Ukraine and Europe are left out of the high-level talks between the US and Russia.
There will be big changes in the way Washington and Moscow work together after the meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian partner.
US and Russia initiated high-level talks, reversing Trump’s stance towards Moscow, causing Kyiv’s fear and boosting Kremlin’s confidence in rejoining international mainstream.
Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, met in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is facilitating the talks and wants to strengthen its position as a world power.
The meeting is a big change in Washington’s relationship with Moscow, which has been cut off from Washington politically and financially since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This happened while Europe was focused on the war in Ukraine.
Trump said last week that he and President Vladimir Putin had a 90-minute talk. On Monday, a spokesperson for the State Department, Tammy Bruce, told reporters, “This is that second step to see if the Russians may be serious and if they’re on the same page.”
Ukraine is in the middle of the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, and other European leaders are worried and upset that they can’t take part in the talks. A big worry for Kyiv was that Russia would be allowed to keep about 20% of the country it has taken over.
Voronezh warned before the meeting, “Ukraine did not know anything about it.”
He also said that Kyiv “sees any negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine as ones that have no result, and we cannot recognize… any agreements about us without us.” He also said that he was planning to go to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday for a trip that had already been planned and had nothing to do with the talks between the U.S. and Russia.
Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister of Denmark, said that Russia could use the break to get ready for a new attack on Ukraine or other European countries.
“Unfortunately, Russia is now a threat to all of Europe,” Frederiksen said. This was in line with the view of many people in Europe that Putin would try to control or even take over more countries.
Kherson is a port city in southern Ukraine that has been heavily shelled by Russia during the war. People there were hoping for an end to the fighting but also worried about Trump’s choice to leave Kyiv out of the talks.
“It’s not clear. An NBC News crew on the ground talked to Yulia Ishuk, who used to work in a restaurant in Odessa before the war and now runs a rehab center for soldiers. “It’s going fast, and we don’t see where it’s going,” she said.
“Without our president, Zelenskyy … its kind of like games behind our backs and we don’t like it because we don’t understand that,” said Ishuk, 47. “We don’t understand what’s going on.”
Talks between Ukraine and Russia are ongoing in Riyadh, with Keith Kellogg, US special envoy, speaking with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels.
As Zelenskyy spoke in Abu Dhabi, he said that he wanted to put Kellogg “on the front lines” and have him meet with diplomats and intelligence officers so that Kellogg could “bring more information back to America.”
France held an emergency meeting with EU countries and Britain to determine action after the Trump administration’s refusal to attend talks.
Macron wrote on X, “We want a strong and long-lasting peace in Ukraine.” “To do this, Russia needs to stop being aggressive, and in exchange, the Ukrainian people need strong and reliable security guarantees.”
In a Monday post on X, Zelenskyy talked about his chat with Macron and said that the two world leaders had a “common vision” of giving Ukrainians “robust and reliable” security.
“Any other decision without such guarantees — such as a fragile ceasefire — would only serve as another deception by Russia and a prelude to a new Russian war against Ukraine or other European nations,” he told us.