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Russia and the US have agreed to “lay the groundwork for future cooperation” for links to links and the end of the Ukraine war after holding the first high -level talks on the first months of Vladimir Putin’s occupation.
After Tuesday in four and a half hours of talks in Riyadh, the US State Department said both sides would appoint “high -level teams” to seek to end the war and create a diplomatic channel to resolved bilateral issues.
“This should be a permanent end of war and not a temporary end as we have seen in the past,” US National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who accompanied the Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff in talks.
“The practical reality is that there will be a discussion of the territory and there will be discussions of security guarantees, they are just the basic foundations,” Waltz added, stressing that Trump was “determined to move very quickly”.
Riyadh talks have sparked fear in Kyiv and in the European capitals Trump wants to resolve the conflict in Putin conditions and on Tuesday the Kremlin appeared to harden its position.
The State Department said the new diplomatic channel will “lay the groundwork for future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historical economic opportunities and investments that will emerge from a successful end of conflict in Ukraine”.
Russia said both sides would also appoint separate delegations to discuss Ukraine.
Asked what concessions Moscow would do, Rubio said that every such step would result from “difficult, hard” diplomacy “in” closed rooms for a period of time “.
He added: “No one is being avoided here.”
Witkoff said the EU would be “would have to be on the table at one point because they have sanctions also imposed.”
But on Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry excluded a role in Europe in Ukraine’s talks and demanded that NATO abandon an open invitation to KYIV, after saying that Moscow was “categorically opposing” to a European peacekeeping setting .
European leaders had previously clashed at a Paris summit for sending peacekeeping forces to Ukraine. While the United Kingdom offered to put “boots on earth”, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain expressed reluctance to do so.
Waltz said the US was conducting “ship’s diplomacy” and consulted with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and French President Emmanuel Macron, while Trump will meet UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer next week.
He added that he rejected “the notion that our allies were not consulted.”
Tuesday’s meeting in Riyadh was the first of its kind between the US and Russia since the 2022 invasion of Moscow in Ukraine. In an almost unimaginable appearance a few weeks ago, Russian and American flags flew to one another outside the wealthy palace, where the meeting took place.
The talks marked a tremendous turn in just days after Trump called Putin last week in an effort to end the war – without consulting Ukraine or its European allies.
Kyiv has said he will refuse any agreement imposed on her without her involvement, while European countries have remained clashing to capture a place on the table.
As Tuesday’s talks were held, Zelenskyy visited his Turkish counterpart Rexhep Tayip Erdogan, who has previously sought to play a mediating role in the conflict.
Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, who accompanied Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Riyadh talks, said the discussions were not “bad”. He added that Russia and the US had agreed to consider each other’s interests “, but it was” hard to say “they were” growing closer “.
Ushakov said the US and Russia would work to “create the conditions” for a Trump-Putin meeting, though he said it would probably not take place next week, as “full work” was first needed.
The US seemed to have given some of Putin’s essential demands before the talks even began after saying Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO and to restore the territory currently occupied by Russia were not “realistic”.
