Two senior Russian officials will travel to Saudi Arabia to meet their counterparts from the United States to discuss ending the Ukraine war, the Kremlin has confirmed.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov, a foreign policy adviser to President Vladimir Putin, will fly to Riyadh on Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
The duo is expected to meet US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to prepare for peace talks on Ukraine.
“Also it will be dedicated to possible negotiations on a Ukrainian resolution and organising a meeting between the two presidents,” Peskov said.
The Kremlin spokesman also said the meeting will focus on “restoring the whole complex of Russian-American relations”, the Reuters news agency reported.
Russia’s sovereign wealth fund chief Kirill Dmitriev is reported to be set to join the meetings, and US National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff are also due in Riyadh.
Rubio said on Sunday that Tuesday’s meeting would seek to open a broader conversation that “would include Ukraine and would involve the end of the war”.
“A process towards peace is not a one-meeting thing,” he told the US television network CBS.
Alarm
As the talks in Riyadh were confirmed, European leaders were due to meet in Paris to discuss their response to Washington’s shocking policy shift on Ukraine, which has seen Kyiv and its European allies sidelined.
Trump has announced that he intends to talk “peace in Ukraine” directly with Putin, who unleashed a full-scale invasion of his neighbour three years ago. US officials confirmed over the weekend that they do not expect Europe to be involved.
That has sparked alarm that the US president could hand concessions to Russia and Europe’s security architecture and its defence partnership with the US could be weakened.
Peskov suggested that Moscow is happy with Trump’s approach, stating that discussions on European participation in talks on a settlement in Ukraine would be premature.
Before the informal summit in France, Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares said European leaders will discuss how to prevent a peace negotiation ending up rewarding Russian aggression.
“A war of aggression cannot be rewarded. We cannot encourage others to launch wars of aggression,” he said in an interview with the radio station Onda Cero. “Today I’m convinced Putin will keep attacking and bombing Ukraine, so I do not see peace on the horizon at the moment.”
High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas last week warned Trump against “any deal behind” the backs of Ukraine or Europe and accused him of “appeasement”.
