Ukraine, Russia to hold separate talks with the US in Riyadh

Brussels -The eyes of the world will again turn to Saudi Arabia on Monday (March 24) to scrutinize the dual meeting of the US delegation with the negotiating teams from Russia and Ukraine. On the agenda are mainly the details of the truce in the skies and the safety of navigation in the Black Sea. At the same time, the issue of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which the White House reportedly has its eye on, seems to have been excluded for now.

Speaking to reporters alongside Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre from Oslo, where he was visiting while the leaders of the 27 member states renewed from Brussels their support for the former Soviet republic, Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed yesterday (March 20) that on Monday, a Ukrainian delegation will travel to Riyadh to meet with US negotiators. He explained that there would be two separate bilateral meetings in the Saudi capital: the US team would sit at the table first with Kyiv’s team and then with Moscow’s.

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The objective is to agree on the technical aspects of the 30-day partial ceasefire approved on paper by both countries, which, for the time being, no one is abiding by since reciprocal shelling has not yet stopped. The main issue to be solved for the truce to go into effect concerns the type of infrastructure to spare from missiles and drones under the agreement: the Russians would like to narrow it down to only energy infrastructure, while the Ukrainians are pushing to include civilian infrastructure such as ports and rail networks.

The Russian side also confirmed the upcoming talks. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov referred to the so-called “Black Sea Initiative,” which Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump discussed in their phone call on Tuesday (March 18). Based on the discussion between the two presidents, a pause in maritime fighting should be a second step after the halt in aerial bombardment and a prelude to a broader ceasefire that includes land operations, a prerequisite for starting negotiations on a permanent peace.

Zelensky denied that he had discussed with the White House occupant the possible transfer of ownership of the Zaporizhzhia power plant, Europe’s largest nuclear plant (in 2021, it supplied about a quarter of Ukraine’s entire electricity production) to the US. With the tycoon, if anything, he talked about managing the facility, which Moscow’s troops currently control.

The Ukrainian leader also said he had not confronted Trump about the future of Crimea, the peninsula formally part of Ukrainian territory that the Federation unilaterally annexed in 2014. According to many observers, the US president would be inclined to propose yielding it to Putin to accelerate negotiations toward ending the conflict. However, the official line in Kyiv is firmly against it.