Riyadh (TDI): US and Russian officials began talks in Saudi Arabia on Monday aimed at making progress towards a broad ceasefire in Ukraine with Washington eyeing a separate Black Sea maritime ceasefire agreement before securing a wider deal.
The negotiations, which followed US talks with Ukraine in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, come as US President Donald Trump intensifies his drive to end the 3-year-old war after he last week spoke to both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In talks, the US side was being led by Andrew Peek, a senior director at the White House National Security Council, and Michael Anton, a senior State Department official, Reuters reported.
Washington said that aim of the negotiations is to reach a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, allowing the free flow of shipping, though the area has not been the spot of intense military operations in recent months.
Moscow will be represented by Grigory Karasin, a former diplomat who is now chairperson of the Russian upper house of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, and by Sergei Beseda, an adviser to the director of the Federal Security Service (FSS), the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.
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Trump, who has repeatedly called for an end to the conflict in Ukraine, has expressed satisfaction over the way negotiations have been going and has been complimentary about Putin’s engagement in the process so far.
He said on Saturday that efforts to stop further escalation in the war were “somewhat under control”.
But there is skepticism among major European powers over whether the Russian President is ready to make meaningful concessions or will stick to what they see as his maximalist demands that do not appear to have changed since he sent tens of thousands of forces into Ukraine in 2022.
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Putin says he is ready to discuss peace but that Kyiv must officially drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw its forces from the entirety of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and mostly controlled by Moscow.
