Ukrainian and American officials are meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday in hopes of finding a way to halt the Russia-Ukraine war. But the United States, Ukraine and Russia each have very different ideas about what a potential agreement should look like.
Ahead of the talks, Ukraine and Russia launched deadly strikes on each other’s territory, including a large-scale drone attack on Moscow.
What’s happening today?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, the U.S. national security adviser, sat down in the city of Jeddah with a delegation led by Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov.
U.S. officials have said that they hope to determine in the meetings whether Ukraine is committed to pursuing peace with Russia.
Emerging for a break after more than two hours of talks, Mr. Waltz said, “We’re getting there.”
Russia was not present for the talks. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said on Tuesday that Russia expected the American side to inform Moscow about the results of talks with Ukraine.
Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, plans to visit Russia in the coming days, according to two people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss internal plans.
Ukraine and Russia trade strikes
Hours before the talks began, Russian officials said Ukraine had attacked Moscow with its largest long-range drone bombardment of the war.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said it shot down at least 91 drones before dawn in the Moscow region, along with over 240 drones targeting other parts of the country. At least three people were killed and 18 others were injured in the Moscow region, the Russian authorities said. Ukraine’s military said it had targeted Moscow’s oil refinery, along with an oil production station in the Orel region. Neither claim could be independently verified.
Kyiv has long maintained that the only way to force Russia to accept an enduring peace deal is through force and by raising the cost of the war for the Kremlin. The timing of the overnight attack on Moscow was meant to drive home that message, Andriy Kovalenko, a senior Ukrainian official focused on Russian disinformation operations, said in a statement.
Russia has also continued its relentless bombardment of Ukrainian civilian and military institutions, regularly launching more than 100 drones each night.
On Tuesday morning, Ukraine’s Air Force said that Russia had launched 126 drones and one ballistic missile overnight. At least one person was killed when a Russian drone struck a warehouse in Kharkiv and at least 17 others were injured in attacks elsewhere in the country, the Ukrainian authorities said.
State of the war
Russian forces have long held the initiative on the battlefield in Ukraine. In recent weeks, they also have managed to retake about two-thirds of the territory Ukraine seized last summer in the Kursk region of Russia.
But Ukrainian forces have stalled the Russian offensive in the eastern Donetsk region in recent months and have started to win back small patches of land, according to military analysts and Ukrainian soldiers. However, military analysts have been debating whether, after more than 15 months on the offensive, Russian brigades are depleted or are regrouping for a renewed push.
Drones, not the big, heavy artillery that the war was once known for, inflict about 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, according to the Ukrainian military. . They kill more soldiers and destroy more armored vehicles than all traditional weapons of war combined, including sniper rifles, tanks, howitzers and mortars, Ukrainian commanders and officials say.
The war has killed and wounded more than a million soldiers in all, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates.
U.S.-Ukraine tensions
These are the first high-level, in-person talks for the United States and Ukraine since a Feb. 28 meeting at the White House in which President Trump and Vice President JD Vance castigated and berated President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying he was not grateful enough for U.S. support.
Ukraine is facing the dispiriting challenge of adapting to its main ally adopting the positions of its enemy. Russia and the Trump administration question Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy and have blamed Ukraine for starting the war.
Ukrainian officials are seeking to smooth over relations with the Trump administration. Over the weekend, French and British officials coached the Ukrainian delegation on how to talk with the Americans, a Ukrainian official with the delegation said.
Ukraine has proposed an immediate truce in the air, saying it would immediately stop long-range strikes into Russia if Moscow agreed to an equivalent halt. That plan, supported by European nations, including France, is envisioned as a first step in building trust ahead of talks about the overall conflict — and the Ukrainian delegation is expected to raise the proposal again in the Jeddah meetings.
Ukraine is also more broadly seeking a resumption of American military aid and intelligence sharing that was suspended after the Oval Office debacle. The intelligence cutoff has already impaired soldiers in combat, according to Ukrainian commanders in the field.
Potential concessions
While European allies have pledged further support to Kyiv, Ukraine is seen as having few options for reversing Russia’s recent gains on the battlefield.
On the flight to Jeddah, Mr. Rubio said Ukraine would have to make concessions over land that Russia had taken since 2014 as part of any agreement to end the war. But he also said that it would be imperative in future talks with Moscow to determine what Russia was willing to concede.
“We don’t know how far apart they truly are,” he said, referring to Ukraine and Russia.
Anton Troianovski and Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.
