Trump team converges on Riyadh ahead of Ukraine talks with Russia

The Washington Post

16:24 JST, February 18, 2025

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – President Donald Trump’s top foreign policy advisers converged in Saudi Arabia on Monday ahead of talks with Russian counterparts, as officials race to advance the U.S. leader’s bid to end the war in Ukraine and, potentially, reverse a diplomatic deep freeze with Russia.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Michael Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on the eve of their high-stakes talks Tuesday with a Russian delegation led by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the first such high-level U.S.-Russian encounter since President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The Tuesday meeting, just weeks after Trump’s return to office, represents a dramatic turnaround after a period of frigid U.S.-Russian relations following Moscow’s military assault, which prompted President Joe Biden to spearhead a Western coalition that isolated Russia diplomatically, imposed sweeping sanctions and supplied arms for Kyiv’s battlefield fight.

It was not immediately clear whether the Saudi crown prince, who is hosting the foreign delegations, will take part in Tuesday’s talks.

The U.S.-Russian discussions are also expected to lay the groundwork for a potential summit between Trump and Putin, another sign of the dramatically different approach the returning president has taken in navigating a conflict that has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of people and plunged Europe into its worst security crisis in 70 years.

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the goal of the talks, which U.S. officials have said will test the potential for more substantive U.S.-mediated negotiations to end the Ukraine conflict, was “to determine if this is something that can move forward.”

“It’s a unique situation, involving unique men, and certainly as we’ve already seen with President Trump and this administration, things that maybe normally would take six months or a year or two years are taking a matter of weeks,” she told reporters in the Saudi capital.

The hastily arranged gathering in Riyadh brings together the president’s efforts to forge deals to halt two major global conflicts in short order: the war in Ukraine and that in the Gaza Strip, where the future of a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas militants remains uncertain.

Rubio arrived from Jerusalem, where he consulted with Israel’s government about Trump’s proposal to move Palestinians permanently out of Gaza, a notion that has left Arab nations aghast and scrambling to present Washington with an alternative plan. Securing Saudi support will be key if Trump’s Middle East peace efforts are to succeed.

Trump’s disruptive handling of both conflicts reflects his unsentimental approach to dealmaking and his willingness to overturn established positions shared by core allies in pursuit of his “America First” agenda.

The Riyadh meetings come days after Vice President JD Vance and other senior officials shocked European allies by giving their leaders a dressing-down at a security conference in Munich and, separately, suggesting that Kyiv cannot expect to recover all territory occupied by Russia. Many in Europe have objected to the idea that Washington would discuss a Ukraine deal with Russia without the presence of representatives of Kyiv – a departure from the “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” mantra that NATO officials have embraced since the war’s start.

Trump, who has a history of friendly relations with Putin, voiced his faith in the Russian leader’s desire to end the war following a 90-minute call with him last week. “I think he wants to end it, and they want to end it fast,” he told reporters Sunday.

European leaders convened an emergency meeting in Paris on Monday to discuss Ukraine and their shared future in light of Trump’s Russia outreach. Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron spoke by phone before that meeting.

Some Trump administration officials have sought to allay the concerns, saying the Riyadh talks would be preliminary and that subsequent negotiations would include the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Anything that’s going to happen is going to involve Ukraine,” Bruce said. “How could it not? Because of course they were the country that was invaded.”

Zelensky has said that no agreement can be brokered in Ukraine’s absence and has demanded that any peace include strong measures to guarantee lasting security. Speaking in the United Arab Emirates on Monday, Zelensky said he expected Trump’s envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, to visit Kyiv this week.

Suggesting an eagerness to end Moscow’s isolation from the West, Russian officials characterized the planned talks more broadly than U.S. officials did. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the talks would focus on “restoring the whole complex of U.S.-Russian relations.”

“If literally two months ago everyone in the world, with the exception perhaps of Russia and countries friendly to us, was talking about how to continue the war at any cost, it is gratifying that now everyone is trying to talk about what needs to be done to stop the war at any cost,” Peskov told reporters in Moscow. “This is a positive fact.”

Lavrov, speaking in Moscow on Monday, said the time had come for the United States and Russia to end what he called an “absolutely abnormal period” of estrangement. “We want to listen to our partners,” he told reporters.

The last time Lavrov sat down for talks with an American counterpart was in January 2022, just weeks before Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, when then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an 11th-hour, unsuccessful attempt to head off the war during a summit in Geneva. Top Biden administration officials largely shunned talks with their Russian counterparts after that, although Blinken and Lavrov had a brief “on-the-go” encounter in India in 2023.

Last week Trump revealed that he had sent Witkoff to meet with Putin to broker the release of a U.S. man held prisoner in Russia.

Lavrov will be joined in Riyadh by longtime Putin aide Yury Ushakov, the Kremlin said. One of the Russian delegation’s chief priorities is likely to be restoring diplomatic channels that were narrowed following Putin’s invasion, including more robust staffing and operations at the countries’ respective embassies. Russia’s former ambassador to the United States returned to Moscow in October 2024 and has yet to be replaced.

Ushakov, a veteran diplomat specializing in relations with the West, has been tasked with preparing a new track for bilateral relations between Moscow and Washington and laying the groundwork for Putin’s eventual meeting with Trump.

But Russian officials are also ruling out any territorial concessions from Russia. Putin has demanded that Russia not only keep the areas it now occupies – equivalent to roughly a fifth of Ukrainian territory – but said Kyiv should pull back further, handing over territory in four regions claimed in 2022 by Russia that it has not conquered.

One Russian academic close to senior Russian diplomats said the Kremlin’s priorities in renewed talks with Washington would probably include the lifting of some sanctions on Russia, including on senior officials and on some major Russian businessmen, as well as potentially on some forms of energy cooperation. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

In return, he said, “Putin could consider it a compromise to demonstrate his readiness not to go further” and take more Ukrainian territory, “since the initiative is now on Russia’s side and because in the Russian leadership there are people who think we should not stop at these four regions.”

In a statement following Rubio’s meeting with the Saudi crown prince, Bruce said that both men emphasized the Trump administration’s desire to maintain the Israel-Hamas ceasefire and that the U.S. diplomat underscored “the importance of an arrangement for Gaza that contributes to regional security.”