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Today is the first step of long, difficult journey: US after Riyadh meeting with Russian delegates to end Ukraine war

by Trans World Features | @twfindia 18 Feb 2025, 10:09 pm

Riyadh : The much-anticipated meeting between Russia and the United States to end the Ukraine war concluded in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday evening (Riyadh time).

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke to the international press immediately after the top-level meeting.

"Today is the first step of a long and difficult journey - but an important one," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in his opening remarks.

"The goal is an agreement that is acceptable to everyone involved in it - and that obviously includes Ukraine, but also our partners in Europe, and, of course, the Russian side as well."

Secretary Rubio stressed that US President Donald Trump wants an immediate resolution to the war and has urged all sides to move quickly.

Calling for a fair, enduring, and sustainable agreement in this regard, Rubio said all sides will need to make concessions to find a common ground.

The US delegation, which included National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and special envoy Steve Witkoff, said  Russia and the United States will name teams, who will negotiate how to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible, Washington DC said as the superpowers met on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia.

However, Kyiv and the European Union were not present in the meeting.

Tuesday's meeting is the first high-level official talks between Washington and Moscow since Ukraine's 2022 invasion.

Russian negotiator and Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters that "it was a very serious conversation on all the questions we wanted to touch upon."

She, however, gave no specific details of Moscow's demands.

At the meeting in Riyadh, Russia signalled a hardening of its demands.

In a press briefing in Moscow, foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said it was "not enough" for NATO not to admit Ukraine as a member, adding that the military alliance must go further by disavowing a promise it made at a summit in Bucharest in 2008 that Kyiv would join at a future, unspecified date. "Otherwise, this problem will continue to poison the atmosphere on the European continent," she stressed.

Russia currently controls approximately one-fifth or 20 percent of Ukraine's territory.

Some European leaders, alarmed by Trump's overhaul of US policy on Russia, fear Washington DC will make serious concessions to Moscow and re-write the continent's security arrangement in a Cold War-style deal between superpowers, NDTV reported.

On Tuesday, both Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov agreed to "appoint respective high-level teams to begin working on a path to ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible," the US State Department said.

Last week, Trump called Vladimir Putin and both leaders agreed to immediately start talks to end the Ukraine war.

Trump described the call as "lengthy and highly productive" in a post on Truth Social, saying that the two leaders had even agreed to visit each other's nations to address the deep tensions since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022.

In an official statement, the Kremlin too confirmed the call and said it lasted nearly one-and-a-half hours.

They also confirmed that both Putin and Trump had agreed that the "time has come to work together," with a long-term solution for the Ukraine war in reach.