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Senior US and Russian officers will meet in Riyadh on Tuesday for talks that the Kremlin has hailed as a step to restoring full bilateral relations and ending the Ukraine battle however which Kyiv says it won’t recognise.
As US secretary of state Marco Rubio arrived within the Saudi capital forward of assembly the Russian delegation, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine stated Kyiv “won’t participate” within the talks and “didn’t know something about it”.
Talking from the United Arab Emirates, Zelenskyy added: “Ukraine regards any negotiations on Ukraine with out Ukraine as ones that haven’t any end result, and we can’t recognise . . . any agreements about us with out us.”
Washington stated Rubio could be accompanied by Donald Trump’s nationwide safety adviser Mike Waltz and particular envoy Steve Witkoff. The Kremlin stated Russian international minister Sergei Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s international coverage adviser, would head Moscow’s delegation.
Russia is framing the assembly as the beginning of its return from the chilly after years of western makes an attempt to isolate it in response to its invasion of Ukraine.
“The presidents agreed to depart behind this totally ridiculous interval in US-Russia relations once they basically didn’t converse aside from remoted technical and humanitarian points,” Lavrov stated on Monday.
Tuesday’s assembly goals to find out if “the Russians maybe are critical and in the event that they’re on the identical web page” about bringing an finish to the battle between Russia and Ukraine, the US state division stated.
It added that the discussions had been preliminary and never anticipated to be detailed negotiations on phrases for ending the battle.
A spokesperson stated the assembly on the Ritz-Carlton resort was “a follow-up” on final week’s preliminary telephone dialog between Putin and Trump “about if that first step is even doable, what the pursuits are, if this may be managed”.
The swiftly convened talks have alarmed Ukraine and its European allies. The US didn’t inform its allies of Trump’s name with Putin upfront and has largely left them out of the method.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, who has tried to play a brokering function within the battle up to now, has invited Zelenskyy to go to Ankara on Tuesday.
The state division stated the talks could possibly be a precursor to a gathering between Trump and Putin, including that Ukraine could be concerned in any substantive negotiations that resulted from the conferences in Riyadh.
“Something that’s going to occur goes to contain Ukraine. It’s inconceivable. How might it not?” the spokesperson stated.
Russia dismissed European efforts to carve out a spot on the peace talks and presumably ship a peacekeeping contingent to Ukraine.
“Their need to be a part of the Ukraine negotiating course of has been glad greater than as soon as,” Lavrov stated, referring to the failed Minsk course of, led by France and Germany, that brokered a fragile ceasefire following Russia’s preliminary invasion in 2014.
So long as European international locations need to strengthen Ukraine militarily, “I don’t know if there’s something for them to do on the negotiating desk,” he added.
Dmitry Peskov, the Russian president’s spokesperson, stated it was “troublesome to speak about” a European peacekeeping drive in Ukraine as a result of it will contain Nato members and “Nato troops can be deployed on Ukrainian territory”.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has supplied to place British “boots on the bottom” in Ukraine, forward of a Paris summit with different European leaders on Monday.
European officers stated the Paris summit’s foremost focus could be a doable deployment of European troops to Ukraine, to be stationed behind, not on, a future ceasefire line as a “reassurance drive”. However one famous that Germany specifically was cautious concerning the thought of peacekeeping forces.
