US and Russia set to begin high-stakes talks over Ukraine’s fate

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US and Russia set to begin high-stakes talks over Ukraine’s fate

High-level delegations from the U.S. and Russia were set to begin talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday over the fate of Ukraine — negotiations taking place — without Ukraine.

Ahead of the talks that the State Department said were aimed to discuss ending the now three-year-long war, an American delegation headed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Saudi Arabian Crown

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Mohammed bin Salman.

Rubio’s counterpart, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, confirmed the bilateral talks would take place in Riyadh on Tuesday.

PHOTO: Secretary of State Marco Rubio meets with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Feb. 17, 2025. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

The talks between Moscow and Washington end a ******* of some three years — since President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Geneva before Russia invaded Ukraine — without senior-level engagement between the two nations.

Lavrov and Rubio talked on the phone Saturday, according to the State Department, after a conversation between Putin and Trump last week.

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PHOTO: Vladimir Putin, in Moscow, Feb. 17, 2025 and President Donald Trump, in Washington, Feb. 11, 2025. (Reuters/AFP via Getty Images)

While a spokesman for Putin said the meeting would be “devoted” primarily to “restoring the entire range of Russian-American relations,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said that the meeting would be more narrowly focused on the “larger issue of Ukraine.”

After the Trump-Putin conversation, Bruce called the meeting the “second step to determine if the Russians perhaps are serious, and if they’re on the same page.”

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PHOTO: President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks to the media during a briefing at the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine, Feb. 13, 2025. (Alex Babenko/AP)

Zelenskyy said Monday Ukraine ‘will not recognize agreements’ struck without Kyiv’s participation

Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy was not invited and Zelenskky said Monday that Ukraine “cannot acknowledge any… agreements about us without us, and will not recognize such agreements.”

“Earlier, during the war, it was considered taboo to talk to the aggressor,” the Ukrainian president said.

Amid the flurry of diplomatic activity, French President Emmanuel Macron convened a meeting of European heads of government Monday ahead of the U.S.-Russia engagement.

Macron and Trump spoke via telephone for nearly 30 minutes prior to the European meeting, a White House official said. The official called the conversation “friendly” and said it included discussion of the war in Ukraine and the U.S.-Russia bilateral meetings Tuesday.

Mike Waltz, the White House national security adviser, said on Sunday he would “push back on … any notion that [Ukrainians] aren’t being consulted.”

“They absolutely are. And at the end of the day, though, this is going to be under President Trump’s leadership that we get this war to an end,” Waltz said, conceding “they may not like some of the sequencing that is going on in these negotiations.”

Zelenskyy himself is in the Middle East, where he met with officials in the United Arab Emirates Monday, with meetings scheduled in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, Zelenskyy said he’d ask Crown Prince Salman, who is also the Saudi prime minister, about the US-Russia meetings.

The opening of White House-facilitated talks on peace in Ukraine comes after Trump officials signaled potential terms for a deal at the Munich Security Conference last week.

Ahead of the conference, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called a return to Ukrainian borders before Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea “unrealistic.” That “illusory goal” – and NATO membership for Ukraine – would not be promoted by the US, the secretary said.

Zelenskyy at the conference said Ukraine must be assured of membership in “NATO, or a reliable alternative.”

He called for the building of the “armed forces of Europe” as the Trump administration presses for more European spending on defense.

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PHOTO: French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer as he arrives for a meeting with European leaders on Ukraine and European security at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Feb. 17, 2025. (Abdul Saboor/Reuters)

Among the attendees of Macron’s hastily organized meeting in Paris, the prime ministers of the United Kingdom and Sweden said they would be open to contributing armed forces on the ground in Ukraine in a peacekeeping capacity, after a potential deal is struck.

“If there is a peace deal [for Ukraine], and everybody wants a peace deal, then it’s got to be a lasting peace deal, not just a pause for Putin to come again,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in Paris.

“There’s also a wider piece here which is the collective security and defense in Europe, and here, I think we’ve got a generational challenge. We’ve all got to step up,” he added.

-ABC News’ Molly Nagle and Patrick Reevell contributed to this report.

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