Don’t free up your calendar just yet.

Moscow on Tuesday moved to cool expectations of a long-awaited face-to-face summit between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, despite much excitement following U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House meetings with top European leaders on Monday.

Trump has been enthusiastically touting the idea of a trilateral summit featuring himself, Putin and Zelenskyy as the best route to end the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine. But Russia signaled it was in no rush to get there.

During an interview with state-controlled TV channel Rossiya-24 on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow does not refuse talks with Ukraine — but, crucially, insisted any summit would have to be prepared “step by step, gradually, starting from the expert level and then going through all the necessary stages.”

Russia’s calibrated language follows a familiar pattern: agree in principle, stall in practice. A similar dynamic played out in May, when Putin suggested a Russian meeting with Zelenskyy for peace talks, only to send a second-tier delegation instead.

This time, Trump put Putin directly on the spot, placing a call to the Kremlin leader while European leaders and Zelenskyy were still in the White House. “At the conclusion of the meetings, I called President Putin, and began the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelensky,” Trump said.

“I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me,” Trump was overheard saying on a hot mic to French President Emmanuel Macron, before sitting down for the multilateral meeting with Zelenskyy and the other European leaders.

The Russians, however, were more reticent about the content of the Trump-Putin call.

“Putin and Trump discussed the idea of raising the level of direct Russian-Ukrainian negotiations,” said Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, adding that both presidents “spoke in favor of continuing direct negotiations between the delegations of the Russian Federation and Ukraine.”

But Trump’s call to Putin was enough to fuel speculation that a breakthrough on talks might be close. “We are ready,” Zelenskyy told reporters at the White House, adding that plans for a summit would be “formalized in some way in the next week or 10 days.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio welcomed Putin’s supposed verbal openness to talks, telling Fox News: “Just the fact that Putin is saying, ‘sure, I’ll meet with Zelenskyy’ — that’s a big deal.”

Still, the top diplomat also played down expectations. “We’re not there yet, but that’s what we’re aiming towards and that’s one of the things that was discussed today, is how to get to that point,” he said.

During his meeting with Trump in Alaska last Friday, Putin said the “root causes” of the Ukraine conflict need to be addressed in order to achieve a lasting peace, signaling once again that the Kremlin leader hasn’t backtracked on his war goals.

Those ambitions include an expansive list of demands that Russia has not been able to achieve during the war, such as Ukraine becoming a neutral state, giving up additional land in the eastern part of the country, drastically reducing its military, and abandoning its aspiration to join NATO.

According to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump and Putin had agreed on the phone to a meeting “within the next two weeks.” But even he was cautious, “We don’t know whether the Russian president will have the courage to attend such a summit. Therefore, persuasion is needed.”

“The next 15 days are absolutely critical for us to finalize the work with the Americans and give these security guarantees substance,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with French broadcaster LCI, which was published Tuesday.

Putin’s eventual decision to participate or not in the trilateral, Macron argued, would “clear up ambiguities” and show whether he was serious about peace.

But for now, Moscow’s message remains clear: Don’t hold your breath. Russia is willing to talk about talks, but not to commit to a summit.