The Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, says that the officials of the US-Russian conversations agreed to restore the embassy staff and create a high-level team to negotiate peace in the peace of Ukraine and promote cooperation economic.
Rubio said that the actions in recent years have reduced the skills of diplomatic missions of both countries to operate.
“We will need to have vibrant diplomatic missions that can work normally to continue with these ducts,” he said.
This occurs when the main diplomats of Russia and the United States met Tuesday in Saudi Arabia to discuss the improvement of ties and negotiate the end of the war in Ukraine, conversations that reflect an important and rapid change in American foreign policy The president of the United States, Donald Trump.
There are no Ukrainian officials present at the meeting, which occurred when the besieged country is losing slow ground but constantly against more numerous Russian troops in a grinding war that began almost three years ago. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said that his country will not accept any result of this week's conversations if kyiv does not participate. European allies have also expressed concern that they are being marginalized.
Beyond Ukraine, the meeting was expected, to which Rubio assistance, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other senior officials, focused on defrosting relations between the two countries, whose ties have fallen to their level more under decades.
He was also destined to pave the way for a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. After the conversations wrapped, the Foreign Affairs Advisor of Putin, Yuri Ushakov, told Channel one of Russia that a date for that summit has not yet been established, but that it was “unlikely” that it took place next week.
Concerns of allies who are being marginalized
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Monday that conversations would mainly focus on “restoring the entire range of relations between the United States and Russia, as well as preparing possible conversations about the Ukrainian settlement and organizing a meeting of the Two presidents. ” The spokeswoman for the United States Department, Tammy Bruce, said that the meeting was aimed at determining how serious the Russians are to want peace and if detailed negotiations can be initiated.
After the meeting, Ushakov's comments suggested that the two parties made little progress. Russia and the United States agreed to “take into account the interests of others” and advance their relationships. He added that it was “difficult to say” that the positions of the two countries “are approaching, but there was talk of it.”
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Following the 2022 invasion of Moscow, the United States, together with the European nations, imposed a series of sanctions on Russia and the allies have repeatedly expanded the measures to damage their economy.
The recent diplomatic bombing of the United States in the War has sent Ukraine and key allies to guarantee a seat at the table amid the concerns that Washington and Moscow could continue with an agreement that is not favorable for them.
The absence of kyiv in Tuesday's conversations has marked many Ukrainians, and France on Monday convened an emergency meeting of the countries of the European Union and the United Kingdom to discuss war.
Bruce has said that although Ukraine will not be on the table on Tuesday, any real peace negotiation will include the country. kyiv's participation in such conversations was a basis of American policy under Trump's predecessor, Joe Biden, whose administration also directed international efforts to isolate Russia during the war.
White House officials have also retreated against the notion that Europe has been left out of conversation, noting that administration officials have spoken with several leaders.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Tuesday that he spoke on the phone to Trump and Zelenskyy after the meeting he called in Paris.
“We are looking for a strong and lasting peace in Ukraine,” Macron wrote on the social media platform X. He promised to “work on this along with all Europeans, American and Ukrainians.”
Peskov said Tuesday that Putin has repeatedly expressed the preparation for peace conversations, and pointed out that a lasting agreement of the conflict in Ukraine would be impossible without “an integral consideration of security problems” in Europe.
The meeting at the Diriyah Palace in the Saudi capital of Riad also highlights the efforts of the de facto leader of Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to be an important diplomatic player, joking a reputation severely fogged by the 2018 murder of the journalist of the Washington Post Jamal Khashoggi .
Saudi state media described that conversations happened in the direction of the prince. Like the United Arab Emirates neighbors, the prince has maintained close relations with Russia throughout its war in Ukraine, both through the OPEC+ Oil poster and diplomatically also.
Saudi Arabia has also helped in the negotiations of the prisoners and has hosted Zelenskyy for a summit of the Arab League in 2023. Zelenskyy said he would travel to the kingdom at the end of this week.
Rubio was accompanied by the United States National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, and the special envoy Steve Witkoff, while Lavrov sat next to the Kremlin Foreign Affairs Advisor, Yuri Ushakov. Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal Bin Farhan, and National Security Advisor Musaed al Alban joined Rubio, Lavrov and others for the beginning of the meeting, but expected to leave early in the conversations.
Before the conversations, Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Sovereign Fund of Russian wealth, who said that Kremlin could join, stressed the importance of the meeting.
“The good relations between the United States and Russia are very important for everyone. Only together, Russia and the United States can address many global problems, resolve global conflicts and offer solutions, ”said Dmitriev, who said he and his team would focus on economic problems on conversations, The Associated Press.
The meeting marked the most extensive contact between the two countries since the invasion of February 24, Moscow. Lavrov and the then Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, spoke briefly outside a G-20 meeting in India almost two years ago, and in the autumn of 2022, the US and Russian spimons met in Turkey in Turkey In the midst of Washington's concerns that Moscow could resort to nuclear weapons in the middle of battlefield setbacks.
Meanwhile, Russia continued to hit Ukraine with drones, according to kyiv's army. The Ukraine Air Force said that Russian troops launched a flood of 176 drones in Ukraine during the night, most of which were destroyed or disabled by Jamming.
A Russian drone hit a residential building in Dollynska in the Kirovahrad region, hurting a mother and her two children and caused an evacuation of 38 apartments, the regional administration reported. According to local officials, four more residential buildings were damaged by drone debris in the Cherkasy region of Ukraine.