Donald Trump announces second round of Ukraine peace talks with Russian diplomats
US President Donald Trump has announced a new phase for ceasefire talks between American and Russian delegations in a statement released through the public broadcasting service, C-Span.
Trump said the talks would take place in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, on 25 February, a week after the first round, which occurred in the same city just last Tuesday.
After the meeting, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated the two parties had broadly agreed to pursue three objectives: to reinstate staffing at their respective embassies in Washington and Moscow; to establish a high-level team to facilitate Ukraine peace negotiations; and to investigate the possibility of closer relations and economic cooperation.
He made it clear though that the talks, which included his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and other top Russian officials, were just the start of a discussion and there's a lot more to be done.
Lavrov described the meeting as "very useful".
No Ukrainian officials were present, which came as the country is slowly losing ground against a larger number of Russian troops, nearly three years after Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of its smaller neighbour.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country wouldn't accept any outcome from the talks as Kyiv wasn't involved and he pushed back his own trip to Saudi Arabia, which was set for last Wednesday.
Australian allies have also expressed dismay that they're being left out of the loop.
Trump-Putin summit
Meanwhile, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has said that preparations are underway for a face-to-face meeting between Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, marking a dramatic shift away from the West's isolation of Moscow over its conflict in Ukraine.
Speaking to Russian state media, Ryabkov said a possible Trump-Putin summit could involve wide-ranging discussions on global issues and not just the conflict in Ukraine.
"The question is about moving towards normalising relations between our countries, finding ways to resolve the most pressing and potentially extremely hazardous situations, including Ukraine," he said.
But he said efforts to arrange a meeting are at an early stage and that making it happen will require "the most intensive preparatory work."
That first round of peace talks prompted European mates to rally behind Zelenskyy, concerned about Trump's apparent shift towards Moscow and worries that peace talks would occur without Ukraine's direct involvement and advantage Russia.
On Friday, Trump seemed to backtrack on his previous comments that falsely attributed the start of the war to Kyiv, but still maintained that Zelenskyy and former President Joe Biden should have reached an agreement with Putin.
"Russia pounced, but they shouldn't have let him launch an attack," he said during a radio interview with Brian Kilmeade of Fox News, referring to the Russian leader.
Russia's army crossed the border on 24 February, 2022, in a full-scale invasion that Putin claimed was necessary to safeguard Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine and stop the country from joining NATO.
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