US and Russian officials held talks in Saudi Arabia yesterday aimed at making progress towards a broad ceasefire in Ukraine with Washington eyeing a separate Black Sea maritime ceasefire deal before securing a wider agreement.
The talks, which followed US negotiations with Ukraine in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, come as US President Donald Trump intensifies his drive to end the three-year-old conflict after he last week spoke to both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The White House says the aim of the talks is to reach a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, allowing the free flow of shipping, though the area has not been the location of intense military operations in recent months.
“This is primarily about the safety of navigation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, noting that an earlier agreement on Black Sea shipping brokered in 2022 had failed to deliver what it had promised Moscow.
A source briefed on the planning for the talks said the US side was being led by Andrew Peek, a senior director at the White House National Security Council, and Michael Anton, a senior State Department official.
Russia was represented by Grigory Karasin, a former diplomat who is now chair of the Russian upper house of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, and by Sergei Beseda, an adviser to the director of the Federal Security Service, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.
Karasin was cited by Interfax news agency as saying during a break after nearly three hours of talks that consultations were progressing ‘creatively’ and that the two sides had discussed issues regarded as ‘irritants’ in their bilateral ties.
Trump, who has repeatedly called for an end to the war in Ukraine, has expressed broad satisfaction over the way talks have been going and has been complimentary about Putin’s engagement in the process so far.
He said on Saturday that efforts to stop further escalation in the conflict were ‘somewhat under control’.
But there is scepticism among major European powers over whether Putin is ready to make meaningful concessions or will stick to what they see as his maximalist demands that do not appear to have changed since he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022.
Putin says he is ready to discuss peace but that Ukraine must officially drop its Nato ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entirety of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and mostly controlled by Russia.
The Kremlin said yesterday that Russia was still abiding by a 30-day moratorium on attacking Ukrainian energy infrastructure targets that Putin last week promised Trump, despite Kyiv continuing to strike Russian energy facilities.
Ukraine, which said it would only agree to the pause if a formal document was signed, has accused Moscow of flouting its own moratorium, which Russia denies.
Meanwhile, a powerful cyberattack knocked out the online ticketing system for Ukraine’s state railway service, causing long queues at stations yesterday in what Kyiv officials said looked like a Russian attempt to ‘destabilise’ the situation.
An outage was first reported on Sunday when the rail company notified passengers about a failure in its IT system and told them to buy tickets on-site or on trains.
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