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The top diplomats from Russia and the U.S. met Tuesday in Saudi Arabia for about four hours to discuss improving ties and negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, in talks that represented a rapid and major change in American foreign policy under U.S. President Donald Trump.
President Vladimir Putin’s foreign affairs advisor, Yuri Ushakov, who attended the talks in Riyadh alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, told Russia’s Channel One that no date has been set yet for a meeting between Putin and Trump. He said the meeting was “unlikely” to take place next week.
“The delegations of the two countries need to work closely together. We are ready for this, but it is still difficult to talk about a specific date for the meeting of the two leaders,” Ushakov said.
The meeting came after Trump last week revealed a phone call he had with Putin, abruptly ending a three-year, U.S.-led effort to isolate the Russian leader over Ukraine.
The two countries agreed on Tuesday to address “irritants” to the U.S.-Russia relationship and begin working on a path to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, the State Department said, making clear the effort was in its early stages.
“One phone call followed by one meeting is not sufficient to establish enduring peace,” department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said.
NATO invite rankles Kremlin
The meeting marked the most extensive contact between the U.S. and Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
No Ukrainian officials were present at the meeting attended by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other senior American and Russian officials.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country won’t accept any outcome from this week’s talks if Kyiv doesn’t take part. European allies have also expressed concerns they are being sidelined.
Kyiv’s participation in such talks was a bedrock of U.S. policy under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, whose administration also led international efforts to isolate Russia over the war. White House officials have also pushed back against the notion that Europe has been left out of the conversation, noting that administration officials have spoken to several leaders.
After suffering early setbacks, Russia gradually regained the initiative in combat, unleashing a series of offensives across the 1,000-kilometre front line in slow but steady gains throughout 2024. It controls about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, which it took in 2014.
Putin has demanded that Ukraine withdraw its troops from the four regions that Russia has seized but never fully controlled, renounce its bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and protect the rights of Russian speakers.
Even while the Riyadh meeting was underway, Russia signalled a hardening of its demands.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters in Moscow it was “not enough” for NATO not to admit Ukraine as a member. She said the alliance must go further by disavowing a promise it made at a summit in Bucharest in 2008 that Kyiv would join at a future, unspecified, date.
“Otherwise, this problem will continue to poison the atmosphere on the European continent,” she said. There was no immediate response from NATO members, including the United States.
Trump envoy meets with EU leader
Kyiv’s absence at Tuesday’s talks has rankled many Ukrainians, and France called an emergency meeting of European Union countries and the U.K. on Monday to discuss the war.
“We seek a strong and lasting peace in Ukraine,” Macron wrote on social media platform X. “To achieve this, Russia must end its aggression, and this must be accompanied by strong and credible security guarantees for the Ukrainians,” he said.
European leaders met Monday in Paris for emergency talks about the ongoing Ukraine war as the U.S. forges ahead on peace talks with Russia.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Trump’s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg on Tuesday that Europe wants to work with the U.S. in talks aimed at ending the Ukraine war, according to her office.
“Financially and militarily, Europe has brought more to the table than anyone else,” she said in a post on the X social media platform after meeting Kellogg in Brussels. “And we will step up.”
Von der Leyen’s office said in a statement that during the meeting she had “reiterated that any resolution must respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity, backed by strong security guarantees.”
She also outlined Europe’s plans “to scale up defence production and spending, reinforcing both European and Ukrainian military capabilities,” her office said.
Multiple world leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reacted with skepticism over U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to broker an end to the war through discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, Russia continued to pummel Ukraine with drones, according to Kyiv’s military. The Ukrainian air force said Russian troops launched a barrage of 176 drones at Ukraine overnight, most of which were destroyed or disabled by jamming.
One Russian drone struck a residential building in Dolynska in the Kirovohrad region, wounding a mother and her two children and prompting an evacuation of 38 apartments, the regional administration reported. Four more residential buildings were damaged by drone debris in the Cherkasy region of Ukraine, according to local officials.