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American negotiators are having conversations in the Saudi capital Riad with their Ukrainian counterparts and separately with the Russians on Monday.
Washington’s goal is to achieve a high partial fire to the war in Ukraine, followed by an integral peace agreement.
So could these Riad conversations produce the progress that many expect?
It depends on who you listen to.
“I feel that he (Putin) wants peace,” said President Trump’s personal envoy Steve Witkoff, adding: “I think you’re going to see in Saudi Arabia on Monday a real progress.”
However, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, has reduced expectations. “We are only at the beginning of this path,” he told Russian State TV.
Kyiv suffered one of his heaviest attacks from Russian drones on Saturday night, with three people killed, including a five -year -old girl.
“We need to press Putin to give a real order to stop attacks,” said Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his afternoon speech on Sunday. “He who brought this war must remove it.”
The Kremlin, meanwhile, seems to be in a hurry to register in a high fire, with Vladimir Putin by adding numerous “nuances”, or previous conditions, before accepting the high 30 -day fire proposed by Washington and agreed by Kyiv by Kyiv.
In Riad, the United States-Ukraine conversations began shortly after Sunday nightfall, behind closed doors in one of the many luxury establishments of Saudi Arabia, with the Ukrainian delegation headed by the country’s defense minister, Rustem Uumerov.
These, he said, were “technical” discussions, focusing on the best way to safeguard energy and critical infrastructure facilities.
The black Sea shipping lanes are also under discussion, and Russia, according to reports, eager to relive an agreement that allowed Ukraine to export grains from its ports without being attacked, in exchange for relief in the sanctions.
Both parties, Russia and Ukraine, have carried out enormously destructive attacks against the infrastructure of the other.
Moscow has tried to immerse the population of Ukraine in cold and darkness by attacking its generation of electricity, while kyiv has become increasingly successful in their long -range drone attacks that have reached the critical Russian oil facilities for their war effort.
President Trump wants a rapid end for this war, the worst in Europe since 1945 and one that has led to combined casualties on both sides of hundreds of thousands of dead men, captured, wounded or missing.
The leadership of Ukraine, still bruised of that catastrophic row in the Oval office last month, is trying to convince Washington that it is not the obstacle to peace.
When the Americans proposed a high integral fire on Earth, the sea and in the air in the conversations in Jeddah this month, Ukraine quickly agreed the terms.
The ball, said the Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, at that time, was now in the court of Russia.
But although the United States failed to agree with that high fire, the Trump administration is putting little or no pressure, at least not in public, in Russia to align. In fact, quite the opposite.
In an interview this weekend with the Pro-Trump journalist, Tucker Carlson, Steve Witkoff, the man who heads the impulse of the United States for a high fire, seemed to take a position totally disagree with that of Europe.
Ukraine, he suggested, was “a false country,” Russia had been provoked and Putin was a man of his word in which he could trust.
Witkoff, a former New York real estate developer and Donald Trump’s golf partner, also Dismissed the efforts of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer To assemble a military force to help safeguard an eventual peace agreement in Ukraine, calling it “a position and a pose.”
