US and Russia meet to discuss Ukraine without Ukrainian or European participation

Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine “on day one” of his new term in office. Obviously, it was one of his many unfulfilled hyperbolic promises, but the U.S. president has now got down to business. After his phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, diplomatic delegations from the United States and Russia were meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, without representatives from either Ukraine or the European Union. The meeting, attended by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, will serve to test the waters and see on what terms an end to the conflict is feasible. At the same time, it will be a step towards a meeting between Trump and Putin themselves, which the American president on Sunday said he hopes will take place “very soon.”

In addition to Rubio, the U.S. delegation in Saudi Arabia is led by the special envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and the National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz. The Russian delegation is headed by Lavrov, the architect of Putin’s foreign policy, and by the veteran diplomat Yuri Ushakov, a foreign policy adviser to the president and former ambassador to Washington between 1998 and 2008.

The exclusion of representatives from Kyiv and Brussels has raised mistrust about the content of the negotiations. Under former President Joe Biden, the United States was the main supporter of Ukraine’s resistance against the Russian invasion, which is about to hit the three-year mark. Both Ukraine and its European allies fear that Trump will endorse concessions to Putin that are unacceptable to them.

French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of European leaders in Paris on Monday to coordinate a common position for peace negotiations in Ukraine and strengthen the defense policy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, expressed his rejection of any agreement to which he is not a party. “Ukraine will not accept it. Ukraine knew nothing about this and believes that any negotiation on Ukraine without Ukraine will not yield results,” he said from Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates. “We cannot recognize anything or any agreement about us without us. We will not recognize such agreements,” he added.

In any event, Tuesday’s meeting in Riyadh is only the first diplomatic meeting between delegations from both countries after a period of cooling of the bilateral relationship, and the U.S. Secretary of State is trying to lower expectations. “A process towards peace is not a one-meeting thing,” Marco Rubio said this Sunday in an interview with CBS. “This war has been going on for a while. It’s difficult, it’s complicated. It’s been bloody, it’s been costly, so it will not be easy to end a conflict- and there are other parties at stake that have opinions on this as well. The European Union has sanctions as well. The Ukrainians are obviously fighting this war. It’s their country, and they’re on the front lines. So, one meeting isn’t going to solve it, but I want to reiterate, the President made clear he wants to end this war, and if opportunities present themselves to further that, we’re going to take them if they present themselves. We’ll see what happens over the next few days.”

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned on Monday that he only recognizes Ukraine as an appendage to the negotiations with the United States, from which the Kremlin expects a new division in the world order. “The meeting will focus, first of all, on the restoration of the entire spectrum of Russian-American relations. It will also be devoted to the preparation of possible negotiations on the Ukrainian issue and a meeting between the two presidents,” Peskov specified. This meeting between Putin and Trump is also expected to take place in Saudi Arabia.

The role of Europe

Lavrov has flatly rejected the involvement of the European Union in the talks on the future of Ukraine. “I don’t know why they should be at the negotiating table. If they are going to slyly hint at some ideas about freezing the conflict while they themselves, by dint of their customs, character and habits, have in mind to continue the war, why invite them?” the head of the Russian delegation said on Monday after meeting with Serbian foreign minister Marko Duric.

Lavrov was referring to statements made a day earlier by Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who told the Munich Security Conference that the first phase of talks “is pre-negotiation, and it is a time when we need to rearm Ukraine and put maximum pressure on Russia with sanctions.”

Rubio, however, does point out that when the time comes for real negotiations, both Ukraine and European countries would have to be involved. “We’re just not there yet,” he said on Sunday.

Among the thousands of justifications Moscow has provided for its invasion of Ukraine since 2022, one has been the failure of the agreements signed in Minsk in 2015 to bring peace to the war that Kyiv waged in the Donbas region against separatists and the Russian army, although the Kremlin has never recognized this. Moscow blames Berlin and Paris, negotiating parties to that pact, for the Ukrainian government not fulfilling its part and granting autonomy to the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces. However, the Kremlin never seems to remember that other points of that agreement included returning control of the border to Kyiv and removing all troops and weapons from the region.

While refusing to agree to a truce that would allow Kyiv to gain strength, Lavrov welcomed Trump’s assumption, even before negotiations, that Ukraine would give up part of its territory. “The issue of territorial concessions in the context of Ukraine is beginning to be heard in Washington,” the Russian foreign minister stressed. Lavrov flatly ruled out the possibility of Moscow giving up any of its territorial gains as part of a possible agreement, saying that “it is not even on the table.”

The second in command of the Russian delegation, Yuri Ushakov, told RIA Novosti that his delegation would take the meeting in Riyadh “seriously” and hinted that, despite the contacts held at various levels in recent months, there was still a lot of work to be done. “The United States has not yet appointed a negotiator who will discuss the Ukraine issue with the Russian side,” Ushakov said.

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