High-ranking officials from the United States and Russia will meet in Saudi Arabia next week and discuss, among other topics, a future encounter between their respective presidents, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, it was reported on Saturday. According to Bloomberg, the US delegation will be led by Special Envoy to the Middle East Steven Witkoff and National Security Advisor (NSA) Michael Waltz. The main topic of the meeting will be the conflict in Ukraine, with Kiev’s representatives planned to attend as well. On the other hand, the European Union is not projected to have any delegates there. The report came after the allegations Trump and Putin could meet in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.
United States will hold peace talks with Russia without Europe or Kyiv
While American officials prepared on Sunday for the start of talks with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, European leaders were moving to formulate a response to President Trump’s rapid push for a settlement that appeared to leave them and Ukrainian officials with no clear role in the process. The Russian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, where the talks are to take place this week, met Sunday with the kingdom’s foreign minister. Two senior Trump administration officials — Mike Waltz, and the Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff — will fly to Saudi Arabia to join Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the negotiations, Mr. Witkoff said Sunday in an interview with Fox News. The preparations come after a flurry of diplomatic discussions over the past several days that included a conversation between Mr. Rubio and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov. On Sunday, Mr. Rubio said in an interview from Jerusalem with CBS News that if an opportunity presented itself for a “broader conversation that would involve Ukraine and would involve the end of the war, and would involve our allies all over the world, particularly in Europe,” the United States would explore it. He did not say which Russian officials would be in Riyadh this week, and noted that he had made plans earlier to be in Saudi Arabia anyway during this trip, his first to the Middle East as secretary of state. “Nothing’s been finalized yet,” he said. The meeting with Russia, while preliminary, would signal the start of Mr. Trump’s accelerated timetable for a deal and his seeming determination to conduct negotiations with Russia alone, at least for now. On Monday, the leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain the Netherlands and Denmark, and the top officials of the European Union and NATO, will convene in Paris in an emergency meeting on the war in Ukraine and European security, French officials said Sunday. The aim is to coordinate a response to the Trump administration’s opening of talks with Russia without European participation.