US and Russian officials have started talks in Riyadh about the war in Ukraine, amid fears in Kyiv and in European capitals that Donald Trump wants to settle the conflict on Vladimir Putin’s terms.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, began the meeting in the Saudi capital with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser.
The talks in the Saudi capital are the first high-level effort to broker an end to Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since its early stages almost three years ago, when negotiations fell apart amid the Russian president’s intractable demands.
Speaking to reporters on Monday ahead of the talks, Trump said Putin “wants to stop the fighting” and said he did not believe Putin wants to seize all of Ukraine. “That was my question to him, because if he’s going to go on, that would have been a big problem for us,” Trump said.
Tuesday’s talks do not include Ukraine, which has said it will not agree to any arrangement made without its participation.
“They want to end it fast, both of them. And [Ukraine’s president Volodymyr ] Zelenskyy wants to end it too,” Trump said on Monday.
The US has already appeared to make significant concessions to Putin before negotiations by dismissing Ukraine’s aspirations to join Nato and restore control over land at present occupied by Russia.
Those accommodations are likely to encourage Putin, who had not expressed any indication to compromise on his goals of rolling back Nato’s expansion and turning Ukraine into a failed state, said Andrei Kozyrev, a former Russian foreign minister.
“For Putin, the cold war and its goals never ended: to subvert Nato, to split the US and Europe, and subdue eastern Europe,” Kozyrev said.
“Since he is given territorial and strategic rewards even before the talks, he is encouraged to conquer more and to discuss more humiliating concessions he could get, reinforcing the old Kremlin mantra of the frail democratic west.”
Russia’s decisive shift in momentum, coupled with Trump’s eagerness to end the war quickly, has led western officials to doubt whether the Kremlin is truly interested in any deal short of Ukraine’s capitulation and the west’s recognition of its sphere of influence.
“If the agreement includes giving Ukraine unlimited flexibility to arm itself and continue co-operating closely with the west, Putin would be much more reluctant to agree to something like that,” a former senior US official said.
“He fears Ukraine will just get stronger and closer to the west,” depriving Moscow of the option to stage another invasion “down the road”, the former official said. If Putin “feels confident that he can dominate Ukraine or that Ukraine will be unable to get support from the west, then he can go back for more.”
Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian sovereign wealth fund boss who helped broker a prisoner exchange with Witkoff last week, is also travelling to Saudi Arabia for the talks.
“Russia’s approach is that of dealmakers, not peacemakers,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political scientist. “Putin will be more than happy to split up the world and spheres of influence with Trump. A new Iron Curtain and cold war will help him keep the Russian population on a short leash without a hot war.”
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy has pledged to reject any deal imposed by the US and Russia, saying “we cannot recognise . . . any agreements about us without us”.
Putin’s desire to write the rules of a new security order is so strong that he could step back from some of his demands for Ukraine, said Ekaterina Schulmann, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
Russia dropped its vague demand that Ukraine be “denazified” during talks in the war’s early weeks, though Putin restored the demand when setting out his most recent ceasefire conditions in June last year.
“He’s said many times that the war isn’t for Ukraine, but for existential sovereignty in the eyes of the west,” Schulmann said.
“If [he] can make a convincing enough case that Russia has forced the west to finally realise Russia’s greatness, accept it back among the great powers, and remove sanctions, then minor territorial and practical military issues take a back seat,” she added.
At last weekend’s Munich security conference, European diplomats balked at the speed with which the Trump administration was moving to get to talks with Putin — and the prospect of the Russian president holding almost all the leverage.
One European diplomat said the problem was that Putin’s Plan A was to “keep on fighting” rather than peace talks. “We know Trump wants to stop the killing, he keeps saying that. But Putin is happy to go back to the war if he doesn’t get what he wants, and can keep dragging this out.”
Putin has not commented publicly on the talks, but told Trump last week that Russia wanted to “settle the reasons for the conflict”.
That, another EU diplomat said, “means he’s thinking about the whole of the eastern European theatre, US bases, US troops. Even the Turks are worried about what the Americans could agree about Nato’s future.”
Cartography by Steven Bernard