Moscow ruled out the presence of Nato soldiers in Ukraine as part of any deal to end the war but committed to negotiations amid a dramatic reset of relations with the US at their first high-level talks since the invasion three years ago.
Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, insisted that Ukraine was not being “sidelined’ from the process despite not having a seat at Tuesday’s talks in Saudi Arabia, saying that no final deal would be signed without Kyiv.
However, the main channel of peace talks appears to be between the US and Russia as the Trump administration buried President Biden’s approach of isolating Moscow. The two sides agreed to explore improved economic ties and boost diplomatic missions to revive relations that began to deteriorate in President Trump’s first term after tit-for-tat mass expulsions of diplomats following the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.
The talks were the first high-level meeting between Russian and US officials since Putin ordered tanks into Ukraine almost three years ago
EPA
US officials also confirmed that Sir Keir Starmer would visit Washington next week. Starmer had said he would be prepared to deploy British troops to Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force after a ceasefire agreement, as did Sweden, another Nato country.
Russia previously warned that the deployment of western troops to Ukraine could trigger an “uncontrolled escalation” in the conflict. After American and Russian negotiators had spoken for more than four hours in the Saudi capital, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said: “The appearance of troops from Nato countries … under a foreign flag, the flag of the European Union or the national flag, is unacceptable.”
The talks were the first high-level meeting between Russian and US officials since Putin ordered tanks into Ukraine almost three years ago, sparking the biggest armed conflict in Europe since 1945.
Rubio said he believed that Russia was “willing to begin to engage in a serious process to determine how quickly and through what mechanism can an end be brought to this war”.
Rubio said there will be a discussion on “concessions by all sides”
REUTERS
He pleaded for patience while teams were formed to discuss “concessions by all sides” that would be necessary for a deal.
“A practical reality is that there is going to be some discussion of territory and there’s going to be discussion of security guarantees,” he said.
“The only leader in the world who can make this happen, who can even bring people together to begin to talk about it in a serious way, is President Trump,” Rubio added. “In order for a conflict to end, everyone involved in that conflict has to be OK with it. It has to be acceptable to them … That obviously includes Ukraine, but also our partners in Europe and of course the Russian side as well.”
President Zelensky accused American negotiators of seeking to decide his country’s future without consulting Ukraine. He said the discussions were “about Ukraine, without Ukraine.”
“Ukraine, Europe in a broad sense — and this includes the European Union, Turkey, and the UK — should be involved in conversations and the development of the necessary security guarantees with America regarding the fate of our part of the world,” Zelensky said. He also said he was postponing a visit to Saudi Arabia to sign economic agreements that had been due to take place on Wednesday.
• Who was in the room for US-Russia peace talks? An annotated guide
On Monday Zelensky accused the US of trying to “please” Moscow, telling the German broadcaster ARD: “They want to meet quickly and have a quick win. But what they want — ‘just a ceasefire’ — is not a win.”
Mike Waltz, the US national security adviser
EVELYN HOCKSTEIN/POOL PHOTO VIA AP
Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, insisted that the US was conducting a familiar form of “shuttle diplomacy” between the two combatants at this stage.
“Shuttle diplomacy has happened throughout history. It’s happened all over the world,” Waltz said. “We are absolutely talking to both sides. The secretary of state just met with President Zelensky days ago, along with the vice president, seven cabinet members in Europe at the same time, really showing the importance of engaging our allies. President Trump spoke with President Macron just yesterday. Prime minister Starmer is coming to Washington next week.”
• How Brexit made Starmer the EU’s man to talk defence with Trump
The French foreign ministry said Rubio had briefed several key European ministers about the talks in Saudi Arabia, including the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the European Union foreign affairs chief.
EU countries are reportedly preparing a military aid package worth at least €6 billion for Ukraine, Politico reports, marking one of the bloc’s largest military aid deals since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
President Macron said he would host another meeting on Wednesday with “several European and non-European states” after an emergency summit on Monday brought together a small number of key European countries.
In an interview with French regional newspapers, Macron said Paris was “not preparing to send ground troops, which are belligerent to the conflict, to the front” in Ukraine but was considering, with Britain, sending “experts or even troops in limited terms, outside any conflict zone”.
He added that Trump “can restart a useful dialogue” with Putin by “recreating strategic ambiguity” for the Russian leader by using “very firm words” and creating “uncertainty” that can “help to exert pressure”. Macron also said that he himself is ready to speak to Putin “when it is appropriate in the cycle of upcoming negotiations”.
Negotiators said Washington and Moscow will now name delegations for talks that will focus on bringing an end to the fighting.
Putin and Trump are also due to meet but there is no agreement yet on the details. Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin foreign policy advisor, said it was unlikely to happen before the end of the month.
There are no signs, however, that Moscow is willing to lower its demands or drop demands to control areas of Ukraine that it has claimed as its own land. There are fears in Kyiv that Trump will abandon Ukraine for the sake of a short-term, unsustainable peace that could also endanger the rest of Europe.
Ahead of the meeting in Riyadh, the Kremlin said there could be no prospect of an enduring peace in Ukraine unless Russia’s concerns over national security were addressed.
“A lasting and long-term viable resolution is impossible without a comprehensive consideration of security issues on the continent,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said.
• Putin’s no longer a pariah — and his ambitions lie beyond Ukraine
Before its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia demanded that Nato roll back military deployments in eastern Europe and former Soviet republics. It also called for Nato to formally renounce a pledge that Ukraine would one day become a member of the western alliance, a demand that it repeated on Tuesday.
European officials believe that Trump is willing to agree to a withdrawal of American troops from the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Financial Times reported this week. The move could leave the three countries, which were occupied for decades by Moscow during the Soviet era, at risk of attack from Russia.
President Erdogan said after talks with Zelensky in Ankara on Tuesday that Turkey would be an “ideal host” for the next round of talks. Although Turkey is a member of Nato, it has refused to join western sanctions against Moscow.
Rubio said “extraordinary opportunities” existed for ties between Washington and Moscow if the conflict in Ukraine was brought to a close. He spoke after Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Kremlin’s sovereign wealth fund, said US businesses had lost $300 billion since pulling out of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.
Russian negotiators welcomed the talks as a vital step towards what the Kremlin hopes will be a full restoration of relations with the US under Trump.
“We have a very long, serious road ahead of us, but this is a very positive start to constructive discussions,” Dmitriev said. “We talked about how two great superpowers cannot not communicate or conduct dialogue or understand each other, as was the case under President Biden.”
He also said that the two delegations had dined together. “There were a lot of jokes and a desire [by the Americans] to at some point come to Russia. They were surprised that many restaurants were opening in Moscow, because if you watch CNN, everything is bad, but we talked about how everything is good.”
Lavrov said that Russia was unable to agree to a proposed ban on attacking Ukrainian energy infrastructure, claiming falsely that it had never done so. Russian missile strikes on power stations and other energy facilities have led to blackouts across Ukraine. Russia’s defence ministry also regularly boasts about the attacks.