Washington sent his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who arrived on Monday in Saudi Arabia; and Moscow, to two experienced negotiators: Foreign Minister Serguéi Lavrov and the Kremlin Yuri Ushakov diplomatic council, which landed Monday in Riad.
Rubio met Monday with the Saudi heir prince, Mohamed Bin Salmán, with whom he had to talk about the situation in the Gaza Strip, said a source of his surroundings.
At the meeting, Rubio was accompanied by the Minister of National Security, Mike Waltz, and the special envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff.
Relationships between the United States and Russia have been practically frozen for almost three years.
The meeting will occur a few days after the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and was encouraged by a telephone call from the US President, Donald Trump, to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin last week.
Zelenski states that the US wants to “please” Putin
However, the conflict in Ukraine will be nothing more than one of the different points of the agenda of the Riyadh meeting, which, for the moment, were not invited by Ukraine or the Europeans.
The United States does not see Tuesday as the beginning of a “negotiation” on Ukraine, but rather as a monitoring of the telephone conversation between Putin and Trump, the US State Department said Monday. But the mechanisms for the beginning of the negotiations are expected to be established in order to put the end of the war.
According to the spokesman of the Russian presidency, Dmitri Peskov, the meeting “will be mainly dedicated to restoring the set of Russian-American relations.”
“It will also be dedicated to preparing possible negotiations about a Ukrainian resolution and the organization of a meeting between the two presidents,” Putin and Trump, he added.
Middle East could also sneak into the conversations, added Peskov. Russia, who rivals the United States in the region, saw how his allies Iran and Bashar al Asad in Syria fit failures in recent months.
“Putin and Trump agreed on the need to leave behind (some) absolutely abnormal relationships. The presidents decided that the dialogue should be resumed,” said Lavrov.
For his part, Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski will travel on Wednesday Saudi Arabia, said his spokesman.
According to Zelenski, cited by the Interfax-Ukraine agency, his government was not officially informed of the Riyadh meeting between Russia and the United States. The president warned that Ukraine “will not recognize” any agreement on his future that is achieved without his participation.
The president declared in an interview with the German public chain, which the United States wants to “please” the Russian president.
“They want to meet quickly and have a quick victory. But, what they want is simply a ceasefire, it is not a victory,” he said in the interview recorded on Saturday.
Trump will meet with Putin
Donald Trump said on the last Sunday that “he could meet very soon with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to address peace in Ukraine” and has also expressed his willingness to include the Ukrainian president in the negotiations.
The US head of state said that “he spoke long and lying” with Vladimir Putin, and that the special envoy, Steve Witkoff, was with him for “a very prolonged period, like about three hours.”
A source close to the Saudi government He revealed that the meeting that the US Secretary of State will hold with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will be given in the prelude to the summit between Donald Trump and the controversial leader of Russia.
Moscow demands
Trump’s decision to call Putin last week and proclaim that negotiations were opened to end war caused discomfort in Europe and the Ukrainian government.
The European powers, which were outside the conversations between Russia and the United States, met on Monday in Paris with the aim of defining a common response to guarantee the safety of the old continent.
According to Lavrov, European leaders have no place in future negotiations because they seek to “continue war” in Ukraine.
In any case, Marco Rubio pointed out that “a process towards peace is not a matter of a meeting” and pointed out that, when the “true negotiations” begin, Ukraine should “be involved.”
The Kremlin, meanwhile, declared a few days ago that, if conversations about the future of Ukraine were produced, kyiv would participate “in one way or another.”
Putin claims that Ukraine gives four regions of the east and the south of its territory, in addition to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow was annexed in 2014, and that he renounced to join NATO. Conditions that kyiv rejects sharply.
In addition, Russia wants Washington to commit to any country from the extinct Soviet Union to enter NATO.
Moscow also asks that this organization withdraw its troops and weapons from the states that adhered to it after May 1997.
Both NATO and the United States rejected those demands in January 2022, and a month later, Moscow invaded Ukraine.
