Russian and US officials meet in Saudi Arabia for high-stakes talks on war in Ukraine, without Kyiv – Europe live | Ukraine

The prospects of the US-Russia talks leading to an agreement to halt the fighting in Ukraine are unclear, Agence France-Presse reports, and the US and Russia have cast the discussions as the beginning of a potentially lengthy process.

“I don’t think that people should view this as something that is about details or moving forward in some kind of a negotiation,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said.

Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, told state media the talks would discuss “how to start negotiations on Ukraine”.

Both Ukraine and Russia have ruled out territorial concessions and Putin last year demanded Kyiv withdraw its troops from even more territory.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy travelled to Turkey on Tuesday to discuss the conflict with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and then Saudi Arabia a day later.

He does not plan to hold talks with either the US or Russian delegations, his spokesperson said on Monday.

Zelenskyy said last week he was prepared to meet Putin, but only after Kyiv and its allies had a common position on ending the war.

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the US-Russia talks in Riyadh – it’s approaching 8am in the Saudi capital.

Today’s talks aim to pave the way for the first exchanges on a potential peace deal to end the Ukraine war. However, Kyiv and European leaders have been excluded, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that Ukraine “cannot recognise any things or any agreements about us without us”.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and senior Putin aide Yuri Ushakov are to meet with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, criticised US president Donald Trump’s decision to rush into peace talks with Russia, saying it was “highly inappropriate” that a debate had started about the outcome of talks that had not yet taken place and were being conducted without Ukraine’s involvement.

This is Adam Fulton to kick off our reporting before Jakub Krupa takes the reins later to steer you through the day.

The US and Russian sides both sides played down the chances that the first high-level meeting since US Trump took office would result in a breakthrough, but the existence of the talks and Washington’s recent overtures towards the Kremlin have alarmed Ukraine and Europe.

The talks come after European leaders gathered in Paris for an emergency summit on how to respond to the new US administration’s dramatic pivot. The summit heard widespread calls for a large boost in defence spending, and the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, later urged Trump to provide a US “backstop” to a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine, saying it was the only way to deter Russia from attacking the country again.

Preparations for a possible summit between presidents Trump and Vladimir Putin are also expected to be on the Riyadh agenda. Trump is pushing for a swift resolution to the three-year conflict in Ukraine, while Russia sees his outreach as a chance to win concessions.

In other developments:

• Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said on Monday upon arrival in Riyadh that talks on Ukraine would be strictly bilateral, Russia’s RIA state news agency reported. “We came to negotiate with American colleagues,” it quoted Ushakov as saying. “These are bilateral talks, purely bilateral. There can be no trilateral talks in Riyadh.”

• The Riyadh talks are proceeding to follow up on a surprise phone call to Putin initiated by Trump last week. Trump’s special Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, stressed Trump wanted a quick deal: “We are now at Trump time, which means I get an assignment today and tomorrow at noon he asks me why it hasn’t been done yet.”

• Russia said ahead of the meeting that Putin and Trump wanted to move on from “abnormal relations” and that it saw no place for Europeans to be at any negotiating table.

• Zelenskyy accused Washington of wanting “to please” Putin by “now saying things that are very favourable” to him. The Ukrainian president said any peace deal would need to include “robust and reliable” security guarantees, which France and Britain have called for but not all European powers support.