A deal in the desert? US and Ukraine meet ahead of Russia ceasefire talks

US negotiators are holding talks within the Saudi capital Riyadh with their Ukrainian counterparts and individually with the Russians on Monday.

Washington’s goal is to result in a right away partial ceasefire to the battle in Ukraine, adopted by a complete peace deal.

So may these Riyadh talks produce the breakthrough so many are hoping for?

It relies upon who you hearken to.

“I really feel that he (Putin) needs peace,” mentioned President Trump’s private envoy Steve Witkoff, including: “I believe that you’ll see in Saudi Arabia on Monday some actual progress.”

But Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman has dampened expectations. “We’re solely firstly of this path,” he instructed Russian state TV.

Kyiv suffered certainly one of its heaviest assaults from Russian drones on Saturday night time, with three individuals killed, together with a five-year-old woman.

“We have to push Putin to offer an actual order to cease the strikes,” mentioned Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in his night handle on Sunday. “The one who introduced this battle should take it away.”

The Kremlin, in the meantime, appears to be in no rush to enroll to a ceasefire, with Vladimir Putin including on quite a few “nuances”, or preconditions, earlier than agreeing to the 30-day ceasefire proposed by Washington and agreed to by Kyiv.

In Riyadh the US-Ukraine talks started quickly after dusk on Sunday, behind closed doorways in certainly one of Saudi Arabia’s many luxurious institutions, with the Ukrainian delegation headed by the nation’s defence minister, Rustem Umerov.

These, he mentioned, have been “technical” discussions, specializing in how greatest to safeguard power services and important infrastructure.

Black Sea delivery lanes are additionally beneath dialogue, with Russia reportedly eager to revive a deal that allowed Ukraine to export grain from its ports with out being attacked, in trade for aid on sanctions.

Either side, Russia and Ukraine, have carried out vastly harmful assaults on one another’s infrastructure.

Moscow has sought to plunge Ukraine’s inhabitants into chilly and darkness by focusing on its electrical energy technology, whereas Kyiv has develop into more and more profitable in its long-range drone strikes which have struck Russian oil services vital to its battle effort.

President Trump needs a fast finish to this battle, Europe’s worst since 1945 and one which has led to mixed casualties on either side of lots of of 1000’s of killed, captured, wounded or lacking males.

Ukraine’s management, nonetheless bruised from that catastrophic row within the Oval Workplace final month, is making an attempt laborious to persuade Washington it’s not the impediment to peace.

When the Individuals proposed a complete 30-day ceasefire on land, sea and within the air at talks in Jeddah this month, Ukraine rapidly agreed to the phrases.

The ball, mentioned the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the time, was now in Russia’s court docket.

However regardless of the US failure to get Moscow to comply with that ceasefire, the Trump administration is placing little or no stress, a minimum of not in public, on Russia to fall into line. The truth is, fairly the alternative.

In an interview this weekend with the pro-Trump journalist Tucker Carlson, Steve Witkoff, the person spearheading the US drive for a ceasefire, appeared to take a stance completely at odds with that of Europe.

Ukraine, he prompt, was “a false nation”, Russia had been provoked and Putin was a person of his phrase who could possibly be trusted.

Witkoff, a former New York actual property developer and {golfing} associate of Donald Trump, additionally dismissed Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s efforts to place collectively a army power to assist safeguard an eventual peace deal in Ukraine, calling it “a posture and a pose”.