European officials not part of discussions as Volodymyr Zelenskyy warns his country will not recognise peace deals made without Ukrainian participation
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Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the US-Russia talks in Riyadh – it’s approaching 8am in the Saudi capital.
Today’s talks aim to pave the way for the first exchanges on a potential peace deal to end the Ukraine war. However, Kyiv and European leaders have been excluded, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that Ukraine “cannot recognise any things or any agreements about us without us”.
Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said on Monday upon arrival in Riyadh that talks on Ukraine would be strictly bilateral, Russia’s RIA state news agency reported. “We came to negotiate with American colleagues,” it quoted Ushakov as saying. “These are bilateral talks, purely bilateral. There can be no trilateral talks in Riyadh.”
The Riyadh talks are proceeding to follow up on a surprise phone call to Putin initiated by Trump last week. Trump’s special Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, stressed Trump wanted a quick deal: “We are now at Trump time, which means I get an assignment today and tomorrow at noon he asks me why it hasn’t been done yet.”
Russia said ahead of the meeting that Putin and Trump wanted to move on from “abnormal relations” and that it saw no place for Europeans to be at any negotiating table.
Zelenskyy accused Washington of wanting “to please” Putin by “now saying things that are very favourable” to him. The Ukrainian president said any peace deal would need to include “robust and reliable” security guarantees, which France and Britain have called for but not all European powers support.
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