Left Out of Ukraine Talks, Europe Races to Organize a Response

While American officials prepared on Sunday for the start of talks with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, European leaders were moving to formulate a response to President Trump’s rapid push for a settlement that appeared to leave them and Ukrainian officials with no clear role in the process.

The Russian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, where the talks are to take place this week, met Sunday with the kingdom’s foreign minister. Two senior Trump administration officials — Mike Waltz, and the Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff — will fly to Saudi Arabia to join Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the negotiations, Mr. Witkoff said Sunday in an interview with Fox News.

The preparations come after a flurry of diplomatic discussions over the past several days that included a conversation between Mr. Rubio and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.

On Sunday, Mr. Rubio said in an interview from Jerusalem with CBS News that if an opportunity presented itself for a “broader conversation that would involve Ukraine and would involve the end of the war, and would involve our allies all over the world, particularly in Europe,” the United States would explore it.

He did not say which Russian officials would be in Riyadh this week, and noted that he had made plans earlier to be in Saudi Arabia anyway during this trip, his first to the Middle East as secretary of state. “Nothing’s been finalized yet,” he said.

The meeting with Russia, while preliminary, would signal the start of Mr. Trump’s accelerated timetable for a deal and his seeming determination to conduct negotiations with Russia alone, at least for now.

On Monday, the leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain the Netherlands and Denmark, and the top officials of the European Union and NATO, will convene in Paris in an emergency meeting on the war in Ukraine and European security, French officials said Sunday. The aim is to coordinate a response to the Trump administration’s opening of talks with Russia without European participation.

That follows a meeting Sunday of foreign ministers from the European Union, which as a bloc has provided more military support for Ukraine than the United States has.

It is unclear if President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine will be in Saudi Arabia this week. He has said he would travel to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but did not specify when.

But he has made clear he does not want to enter negotiations before determining what security guarantees Western nations are willing to offer to ensure any cease-fire is not violated. As of Saturday, he said he had no such assurances from the United States.

In an interview with NBC aired Sunday he reiterated that he would “never” accept a peace negotiation settled between Russia and the United States without Ukraine.

Asked if he feels he has a seat at the table right now, he did not answer directly. He said he counted on one. He said he told Mr. Trump that Putin “is a liar” who “doesn’t want any peace.”

Still, if Russian and Ukrainian delegations were to meet, it would be the first direct talks in nearly three years, raising the prospect of an end to the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II.

In Moscow, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. But Russian state television on Sunday released an interview with Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, who reasserted Russia’s newfound optimism about negotiating with the United States after years of diplomatic isolation by the Biden administration.

“We’re now going to be talking about peace, not about war,” Mr. Peskov said. “Based on President Trump’s statements, we’re solving problems through dialogue.”

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Washington, and Anton Troianovski from Berlin.