prompting Moscow to release his responses and denounce the move as censorship.