Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to Vitaly Mutko, the chief executive officer of Dom.RF, not pictured, during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on Monday. (Alexander Kazakov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday his plan for a swift meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin was on hold because he doesn’t want it to be a “waste of time.” It was the latest twist in Trump’s stop-and-go effort to resolve the war in Ukraine.

The decision to hold off on the meeting in Budapest, Hungary, which Trump had announced last week, was made following a call Monday between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting,” Trump said. “I don’t want to have a waste of time — so we’ll see what happens.”

Trump’s hesitancy will likely come as a relief to European leaders, who have accused Putin of stalling for time with diplomacy while trying to gain ground on the battlefield. The leaders — including the British prime minister, French president and German chancellor — said they opposed any push to make Ukraine surrender land captured by Russian forces in return for peace, as Trump most recently has suggested.

They also plan to push forward with plans to use billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets to help fund Ukraine’s war efforts, despite some misgivings about the legality and consequences of such a step.

The U.S. and Russian presidents last met in Alaska in August, but the encounter did not advance Trump’s stalled attempts to end a war that began almost four years ago.

The Kremlin didn’t seem to be in a rush to get Trump and Putin together again either. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that “preparation is needed, serious preparation” before a meeting.

Trump suggested that decisions about the meeting would be made in the coming days.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been trying to strengthen Ukraine’s position by seeking long-range Tomahawk missiles from the U.S., although Trump has waffled on whether he would provide them.

“We need to end this war, and only pressure will lead to peace,” Zelenskyy said Tuesday in a Telegram post.

He noted that Putin returned to diplomacy and called Trump last week when it looked like Tomahawk missiles were a possibility. But “as soon as the pressure eased a little, the Russians began to try to drop diplomacy, postpone the dialogue,” Zelenskyy said.

Today, Trump will hold talks with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The official did not provide any detail about Trump’s agenda for the talks.

The military alliance has been coordinating deliveries of weapons to Ukraine, many of them purchased from the U.S. by Canada and European countries. A meeting of the Coalition of the Willing — a group of 35 countries who support Ukraine — is due to take place in London on Friday.

Trump’s stance on the war has shifted throughout the year.