KEY POINTS
- US and Russian officials will meet in Riyadh on Tuesday for a follow-up meeting.
- A “consultation mechanism” was agreed upon last week to facilitate talks on the Ukraine war.
- Trump expresses confidence in reaching an agreement with Moscow.
- Zelensky criticises the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia: US and Russian officials are due to meet in Saudi Arabia’s capital on Tuesday, a diplomatic source told AFP, a week after foreign ministers from the two nations met there for breakthrough talks.
Delegations from the two sides will “meet in Riyadh on Tuesday”, the source said Monday on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of talks.
The new sit-down will be “a follow-up meeting to last week’s. It is at a lower level than last week, but it is still a sign of progress,” the source added without disclosing the names of the representatives from the two sides.
A week ago, US and Russian delegations led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met in Riyadh for discussions potentially laying the foundation for a summit between US and Russian presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Russia and the US agreed to establish a “consultation mechanism” to settle disputes and to appoint negotiators for talks on the war in Ukraine at the end of last week’s meeting, the first at that level between the two powers since the Ukraine war started in February 2022.
The meeting followed a telephone conversation between Trump and Putin earlier in February that upended the standing Western strategy of isolating the Russian president.
Last week, Trump said he was “much more confident” about the possibility of an agreement with Moscow.
When asked by the press at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida about a possible meeting with Vladimir Putin before the end of the month, the American president replied: “probably”.
Trump sent shock waves across Europe when he declared his readiness to resume diplomacy with Putin and end the Russia-Ukraine war without the involvement of European nations and Ukraine.
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He has appeared to parrot Russian talking points about Ukraine’s supposed responsibility for starting the war.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has slammed the possibility of talks “about Ukraine without Ukraine”.
“I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.
“Today I heard, ‘oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years… You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
“I think I have the power to end this war,” he said.
