The American president Donald Trump is again aimed at ending the conflict in Ukraineannouncing a new meeting with its Russian counterpart Vladimir Putinafter the “fiasco” of the first summit in Alaska.

Trump characterized the decision, announced after more than two hours of talks with Putin on Thursday, as a plan to bring peace to a conflict he once claimed would be resolved within a day. However, the Bloomberg agency comments that this decision also eases the pressure put on Putin in recent weeks by Trump, who expressed his frustration with the Russian leader’s delay in ending the war.

Trump’s phone conversation with Putin took place before meeting scheduled for today with the president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump had taken an increasingly warm stance toward Zelensky in recent weeks as he increasingly expressed his frustration with Putin, a stark shift from his cooler attitude toward the Ukrainian leader earlier in his tenure, including a public rebuke in the Oval Office earlier this year.

Even more troubling for Zelensky is that Trump wavered Thursday on both the possibility of sending long-range Tomahawk missiles and the Senate’s push for tough sanctions against Russia.

“We need Tomahawks for the U.S., too,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “So I don’t know what we can do about it.” As for sanctions, he said the Republican push for tough new measures “may not be the ideal time, but it could happen in a week or two.”

Both Ukraine and Russia are trying to take advantage of Trump’s momentum after the Gaza summit that ended hostilities between Hamas and Israel — albeit with opposite ends. Zelensky believes Trump’s growing frustration with Putin could lead him to apply pressure that the White House has so far refused to apply. Zelensky will today again make calls for air defense and weapons supplies, along with the coveted Tomahawks.

However, Trump has yet to sign their mission to Ukraine, and Putin, in a phone conversation with Trump, warned the US president that doing so “would cause significant damage to relations between our countries as well as the prospects for a peaceful solution,” according to a Kremlin statement.

Sergei Radchenko, a Cold War historian and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said it was “almost gut-wrenching” for Trump to agree to another meeting, given that the Alaska summit in August failed to produce any agreement despite all the fuss it generated. What is needed, he said, is to combine pressure with communication. “I see a lot of attempts at dialogue,” Radchenko said. “I don’t see peak pressure yet.”

Instead, the US president appears to be relying on incentives to bring Putin to the negotiating table. Trump noted that the two leaders discussed at length the prospects for trade after the end of the war. According to the Kremlin, Trump stressed that the economic opportunities will be “enormous.”

With plans for lower-level dialogue and an eventual leaders’ summit, “Putin is effectively buying time by delaying the delivery of much-needed US weapons to Ukraine and the implementation of Trump’s promised energy sanctions,” according to Maria Snegovaya, senior researcher on Russia and Eurasia at the Center for International and Strategic Studies’ Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program Studies.

The venue of the planned summit between Trump and Putin — Budapest — is also likely to be viewed with skepticism by European allies as an attempt by the Russian leader to drive a wedge between the US and Europe. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has come under fire from his European Union and NATO allies for maintaining close ties with Russia, even after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Orban strongly opposes EU sanctions against Moscow and arms deliveries to Ukraine while it has a long-term contract to supply natural gas from Russia.

Trump has ordered Europe to cut off all energy supplies from Russia as a condition for the US to take tough measures against Russia. However, after the European Union drastically reduced its purchases of Russian oil and gas since the start of the Ukraine war, Hungary is one of the few countries in the bloc that continues to depend on Russian imports.

Despite tensions in Europe, Trump has long considered Orban a close ally on the international stage, part of a small group of foreign leaders who support the MAGA movement. Therefore, the American president may consider Budapest friendly ground for holding a summit with his Russian counterpart.

The Hungarian leader said in a post on X that preparations for the “US-Russia peace summit” are underway, adding that “Hungary is the island of PEACE!”

For Trump, holding a second summit with Putin carries significant risk if the White House does not have a plan to impose sanctions on Russia, according to Celeste Wallander, deputy senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a senior Pentagon official who was involved in Russia and Europe during the Biden administration. If the summit ends without an acceptable deal, it will “once again allow Putin to use the opportunity to send a message to the world that he is in control of the situation,” he said.