The United States and Russia agreed to restore embassy staffing in high-level talks marking President Donald Trump’s reversal of American policy on Moscow, fueling fears in Kyiv and building the Kremlin’s hopes of reentering the international mainstream.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said both countries had agreed to “reestablish the functionality of our respective missions in Washington and Moscow” and that Washington would create a high-level team to work on a path to ending the war in Ukraine.
Rubio said negotiators also agreed to “begin to discuss and think about and examine both the geopolitical and economic cooperation that could result from an end to the conflict in Ukraine,” which he said could only happen once the war came to an end.
His comments came after he led a U.S. delegation in a four-and-a-half hour meeting attended by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other Kremlin officials in Saudi Arabia.
Lavrov told reporters the meeting was “very useful” as he confirmed efforts to “remove obstacles” for diplomatic missions on the two sides, which he blamed the Biden administration for.
Under the Trump administration, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.”
Separately, Yuri Ushakov, President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said the talks had paved a way for a possible meeting between Trump and Putin, although he did not say when that might take place, according to the Russian state news agency TASS.
Trump announced last week that he and Putin had held a 90-minute conversation and the meeting in Riyadh is a major turning point in Washington’s relationship with Moscow, which has been diplomatically and financially isolated since it launched its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
U.S. and Russian officials meet at Riyadh’s Diriyah Palace on Tuesday.
Attention in Europe meanwhile, was focused on the war in Ukraine, the deadliest conflict on the continent since World War II.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and other European leaders expressed alarm and dismay at being shut out of the talks. One of Kyiv’s main concerns was that Russia would be given the go-ahead to keep some 20% of the country it has occupied.
“Ukraine did not know anything about it,” Zelenskyy warned ahead of the meeting.
Kyiv “regards any negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine as ones that have no result, and we cannot recognize … any agreements about us without us,” he said, adding that he planned to travel to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday for a trip had had been arranged in advance and was not related to the talks between the U.S. and Russia.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that Russia could use the pause to remobilize and mount a fresh attack on Ukraine or target other countries in Europe.
“Russia is threatening all of Europe now, unfortunately,” Frederiksen said, reflecting the view of many in Europe that Putin would seek to dominate, if not outright occupy, more countries.
In Kherson, a port city in southern Ukraine that has come under heavy Russian shelling throughout the war, residents balanced their hopes for an end to the fighting with fears about Trump’s decision to leave Kyiv out of negotiations.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, second right, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, second left, at Riyadh’s Diriyah Palace on Tuesday.
“It’s confusing. It’s going quickly and we don’t see where it’s going,” Yulia Ishuk, who worked at a restaurant in the port city of Odesa before the war and now runs a rehab center for soldiers, told an NBC News crew on the ground.
“Without our president, Zelenskyy … its kind of like games behind our backs and we don’t like it because we don’t understand that,” Ishuk, 47, said. “We don’t understand what’s going on.”
As negotiators had discussions in Riyadh, Washington’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, was in Brussels on Tuesday, where he was was meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ahead of a trip to Ukraine.
During his briefing in Abu Dhabi, Zelenskyy said he wanted to take Kellogg “to the front line” and have him meet with intelligence officials and diplomats so he could “bring more information back to America.”
Kellogg’s visit comes after France on Monday hosted an emergency meeting of European Union countries and Britain to decide how to respond after the Trump administration said they would not be part of the talks.
French President Emmanuel Macron said he spoke with both Trump and Zelenskyy following an emergency meeting of European leaders Monday.
Ukrainian soldiers fire artillery at Russian positions in the direction of Pokrovsk, Ukraine, on Monday.
“We seek a strong and lasting peace in Ukraine,” Macron said in a post on X. “To achieve this, Russia must end its aggression, and this must be accompanied by strong and credible security guarantees for the Ukrainians.”
Noting his conversation with Macron, Zelenskyy said in a post on X on Monday that the two world leaders shared a “common vision” of “robust and reliable” security guarantees for Ukrainians.
“Any other decision without such guarantees — such as a fragile ceasefire — would only serve as another deception by Russia and a prelude to a new Russian war against Ukraine or other European nations,” he warned.
The high-level talks in Riyadh came after Russia released American Kalob Byers, a Trump administration official confirmed to NBC News on Tuesday. Byers had been detained in the country on suspicion of drug smuggling since early February.
“The Russians turned him over which is a welcome gesture,” an administration official said. “We hope they consider the same for all Americans unjustly detained in Russia.”
Byers’ release came days after that of Marc Fogel, a teacher from Pennsylvania who was detained in Russia for more than three years before being freed earlier this month in exchange for the release of Alexander Vinnik, a Russian cryptocurrency expert who faced Bitcoin fraud charges in the U.S.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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