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Senior US and Russian officials will meet in Riyadh on Tuesday for talks that the Kremlin has hailed as a step to restoring full bilateral relations and ending the Ukraine war but which Kyiv says it will not recognise.
As US secretary of state Marco Rubio arrived in the Saudi capital ahead of meeting the Russian delegation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv “will not take part” in the talks and “did not know anything about it”.
Speaking from the United Arab Emirates, Zelenskyy added: “Ukraine regards any negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine as ones that have no result, and we cannot recognise . . . any agreements about us without us.”
Washington said Rubio would be accompanied by President Donald Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz and special envoy Steve Witkoff. The Kremlin said Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov, President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy adviser, would head Moscow’s delegation.
Russia is framing the meeting as the start of its return from the cold after years of western attempts to isolate it in response to its invasion of Ukraine.
“The presidents agreed to leave behind this absolutely ridiculous period in US-Russia relations when they essentially didn’t speak except for isolated technical and humanitarian issues,” Lavrov said on Monday.
Tuesday’s meeting aims to determine if “the Russians perhaps are serious and if they’re on the same page” about bringing an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, the US state department said.
It added that the discussions were preliminary and not expected to be detailed negotiations on terms for ending the war.
A spokesperson said the meeting at the Ritz-Carlton hotel was “a follow-up” on last week’s initial phone conversation between Putin and Trump “about if that first step is even possible, what the interests are, if this can be managed”.
The hastily convened talks have alarmed Ukraine and its European allies. The US did not inform its allies of Trump’s call with Putin in advance and has largely left them out of the process.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, who has tried to play a brokering role in the conflict in the past, has invited Zelenskyy to visit Ankara on Tuesday.
Zelenskyy is also due to meet Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, later this week. Kellogg said on Monday in Brussels that his interactions with Ukraine and his colleagues’ discussions with Russian officials were “simultaneous” and “synchronised”. He would be in Kyiv to discuss, not tell Ukraine what to accept, he said.
“I am not going there to make demands. That is not going to happen,” he said. “The decisions are [Zelenskyy’s] and nobody will impose them on an elected leader of a sovereign nation. He and the people of Ukraine will make that decision.”
The state department said the talks in Saudi Arabia could be a precursor to a meeting between Trump and Putin.
Russia dismissed European efforts to carve out a place at the peace talks and possibly send a peacekeeping contingent to Ukraine.
“Their desire to be part of the Ukraine negotiating process has been satisfied more than once,” Lavrov said, referring to the failed Minsk process, led by France and Germany, that brokered a fragile ceasefire following Russia’s initial invasion in 2014.
As long as European countries want to strengthen Ukraine militarily, “I don’t know if there’s anything for them to do at the negotiating table,” he added.
Dmitry Peskov, the Russian president’s spokesperson, said it was “difficult to talk about” a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine because it would involve Nato members and “Nato troops will be deployed on Ukrainian territory”.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has offered to put British “boots on the ground” in Ukraine, ahead of a Paris summit with other European leaders on Monday.
European officials said the Paris summit’s main focus would be a possible deployment of European troops to Ukraine, to be stationed behind, not on, a future ceasefire line as a “reassurance force”. But one noted that Germany in particular was cautious about the idea of peacekeeping forces.
Additional reporting by Henry Foy in Brussels