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Russia and the United States have agreed to “lay the foundations for future cooperation” on the strengthening of links and the end of the Ukraine War, after having held the first high-level talks on the conflict since the first month of the invasion of Vladimir Putin.
After four hours of negotiations and a half in Riyadh on Tuesday, the US State Department said that the two parties would name “high -level teams” to try to end war And establish a diplomatic channel to solve bilateral problems.
“It must be a permanent end for war and not a temporary end as we have seen in the past,” said US National Security Councilor Mike Waltz, who accompanied Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, in the talks.
“The practical reality is that there will be a discussion on the territory and that there will be a discussion on security guarantees, these are only fundamental bases,” added Waltz, noting that Trump was “determined to be move very quickly “.
Riyadh talks have sparked fears in kyiv and in the European capitals that Trump wants settle the conflict to Putin conditions And Tuesday, the Kremlin seemed to harden its position.
The State Department has declared that the new diplomatic channel “would launch the basics of future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and economic and historical investment possibilities which will emerge from a successful term in the conflict in Ukraine” .
Russia said the two parties would also appoint separate delegations to discuss Ukraine.
Asked what Moscow concessions would make, Rubio said that such a step would result from “hard and difficult diplomacy” in “closed rooms over a period of time”.
He added: “No one is sidelined here.”
Witkoff said the EU “would have to be at the table at some point because they also have sanctions that have been imposed”.
But Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs excluded a role for Europe in talks in Ukraine and asked NATO to cancel an open invitation of 2008 to kyiv, because it said that Moscow was “categorically opposed “To a European deployment of peacekeeping.
European leaders had previously had confused During a Paris summit on sending peace forces to Ukraine. While the United Kingdom proposed to put “boots on the ground”, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain have expressed their reluctance to do so.
Waltz said the United States was doing a “shuttle diplomacy” and consulted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and French President Emmanuel Macron, while Trump will meet British Prime Minister Keir Starmer next week.
He added that he had rejected the “notion that our allies were not consulted”.
Tuesday’s meeting in Riyadh was the first of its kind between the United States and Russia since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in Moscow. In sight, a few weeks ago, Russian and American flags stolen next to each other outside the opulent palace where the meeting took place.
The talks marked an extraordinary turnaround in a few days after Trump called Putin last week in order to end the war – without consulting Ukraine or its European allies.
Kyiv said it would be reject any agreement imposed on it without its involvementWhile European countries have been left climbing to retreat a seat to the table.
While Tuesday’s talks took place, Zelenskyy visited his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who previously sought to play a brokerage role in the conflict.
Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy advisor, who accompanied the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, during Riyadh talks, said discussions were “not bad”. He added that Russia and the United States “agreed to take into account the interests of others”, but it was “difficult to say” that they “approached”.
Ushakov said the United States and Russia would try to “create conditions” for a Trump-Putin meeting, although it said it would probably not take place next week, because “work in -depth ”was necessary first.
The United States seemed to have given up some of the basic requests from Putin even before the talks begin after having declared that Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO and to recover the territory currently occupied by Russia were not “Realistic”.
