Marco Rubio Meets With Russians To Kick Start Peace Talks – Without Ukraine
(Evelyn Hockstein/Pool Photo via AP)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio led a US delegation to meet with Russia’s top negotiators to discuss peace in Ukraine on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia for a sit-down with Kyiv notably absent from the table.
Rubio was joined by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, in Riyadh to talk to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov.
The Saudi-brokered meeting marks the highest-level negotiations on ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since the early days of the war.
“The main thing for Russia is to achieve its goals in Ukraine, preferably through peaceful means,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said via Russian state media, adding that Moscow seeks a “peaceful resolution to the conflict, unlike Europe and the previous U.S. administration.”
Trump himself weighed in ahead of the talks, telling reporters that Putin “wants to stop the fighting” and claiming the Russian leader has no intention of seizing all of Ukraine.
“That was my question to him because if he’s going to go on, that would have been a big problem for us,” Trump said.
While the president continues to tout his ability to cut a deal, critics see these talks as nothing short of a preemptive surrender. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth already signaled key concessions to Russia just last week, backing away from supporting Ukraine’s NATO bid and seemingly offering little resistance to Putin’s territorial gains. That, according to former Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, cited in the Financial Times, is exactly what Putin wants to hear.
“Since he is given territorial and strategic rewards even before the talks, he is encouraged to conquer more and to discuss more humiliating concessions he could get,” Kozyrev warned.
Ukraine, for its part, has outright rejected any settlement it isn’t part of. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly stated that any agreement made without Ukraine is a nonstarter.
In the meantime, Russia appears to be setting the terms of any possible deal. On Tuesday, Peskov floated the idea that any agreement should include “the possibility of disputing Zelenskyy’s legitimacy,” a clear sign that the Kremlin is looking for more than just battlefield gains.
