The United States and Russia on Tuesday held high-level talks marking President Donald Trump‘s reversal of American policy on Moscow, fueling fears in Kyiv and building the Kremlin’s hopes of reentering the international mainstream.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met for four-and-a-half hours in Saudi Arabia, which is mediating the talks and is itself looking to boost its credentials as a world power.
The talks were successful, Yuri Ushakov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy adviser, told the state-owned TASS news agency. He added that they had paved a way for a possible meeting between Trump and Putin, although he did not say when that might take place.
While attention in Europe was focused on the war in Ukraine, the meeting is a major turning point in Washington’s relationship with Moscow, which has been diplomatically and financially isolated since it launched its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“This is that second step to determine if the Russians perhaps are serious, and if they’re on the same page,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters Monday, following Trump’s announcement last week that he and President Vladimir Putin had held a 90-minute conversation.
U.S. and Russian officials meet at Riyadh’s Diriyah Palace on Tuesday.
As the deadliest war in Europe since World War II rages in Ukraine, the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and other European leaders are alarmed and dismayed at being shut out of the talks. One of Kyiv’s main concerns was that Russia would be given the go-ahead to keep some 20% of the country it has occupied.
“Ukraine did not know anything about it,” Zelenskyy warned ahead of the meeting.
Kyiv “regards any negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine as ones that have no result, and we cannot recognize … any agreements about us without us,” he said, adding that he planned to travel to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday for a trip had had been arranged in advance and was not related to the talks between the U.S. and Russia.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that Russia could use the pause to remobilize and mount a fresh attack on Ukraine or target other countries in Europe.
“Russia is threatening all of Europe now, unfortunately,” Frederiksen said, reflecting the view of many in Europe that Putin would seek to dominate, if not outright occupy, more countries.
In Kherson, a port city in southern Ukraine that has come under heavy Russian shelling throughout the war, residents balanced their hopes for an end to the fighting with fears about Trump’s decision to leave Kyiv out of negotiations.
“It’s confusing. It’s going quickly and we don’t see where it’s going,” Yulia Ishuk, who worked at a restaurant in the port city of Odesa before the war and now runs a rehab center for soldiers, told an NBC News crew on the ground.
“Without our president, Zelenskyy … its kind of like games behind our backs and we don’t like it because we don’t understand that,” Ishuk, 47, said. “We don’t understand what’s going on.”
As negotiators had discussions in Riyadh, Washington’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, was in Brussels on Tuesday, where he was was meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ahead of a trip to Ukraine.
During his briefing in Abu Dhabi, Zelenskyy said he wanted to take Kellogg “to the front line” and have him meet with intelligence officials and diplomats so he could “bring more information back to America.”
Ukrainian soldiers fire artillery at Russian positions in the direction of Pokrovsk, Ukraine, on Monday.
Kellogg’s visit comes after France on Monday hosted an emergency meeting of European Union countries and Britain to decide how to respond after the Trump administration said they would not be part of the talks.
French President Emmanuel Macron said he spoke with both Trump and Zelenskyy following an emergency meeting of European leaders Monday.
“We seek a strong and lasting peace in Ukraine,” Macron said in a post on X. “To achieve this, Russia must end its aggression, and this must be accompanied by strong and credible security guarantees for the Ukrainians.”
Noting his conversation with Macron, Zelenskyy said in a post on X on Monday that the two world leaders shared a “common vision” of “robust and reliable” security guarantees for Ukrainians.
“Any other decision without such guarantees — such as a fragile ceasefire — would only serve as another deception by Russia and a prelude to a new Russian war against Ukraine or other European nations,” he warned.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
