Saudi Arabia is preparing to host US-Russian talks scheduled this week in the presence of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The talks come shortly after US President Donald Trump contacted his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and agreed to hold a summit in the Kingdom.
White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Sunday said he would travel to Saudi Arabia later in the day with National Security Advisor Mike Waltz for talks on how to end Russia’s war on Ukraine.
His remarks to Fox News were the first official confirmation that the talks would take place.
“I am going tonight,” Witkoff said of the trip in a Fox News interview. “I'll be traveling there with the national security advisor, and we'll be having meetings at the direction of the president, and hopefully we'll make some really good progress.”
On Sunday, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov visited Saudi Arabia.
Siluanov spoke at the AlUla Conference for Emerging Market Economies, organized by the Saudi Ministry of Finance and the International Monetary Fund.
US and Russian officials will meet in Saudi Arabia in the coming days to start talks aimed at ending the nearly three-year war in Ukraine, a US lawmaker and a source familiar with the planning said on Saturday.
The upcoming talks in Saudi Arabia will be among the first high-level in-person discussions between Russian and US officials in years and are meant to precede a meeting between Trump and Putin, in the presence of the Saudi Crown Prince.
Ukrainian officials have said they were not invited to the upcoming meeting in Saudi Arabia and that they would not be bound by any agreement that comes out of any dialogue there.
Witkoff pushed back against the idea that the Ukrainians have been cut out of talks with the Russians.
In the Fox interview, he noted that Ukrainian officials met with several high-ranking US officials during the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, though he did not say that the Ukrainians were welcome in Saudi Arabia.
“I don't think this is about excluding anybody,” Witkoff said. “In fact, it's about including everybody.”
Focus on Peace
The Kremlin said on Sunday that the significance of the phone call between Putin and Trump was that now Russia and the US would speak about peace and not war.
“This is a powerful signal that we will now try to solve problems through dialogue,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state TV Kremlin reporter Pavel Zarubin in a clip released on Sunday. “Now we will talk about peace, not war.”
Peskov said the first meeting between Putin and Trump had a special significance given current circumstances, adding that the Western sanctions would not prevent Russia-US talks as they could be “lifted as quickly as imposed.”
Russia's Foreign Ministry said earlier on Saturday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the situation in Ukraine on Saturday, as well as the removal of “unilateral barriers” set by the previous US administration.
Removing Barriers
Lavrov and Rubio, in a call initiated by the US, agreed to maintain contacts to resolve problems in bilateral relations, “in the interests of removing the unilateral barriers to mutually beneficial trade, economic and investment cooperation inherited from the previous administration,” the ministry said in a statement.
The US under then-President Joe Biden and Kyiv's allies around the world imposed waves of sanctions on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine three years ago, aimed at weakening the Russian economy and limiting the Kremlin's war efforts.
The US State Department said Rubio reaffirmed in the call Trump's commitment to finding an end to the conflict in Ukraine.
“In addition, they discussed the opportunity to potentially work together on a number of other bilateral issues,” it said in a statement, without providing further details.
Russia said Lavrov and Rubio “expressed their mutual willingness to interact on pressing international issues, including the settlement around Ukraine, the situation around Palestine and in general in the Middle East in general.”
Trump and Putin spoke for over an hour last Wednesday, the first known direct contact between US and Russian presidents since Putin had a call with Biden shortly before ordering tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said Lavrov and Rubio also discussed how to quickly improve “the conditions for the functioning of Russian diplomatic missions” in the US.
Experts will meet soon “to agree on specific steps to mutually remove obstacles to the work of Russian and US missions abroad,” the ministry said.
Kiev Is Concerned
In return, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy believes Russia is preparing to “wage war” against a weakened NATO should Trump dilute US support for the alliance.
In an interview with broadcaster NBC on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, Zelenskyy also said Trump had the leverage to push Putin into ceasefire negotiations over Ukraine, but warned the Russian leader should never be trusted.
“We believe that Putin will wage war against NATO,” Zelenskyy told the network in an interview aired Sunday.
He suggested Putin may be waiting “for a weakening of NATO,” which could be triggered by the possibility “that the United States of America will think to take its military from Europe.”
An emboldened Russia would move swiftly into territorial expansionist mode, the Ukrainian leader said.
“I don’t know (if) they will want 30% of Europe, 50%, I don’t know. Nobody knows. But they will have this possibility,” he said.
Zelenskyy’s comments to NBC echoed his remarks to the Munich conference on Saturday, where he urged the creation of a European army, arguing the continent could no longer count on Washington.
“We can’t rule out the possibility that America might say no to Europe on issues that threaten it,” Zelenskyy told the conference.
“I really believe that time has come. The Armed Forces of Europe must be created.”
The push for a joint continental force has been mooted for years without gaining traction and Zelenskyy’s intervention seems unlikely to shift the balance.
