Top US and Russian officials held talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine, without anyone from Kyiv involved, fueling concerns about a rapid push for a deal by the two powers that may leave Europe on the sidelines.
A senior Russian official said after the meeting, which lasted roughly four hours, that no date had been set for President Vladimir Putin and US counterpart Donald Trump to meet. He added that such a summit was unlikely to be next week, which Bloomberg reported was a possibility.
“It’s hard to say yet that we’re getting closer, but there was a conversation,” Kremlin foreign-policy aide Yuri Ushakov said about the two sides’ positions, according to the state-run Tass news agency.

The talks in Riyadh followed Trump’s landmark phone call with Putin last week in which he reversed key US positions on the conflict. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned his country won’t recognize “any agreements about us without us.”