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While American officials prepared on Sunday for the start of talks with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, European leaders were rushing to formulate a response to President Trump\u2019s push for a settlement that appeared to leave them and Kyiv with no clear role in the process.<\/p>\n
The Russian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, where the talks are set to take place this week, met Sunday with the kingdom\u2019s foreign minister. Two senior Trump administration officials \u2014 the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and the Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff \u2014 will fly to Saudi Arabia to join Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the negotiations, Mr. Witkoff said Sunday in an interview on Sunday Morning Futures, on Fox News.<\/p>\n
The final preparations follow a flurry of diplomatic discussions over the past several days that included a conversation between Mr. Rubio and Russia\u2019s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, Mr. Rubio said in an interview from Jerusalem with CBS News that if an opportunity presented itself \u201cfor a broader conversation that would involve Ukraine, that would involve the end of the war, that would involve our allies all over the world, particularly in Europe, we\u2019re going to explore it if that opportunity presents itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The meeting with Russia, while preliminary, would signal the start of Mr. Trump\u2019s accelerated timetable for a deal and his seeming determination to conduct negotiations with Russia alone, at least for now.<\/p>\n
Ukraine will not take part, Andriy Yermak, the head of the President Volodymyr Zelensky\u2019s presidential office, confirmed Sunday in a post on the Telegram social networking site. He said that Ukraine would prefer to reach a common plan for negotiations with the Trump administration before meeting with a Russian delegation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere have been no meetings, nor are any planned,\u201d Mr. Yermak wrote. \u201cThe president made it clear that any agreement reached without Ukraine\u2019s involvement will not be accepted. Security guarantees must include the United States. We will never make decisions that go against Ukraine\u2019s interests.\u201d <\/p>\n
In an initiative initially encouraged by Ukraine, the Trump administration is in talks to secure a portion of the profits from Ukraine\u2019s natural resources in exchange for security aid. But when the administration proposal arrived, Mr. Zelensky declined the terms, under which the United States would receive half of the profits.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Mr. Zelensky said he declined, in part, because it offered no assurances of U.S. support in the war in exchange. It has not been clear whether the U.S. demand is tied to future aid or seen as compensation for assistance already provided.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Mr. Zelensky\u2019s rejection of the proposal prompted a rebuke from Mr. Waltz, the national security adviser. Mr. Zelensky, he said in an interview on Fox News Sunday, would be \u201cvery wise\u201d to accept the deal, adding, \u201cThe American people deserve to be recouped, deserve to have some kind of payback for the billions they have invested in this war.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 an emergency meeting in Paris on Monday to discuss the war in Ukraine and European security, French officials said Sunday. The aim is to coordinate a response to the Trump administration\u2019s opening of talks with Russia without European participation.<\/p>\n
That follows a meeting Sunday of foreign ministers from the European Union, which as a bloc has provided more military support for Ukraine than has the United States.<\/p>\n
In the Fox News interview, Mr. Waltz denied that the Europeans were being excluded from the negotiations. \u201cThey may not like some of the sequencing that is going on in some of these negotiations,\u201d he said. \u201cI have to push back on any notion that they aren\u2019t being consulted. They absolutely are.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Mr. Waltz added that the U.S. negotiators \u201cwill bring everyone together when appropriate,\u201d while specifying that the Europeans will be expected to \u201cprovide long-term military guarantees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Zelensky said he would be in Saudi Arabia this week but did not specify when. 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.<\/p>\n
In an interview with NBC on Sunday he reiterated that he would \u201cnever\u201d accept a peace negotiation settled between Russia and the United States without Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Asked if he feels he has a seat at the table right now, Mr. Zelensky did not answer directly. He said he counted on one. He said he told Mr. Trump that Putin \u201cis a liar\u201d who \u201cdoesn\u2019t want any peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s spokesman, who reasserted Russia\u2019s newfound optimism about negotiating with the United States after years of diplomatic isolation by the Biden administration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re now going to be talking about peace, not about war,\u201d Mr. Peskov said. \u201cBased on President Trump\u2019s statements, we\u2019re solving problems through dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Russia and Ukraine have not met for direct talks in nearly three years. Direct Russian and Ukrainian talks, mediated first by Belarus and then Turkey, began at the outset of Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 but unraveled six weeks later. They became untenable after Russia suffered battlefield defeats and after human rights abuses by the Russian Army came to light in the town of Bucha, where about 400 bodies were found on city streets, in mass graves and in backyards.<\/p>\n
Russia subsequently lost about half of the territory gained in the invasion, but for a year it has been advancing in a bloody, slow-motion offensive in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine that has moved the front line about 30 miles. Ukraine has a pocket of Russian territory it captured six months ago in the Kursk region to use as leverage going into the talks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
For now, though, Ukrainians \u2014 who have endured hundreds of thousands of casualties in the fighting and missile attacks, electrical blackouts and displacement for civilians to fight Russia to a near stalemate \u2014 were left with the unwelcome prospect of negotiations on their future without their voice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cI find this completely incomprehensible, and of course, it outrages me,\u201d Vladyslava Bilova, 19, a student in Kyiv, said of Ukraine\u2019s exclusion from the opening of talks. \u201cIt\u2019s strange to decide the fate of a country when it is not even participating in the process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Viktor Reuta, 49, a soldier, said Ukrainians would not accept a settlement forced on them. \u201cThey can try to impose whatever they want,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are already at war, and we have realized that we can speak for ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
The exclusion of Ukraine from the start of talks is \u201cvery unsettling and even terrifying,\u201d said Vita Voinovska, 40, a pharmacist. She added, \u201cIt feels like three people are standing together, and two are talking to each other while the third \u2014 the one actually facing the problem \u2014 is standing there as if they don\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Edward Wong contributed reporting from Washington, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn from Kyiv and Anton Troianovski from Berlin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n