United States and Russia officials began conversations in Saudi Arabia on Monday to progress toward a large ceasefire in Ukraine with Washington eyeing a separate maritime ceasefire agreement before ensuring a more comprehensive agreement.
The conversations, which followed US negotiations with Ukraine in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, occur at the time the US President Donald Trump intensifies his effort to end the three -year conflict after talking last week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
An informed source on conversation planning said the US side was being led by Andrew Peek, a senior director of the White House National Security Council, and Michael Anton, senior representative of the state department.
The White House states that the goal of the conversations is to reach a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, allowing the free flow of ships, although the area has not been the subject of intense military operations in recent months.
Russia will be represented by Grigory Karasin, a former Diplomat who is now chairman of the Russian High Chamber Foreign Committee, and Sergei Beseda, advisor to the director of the Federal Security Service, the main successor agency of the Soviet era KGB.
Trump, who has repeatedly defended the end of the war in Ukraine, expressed broad satisfaction with the progress of negotiations and praised Putin’s involvement in the process so far.
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He said on Saturday that efforts to prevent a new escalation in the conflict were “somehow under control.”
But there is skepticism among the major European powers about whether Putin is ready to make significant concessions or will keep what they consider their maximalist demands, which do not seem to have changed since he sent tens of thousands of soldiers to Ukraine in 2022.
Putin says he is willing to discuss peace, but that Ukraine must officially abandon its ambitions in NATO and remove its troops from all over the four -regions claimed and mostly controlled by Russia.
