Left Out of Ukraine Talks, Europe Races to Organize a Response
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The Trump administration’s push for negotiations without Ukrainian involvement leaves European allies with no clear role.
While American officials prepared on Sunday for the start of talks with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, European leaders were moving to formulate a response to President Trump’s rapid push for a settlement that appeared to leave them and Ukrainian officials with no clear role in the process.
The Russian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, where the talks are to take place this week, met Sunday with the kingdom’s foreign minister. Two senior Trump administration officials — Mike Waltz, and the Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff — will fly to Saudi Arabia to join Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the negotiations, Mr. Witkoff said Sunday in an interview with Fox News.
The preparations come after a flurry of diplomatic discussions over the past several days that included a conversation between Mr. Rubio and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.
On Sunday, Mr. Rubio said in an interview from Jerusalem with CBS News that if an opportunity presented itself for a “broader conversation that would involve Ukraine and would involve the end of the war, and would involve our allies all over the world, particularly in Europe,” the United States would explore it.
He did not say which Russian officials would be in Riyadh this week, and noted that he had made plans earlier to be in Saudi Arabia anyway during this trip, his first to the Middle East as secretary of state. “Nothing’s been finalized yet,” he said.
The meeting with Russia, while preliminary, would signal the start of Mr. Trump’s accelerated timetable for a deal and his seeming determination to conduct negotiations with Russia alone, at least for now.