Top U.S. officials headed Sunday to Saudi Arabia for talks with Russian diplomats in the coming days on ending Moscow’s three-year war on Ukraine, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio downplayed prospects for an immediate breakthrough.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin agreed during an hour-long call last week to the immediate start of peace negotiations, but Rubio told CBS’s “Face the Nation” in an interview aired Sunday, “A process towards peace is not a one- meeting thing.”
"We'll see in the coming days and weeks if Vladimir Putin is interested in negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine in a way that is sustainable and fair,” Rubio said.
Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, and U.S. national security adviser Mike Waltz said they were headed to Riyadh for the talks, while a Ukrainian minister says that an official delegation has arrived there in preparation for a possible visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The shape of the talks remained uncertain.
Rubio said he wasn't even sure who Moscow was sending. "Nothing's been finalized yet," he said, adding that the hope was for an opening for a broad conversation that "would include Ukraine and would involve the end of the war."
Trump’s call with Putin blindsided NATO allies as well as Kyiv, with Zelenskyy later saying that there should be "no decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine."
Whatever occurs this week in Saudi Arabia, Rubio said that once "real negotiations" begin, then Ukraine "will have to be involved.”
Hours before European leaders meet in Paris to address Washington's policy shift on the war in Ukraine, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in the Daily Telegraph on Sunday that he was ready to send British troops to Ukraine as part of any postwar peacekeeping force.
"I do not say that lightly," he wrote. "I feel very deeply the responsibility that comes with potentially putting British servicemen and women in harm's way."
Starmer said securing a lasting peace in Ukraine was essential to deter Russian President Putin from further aggression.
His article was meant to show the U.S. that European nations should have a role in discussions on ending the nearly 3-year-old conflict.
French President Emmanuel Macron also warned that European countries should do more for their collective security, as talks between the United States and Russia loom.
The U.K. premier is due to join leaders from Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark at the Paris meeting on Monday, just days ahead of the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said, “I will never accept any decisions between the United States and Russia about Ukraine. Never. The war in Ukraine is against us, and it is our human losses.”
Zelenskyy said he told Trump in a call they had last week that Putin is only pretending to want peace.
“I said that he is a liar. And [Trump] said, ‘I think my feeling is that he's ready for these negotiations.’ And I said to him, ‘No, he's a liar. He doesn't want any peace.’"
The United States has been Ukraine’s biggest arms supplier during the conflict, but Trump has wavered on continued support and declined during a political debate last year to say that he wants Ukraine to win.
Zelenskyy said that without continued U.S. military support, “Probably it will be very, very, very difficult” to defeat Russia. “And of course, in all the difficult situations, you have a chance. But we will have low chance -- low chance to survive without support of the United States.”
Russia now controls about 20% of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory, including the Crimean Peninsula it unilaterally annexed in 2014 and the eastern portion of Ukraine pro-Moscow separatists captured after that and since the full-scale February 2022 Russian invasion.
Some information for this article came from Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
