Earlier, Trump had said he would probably meet with Putin at a G20 summit in Argentina over the weekend.
US President Donald Trump on Thursday said he was canceling a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin scheduled to take place during the upcoming summit for the Group of 20 industrialized nations in Argentina, citing the current Ukraine crisis.
"Based on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia, I have decided it would be best for all parties concerned to cancel my previously scheduled meeting in Argentina with President Vladimir Putin. I look forward to a meaningful Summit again as soon as this situation is resolved!" Trump tweeted after departing for the G20 summit.
Earlier, Trump had said he would probably meet with Putin at a G20 summit in Argentina over the weekend, despite having expressed displeasure with Russian actions against Ukraine.
"I probably will be meeting with President Putin," he told reporters as he left Washington to fly to Buenos Aires. "They would like to have it. I think it's a very good time to have the meeting," Trump said.
He said he would get a final report during the flight on the tension in the region after Russia seized Ukrainian vessels near Crimea on Sunday.
Relations between Washington and Moscow became the most strained since the end of the Cold War during the administration of President Barack Obama who imposed sanctions for Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko accused Putin of wanting to annex his entire country and called for NATO to deploy warships to a sea shared by the two nations.
Poroshenko's comments to German media were part of a concerted push by Kiev to gain Western support for more sanctions against Moscow, securing tangible Western military help, and rallying opposition to a Russian gas pipeline that threatens to deprive Ukraine of important transit revenues.
His Western allies have so far not offered to provide any of these things, despite his warnings of a possible Russian invasion after Moscow seized three Ukrainian naval ships and their crews on Sunday near Crimea.
Moscow and Kiev blame each other for the incident, which took place in the narrow Kerch Strait off Crimea, the Ukrainian region annexed by Russia in 2014.
"Don't believe Putin's lies," Poroshenko told Bild, Germany's biggest-selling paper, comparing Russia's protestations of innocence in the affair to Moscow's 2014 denial that it had soldiers in Crimea even as they moved to annex it.
Putin has accused Poroshenko of manufacturing the crisis to boost his flagging ratings ahead of next year's elections in Ukraine.
Volodymyr Omelyan, Ukraine's infrastructure minister, said on Thursday Russia had imposed a de facto blockade on two Ukrainian ports on the Sea of Azov by barring ships from leaving and entering the sea via the Kerch Strait.
The Kremlin denied it was restricting shipping, saying it had not heard of any problems. If there were any delays they were due to bad weather rather than politics, it said.
(With Reuters inputs)
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