While US officials prepared on Sunday for the start of the talks with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, European leaders rushed to make a response to President Trump’s push for a regulation that seemed to leave them and kyiv Without any clear role in the process.
The Russian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, where talks are expected to take place this week, met the Kingdom’s Minister of Foreign Affairs on Sunday. Two senior officials of the Trump administration – National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and the Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff – will go to Saudi Arabia to join Secretary of State Marco Rubio for negotiations , Mr. Witkoff said on Sunday in an interview on Sunday morning future, on Fox News.
The latest preparations have followed a wave of diplomatic discussions in recent days which included a conversation between Mr. Rubio and the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sergey V. Lavrov.
Sunday, Rubio declared in an interview of Jerusalem with CBS News that if an opportunity arose “for a wider conversation which would imply Ukraine, this would imply the end of the war, which would imply our allies all over the world , In particular in Europe, we will explore it if this opportunity arises. »»
The meeting with Russia, although preliminary, would signal the start of Mr. Trump’s accelerated calendar for an agreement and his apparent determination to carry out negotiations with Russia alone, at least for the moment.
Ukraine will not participate, Andriy Yermak, the head of the presidential office of President Volodymyr Zelensky, confirmed Sunday in an article on the social networking site of the telegram. He said that Ukraine would prefer to reach a common plan for negotiations with the Trump administration before meeting a Russian delegation.
“There was no meeting or planned,” said Mr. Yermak. “The president clearly indicated that any agreement concluded without the involvement of Ukraine will not be accepted. Security guarantees must include the United States. We will never make decisions that go against the interests of Ukraine. »»
In an initially encouraged initiative by Ukraine, the Trump administration is in talks to guarantee part of the profits of Ukraine natural resources in exchange for security aid. But when the administrative proposal arrived, Mr. Zelensky refused the conditions, under which the United States would receive half of the profits.
Mr. Zelensky said he refused, in part, because he did not offer any assurance of American support in the war in exchange. It has not been clear if American demand is linked to future assistance or considered compensation for assistance already provided.
The rejection by Mr. Zelensky of the proposal caused a reprimand of Mr. Waltz, the national security advisor. Mr. Zelensky, he said in an interview on Fox News Sunday, would be “very wise” to accept the agreement, adding: “The American people deserves to be recovered, deserves to have a kind of recovery For the billions in which they invested this war. “”
The leaders of France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, and the main officials of the European Union and NATO, will convene an emergency meeting in Paris on Monday to discuss the war in Ukraine and European security, French officials said on Sunday. The objective is to coordinate a response to the opening by the Trump administration of talks with Russia without European participation.
This follows a meeting on Sunday from the European Union foreign ministers on Sunday, which as a block provided more military support to Ukraine than the United States.
In the interview with Fox News, Mr. Waltz denied that Europeans were excluded from negotiations. “They may not like part of the sequencing that is happening in some of these negotiations,” he said. “I have to repel any idea that they are not consulted. They are absolutely.
Waltz added that American negotiators “will bring everyone together if necessary”, while specifying that Europeans should “provide long -term military guarantees”.
Mr. Zelensky said he would be in Saudi Arabia this week but did not specify when. He clearly indicated that he did not want to undertake negotiations before determining what guarantees of guarantee Western nations are ready to offer to ensure that all ceases is not violated. On Saturday, he said he had no such insurance from the United States.
In an interview with NBC on Sunday, he reiterated that he would accept “never” a peace negotiation set between Russia and the United States without Ukraine.
When asked if he felt that he had a seat at the table at the moment, Mr. Zelensky has not responded directly. He said he was counting on one. He said he told Mr. Trump that Putin “is a liar” who “did not want peace”.
In Moscow, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comments. But Russian state television published an interview on Sunday with Dmitri S. Peskov, the spokesperson for Mr. Putin, who reaffirmed the new Russian optimism on negotiation with the United States after years of diplomatic isolation by Biden administration.
“We are now going to talk about peace, not war,” said Peskov. “Based on President Trump’s statements, we are solving problems through dialogue.”
Russia and Ukraine have not met for direct talks for almost three years. The Russian and Ukrainian direct discussions, mediated first with Belarus and then Turkey, began at the start of the Invasion of Russia on the scale of Ukraine in 2022 but took place six weeks later. They became untenable after Russia has suffered defeats on the battlefield and after human rights violations of the Russian army turned out to be in the city of Bucha, where about 400 bodies were found in The streets of the city, in mass pits and in the backgrounds.
Russia has subsequently lost about half of the territory earned in the invasion, but for a year, it has progressed in a bloody offensive and slowed down in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine which moved the front line at around 30 miles. Ukraine has a pocket of Russian territory which he captured six months ago in the Kursk region to use as leverage in talks.
For the moment, however, the Ukrainians – who have endured hundreds of thousands of victims in combat and missile attacks, power outages and travel for civilians to fight Russia in a dead end – found themselves With the undesirable perspective of negotiations on their future without their voice without their voice without their voice without their voice without their voice without their voice without their voice without their voice without their voice.
“I find it completely incomprehensible, and of course, it offers me,” said Vladyslava Bilova, 19, a student in kyiv, about the exclusion of Ukraine from the opening of talks. “It is strange to decide the fate of a country when it does not even participate in the process.”
Viktor Reuta, 49, soldier, said that the Ukrainians would not accept a colony forced to. “They can try to impose what they want,” he said. “We are already at war and we realized that we can speak for ourselves.”
Ukraine’s exclusion from the start of talks is “very disturbing and even terrifying,” said Vita Voinovska, 40, pharmacist. She added: “We have the impression that three people stand together, and two talk to each other while the third – the one in front of the problem – stands there as if they did not exist.”
Edward Wong contributed Washington reports, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn from Kyiv and Anton Troanovski from Berlin.
